by Betsy Uhrig
Marta was still carrying the stick, and neither Javier nor I was up for asking what she planned to do with it. Sometimes it was easier to stay in the dark.
“That could have gone better,” I said finally.
“At least you got a feel for it,” said Marta.
“A slippery, cold, wet feel for it,” I said. “Not to mention a pain-in-the-butt feel for it.”
“You know,” said Javier, “most times when a person says, ‘I think I’ll write a book,’ the next thing you say isn’t ‘Uh-oh, someone’s going to get hurt.’ ”
“True,” said Marta. “It’s not like when someone says, ‘I think I’ll go cliff diving without any lessons—I can figure it out on the way down.’ ”
Javier nodded. “And it’s not like when someone says, ‘I’ve got a terrible itch I can’t reach. I think I’ll roll around in broken glass—that should take care of it.’ ”
“It’s not like when someone says, ‘You know what’s really holding back my trapeze career? The safety net. That thing has to go.’ ”
“It’s not like when someone says, ‘I lost my glasses, but I can still find my way down the black-diamond slope no problem.’ ”
“It’s not like when someone says—”
“I get it,” I broke in. “Writing a book isn’t supposed to be dangerous. But I’m not writing a book. I’m researching details for a book to make it realistic. By trying things out. And sometimes that turns out to be dangerous.”
“I don’t think fictional-character stunt double is an actual job,” said Javier. “And I’m pretty sure your aunt never hired you to be one, even if it is.”
He was right. Caroline would have been horrified to see me falling off that trellis or flailing around in that stream.
“As soon as my mom lets me use my arm again, I’ll take over,” said Marta. “Because I’m thinking that fictional-character stunt double might be my dream job.”
55
ALMOST A WEEK AFTER THE WEIR incident, just as my tailbone was feeling like itself again, I got home from school and encountered my dad looming in the front hall.
“Alex,” he said. “You want to see something strange?”
“Is Alvin involved?”
“No—it’s not something that’s been in his nose. I promise. It’s even stranger than that. Something you hardly ever see. Something you may never have seen before.”
“Geez, Dad, just show me,” I said. I had stuff to do.
He walked me into the kitchen and pointed dramatically at the house phone.
“Look at that,” he said.
I looked. And it was strange. The base under the phone had a tiny screen on it, and that screen was lit up with a number 1.
“Ever seen anything like that before?” my dad asked. He was enjoying himself.
“What does it mean?”
“It means someone called—on the house phone. And they left a message.”
“Who would do such a thing?”
“That’s where it gets even more interesting,” said Dad. “The message is for you.”
That didn’t make any sense at all.
“What do I do to get it?” I asked.
“You press play,” said my dad. “And then you listen.”
“How do you know it’s for me?”
“I already listened to it.”
“Then why can’t you just tell me what it said?”
“Well, first of all, because this could be your only chance to listen to a message left for you on a landline. It’s historic! And second, because I want to see the look on your face when you hear it.” He folded his arms and leaned ever so casually against the wall.
So now I was picturing all kinds of stuff. A famous movie star asking me to play him as a child in an upcoming movie? A contest that I’d won without knowing I’d entered? A teacher calling about a paper I wrote that was so awesome, she had to…
But my dad’s face didn’t have “something cool for Alex” written all over it. Or even “something impressive Alex did.” My dad looked interested. And amused. So this was probably more along the lines of “something embarrassing about Alex.”
I pressed play.
56
THE MESSAGE WAS SHORT and to the point.
“This is a message for Alex Harmon,” it began in a woman’s no-nonsense voice. A familiar no-nonsense voice. “I’m calling to inform you that the book you require is waiting for you at the library. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.”
My father was outright grinning now. That huge grin that showed all his teeth and then some.
“I have no idea what this is about,” I said.
“You didn’t reserve a book from the library?”
“No, I didn’t. Maybe this is for Alvin.”
“She said Alex. Quite clearly.”
“So what do I do?”
“Sounds like you’d better hustle on down to the library and pick up the book you require.”
My father was still grinning as I went out the door.
* * *
I arrived at the library as most people were leaving. I went over to the checkout desk and told the lady there that I had a book waiting for me.
She looked around the reserve shelf for a while, then asked me to repeat my name. She searched some more and gave up.
“Sorry,” she said. “When did you get the message? Maybe it’s gone back to the stacks if it’s been a while.”
“I got the message today,” I said.
“Do you know who left it?”
“The librarian from the children’s room.”
“Well, it’s possible she has it, then. Why don’t you run in there and check?”
Of course. Of course this would involve going back to the librarian in her remote alpine dwelling.
I could have left at that point. But I was my father’s son: curious. Plus, I’d come all this way. Plus, my dad was not going to let up if I came home without an explanation for the historic Message on the Home Phone.
So I thanked the lady at the desk and headed up the mountainside to the lair of the librarian.
57
THERE SHE WAS, SITTING AT HER desk, waiting like a well-read spider for the fly (me) to bumble onto her web looking for a book it never requested.
