by Nydam, Anne
It was then that he heard a voice hiss, “Psst!”
He jumped and looked around, startled. At the edge of the window was a narrow vertical strip of light, as if the window were a door opening into the office. And through this crack peered the freckled face of Polly Goggin, who whispered again, “Psst! Chen! Is it safe?”
“Uh, sure, come in,” he stammered, flustered, and the crack opened wider, like a doorway superimposed over the window, and Polly walked through, her Book in her hands.
“Hello!” she said cheerfully, “I came to visit and see what you’ve discovered about your Book. I’ve been trying to do a little research about mine.”
Chen recovered himself and pointed to the computer screen. “I started a table of contents for my Book. I thought I’d keep track of where each of the pages goes.”
Polly glanced at Chen’s list of four doors and raised her eyebrows.
“Well, I haven’t had much chance to try it out,” he said defensively.
“Okay, well, here’s what I’ve got.” Polly unzipped her hip pouch, which was belted around a ruffled purple blouse. Chen glanced down and noted with an inward eye-roll that today her socks had orange turtles on a turquoise background, although at least they matched each other.
Serenely unaware of Chen’s disapproval, Polly pulled out a sheet of graph paper that was folded about four times, and smoothed it open on Dr Burr’s desk. Like Chen, Polly had listed Roman numerals down one side of the paper, but hers were written in pencil and only went through 40/XL. She had written some sort of note after almost every number.
“Are those really all the places you’ve been already?” asked Chen, surprised and a little envious.
Polly shook her head. “No. See, when I’ve been through a door my notes are over here.” Chen saw that even in that third column it looked as if she’d explored about ten places, but Polly went on, “Here’s where I’ve copied what’s written on the back of each door, because I think they’re Benjamin Franklin’s notes about the exploring he did. And I wanted to find out whether your Book has notes about any of the pages that my Book doesn’t explain.”
Chen opened his volume and flipped through several pages, this time looking at the backs on the left hand side of each spread. But they all appeared to be blank. He frowned. “I don’t have any notes at all. Your book tells you what’s through each door?”
“Not really. They’re more like they were just supposed to be reminders to someone who already knew, but they don’t tell you straight out. And some of them actually seem like clues. See, like here:
“Look up where the sun sets to see that which makes the second of my name, hearing which brings the good man closer to goodness and the frivolous man closer to frivolité.”
Chen frowned a little. “It sounds like a clue, all right, but what is it a clue for?”
“There’s only one way to find out, right?” Polly grinned.
Slowly, nervously, Chen grinned back. “Fine, let’s see what’s behind door number 22.”
Polly fitted her key into the hole in the page and turned. Then she lifted the page and Chen saw the ancient-looking door opening before him, into the dim space of a church.
“Go on,” said Polly, giving Chen a little shove.
He stumbled through the Book and his feet clomped loudly in the echoing space. Ancient stone arches rose on either side of him, with rows of arches above the arches, and above them all tall arched windows. People could be heard speaking in hushed voices here and there in the building, but no one was in the lower-vaulted area where Chen had just walked out of thin air. Polly, stepping into the church behind Chen, turned to her left and wrinkled her nose.
“Good gosh, my mom would probably love that,” she muttered with a groan.
Chen turned to see what she was looking at and saw a bronze sculpture of a very thin man holding a pair of scissors in one hand and a long wrinkled strip of shredded fabric in the other. He walked closer, frowning. “Wait, hasn’t he got any skin?”
Polly, who was already reading the sign in front of the sculpture, said, “Yes he does. He’s holding it in his hand.”
“What? That’s supposed to be his skin? That’s disgusting!”
“Isn’t it? It’s Saint Bartholomew, by Damien Hirst. Fun art fact brought to you by Goggin Antiques: you can always tell Saint Bartholomew by his skinlessness. And this tells us where we are, too: Saint Bartholomew the Great church,” she announced.
“And judging by the accents, England,” added Chen.
