by Becket
They had been murmuring, but now they all silenced and moved a little nearer to better hear him.
“Friends and fiends,” he announced, “the WORM took the Magic Library from you. But the library’s operating system, DIOS, has worked out a plan to restore that which was taken. It was she who hid the magic books. And it is she who appoints four new librarians. They will now unlock the door.”
The crowd applauded and cheered loudly.
The two old robots waved at them. They were totally overjoyed to be useful again. Their lights were blinking and their circuits were snapping, charged with newfound electricity.
Peter Butterpig was also happy to be getting so much attention. Pigs were usually unwelcomed animals. And butterpigs were even more unwelcomed because their big bright butterfly wings made them so un-normal. But being so wonderfully accepted, Peter Butterpig now smiled broadly and flapped his wings even more openly.
Meredith smiled and waved at everyone too. She did not mind that they had ignored her before when she was poor and lived on the street. And she did not really desire any of that attention now. She was simply happy that they were happy. And she hoped she could be a good librarian for them.
Mr. Fuddlebee floated toward the front doors.
The four new librarians followed him.
“Hold out your books,” he told them.
Meredith and the two old robots held their books in their hands while Peter Butterpig gripped his in his snout.
The elderly ghost pointed at the padlock with his umbrella. “Now unlock the lock,” he said to them.
They stared at him, not knowing what he meant.
“Oh dear,” he said after an uncomfortable pause, “have none of you ever heard of a book lock before?”
They all shook their heads together, wondering what he meant.
“It is old magic,” he explained and pointed with his umbrella toward four grooves on the face of the large padlock. Each groove was a different size. And each had somewhat familiar markings.
The elderly ghost pointed from the grooves to the spines of their books.
“I think you will find that each groove in the lock will match the spines of your books.”
The four studied one another’s matching expression of curiosity. Then they studied the spines of their books. Slowly, each one put the spine of their book into the groove where it fit. The smaller books fit snuggly into the smaller grooves. So did the larger books for the larger hollows.
When all the books were fitted perfectly into their proper grooves, the lock beamed with a bright white light.
In a flash the lock clicked and opened.
With his umbrella, Mr. Fuddlebee knocked the lock.
The chains unraveled and fell to the ground with a cloud clank.
The lock broke apart.
The Magic Library had finally, after all this time, reopened.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dimensionally Intelligent Operating System
The crowd returned to their homes and offices, to their favorite coffee shops for a hot cup of cocoa or to go shopping for magic bookshelves to hold all the magic books they were about to borrow. They seemed full of new life. The whole town was brimming and bubbling over with excitement. The townsfolk could barely wait to get inside the Magic Library and start reading all its amazingly magic books.
Mr. Fuddlebee then led the four new librarians inside the Magic Library and the doors closed behind them with a loud bang that echoed like thunder in a cave.
“DIOS,” he said, “would you please give us a little more light?”
From the tip of his umbrella shone out a little light, as small as a flickering candle.
Gradually the light brightened, yet it did not hurt anyone’s eyes. It shone over everything.
There were many shadows, and some were alive, yet they backed away when they saw the power of the light.
The five of them were in a circular room. The wallpaper looked very old. Around them on the walls were beautifully framed paintings of former librarians. The paintings were very tall, going up and up and up and up and up, far higher than Meredith could see, reaching high up into the darkness.
“The Magic Library does not look that tall on the outside,” she said. “How is this room possible?”
“We did not simply enter a library,” Mr. Fuddlebee explained. “This Magic Library is the memory bank of DIOS, which means it is far larger than you and I might ever imagine.”
“DIOS?” said Meredith in a tone of curiosity. “You said that name outside. What does that mean?”
“DIOS is called a she,” Mr. Fuddlebee explained, “and she is a D – I – O – S… a Dimensionally Intelligent Operating System.”
Meredith thought for a moment more. Then she asked again, “So what does that mean?”
“It means…” Mr. Fuddlebee began to say, but paused in reconsideration. “It means… Well, to be honest, I am not entirely certain what all that means. However, I am quite sure that DIOS is far more intelligent than most people give her credit for. She is the operating system that runs all our computers. She is in my onbrella and she is even in your two robot friends here. She can answer all your questions. And she knows how to make the most delicious cup of chai tea with maple syrup.”
Meredith’s head was buzzing with questions.
“It’s starting to come back to me,” Sir Copperpot said. “DIOS runs all our programs.”
“But I think she mostly runs the stuff we don’t think about,” Uncle Glitch added, starting to remember too. “She maintains what we call our subroutines, things like pumping oil through our parts, or organizing our thoughts when we’re in sleep mode.”
Peter Butterpig squealed a question at the elderly ghost.
Mr. Fuddlebee held up his red and black umbrella. “No, this is not an actual umbrella, dear boy,” he answered him. “This is called an onbrella.”
“What’s an onbrella?” Meredith asked.