“Alex Harmon,” she said when I arrived at the desk. “You got my message, I take it.”
What, exactly, was she taking and where?
“Yes, but I don’t think I requested a book.”
She studied me, and the dried sweat from my run reliquified in my armpits.
“You read only one of the three books I recommended last time you were here,” she said.
Okay, how did she know that?
I didn’t ask that question out loud, but apparently she had psychic powers—maybe she got them from tea she brewed from old bookmarks.
She rested her hand on a book lying on her desk. “I know when a book comes back read and when it doesn’t,” she said.
She looked me up and down. I started to wish that the abyss I’d been trying to avoid last time would open so I could dive into it, Beast or no.
“Were they not what you needed?” she asked.
“Um, no, not at all. I mean yes, yes, they were. What I needed. They were great. It’s just that I, uh, I didn’t have time to read all of them.”
“And?”
Looking back on this conversation, it occurs to me that the librarian would have made a great police detective. The library was getting ready to close, but she was staring at me like we had all night if that’s what it took. So I spilled. Gushed, pretty much.
“And I got restless and I went running and my phone pinged and…”
She held up a hand, and I ground to a halt before I got to “… I had to pee a few times.”
She turned in her chair and pulled a plastic box off the shelf behind her. “This is for you,” she said.
I took the box from her. “This isn’t a book.”
&nb
sp; “It most certainly is a book,” she said.
I wasn’t going to argue. If she said the box was a book, then the box was a book. And if she wanted to tell me my big toe was a book, I was going to take my sneaker and sock off and sit down right there and try to read it.
“I look forward to hearing what you think,” she said.
And I was dismissed.
58
THE BOX CONTAINED A LITTLE DEVICE, I found when I opened it outside the library. A little device you could plug earbuds into. Thinking there might be some top-secret spy-mission instructions recorded on the device for me, I started listening right there on the sidewalk. What I heard was not secret instructions, but the opening lines to an audiobook. The book was one of the librarian’s recommendations that I’d returned unread. She’d given it back to me in audio form.
I had a twenty-minute run home, so I decided I might as well give this book a twenty-minute try. I didn’t know if the librarian could tell if an audiobook had been listened to, and I wasn’t going to take any chances. Next time she’d probably try giving it to me in Braille, and I would be in big trouble then.
My dad used to read to me, and then Alvin and me, before bed every night when I was little. He still read to Alvin sometimes, and I admit that I usually listened from across the hall while pretending not to.
My dad grew up in Bermuda, and he had an unusual accent, which made his reading even more enjoyable. (Though Alvin and I would never admit that, and made fun of his pronunciation of certain words.) The author of the book I was listening to as I ran home from the library was British, and so was the narrator of the audiobook. Not quite the same accent, but it reminded me of my dad’s.
The best thing about the audiobook, though, was that I could listen and run at the same time. I didn’t like to listen to music when I ran because I couldn’t hear what was going on around me, and someone could come up behind me. And I did not like anyone coming up behind me, though that’s another story. Listening to someone read a book didn’t drown out other sounds.
So I ran, and I listened, and I’ll be honest: I enjoyed myself. The book was interesting, and the guy reading it did different voices for the different characters. The main characters had just fallen through the eighteenth hole on a minigolf course into another world when I got home, so I passed right by my house and kept going.
I turned around as it started to get dark, but I listened to the book running to and from school every day until it ended. Then I went back for the next audiobook in the series.
As for the librarian, she smiled smugly whenever she saw me in the audiobook section. Then she retreated to her remote lair to weave herself another nubbly cloak or brew some more psychic bookmark tea.
And if she recognized herself in Gerald in the Grotto of the Gargoyles, she never said a word about it to anyone, as far as I know.
59
GERALD IN THE WARLOCK’S WEIR was more than a hundred pages long when I saw it next. It was nowhere near done, but it was already longer than Gerald Visits Grampa. I didn’t read the whole thing again; I just read the new part. Which was a lot.
I don’t know how she’d had the time, but Caroline had clearly been reading my (okay, the librarian’s) recommendations as she was writing. Even though Gerald in the Warlock’s Weir wasn’t a copy of any of those books, it had a family resemblance, as my grandma Sally would say. It was exciting, and it had some funny parts, and my leg only got twitchy a couple times as I read.
Now I actually got to do what Caroline had offered me ten dollars to do in the first place: take the Red Pen of Boring-Part Detection and point out where I thought things slowed down. There weren’t a lot of boring parts, but there were a few, and you will be happy to know that none of them ended up in the finished book. Which means that if you read it and thought there were boring parts in it, you and I will have to disagree on what constitutes a boring part.
Caroline had also done a good job with the flashbacks of Gerald and Grampa. Almost all of my Nate stuff had gone in, which in my opinion is what makes Grampa such a believable character.