Polly read the rest of her plaque. “You’re right: London. Smithfield, to be specific. So why did Benjamin Franklin send us here?”
“Look up, the clue said,” Chen replied, and looked up at the vaulted ceiling with its pattern of dark beams. “If he was talking about the church making people good, don’t you think it would make frivolous people good, too?”
“Maybe Benjamin Franklin wasn’t much of a church person,” Polly suggested.
“Yeah, but then you’d think he’d say church wouldn’t make anybody good.”
“Maybe,” Polly said again. She gazed around curiously.
“Let me see the clue again,” said Chen, reaching for the Book. “Look up where the sun sets,” he read. “So which way is west? I wish I had an iPhone. I could use the GPS and see right where we are.”
Polly didn’t answer. She had already set off across the tiled floor toward a pair of tourists whose heads were bent together over a guidebook.
“Excuse me, sir and madam,” she said, “Would you be so kind as to tell us which way is west?”
Chen felt himself cringing. See, this was why he didn’t want to go anywhere with Polly. Why did she have to be so weird? Who asked a stranger that kind of question, anyway?
But to his surprise the couple didn’t seem to think Polly’s question was strange at all. The woman turned her guidebook and tilted her head as if orienting herself to a map, and replied, gesturing, “That’s the North Aisle, and the Sanctuary is to the east. So west is that way.” She pointed to her right, at a carved and painted wooden screen, and above it a regimented array of organ pipes.
“Thanks,” Polly said, and turned to stare at the west end of the building. Chen came to stand beside her, looking up at the vast stone arch that framed the organ loft and pipes.
The woman with the guidebook added helpfully, “The carved wooden screen is nineteenth century, but the arch is original Norman.”
“Cool,” answered Polly, “Do you happen to know if Benjamin Franklin had anything to do with this place?”
“Yes, that’s right, but that’s the east end.” The woman pointed to her left. “His printing shop was in the Lady Chapel.”
“Benjamin Franklin had a printing shop in a chapel? In London?” demanded Chen, not sure he believed his ears.
The man flipped through the guidebook and read out, “By the eighteenth century the church had fallen into disrepair and parts of the building were rented out to businesses, including a smithy, a maker of fringe, a printing works, and a tavern. It was in the printer’s shop, located in the Lady Chapel, that Benjamin Franklin served a year as a typesetter in 1725-6.”
Polly beamed. “Thank you, sir. That’s very helpful. Come on, Chen, let’s check it out.”
Chen turned to head down the length of the church between the pews, but Polly had gone to the aisle instead and was now pausing to look at a cluster of huge, ancient stone columns. She exclaimed, “Look! A cat!”
“What? Uber’s loose again?”
Polly laughed. “Not Uber. There!” She pointed up, toward a corbel carved as the head of a grinning cat.
“Do there have to be cats everywhere you go?” Chen muttered.
Polly turned toward the east end and strode off. “What can I say? I like cats,” she said. “And how magnificent is this? Benjamin Franklin was really here, and there’s a magic door to bring us here, and he left a mysterious clue about it! I love this!”
Chen couldn’t help gri
nning back, but he retorted, “Yeah, but not only do we not know the answer to the clue, but we don’t even know what the clue is for. And anyway, this Lady Chapel has nothing to do with the clue, does it? He said to look up where the sun sets, and that’s got to mean the west end, with the organ.”
“Sure,” Polly replied, “But think of it this way. If he was working down at this end, then when he walked out of the printer’s shop into the rest of the church, that west wall is just what he’d be looking at, right? So no wonder he made it into his clue.”
They turned and looked back toward the west end.
“The organ,” Chen said, “The clue said you were hearing something, so maybe it’s the organ. Or music. It’s got to mean something like music. Hymns maybe help good people be better, but the kind of music like in… I don’t know, bars, or dance clubs or something… maybe makes frivolous people more frivolous.”
