Chapter 10
How do you travel from an Astral Library to an Astral Gallery?
Through a book of paintings, of course.
“Let’s see . . .” The Gallerist walked unerringly to the nearest shelf as though they knew exactly what they were looking for, pulled down a book, and began paging through it.
One of those big coffee-table art books with huge color plates of famous paintings—I saw the Mona Lisa and a self-portrait of Van Gogh flip past, blank painted eyes staring at me as the Gallerist moved past them to a landscape of some kind.
“There it is. Link up now, ducklings, link up—” And before I could ask what painting we were traveling to, I felt their cool-fingered French-perfumed hand clasp mine.
I hastily clasped Sarah’s, Sarah reached for Stephanie and Stephanie for the boy from Tom Sawyer, and we were stepping through.
Traveling into a painting was slower than jumping into the world of a book—it wasn’t the falling sensation of stepping on a page and dropping straight into the book’s world, but something more deliberate, as if the Library around me was blurring into an Impressionist slurry of colors and re-forming into an entirely new palette.
I had enough time to wonder if I’d done the right thing here, volunteering to help the Gallerist: Should it be a Page’s duty not to abandon her Librarian or her Library?
But I felt a little less panicked about the flurry of red cards now that I’d heard how the last attack on the library had been defeated; a little bit less like I had to hunker down for a fight—clearly the Library knew how to defend itself, and so did its mistress.
Besides, I so very much wanted to make a better impression on the Librarian after my Sherlockian debacle.
Surely if I helped her colleague out in a pinch, I’d get that approving nod she’d bestowed once or twice on Sarah, but not so far on me?
No nod when I volunteered to go with the Gallerist and get the Library Patrons settled and hidden in their temporary painting sanctuaries, just a distracted yes, all right and a wave of the hand with that big emerald ring, but I’d take what I could get.
Ideally, a glowing reference from the Gallerist when we came back: Alix is the most helpful Page imaginable . . .
And then the Impressionist swirl around me resolved itself, and I gasped aloud.
The five of us were in a boat—a wide rowboat with a squared-off stern and a high pointed prow, and we shouldn’t have all fit but we did.
All around us was the vast sweep of a glassy lake, its shores lost to sight, the bluster of piled clouds arching overhead.
Somewhere in front was the shadowed outline of an island, its rocky cliffs climbing toward the sky, but my attention was arrested by something a little closer to hand.
“What—what’s that?” I asked, and I couldn’t quite keep a quiver out of my voice as I pointed to the long rectangular box laid across the prow, lurking under a canvas drape and looking suspiciously like— “Please tell me that’s not a coffin. ”
“Bien s?r que non.” The Gallerist tossed back the drape and opened the lid.
No corpse, just a pile of folded blankets.
“It gets cold here on the lake—who wants une couverture? Of course, Bocklin certainly implied it was a coffin when he painted the scene, but artists take creative license with everything. If someone can assist me in taking the oars . . .”
We all draped blankets around our shoulders, and then it turned out that Larry (the boy who had fled to Tom Sawyer) had done a fair amount of rowing with Tom and Huck and the gang out on the Mississippi, so he took one oar and the ever-capable Sarah took the other, and soon we were stroking through the lake’s calm waters toward the distant island.
I’m in a painting, I kept thinking, pulling the folds of a plaid wool throw around me, and the whole landscape had a different quality than a real ride on a lake would have had.
Not that I had a lot of real-life lakeside jaunts to compare it to, but the ripples of the water below spread just a touch too slowly for real water; the blue-black of the lake and the blue-gray of the clouds were just a touch more vivid to my eye than the colors of any real lake or sky; and though I could smell the iron tang of lake water and the boat’s pine planks, both those scents were underlaid with something stronger, something resinous .
. . I put my fingers in the water, feeling the cool slide that was somehow thicker than ordinary water would have been, then sniffed my fingertips. Paint.
“Um.” The blonde named Stephanie spoke up, voice uneasy. “That island . . .”
It was drawing nearer through the quiet plash of the oars and the shifting mists: a rocky islet half encircled by slate cliffs (just as the Astral Library had merited a word like sward, this definitely called for something like encircled), and thickly spired with tall ink-dark cypress trees.
