The Accidental Keyhand (4 page)

ANOTHER PLACE ALTOGETHER

Dorrie thought she might be screaming but could hear nothing. She thought she might be pumping her legs madly against the pulling current and clinging to her sword, but those motions only felt like ideas. The heat was real. She howled as her skin seemed to dissolve into a sea of blistering bubbles, each carrying an impossible cargo of burning darkness. She felt her hair crackling with fire. And her fingertips melting away.

As quickly as the heat and dark had absorbed and filled Dorrie, they now released her, leaving her with the distinctly unsettling impression that she was plummeting downward. Her eyes and mouth flew open.

Far below, but rushing toward her at a fantastic clip, lay a long rectangle of mossy green. Its uneven surface gleamed with little winking lights. Dorrie's brain insisted on thinking:
When
I
hit, I'm going to split open like a bag of flour.
She squeezed her eyes tight against the coming impact and the whole messy idea, but instead of the end of everything, she felt a terrific splashing jolt and then a deep desire to sleep. She drifted happily, motionless, ready to dream,

Something snaked around her waist. Dorrie felt herself pulled free of the wet and dragged up onto something smooth and hard. With a great effort, she opened her eyes. Marcus, his dripping hair plastered across his forehead, knelt beside her, staring anxiously into her face. Dorrie took a long, damp, chokey breath, and pushed herself upright.

“Are you all right?” asked Marcus.

“I…I think so.” In her sopping clothes, Dorrie's limbs still felt heavy and tired, her thoughts thick and confused. A throbbing in her hand caught her attention. It was wrapped tightly around the hilt of a sword, purply-blue with bruises.
Tiffany.

Dorrie looked around. She was sitting beside a long, rectangular pool of water she'd never seen before. A forest of tiled pillars stood along its edge. From high overhead, an angry chittering sound made Dorrie tilt her head back. The pillars, she now saw, held up a high, white ceiling dotted with gold stars and suns. Dead in its center, a jagged hole interrupted the ceiling's smooth expanse. From a broken-off piece of wood at its edge hung Dorrie's duffel bag, and on the duffel bag perched a furious Moe. The edge of the hole glowed with cold, blue-white light. Through it, Dorrie could see the room where they had briefly stood with its portraits and overstuffed armchairs.

Marcus sighed over Moe's furious accusations. “Whatever just happened, Scuggans is going to completely blame us for it.”

Dorrie staggered to her feet and wrung out the bottom of her soaked dress.

“You're welcome on the whole saving-your-life thing,” said Marcus, beginning to wiggle out of his pajamas bottoms.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting comfortable. They're heavy!”

“We can't get comfortable! We have to get back to the park!” She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Mr. Scuggans!” she hollered into the hole at the top of her lungs.

“Don't call him!” hissed Marcus, scuttling behind a pillar. “Have you not heard of plausible deniability?” He twisted a river of water out of his pajama bottoms. “Let's just
quietly
look for a way out.”

Off-key singing put an end to Marcus's suggestion-making.

Dorrie's hands flew to her head. Not just because of the singing's abominable quality, but because a buzzing had started deep inside her ears, as though a family of bees had moved into her skull.

“What is that horrible sound?” cried Marcus, slapping at his ears.

Dorrie spun around, grimacing. “Which one?”

The singing seemed to be coming from behind a tall, narrow set of mottled greenish-blue doors. Dorrie sloshed toward them in her waterlogged boots and pushed. The doors barely moved. “Hello!” she called out loudly into the crack. Bracing herself, grunting, her feet slipping, she pushed harder until the door swung all the way open.

Panting, she stared open-mouthed. Flickering light from torches set in wooden holders along the walls illuminated the low, cracked ceiling of a narrow corridor that turned sharply farther on. Flagstones covered the floor. “Marcus?” she said slowly into the new silence. She felt him materialize damply behind her.

He stuck his head inside the corridor. “This is so vampire lair.”

“Don't
say
that!”

