Chapter 15
A loud POP made us both flinch, but then I felt a shower of spray and bubbles, heard a shriek of drunken laughter, and realized it had been a champagne cork.
A woman buffeted past me, soaking wet, smelling of chlorine and French perfume, waving a champagne bottle overhead; as I watched, she ran straight through a crowd of men in tuxedos and with a shriek of laughter leaped into a huge sapphire-blue swimming pool.
“Welcome to West Egg,” I said, snagging a crystal coupe the size of a fishbowl off the nearest silver tray.
I’d girded myself for a wave of post-margin-traveling exhaustion, having seen the Librarian look increasingly gray as we jumped from book to book, but what I primarily felt was ravenous thirst.
“The Great Gatsby, got it. Why exactly are we here again? Why not just stay in the Library?”
“I don’t want the Library Board thinking about how to break in and get to the Librarian. I want them distracted by trying to find me. Which I think they will, which will give her time to heal and wake up, and then—”
“Focus, Beau.” I steered us round a marble nymph with a basket of oranges in her arms, clapping a hand to my head as something tickled my ear.
A long plume, it turned out, fastened to a sequined bandeau around my hair, which was now set in tight finger waves.
I could even feel rouge on my lips; this makeover was top to bottom A-plus work and I wished I had a moment to appreciate it because who doesn’t appreciate a good makeover in a book?
But I didn’t think we had time to hunt for a mirror so I could ogle myself.
“We need to figure out if we’re being followed—”
“Seriously, the Astral Library does quality stitchery.” Beau had his nose parked practically between my shoulder blades now as he examined the beading on the drape of my new dress’s back.
“Did they put you in a bandeau brassiere or go for the more figure-flattening corset to achieve the period silhouette?”
“You don’t get to examine my underwear for historical authenticity, sorry,” I said, yelping as the summer breeze plucked at my skirt.
Flapper-style underpinnings were a lot, um, draftier than the Regency stays I’d been wearing two minutes ago.
I stood on tiptoe in the rhinestone T-strap pumps that were now pinching my feet, craning to look over the dancing, drinking throng.
“I know it’s a real mosh pit out here, but we’ve got to keep an eye out.
Someone’s going to be coming after us. Or something,” I added, thinking of the card catalog from hell.
“We’ve got this,” Beau said, swigging more champagne, sounding entirely too breezy, but he was still swamped with I’m-in-a-fantasy-world giddiness and hey, I got that.
He hadn’t had time yet to see just how dark the shadows were.
Hadn’t stumbled headfirst into a nineteenth-century opium den.
Hadn’t watched weeping prisoners stumbling in chains behind a victorious Roman emperor.
Hadn’t watched a cloud of razor-edged cards try to blind a dragon.
“What if those card things come for you again?” Beau asked, evidently reading my mind.
“I don’t think they will.” A deep twang in my gut was telling me that, and generally I trusted that twang—any foster kid does, when you’re sizing up a new set of carers and trying to figure out fast if this dad appreciates teenage girls a little too much, or this mom gets mean after a bad day at work.
No, my gut was telling me the Board wasn’t going to attack me in quite the same way they had the Librarian.
“I don’t think they want me weakened or down for the count the way they did her,” I said, feeling my way through it.
“They know she’s incapacitated—she can’t open the door for them, so I’m the only one who can.
Therefore they can’t afford to take me down too.
They just want me scared and pliant so I’ll Open Sesame, and I can’t do that if I’m bleeding out in West Egg from a million paper cuts.
So they’re going to send something else other than the cards, something to bring me back and make me humble. ”
“And Alix Watson does not do goddamn humble,” said Beau.
“Correct.”
“Attagirl.” He grinned, snagging some little oyster patties off a passing silver platter and passing one to me.
“So, what do we do now? Any chance you can petition your tablet there to include me in the costume changes? Because I could really do with a little early-twenties menswear here. Some wide lapels, silk pocket squares, cuffed trousers—”
The tablet. I dug it out of the beaded art deco clutch that had replaced my Austen-esque reticule, but it was frustratingly blank.
“Suppose I should be happy I didn’t get stuck in plus fours and a golf sweater,” Beau was musing. “The twenties has a lot to answer for when it comes to normalizing sportswear as day wear. If you ask me it’s a direct line from plus fours at Prohibition lunches to Patriots jerseys at the office.”