At its front was a small seawall, with steps leading down into the water; behind I could see stone-linteled doorways cut directly into the cliff face, looking at us like dark eyes.
“Creepy,” said Larry from his oar.
“It’s supposed to be the Isle of the Dead,” said Stephanie, voice still wobbling.
“Art books were one of the only things my father let me check out—well, as long as they were only landscapes and still lifes because he didn’t think women should look at nudes, but I’ve seen that island before, in a painting. Are we—are we—dead?”
“No, we’re merely in The Isle of the Dead, as painted by Arnold Bocklin,” said the Gallerist, standing up at the prow with their French tweeds now overlaid by a decidedly chic white cotton-gabardine raincoat that had been whisked out of the coffin-shaped locker after the blankets.
“Bocklin’s art dealer was the one who put the title on, and admittedly Arnold leaned into the whole ethos—draped the boat in garlands, made my raincoat here look like a monk’s robe so I might as well have been Charon the Ferryman.
But it’s not the Isle of the Dead at all.
” The Gallerist put up a hand as we drew up to the water-lapped stone steps, and Larry raised his oar just in time for us to glide up alongside.
“It’s the entrance to the Astral Gallery.
Or one of them, at least,” they added, scrambling nimbly out and throwing a loop of rope from the prow around a stake on the bottom step.
“I use this one if I’m escorting a group.
Or if I’m looking to make a real statement entrance . . . certainly Arnold was agog.”
“Wait, so you bring artists here?” I discarded my plaid throw in the boat, managing not to fall into the lake as I made the awkward step across to the mossed-over stone stairs. “You brought a painter here during the Victorian era and he painted the place?”
“I’ve been known to inspire an artist or two with a visit to the Astral Gallery.” The Gallerist looked demure, helping Stephanie and her bulky pink satin skirts make the jump out of the boat. “Come along, ducklings.”
And I thought maybe Arnold Whoever had it right, because the Gallerist in their sweeping white raincoat did look a bit like some sort of pagan priest as they led the way up the cracked and mossy steps into the shadowed path between the cypress trees, toward an ancient leaning lintel over a cliff-carved doorway.
Behind me I could hear Stephanie gulping and Sarah soothing her—I felt Larry’s rough paw slide into mine and gave it a reassuring squeeze as we followed.
Into the Astral Gallery.
It was all light, light from every side, dazzling light . . . And there was no smell of oil paint or acrylic paint or any other artist’s medium. This place had not been painted; this place was real.
Imagine an infinite high-ceilinged passageway, black-and-white-checkered marble underfoot, an endless row of crystal chandeliers overhead.
One long side nothing but floor-to-ceiling windows draped in velvet and tasseled in gold, pouring light in like a river of honey.
The other long side simply an unending tapestried wall hung with pictures from floor to ceiling: pictures in acrylic and oil and chalk, pictures in mixed textures glued together into three-dimensional pieces, pictures that were little more than sketches in pencil or charcoal.
Between the paintings and pictures were alcoves with sculptures, marble and wood and porcelain and majolica and plaster, every medium you could imagine.
Sometimes arched doorways in the wall of paintings led to other rooms: an entire chamber of Byzantine mosaics across floors and walls and ceiling, all leaping dolphins and solemn-eyed empresses and grave saints; a room of exuberant street art that looked like it had been spray-painted on the sides of a warehouse; a room full of Vermeers.
I peeked into that one and saw the paintings were moving: in his landscape of Delft, the tiny figures along the river were actually walking; his Girl with a Pearl Earring didn’t stay static and glassy-eyed within her frame but met my gaze and turned her head with a little smile so I could see the pearl flashing and gleaming in her other ear.
“Welcome to the Astral Gallery,” said the Gallerist, with more than a hint of pride in their voice.
“I—I don’t know much about art,” I confessed, suddenly feeling very out of my depth.
I barely recognized any of these paintings on the endless wall—peeping through another archway into a room of what looked like Renaissance paintings, I caught a glimpse of what I was fairly sure was a rendition of The Last Supper, but couldn’t remember if it was a Michelangelo or a Leonardo.
Either way, I didn’t see the point of going to visit it.
Stuck at a dinner party that never ends with a lot of religious types? Pass the water-into-wine, please.