They squeezed through the doorway together. The air felt much colder here. A chill pressed upward from the flagstones, and a shiver twitched Dorrie's shoulders. Bicycles and handcarts lined the walls. Pairs of the strangest roller-skates Dorrie had ever seen sat in a row on a shelf. Each leather boot sat atop two-foot-high wheels that looked as though they'd been torn from the frames of tiny bicycles.

“Roller-skating vampires. Definitely. Probably Mr. Scuggans's relatives.” Marcus stuck his hand into the nearest torch flame. “Real fire,” he yelped, snatching it back.

Urgency drove Dorrie forward down the corridor at a run, her breath making little clouds, her wet clothes feeling clammy now against her skin. “Is anybody here?”

Nobody answered. Between two of the torches stood a low, splintery doorframe. Dorrie sidled up to one side of it and peeked in. Rack upon rack of what looked like rectangles of stone or clay filled a low-ceilinged room.

Marcus ducked his head and went through. Dust rose in puffs around his wet shoes. “Oh, this is totally where they sleep.”

“Quit it!” hissed Dorrie, edging slowly into the room after him. Almost immediately, she felt enveloped in dry warmth. Across the room, another low doorway opened into a starkly different room, all whites and golds with a checkerboard floor, its walls lined with books.

She ran her eyes dazedly over the racks of heavy, dusty slabs nearby. “This must be another part of the library, but what are these things?” She gently touched the edge of one of the thick rectangles. It felt warm and rough beneath her fingers. Tiny marks had been dug into its surface. Tiny marks that seemed, as she stared at them, to tremble and move. She leaped backward, wondering if she'd disturbed a nest of ants or roaches or something worse. She didn't have time to check.

“The pleasure of loooove lasts only a moment,” warbled the still-distant voice again in a plaintive slur, the words now more distinct. “The sorrow of love laaaaaaasts a lifetime.”

“Here! We're here!” yelled Dorrie, her ears filled with angry buzzing again.

The voice seemed to be coming from behind a pair of highly polished wooden doors with brass knobs. Dorrie and Marcus scuttled toward them.

“Wait!” Dorrie called as the singing abruptly ceased, along with the buzzing in her ears. She twisted the doorknob. Though she'd only crossed the room, Dorrie felt as though she'd run miles carrying an armful of bricks. When she finally succeeded in wrenching the door open, she gasped.

A far larger and airier room lay on the other side. Along the room's edges, tall stone figures in swirls of sculpted cloth looked down from pedestals set between banks of gleaming wooden bookshelves packed with leather-bound volumes. A dozen sets of doors—just like the ones they'd come through—interrupted the bookshelves at regular intervals. A wrought-iron and wooden balcony ran around the walls above the statues' heads.

More books lined every inch of the soaring walls between the balcony and a vaulted ceiling painted robin's egg blue. Thin golden lines connected glinting stars into wheeling constellations. Elaborate chandeliers bright with a multitude of white candles cast a wavering light. The silent room smelled of old leather and pencil lead and…Dorrie sniffed carefully…oranges.

Marcus shouldered past Dorrie. “Book-loving vampires.”

“How come nobody ever showed us this part of the library?” whispered Dorrie, taking in the wide tables that marched up the center of the room in two straight rows, each holding a green-hooded lamp. “And where are all the people? Shouldn't there be people?”

Marcus pointed at a broad, polished oak desk on top of which stood a chalkboard propped on an easel. It was covered with what looked like scribbles. Dorrie blinked and rubbed her eyes. Now she could see that the scribbles were letters. They spelled out: “Staff Meeting in Progress. For Assistance in a Research Emergency, please dial Petrarch 5-8105.” Next to the sign stood the kind of telephone that Dorrie had seen people use in old black-and-white movies.

“Does this count as a research emergency?” asked Dorrie.

Marcus helped himself to a piece of hard candy from a glass bowl sitting on the desk. “Sure, why not. ‘How do we get out of here?' is a question.”

Dorrie reached for the strange phone.

Marcus caught her arm. “You do know we've been down here way longer than ten minutes, right?”

