The Accidental Keyhand Read online

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Phillip, handing Marcus and Dorrie each a plate.

  Dorrie took hers slowly and glanced out the window, the hairs on her neck rising. “Why can’t we see Passaic from that window?

  “Ah, now we’ve come to it,” said Mistress Wu, a new torrent of sweat breaking out on her forehead.

  Ursula bustled to the window and pushed the curtains back fully. The blue of the sky had deepened into dusk since Dorrie had last looked through it.

  Ursula took a deep breath. “Do you know what a hub is? The center of a wheel, say?”

  Dorrie and Marcus nodded.

  “Petrarch’s Library is a sort of hub,” said Ursula. “Its spokes, however, aren’t the wooden rods of a wagon wheel. No. Its spokes are the four hundred or so smaller libraries that connect to it.”

  Phillip buttered a piece of bread for himself. “One Spoke Library sits in Passaic, and another sits in Peking, and another in Paris. You see?”

  A wild beating had started up in Dorrie’s chest. “But Paris and Passaic are miles and miles apart.”

  “And yet, through Petrarch’s Library you can get from Paris to Passaic in a matter of minutes.” Phillip sniffed. “Assuming you can find a bicycle when you want one, or a pair of roller-skates in a pinch.”

  “Majestic,” said Marcus with deep fervor.

  “Majestic?” repeated Dorrie.

  “Oh, I meant to tell you,” said Marcus. “I’ve left ‘awesome’ behind.”

  “Always a sad thing to be left behind,” sighed Mistress Wu. “People even leave libraries behind, you know. Just abandon them to the cruelties of mice and wind and rain and torch-bearing philistines.” Her eyes began to well fabulously. “Petrarch’s Library is more full of Ghost Libraries than Spoke Libraries. Oh, yes,” she added vehemently, as though Dorrie and Marcus had expressed some doubt upon the matter. “Ghost Libraries are constantly crashing into us here. Squeezing in. Making places for themselves where it suits.” She suddenly sounded querulous. “Always changes the layout of Petrarch’s Library. Very confusing for us.” She sighed again. “But you can’t blame them, poor things.” Now tears collected again in the corners of her eyes. “Fallen to wrack and ruin in their own times and places.” She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

  “It’s true,” said Phillip cheerfully. “One day, it’s two lefts and a right to get to the loo, and the next day, you’re lucky if you can find the thing at all.” He began to fidget in his seat as if in discomfort. “Excuse me.” He dug two oranges out of a loose pants pocket. Dorrie started, forcibly reminded of the frightening figure who’d surprised them in the room with the History of Histories books.

  Phillip held them up to Ursula. “Found these on my way over.”

  Ursula raised her eyebrows. “The Archivist, no doubt.”

  “Who’s the Archivist?” said Dorrie, avoiding Marcus’s eyes and trying not to sound too interested.

  “One of our resident lybrarians,” said Phillip. “In charge of the History of—”

  “A very old man who once a year drinks far too much Madeira wine and gets maudlin,” Ursula cut in crisply.

  Phillip pulled a third piece of fruit out of his vest pocket. “When the Archivist gets maudlin, the corridors tend to fill with bad singing and oranges. Lots of oranges. He reads them out by the dozens.”

  Dorrie and Marcus looked at Phillip blankly.

  Phillip tossed an orange to each of them. “I’m sorry. I mean, he reads the oranges out of a book. A French novel, in this case. Terrible plotting but a beautiful description of an orange near the end. That’s how we get a good deal of our food around here.”

  “What!” cried Dorrie and Marcus in unison.

  Phillip waved at the laden table. “Took me an hour and a half to read all that out. It’s amazing what the right reader can get out of a book. And if I do say so myself, I have something of a knack when it comes to meats and sauces.”

  Dorrie looked at the bread beside her with new wonder.

  “If we’re quite done discussing oranges and sauces, there’s one other fact of great importance we haven’t yet shared,” said Ursula.

  Something in Ursula’s tone sent a wind kicking up in Dorrie’s chest.