A ripple in the crowd across the long stretch of velvet lawn—I saw the arrow of it, making its way up the slope.
Not the kind of ripple that followed a waiter staggering along under a huge platter of caviar and toast points, or the one that followed a particularly athletic dancer flailing away at the Charleston—the ripple of a shark sliding underwater, the crowd giving way around it and re-forming with oblivious smoothness.
The ripple of something that didn’t belong here.
There you are, I thought, parking my empty champagne coup on the marble balustrade. “Be ready to run,” I told Beau.
“What—”
“Alix Watson,” a voice intoned under the brassy blare of the orchestra playing Al Jolson.
“Please come with us.” No, not one voice—two.
Two dark figures came knifing out through a pack of tuxedo-clad men whinnying over their flasks, and for a moment I thought the world had slipped sideways and I’d fallen out of The Great Gatsby into the Boston Public Library.
Because it was Chester and Chad, Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, in their Library Security uniforms and badges, Chester’s ironed knife sharp and Chad’s with a Cheez Whiz stain.
“What the hell?” I breathed, forgetting my entire careful plan, because I hadn’t expected to see something—someone—I actually knew.
“Who are they?” Beau asked, taking a step forward with his silver-handled walking stick at half guard, and with a click the world slipped back into focus.
“Library Security,” I said, because of course the Library Board would send for Library Security if they were dealing with a runaway Page, and Library Security took the form I was most used to seeing it in.
This couldn’t actually be Chester and Chad from the BPL—for one thing, nobody here seemed able to see them except Beau and me, and for another they marched toward me in a perfect synchronized lockstep they’d never have been able to achieve in real life, like a pair of glassy-eyed chess pawns.
“Alix Watson, please come with us,” they droned again in unison.
“Follow me.” I yanked at Beau’s sleeve, plan snapping back into place, but he was already stepping in front of me.
“Absolutely not, Mall Cop,” he began, and Chester—or whatever it was that looked like Chester—shouldered him aside with surprising force. Beau crashed down hard, and when he sprang back up he had grass stains all down his doeskin breeches.
“Alix Watson,” Chester intoned, stepping around him, “please come—”
“Okay, shit-brick,” Beau said, twisting the silver handle of his walking stick and unsheathing a length of gleaming steel.
“You’ve got a sword?” I heard myself bleat, even as I backed around the fountain to put the spray in between myself and Chester.
Beau ignored me, leveling the blade straight out at Chad, who was still advancing, Cheez Whiz stain and all. “She’s not going anywhere with you and neither am I, so walk your poly-blend ass back to—”
Chad never stopped, just walked straight into the blade.
I saw it punch through the breast pocket of his wrinkled shirt and straight out the back, no resistance.
“Come with us,” he was still saying mechanically as he crumpled down, and the silver-sequined woman doing the tango past us didn’t even seem to see the body as she swirled by, and neither did the waiter who stepped serenely over the tangled legs in their polyester trousers, and I had a crazily distinct image of a dark-suited man presiding from the balcony on the second story high above us whose eyes drifted blankly over the violent little play that had exploded on his lawn, in the middle of his party.
Even Jay Gatsby didn’t register us here, Beau or me or Library Security, just went on gazing out over the champagne-soaked hordes toward East Egg, looking for Daisy Buchanan.
Then Chester seized my wrist, and his grip was like cold, greasy stone.
“Alix—” Beau’s eyes were wide and horrified, looking at the body on his blade. I threw myself away from Chester—I had satin evening gloves on, and I felt a pearl button on my wrist go pop as I yanked my entire hand out of the glove and stumbled back away from him.
“You will come with us,” he said, dropping the glove, and I threw myself around the fountain to grab Beau’s gabardine sleeve as he still stood gazing at the thing he’d stabbed.
“It’s not real,” I yelled, praying I was right, and I was: as Chad slid off the blade, he dissolved.
No blood, no glazed eyes, nothing but empty clothes fluttering to the flattened grass .
. . And as I watched, even those started to dissolve in the crush of rhinestone-buckled pumps and polished oxfords tangoing and jitterbugging all around us.
“Alix Watson, please come with us,” Chester said, voice mechanical as his stride as he came around the fountain. The real Chester would be so proud: he’d finally managed to scare me.