“Well…” the elderly ghost said musingly. “It’s this.”
“But what does it do?”
Mr. Fuddlebee pointed the onbrella at her. From the tip came strange buzzing noises. Then he brought the handle close to his ghostly eyes and studied more readouts written on the handle.
“It tells me many things,” he said. “For instance, it tells me that you used to live in the library.”
Meredith’s heart skipped a beat. She had a faint memory of having been in the library before, the way she faintly remembered her mom and dad. But she had no memory of living in the library, only of living in her box on the street.
“Could your onbrella be wrong?” she asked.
“It is never wrong,” Mr. Fuddlebee said. “It can’t be. DIOS runs it too.”
“Does everything run on this Dimensionally Intelligent… thingy?”
“Operating System,” the elderly ghost finished for her. “And, yes, DIOS runs everything in the Society of Mystical Creatures.”
Peter Butterpig grunted.
“She does indeed use a lot of memory,” Mr. Fuddlebee answered him. “That’s the purpose of this Magic Library. As I said, it is her memory bank.”
Meredith looked around this small circular room.
It did not seem like much. There were a few bookshelves, but little else. She expected the library to have more… “A lot more,” she said. “How can these books be a part of a computer program?”
The elderly ghost shrugged. “How can books be a part of your mind after you read them?”
“Because I remember them.”
“In a little library in your mind,” Mr. Fuddlebee suggested.
“There is no library in my mind,” Meredith protested.
“Not like this one. But every mind is like a little library. The books in our mind are the histories of our experiences, the fantasies of our hopes, and the bibles of our personal beliefs.”
Meredith looked doubtfully at this mostly empty room around her. “But there are so few books here,�
� she argued.
Mr. Fuddlebee winked at her. He pointed his onbrella toward an old brown door behind him.
“Oh,” he said in a knowing tone, “there might be a few more books that way.”
He floated toward the door and pointed his onbrella at the doorknob.
There was a small click.
Mr. Fuddlebee bowed respectfully before Meredith.
“Would you do the honors, my dear?”
Slowly she drew forward, put her hand on the doorknob, turned it, and opened the door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Perambubelt
The last room had been very tall. Yet this new room was very long.
The walls stretched on and on into the distance, farther than the eye could see.
Meredith could barely believe how long it was. The library did not look this long on the outside.
The walls were lined with all kinds of books—tall books, small books, thick books, thin books, books shaped liked balls, books held by dolls, books made of hair, books as light as air, and more and more books.
Torches hung from the ceiling.
The light on Mr. Fuddlebee’s onbrella switched off.
“Will we have to walk down this whole hall?” Meredith asked, wondering how long that might take—maybe a day, maybe a week, or perhaps a whole month!
The elderly ghost floated over a large conveyor belt on the floor. He told everyone else to stand on it.
“And hold on tightly.”
As soon as everyone was on and grasping special straps fixed onto the belt, the whole thing took off in a flash, zooming down the corridor.
“This is called the perambubelt,” Mr. Fuddlebee spoke up over the rush of air. “It will help us get from one place to another faster than you can say ‘Marty Slump Dimples,’ who I am told is not the most respectable goblin.”
The perambubelt went faster and faster.
Meredith, the two old robots, and Peter Butterpig were clinging desperately to the straps.
In no time, the perambubelt was speeding along so quickly that Meredith’s feet lifted off the ground.
The force of wind rushing by completely folded back Peter Butterpig’s butterfly wings and was making his piggy cheeks flap like flags.
“Every room in the Magic Library is extremely important,” Mr. Fuddlebee was telling them as he floated serenely nearby. “But if one room could be called the most important, it would be this room.”
Peter Butterpig loudly squealed a question.
“Because,” Uncle Glitch called out in reply as he held on to his aviator cap, “this room is like a brain. Every book that comes into the library passes through this room at least once.”
“After that,” hollered Sir Copperpot, who, clinging to the strap desperately, had pushed his top hat down over his eyes, “the book gets processed from this room and sent to other rooms, organizing the whole library into one efficient system.”
Mr. Fuddlebee nodded approvingly.
“If the library had a mind of its own, and some believe it does, then this room would be that mind.”
Around them books were magically floating through the air and zipping by in all directions, some soaring, some rocketing, some flapping like birds. Most were flying on to the shelves while the rest of the books were floating off and racing through small openings in the walls, like the size of postal slots, speeding off to other parts of the library.
“The WORM shut down this section when he locked the library,” Mr. Fuddlebee told them. “But now that you four have come, the library is getting back to work again.”
“All these books were borrowed at one time,” Sir Copperpot hollered above the rushing air.
“The ones floating off the shelves are going back to their sections,” Uncle Glitch yelled out too.
Meredith suddenly realized something she had not thought of before.
“Mr. Fuddlebee,” she asked, “what happened to the WORM?”
The other three looked at the elderly ghost for an explanation too. They had been so excited about finding magic books and getting back inside the library that they had completely forgotten about the one who had closed it in the first place.