  Ursula played with the pocket on the long, yellowed apron she wore. “The Spoke Libraries don’t just connect Petrarch’s Library to far-flung places.” She found Dorrie’s eyes, and then Marcus’s in turn. “They connect Petrarch’s Library to every century that has passed since the invention of the written word.”

  Dorrie held tight to the edge of her blanket. “You mean you can get from—”

  “500 BCE to 1611 CE?” finished Phillip. “Ancient Egypt to twelfth-century Byzantium to eighteenth-century Japan? Yes.”

  “Monumental!” shouted Marcus, sending a slosh of cloversweet flying from his goblet.

  “You can tell the Spoke Libraries from the Ghost Libraries,” said Mistress Wu, “because the Spoke Libraries form on the other side of conveniently labeled stone arches. Tells you what lies on the other side.”

  Phillip scratched his head. “Except for yours, apparently.”

  “We saw an archway like that!” cried Dorrie, “There was a man on the other side. He looked like some kind of monk.”

  “Ireland, 812 CE, most probably,” said Phillip. “Tell us, what century are you from?”

  “The twenty-first,” said Dorrie, feeling bewitched. Ursula’s long apron with its big pocket and Phillip’s embroidered vest and Mistress Wu’s long silk tunic made a new kind of sense. Suddenly, a vision of Tiffany’s jeering face smashed through the magic stained glass of the moment. And then the faces of her parents, faces pinched with worry. Who knew what revenge Tiffany was going to take on Dorrie for disappearing. Her parents had probably called the police.

  Setting her bread aside, Dorrie pushed the blanket off her legs. “We have to leave. Now.”

  “Now?” said Marcus, outraged. “But it’s just getting interesting!”

  “Nobody knows where we are!” Dorrie turned to Phillip. “How do we get back into Passaic?”

  “Oh, but you can’t,” said Mistress Wu, sounding as pained as if she were being forced to strangle kittens. “You simply can’t at the moment.”

  Dorrie suddenly did feel mad with a great jag of Mistress Wu’s anxiety. “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing,” said Phillip, “it sounds like we’d have to shoot you back through the hole with a cannon, and we don’t have one of those on hand at the moment. Even if we did, right now you’d just sizzle against the hole rather magnificently and fall back into the pool in a deadish sort of way. The hole will be far too hot to travel back through until at least tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow!” cried Dorrie and Marcus together.

  “Or a day or two after that.”

  “But our parents will think we’ve been kidnapped or something,” said Dorrie.

  “Well, there you’re in luck,” said Ursula. “Time has all but stopped in your Passaic for the moment, at least for those of us here in Petrarch’s Library.”

  “Premium!” cried Marcus.

  “For how long?” said Dorrie hoarsely.

  “For the next four weeks or so,” said Phillip, “or whenever you return to Passaic. Whichever comes first.”

  “Whichever comes first?” repeated Dorrie softly.

  “I promise,” said Phillip. “No one in Passaic has even noticed that you’re gone.”

  Dorrie’s heart beat slowly and hard as she closed her eyes and saw the pandemonium she and Marcus had left behind at the Pen and Sword Festival. Again, she saw herself falling through the floor of the Passaic Public Library and, at that very moment, all the shouting and running and sword-waving in the park coming to a grinding halt.

  She caught her breath as a horrible, wonderful realization blossome
d. Perhaps Tiffany still awaited her return and Dorrie hadn’t forfeited anything to her yet. She hadn’t yet lost the bet. And in the meantime—she looked out the marvelous, impossible window—there was all this.

  “I’m so very sorry,” said Mistress Wu, mournfully. “It’s just how the Library works!”

  Dorrie met Marcus’s enthusiastic eyes with her own eagerly blazing ones.

  “There’s another matter,” said Ursula. “The Lybrariad depends on Petrarch’s Library as a secret headquarters from which to do our work.” Her eyes flicked to Dorrie’s hands and back so quickly that Dorrie wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it. “Now that you’ve found us, we need time to come to some decisions.”

  Dorrie reached for breath which with to speak. “What kind of decisions?”

  “There are things you’ll need to be told, things you’ll need to understand about your situation,” said Ursula carefully.