“That seems plausible.” Polly led the way around the altar into a lower corridor, past the place they had entered, to where they could see into a smaller chapel with a modern painting of a madonna at the far end. She said, “Well, I bet Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t recognize that any more. Let’s go find another clue.”
She took her graph paper out of her hip pouch and skimmed down her list of doors. “Here. This must be the first clue. Door Four.” She stuffed the paper back into the hip pouch and opened the ancient Book to the fourth illustrated plate.
“Hang on,” Chen exclaimed, “If we go straight into the next place we might not be able to get straight back home. Let’s go back to my parents’ office first, like a sort of anchor point, and then go through the next door from there.”
Polly shrugged and flipped to Plate XXII. “Okay. Ready?” She fitted the key into the hole, turned the page, and they stepped back into the Department of Prints and Rare books. Then, without pausing, Polly turned to Plate IV again.
“What’s the clue?” asked Chen.
Polly flipped to the back of the page and read out, “Count fair women to know the first of my name, remembering that the king in his palace is poor who is surrounded by hearts of stone however beautiful, but rich is he with a smaller roof above his head, whose wife holds up her share.”
“Hmm. I hope that makes sense when we get there. Open the door!”
Once again Polly fitted her key into the hole and turned, and once again the door depicted in the woodcut now stood in front of her, like a mirage before her eyes, but completely solid beneath her hands. She pulled open the heavy bronze door, waited for Chen to slip through, and then followed.
VI. A Clue and a Mystery
Chen had stopped abruptly, and Polly, pushing him from behind, immediately saw why. They had entered another huge gallery, but this one was loud with the buzz of voices, and people were every-where, shouldering past Chen in both directions, entering and leaving through the real door just beside him. There were also plenty of people facing toward Chen and Polly, though none of them seemed to be paying any attention to the children or the fact that they had just appeared out of a door that didn’t exist.
“What is this place?” Chen whispered.
Polly shrugged, looking around wide-eyed at the palatial marble hall full of elegant marble columns, life-sized marble sculptures, and wandering people wielding cameras and guide maps. She walked slowly out from under the portico where they had entered, staring all around. “If Benjamin Franklin thought all these statues were ‘fair,’ he obviously must not have felt the same way as my mom about ‘straining muscles’ and beauty.”
“What?”
“Oh nothing important.”
Chen shrugged. “Fine. So do we start counting? There must be like a dozen female statues in here. They don’t wear much, do they?”
“Ha, no kidding. Fun art fact brought to you by Goggin Antiques: buttons were mostly just used for decoration until the thirteenth century, so all these ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t really use buttons to keep their clothes on. Anyway, I bet the rest of the clue is supposed to tell us which statues to count.” Polly turned to the back of Plate IV and read the clue again. “Maybe we don’t count the fair women who have hearts of stone.”
“But that’s all of them, right? And Benjamin Franklin can’t mean for us to count real women, because that number wouldn’t stay the same over time.”
“Maybe there are some wooden statues. They wouldn’t have hearts of stone.”
“Maybe,” Chen answered, unsatisfied, “But all we’ve said so far is maybe.” He followed Polly toward the middle of the room, where a white marble sculpture of the goddess Diana had her back to them. He couldn’t help but notice that her dress was only wrapped and tied: no buttons.
Chen revolved slowly in place, looking in all directions, but saw no wooden statues. When he was facing back the way they had come, however, he suddenly stopped. “Wait a minute, Polly! A smaller roof above his head? When we came through the door, we had a smaller roof above our heads!”
“What?”
Chen pointed. At one end of the grand hall the doorway was surmounted by a balcony that stuck out from the wall so that it formed a small roof over the entrance. This portico was supported on four marble pillars, two on each side, and the pillars…
“Fair women!” cried Polly, “The pillars are shaped like women!”
Chen backed up a step, trying to get a better view of the end of the room. “Right, and they hold up their share of the smaller roof, so those are the ones we count!”