The realization that she'd lost to Tiffany without even getting the chance to try and beat her almost brought Dorrie to her knees. She'd failed in the most frustrating way. She covered her face with her hands. “Poor Mr. Kornberger.”

“Don't worry,” said Marcus, pulling tiny drawers in and out of a heavy cabinet that stood beside the desk. “He probably won't even notice that you're wearing it.” He ran his finger over the cards that filled one of the drawers. “What is this thing?”

Dorrie wiped her nose, which had gone all damp and drippy, and walked slowly toward the nearest bookshelf. No longer in a tearing rush to return to the park, she gave in to her desire to really take in the grand room. She ran her fingers over the soft spines of the nearest books.

“Old penny, dirty dog, coffee, mud,” Dorrie murmured, giving the colors of the leather bindings names. Nearby stood a stepladder, a sprinkling of orange peels littering the floor around its feet. Dorrie lifted a book from where it sat facedown on the top step, propped her sword up beside the ladder, and sat down on the stepladder. The book's muted green cover felt thick and soft. Gilt letters glowed upon it. With a small cry, Dorrie let the book tumble to the ground.

“What?” said Marcus from where he stood spinning a globe.

“The letters on that book. They moved! They…they…squirmed.”

Marcus hurried to her and retrieved the book from the ground. “What are you—” He broke off sharply, almost dropping the book again himself. “Whoa.”

“See!” With a sharp intake of breath, Dorrie watched the figures that made up the title writhe and finally leap into focus as letters she recognized.
Index
to
14th Century Angry Letters Left on Tables by Girls Planning to Run Away from Home
. With trembling hands, she flipped open the volume.

“So many,” murmured Dorrie. Her eyes ran down the list of entries to the last one on a page that smelled strongly of oranges. After more twisting of symbols, it read: “Mohamad, Saffiyah. Baza, Kingdom of Granada, March 11, 1350. ‘To My Parents Who Just Don't Understand.'”

“This place is weird,” said Marcus emphatically and with great pleasure. Dorrie and Marcus exchanged a look of tense excitement, their eyes alight.

Dorrie carefully closed the book and pushed it into the gap between
Index
to
14th Century Novels, Poems, and Other Fictions
and
Index
to
14th Century Treatises on Physics
. She let her eyes dart back and forth across the bookshelves, her heart beginning to pound, as over and over again, squiggles became words before her eyes.

She heard a jingle and spun around to see Marcus swinging open a wrought-iron door set in something that looked like an enormous, ornate version of Moe's cage. A large key dangled in the door's lock.

Marcus stuck his head inside. “Come look at this.”

The back of Dorrie's neck began to prickle. “Marcus, I don't think we're supposed to go in there.” She crept to his side.

Inside the cage stood a long, battered table upon which lay thick, red books chained to it at intervals. Dorrie and Marcus edged farther into the room and peered at the closest book, which looked worn, its title faded. Dorrie squinted at it, not shocked this time to see the letters wiggle and rearrange themselves until they stood out as clearly as anything she'd ever read.
The
History
of
Histories
.

In fact, all the books on the table bore the title
The
History
of
Histories
. As Marcus reached out to open one, Dorrie seized his arm. Somewhere nearby she'd heard a faint stirring, almost a whispering. “Marcus, don't,” she hissed, frozen, her heart banging.

He shrugged her off. “Chillax. It's a library. We're just browsing.”

“Yeah, in somebody's locked safe. C'mon, we've still got to find a way out.”

Marcus ignored her, flipped open the volume, and began to leaf through its pages. He held a page up at an angle to catch the light better. “321 PLE—whatever that is—January 27—okay, got that.” His eyes drifted down the page. “Check this out… ‘On this 14th day of November, 1725, in Cambridge, England: Foiled, a plot to murder Thomas Woolston, author of
The
Moderator.
Lybrarian: Dame Henrietta Banks. Keyhand: Colin Headly.'” Marcus snickered. “It sounds so James Bond. The whole page, the whole book is full of these little—”