The Island of Dr. Libris (3 page)

Billy had a microwaved bacon cheeseburger and a pack of peanut butter crackers for dinner.

Then he went into the living room and stared at the wall where there should’ve been a TV.

Billy turned and stared at a different wall.

This one had a framed black-and-white drawing of people with bulb heads walking up and down all these impossibly sideways sets of stairs or walls that faked you into thinking they were floors.

“It’s an M. C. Escher print,” said his mother, coming down the steps to refill her coffee mug. “He was a Dutch artist famous for his mathematically inspired woodcuts and lithographs. Dr. Libris must be a fan. There’s another one just like it upstairs in my bedroom.”

“People can’t do what the people are doing in that picture,” said Billy. “It’s impossible.”

His mom smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. Some people refuse to accept the limits given to them by others.”

“Huh?”

“Sorry. Guess I’ve been reading too many mathematical theorems supporting the concept of parallel universes. So, how are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” said Billy, following his mom into the kitchen. She was headed for the coffeepot.

“Billy, I’m sorry about your phone. But trust me—it’s not the end of the world.”

Easy for her to say
, Billy thought.
She doesn’t even text.

“There’s lots of other ways to amuse yourself up here.”

“Like what?”

“Swimming. Hiking.”

“It’ll be dark soon.”

She poured coffee into her mug and waved toward the living room. “Well, I saw some board games in those bottom cabinets.”

“Cool. You want to play something?”

“Sorry. Not tonight.”

Right
, Billy thought.
The dissertation.

“How about a jigsaw puzzle?” she suggested.

“Seriously? Are we at Grandma’s house all of a sudden?”

She smiled at that. “Good point.” She cradled her mug and headed into the living room. Billy followed her.

“Hey, have you checked out Dr. Libris’s study? He has hundreds of books in there.”

“Comic books?”

“Billy, what do you think kids did back before video games or TV or even electricity?”

“I don’t know. Cried a lot?” He plopped down dramatically on the couch.

“No, Billy. They read books. They made up stories and games. They took nothing and turned it into something. Like your father taking a taco and turning it into a mariachi singer with a cheesy mustache.”

“You like that commercial?”

“It’s funny.”

“But you don’t like Dad.”

“That’s not true.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“I don’t know. It’s complicated.” She took a breath and ran a hand through her hair.

“That’s okay,” said Billy, letting his mom off the hook. “I’ll find something to do. You sure it’s all right for me to check out Dr. Libris’s study?”

“Definitely. Oh, if you want to read any of the books locked inside the bookcase, you’ll need to find the key. I couldn’t.”

“Awesome.”

Hey, a bookcase key hunt beat sitting on the couch staring at weird pictures on the walls.

Barely. But it beat it.

The door to Dr. Libris’s study was heavier than any other door in the cabin.

Billy pushed it open and stepped into a pitch-dark room.

He fumbled on the wall, searching for a switch.

Found it.

A floor lamp snapped on.

Bookshelves climbed to the ceiling of the windowless room. Every inch of every shelf was crammed with books. The ceiling was covered with stamped-tin tiles.

And, of course, there was a mini security cam mounted just above the door.

Next to the floor lamp, Billy saw a leather reading chair with arms wide enough to park a cocoa mug.

On the wall behind the chair, in a narrow space between bookcases, hung a Wizard of Oz cuckoo clock with its chained pinecone weights lying sideways on the floor. Its hands stood frozen at seven and twelve.

Billy sat down in the chair and felt a small bump under his butt. He grinned.

Finding the hidden key was a cinch!

Reaching under the seat cushion, though, all he found was a switch connected to an electrical cord.

Click. Click.
Nothing.

Billy was starting to think the switch was a dud when, on click three, a track of miniature spotlights lit up the far corner of the room.

“Whoa.”

The darkness had been hiding the most incredible piece of furniture Billy had ever seen.

A bookcase twelve feet tall and maybe eight feet wide. It had double glass doors and a wild tangle of swirling wood carvings running along its sides, top, and bottom. There were 3-D dragons, mermaids, sea serpents, towering giants, shriveled gnomes, prancing jesters, kings, queens, soldiers, sailors, Humpty Dumpty, witches, fairies, Pinocchio, and Tiny Tim with his crutch, all chiseled delicately into the wood.