A large tour group jostled in front of Chen and Polly, and as they hurriedly backed up again the back of Chen’s knees banged into the low metal rail that surrounded the sculpture of the goddess. Losing his balance, he sat down suddenly, right on the edge of the pedestal, flinging out a hand to catch himself, and smacking his knuckles against Diana’s marble calf with a cry of, “Ow!”
Instantly a security guard made his way toward them, scolding, “Ne touchez pas!”
“Sorry!” Chen replied, struggling to his feet, “Er, perdón! No, um, s’il vous pl- No…” He stumbled again, collapsing with his backside bumping the statue’s pedestal. “Ow!”
Polly took Chen by the arm and heaved him to his feet. “We’re very sorry, sir. It was an accident,” she said calmly to the guard, and pulled Chen around the huntress on the opposite side, toward the far door.
“Hé! Un moment! Where are your buttons?”
“Buttons?” asked Chen, bewildered, “But ancient Romans don’t have any buttons!” Still backing away from the guard, he bumped into an elderly man with very sharp elbows. “Ow!”
The guard jabbed a finger at the lapel of his uniform. “Button, ticket. You know, you receive ze button when you pay admission.”
“Oh! Oh dear.” Polly looked down at her own ruffled purple chest.
Chen blurted, “Maybe… Maybe our mom has them. We’d better go find her!” He began to walk more quickly. Polly frowned at him, and so did the security guard.
“Un moment. I must ask you to come with me, please.”
Without stopping, Polly turned and said earnestly, “I’m really sorry, sir, but we can’t do that!” and she broke into a run, jerking Chen along with her so that he knocked into a young woman carrying a fancy camera with a long lens poking out.
“Ow!” he exclaimed again.
“Arrêtez! Stop!”
“We’ve just got to get out of sight, then we can go through the Book,” hissed Polly, as they dodged around a large group to slip out of the gallery.
Polly stopped and fumbled at the Book, but Chen yelped, “Don’t stop yet! I can hear him coming!”
They clattered through another doorway, dodged another set of columns, and once again Chen collided with Polly as she suddenly froze.
“Holy cow!” she gasped, staring between the heads of tourists at the armless marble sculpture ahead of her, “That’s the Venus de Milo! The actual real Venus de Milo! We must be in the Louvre! This is one of the most famous art museums in the world!”
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br /> “I don’t care if it’s the Venus de Mars sprouting alien tentacles instead of arms,” snapped Chen, “We’ve got to get out of here!” He dragged Polly to the left, around another corner, looking frantically back over his shoulder. He didn’t see the security guard, and by now there were enough people between them that he didn’t think the guard would be able to see which way they’d gone. But he might have sent out a warning to all the other guards by walkie-talkie. “Come on, get that door open.”
Polly opened the Book, but she hesitated as people kept walking past them. “Someone’s going to see us,” she said.
Chen looked around desperately. Then he saw the elevators. “Here!” He dashed to the doors just as they opened. Pushing past a family with a stroller, he jumped into the elevator and jabbed the button.
“We’re really sorry!” Polly told the angry father sincerely as the door closed in his face. As soon as the elevator doors had slid all the way shut, she jammed the Book’s key into the page and turned. By the time the elevator opened one floor up, it was empty.
“Oh man,” gasped Chen, flopping in his mother’s desk chair, “Oh man, that was bad.”
“No it wasn’t! I’ve always wanted to go to the Louvre! Anyway, it wasn’t like we were really doing any harm. Ha, I’ve never been on the run from a policeman before! Well, practically a policeman anyway.”
“But what if he’d caught us? We would have been in so much trouble. In fact, the more famous the museum is, the more trouble we’d be in, I bet. And I didn’t have any money to pay a fine or something. What if we got thrown in jail? Do you have any money in that hip pouch of yours?”
Polly shook her head, still grinning. “I might have fifty cents. But so what if they threw us in jail? As soon as they turned their backs we’d go through the Book and disappear. I’ve never been thrown in jail before!”