Then I got to the stretch of the book known as the trials. This was where Gerald had to overcome a bunch of dangerous situations before he could get to the warlock’s domain and start really hunting for Grampa. Snarko and the Daredevil helped a lot, but it was up to Gerald in the end—he was the hero, after all.
Unfortunately, Caroline had left little notes for me in the margins of this section. Notes like “I need more detail about what it would feel like to run through a Forest of Flaming Ferns” and “How long do you think Gerald can swim in the Frozen Fjord?” and “Let’s see what your amazing imagination can do with Gerald’s encounter with the Glass Gremlin!” And if that last one sounds somehow less harmful than the others, keep in mind that the gremlin was all jagged edges and slappy attitude—not a good combination.
60
I WAS CONFIDENT THAT MY EXPERIENCE in the stream would do for sensory details about the Frozen Fjord. Besides, it was getting warmer every day, so I wasn’t going for a swim under ice anytime soon. And we totally skipped the Flaming Ferns—even Marta wasn’t a pyromaniac.
We moved on to what I thought would be the easiest trial: Gerald’s journey through the Vale of Violent Violets. If you don’t remember them, they look like violets, but they’re mean little buggers who stab the ankles of anyone who tries to walk through their vale. With spears.
Marta borrowed a bunch of her parents’ plastic appetizer spears for our simulation. They were shaped like tiny weapons with actual points—perfect for a Violent Violet attack. Her arm was back in a sling, since she’d reinjured it trying to prove to her mother how fine it was.
She lay in wait for me in the long grass behind Javier’s compost bin, with a fistful of spears. I was supposed to walk unknowingly (at first, anyway, until the attack started) into the violet patch and then get stabbed repeatedly.
Javier smiled in anticipation as he got ready to film the mayhem. I started walking and Marta started stabbing, but it was clear right away that Javier was disappointed in the level of mayhem.
“You’ve got to stab him harder than that,” he said to Marta after our first attempt. “He barely flinched.”
“He’s wearing socks,” said Marta. “He’s protected. And he’s walking too fast. Slow down, Alex, and let me spear you good.”
“Gerald isn’t supposed to be helping the violets out with the stabbing,” I said. But it was true that I’d gotten by Marta without feeling much pain. She hadn’t even broken the skin.
“Do you want me to take off my socks?” I said. “Maybe Gerald can be wearing sandals.”
“Gerald is not wearing sandals,” said Javier. “He’s the hero. He’s got to have some dignity.”
“Your dad wears sandals,” I pointed out.
“Exactly,” said Javier.
“My dad wears woolly socks with sandals,” said Marta.
All three of us shuddered.
“The problem is that the violets are supposed to be attacking Gerald from all sides,” I said. “He can’t just step away from them.”
“So stand still while I stab you some more,” said Marta.
“That’s not realistic,” I said. “No one’s going to stand there and let a bunch of crushable flowers stab him if there’s another option.”
“I have an idea,” said Javier.
And he ran into the house before Marta or I could ask what it was.
61
JAVIER WAS BACK MOMENTS LATER WITH his little sisters, Irene and Emilia, in tow. They did not look happy.
“It’s only going to take a few minutes,” said Javier to the girls. “All you have to do is get down on the grass—see where Marta is?—and poke Alex with little spears as he walks by. Okay? You like hurting Alex, don’t you?”
They did. Irene was nine and Emilia was five, and they didn’t agree on much. But they did agree that Alex in pain was good fun. They’d both been there the time I fell off the pogo s
tick, and I don’t think I’d ever seen them laugh harder. Irene was a shin kicker, and Emilia was a biter. I generally steered clear of them.
Javier gave each of them two spears, one for each hand, and positioned them opposite Marta, a few feet apart. “All set?” he asked them. They nodded. “And, action!”
This time through was much more painful. First, Irene stabbed well above sock height. She was obviously going for what she knew were my vulnerable shins. Second, Emilia grabbed my ankle as I went by and started stabbing me in the back when I fell. Then, before I had a chance to get up, Irene and Marta were on me as well, stabbing pretty much everywhere except my face, which I covered with my hands.
All three girls were shrieking like maniacs, and I was yelling at them to stop, when Javier called, “Cut!”
Irene and Emilia took this the wrong way and started sawing at me with the spears until Javier pulled them off. This took longer than it should have because he was laughing so hard.
I thought he was going to tell his sisters off for going overboard and make us try it again, but he said, “Great job, everyone. I think we’ve got what we need here.”
“What I need here is about a hundred Band-Aids,” I said. “What was that, anyway?”
“You’re not even bleeding,” said Marta.
“Can we do it again?” asked Irene. “We’ll stab harder.”
Emilia nodded eagerly. “Much harder.”
* * *
So that’s how Gerald ended up caught in a vine snare and falling in the Vale of the Violent Violets, almost losing an eye in addition to all the ankle-level stab wounds. Caroline, who seemed to be getting as bloodthirsty as Javier’s sisters, loved the whole scene when she’d put in my details.
“There’s something about those delicate little flowers just going nuts on Gerald like that,” she told me when she’d finished.