  Mistress Wu wrung her handkerchief. “I’ve sent word to Hypatia. Once she returns, we can figure out what to do. Also,” —she straightened up a line of sardines on their platter—“Francesco will want to speak with you.”

  Something in her tone made Dorrie’s fears surge back past her wonder. “Who’s Francesco?”

  Ursula looked at Dorrie steadily. “Francesco D’Avila is our director of security. He’s out of library, as well, at the moment. Dealing with more of that nasty Inquisition business.”

  “He can detect a threat just about anywhere,” observed Phillip archly.

  “Francesco is one of us,” said Ursula. “A lybrarian. A good man.”

  “Deep, deep on the inside,” said Phillip under his breath.

  CHAPTER 7

  SWORDS IN THE STACKS

  It was decided that Phillip should keep Dorrie and Marcus company for the night while they recovered.

  “Though I daresay Francesco won’t appreciate that we let them sleep in the Mission Room,” said Mistress Wu as she and Ursula departed.

  While Phillip lit a lantern in the darkening room, Dorrie and Marcus sat in the bathrobe and dressing gown that Millie had brought and feasted on the platters of food. Their wet clothing hung over the fire screen, dripping and steaming pleasantly. After stuffing themselves full of onion soup, sardines, slice after slice of yellow cheese, and a staggering number of eclairs, Dorrie felt a deep weariness stealing over her. Phillip turned down the lantern and settled himself in one of the fat armchairs beside the fire. Dorrie and Marcus eased themselves down beneath their blankets.

  Watching the fire’s dancing flames, still and quiet at last, Dorrie realized that her fingertips still felt faintly warm and had not really stopped feeling that way since she had come through the hole. She drew the hand that Tiffany had bashed out of the blankets. A crescent of blue-black darkness had formed at the base of her thumbnail. She tucked her hand back under the blankets and stared again at the fire.

  She and Marcus truly were…elsewhere…with no Miranda to shout for her imaginary dog and no dinner pots to wash with her father and no familiar blue comforter with the hole that sighed feathers over her. And no chance of her mother easing open the door to whisper, “Good night, Sweet and Sour.” But she and Marcus had stumbled upon something incredible, and it hadn’t cost her even her bargain with Tiffany Tolliver.

  Dorrie thought about the Irish monk on the other side of his archway. When she’d dashed past him, had he really been sitting in an entirely different time? One filled with oxcarts and court jesters and bows and arrows? Her head hurt pleasantly at the thought. Back in Passaic, now was now, the past almost a dream, and the future unknowable. In Petrarch’s Library, now must be something else entirely.

  Despite the shadow cast by the unmet director of security, a small thrill spun through Dorrie’s chest. She fell asleep, leaving any farther thinking in the room to the mouse hunting for crumbs in a shadowy corner.

  ***

  After what seemed like mere minutes, Phillip woke Dorrie with a little shake and the news that she and Marcus had slept half the morning away, that he would soon have to leave on business outside Petrarch’s Library, and that Ebba was on her way over to keep them company until Hypatia returned.

  Dorrie stretched. “What should we do while we wait?”

  “Well, I suppose you could curl up and read a book. We’ve got a few of those around. Or count dust motes. Or wash the windows in here.” He gently shook Marcus, who responded with all the animation of a sack of sand. “Of course, if you’re the sort of person who would prefer to explore the Library, well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

  Dorrie grinned at Phillip and took over the job of waking Marcus. As she used her fists to pound her brother into groggy awareness, Phillip crouched by the fire and pushed a little three-legged iron pot deeper into the flames. “I’ll eat a lot of things out of books, but I draw the line at coffee.”

  In the morning brightness, Dorrie noticed that over the mantel hung an enormous black chalkboard painted with a grid of white lines and words crowded in between the lines. At the top, large letters shifted and swam like eels before Dorrie’s eyes, finally spelling out the words “Mission Docket.”

  “Why do the words in this place do that?” asked Dorrie.

  Phillip glanced at the blackboard. “Ah, one of the Library’s useful peculiarities. Instant translation. If I say or write it in Latin, you hear or see it in…”

  “English,” said Dorrie, catching on.