The books behind the glass doors looked pretty impressive, too. Their leather covers were a dozen different colors, their spines stamped with sparkly gold lettering.

One book was propped open on the middle shelf:
The Labors of Hercules.

An illustration showed a muscleman wrestling a guy twice his size who looked like he might be made out of mud and rock.

Billy tugged on the brass pulls to open the doors.

The glass rattled.

Duh.
His mother had told him the big bookcase was locked.

He glanced around the room, looking for a key rack. There wasn’t one.

So he pushed a few of the wood carvings, hoping they might be secret buttons that would pop open the doors. He bopped a bunny on the snout. Poked a juggling bear in the belly. Tried to toggle Tiny Tim’s crutch sideways.

Nothing moved. The doors were still locked.

“Okay,” Billy said out loud, “if I were a zany old professor, where would I hide a key?”

He rubbed his chin and stared at the bookcase.

Then he stared some more.

Finally, he saw something.…

Just behind the brass keyhole, which looked like a yawning lion, Billy saw a small slip of paper the size of a fortune cookie fortune.

It was under a strip of clear plastic tape that had turned brown around the edges. The fortune itself was so tiny Billy wished he had a magnifying glass.

He looked around the room.

Some of the shelves were decorated with trinkets—like a miniature Gandalf figurine in front of a copy of
The Hobbit
and a whaling ship in a bottle near
Moby-Dick.

But no magnifying glass.

What about Sherlock Holmes?
thought Billy.
He always has that magnifying glass.

There was a library ladder attached to the longest wall of books. Billy rolled it over a few feet, climbed up two rungs, and, working his way through the alphabet
of authors, found
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Score!
Right in front of the book was a toy magnifying glass—the kind you might get with a Happy Meal. Billy wiped the layer of dust off the lens, climbed down the ladder, and went back to the bookcase.

Holding the miniature magnifier right up against the glass doors in front of the slip of paper, he squinted to read letters so small they might’ve been typed by a mouse:

Okay. This was pretty cool. A riddle. Billy loved solving puzzles.

He did some quick math. “Three, five, seven, and nine are odd numbers. Take away one, and you get two, four, six, and eight.”

This riddle wasn’t very good.

Any odd number you subtracted one from automatically turned into an even number. You didn’t need to be an assistant math professor like his mom to know you could do that kind of subtraction to infinity and never end up with a decent answer.

He reread the riddle. In school, whenever he was stumped on a quiz, he found it helped to reread the question, see what it was really asking.

Billy smiled.

The riddle didn’t say “subtract one.” It said “take away one.”
One what?
It wasn’t specific.

He snapped his fingers. “The answer is seven,” he said aloud. “Because if you take away one
letter
—the ‘s’—you end up with the word ‘even.’ ”

Of course, knowing the answer to the riddle didn’t put the bookcase key in Billy’s hand.

So he climbed the library ladder again, gave himself a sideways shove, and started looking for a book with “seven” in the title.

When he reached the far end of the shelves, he stepped up a rung and gave himself a shove back the other way.

Halfway across the room, he found what he was looking for.

The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.

Billy pulled out the book and flipped it open.

No key tumbled out.

He ruffled the pages.

They weren’t bookmarked with a skinny skeleton key.

He put the book back, climbed down the ladder, and stared at the locked bookcase.

Seven
had
to be the answer to the riddle. But was it the secret to finding the key?

Billy noticed something: The brass keyhole wasn’t just a yawning lion. It was the
Cowardly
Lion.

Duh!

The Wizard of Oz cuckoo clock.

The hands were frozen at seven and twelve.
Seven
o’clock.

Billy stood on the chair and examined the cuckoo clock more closely.

Were the clock hands actually keys?

Was he supposed to snap one off?

Then he had another idea.

He pried open the little door above the twelve. Something popped out.

It wasn’t a cuckoo bird or even a barking Toto.

It was an antique skeleton key with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz’s moon-shaped face inscribed on its head.

And it fit the bookcase’s keyhole—perfectly.