“As some of you might be aware,” the elderly ghost began explaining, “I am an agent for the Subcommittee Preventing Oddly Odious Kerfuffles, which is also called SPOOK. The WORM’s infection of the library was definitely odious and most definitely a kerfuffle… At least I think it was… Actually, I’m not entirely sure what kerfuffle means. Regardless, I helped DIOS track down the WORM and stop him.”
“Stop him?” cried Uncle Glitch. “Shouldn’t he be deleted?”
“DIOS would never delete a program with intelligence, even if that intelligence is malicious,” Mr. Fuddlebee answered. “She has allowed the WORM to continue dwelling in the library, going back and forth between rooms.”
The four looked around with wide worried eyes, expecting to see the WORM leap out at them at any moment.
“Oh, do not be afraid,” Mr. Fuddlebee told them with a chuckle. “The WORM is here, but he cannot harm you. DIOS is a wonderful operating system. She takes care of everything in her Magic Library. I suspect that the WORM is somewhere nearby. He might play some nasty tricks, but he is harmless. DIOS made sure of that.”
“How come it took you so many years to stop the WORM?” asked Sir Copperpot.
“Years?” said Mr. Fuddlebee in a tone of surprise. “Was I really in here that long? Goodness me, time certainly does fly when you’re having fun, or at least in my case, it zooms!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Opus’s Room
When the perambubelt stopped suddenly before a golden door, Uncle Glitch, Sir Copperpot, Peter Butterpig, and little Meredith Pocket were nearly hurtled off.
Mr. Fuddlebee floated off serenely. When the others caught their balance, they followed him.
He pointed his onbrella at the doorknob. The tip lit up. More buzzing came from it too.
The door opened by itself.
Through the door was the largest room Meredith had ever seen. It looked even larger than the town. And it was packed, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with books!
The eyes of the four librarians widened as they stared at this amazing room.
It had tables and chairs and a fireplace, but books were everywhere. No, not just that… Books were everything! The floor was made of books. The ceiling was made of books. The walls and the bookcases, the chandeliers and the fireplaces, the paintings and the tables and the chairs and all the other things in the room were made entirely of books. Books were on the table and books were the table. Books were stacked up on the floor and books were the floor. Books were in the bookcases and books were the bookcases. There were also tall stacks of books reaching up to the ceiling, which was made of books too. And all throughout this great big book room were piles of books like hills rising and falling.
“This section is called Opus’s Room,” Mr. Fuddlebee said. “In here is where all the books get grouped together.”
There was a large machine in the middle. It was chugging and shaking and gushing out steam. It had two openings and a large sign on it with three letters.
O.D.D.
Mechanical hands wearing white gloves came out of compartments in the floor, walls, and ceiling. They gathered up the books in piles on the floor and they tossed them into one of the machine’s openings. The books came out of the end, now neatly organized in the shape of more furniture for the room. There were chairs made of books and tables made of books, there were lamps made of books and beds made of books, and there were even more bookcases made of books with books on each shelf.
Then several more mechanical hands lifted up this book furniture and carried it off to other parts of the library.
“My memory banks have been failing lately,” Sir Copperpot admitted. “I do not recall this device.”
“Me neither,” said Uncle Glitch.
Mr. Fuddlebee studied it with his onbrella.
“This machine is called the Organizational Domestic Doodad, or simply put ODD. Yet though it is ODD, it is also quite useful. No other library in the world organizes its books in this ODD way, which I think makes the Magic Library all the more magical. Yet one day soon, the ODD will be available for those remarkable readers who buy too many books and need a place to store them in their house. With the ODD, they can get rid of all their furniture and have book furniture instead. Oh, wouldn’t that be grand?”
Just then Peter Butterpig began squealing loudly. He was gaping at several books that began piling up all by themselves and shaping into a man as tall as a tree.
He had book feet, book legs, a book middle, book arms and hands and a book head. And the books were all different shapes and sizes and subjects. Some were large books on creepy castles. Others were small books on mystic mice. Some were spiky books on icky icicles. Others were balloon books on spooky parties. And there were many more books too.
The book man lumbered over to the ghost and the four librarians. He bent low and peered into Meredith’s face. His voice was a soft whisper, like the flipping of pages.
“Hello… greetings and salutations… and welcome home.”
Uncle Glitch and Sir Copperpot smiled fondly up at the book man.
“Greetings, my old friend,” said Sir Copperpot. “It has been far too long since we last saw one another.”
“Has it?” said the book man. “It seems like only yesterday to me.”
“That’s because,” said Uncle Glitch in a good-humored tone, “all you do all day long is sit around gathering magic dust.”
The book man took a long time to respond and when he did, he said, “I am not very good at gathering. Dust makes me sneeze. I can’t tell you how many pages I blew out the last time I sneezed a bucket-full of that stuff. I think I lost a whole chapter.”