  Phillip poured the steaming coffee into a mug. He held up the iron pot, beaming. “Coffee, anyone?”

  “Sure,” said Marcus, as though he drank it every day at home.

  Phillip poured a second mug full and handed it to Marcus, who took a substantial sip. An instantaneous facial paralysis seemed to strike him. As soon as Phillip turned away, Marcus promptly spit the coffee back into the mug.

  “Hand me that book of Basho poems, will you?” Phillip said to Dorrie, jerking his chin toward a thin volume with a marbled paper cover that sat on the cleared table. “Ursula brought it over when she realized you were going to sleep right through breakfast. Her own copy.”

  Dorrie passed the book to him. Phillip settled himself comfortably back in his chair and flipped through the book’s pages. “You can’t beat haiku for the quick breakfast.” He stopped at a page near the back. “Ah! Here’s just the thing.” With the fingertips of one hand resting gently on the open book, Phillip cleared his throat. Seeming to focus all of his attention of the page below his fingertips, he began to read out loud. “Coolness of the melons, flecked with mud, in the morning dew.”

  Dorrie stared as Phillip began to draw his thumb and forefinger together on the page as if trying to get hold of the end of a thread or the head of a pin. Something seemed to be growing between them. Dorrie gasped as the little book seemed to stretch and flex. In another moment, Phillip had eased a pale green melon from its pages and set it on the table. He looked up into Dorrie and Marcus’s flabbergasted faces.

  “Quite a nice one! Fruit isn’t really my forte.” He picked up a knife and jabbed it toward a basket sitting on the hearth. “Ursula brought those as well. Help yourself. She had to go back to the repair and preservation department. The Archivist came crawling in with a pounding headache about dawn and needed her attention.”

  Marcus reached into the basket and helped himself to a flat rectangle made of nuts and seed and bits of fruit, all held together in a sticky amber glaze.

  “Will the archivist guy be all right?” asked Dorrie.

  “Perfectly,” said Phillip, cutting the melon into pieces.

  Dorrie looked up at the words written below “Mission Docket.” “Imperiled Subject…Nature of Threat…” she read out loud, enjoying the sensation of watching the initially unreadable yellow letters coil and straighten to form words she could comprehend. “Wheren…Assigned Lybrarian…Outcome.”

  Her eyes traveled
down the names below the heading “Imperiled Subject.” She read the names silently: “Simon Morin, Casimir Liszinski, Su Shi, Katharina Henot.” The column labeled “Nature of Threat” was almost too horrible to read. Dorrie’s eyes skittered over words like “beheaded” and “burned at stake” and “tortured.”

  “So all these people,” said Dorrie. “They’re the ones in trouble for writing something?”

  “That’s right,” said Phillip, wafting the steam from the coffee toward his nose. “Wrote something someone didn’t like.” He took a small sip. “It’s always the limericks that seem to get people in the most unexpected trouble.”

  Dorrie’s eyes caught on the last name listed under “Imperiled Subject.” Petrarch’s Library. Her eyes ran across the words that filled the little boxes next to that entry: “Persistent Inquiries by Person Unknown, Timbuktu…1597…Kash…Ongoing.”

  “Petrarch’s Library is an imperiled subject?” asked Dorrie.

  “Oh, not to worry,” said Phillip. “It makes the list regularly. Rumors of imminent discovery. Innuendo. People seek it like lost Atlantis. Our director of security is a great one for thoroughly checking out each and every whiff of a threat to our inconspicuousness or any plots against us.”

  “What are these?” exploded Marcus, staring at what was left of his sticky bar, a look of utter satisfaction on his face.

  “Ambrosia,” said Phillip. “One of our lybrarians reads them out when she’s worried, and she’s frantic about her friend Socrates.”

  Dorrie’s eyes flashed to the Mission Docket. Socrates. She’d just seen that name on the board…near the top.

  Marcus shoved the last of the bar into his mouth. “It must be such a bummer to be named Socrates.”

  “How so?” asked Phillip.

  “You tell people your name,” said Marcus, “and all anyone can think about is the Socrates.”

  Phillip pulled a piece of ambrosia out of the basket. “Well, I am thinking about the Socrates.”