Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
Duke emerged from behind the tree.
“Are you all right, darling?” he asked.
“I know you shouldn’t hate people, but that guy? I hate. My mother wasn’t the saint I thought she was? Why would he even say that? Why would he give me advice?”
I didn’t like this, not one bit.
“This always happens to me in my books,” Duke said. “When someone gives me quote ‘friendly advice’ to back off from my investigation, I know I’m on the right track. It’s a good sign, truly.”
“How was that a good sign?”
He put his arm around my back and made me face him. Clearly he could see how distressed I was. “If a Burner is trying to stop you, that means we’re on the right track. Forget about him, love. Now, shall we get back to work?”
“Please. I need to find my grandfather so I can hug him, then shake him until he tells me what is going on.”
“Lead the way,” Duke said, handing me my umbrella.
The three of us stood together, holding hands and paws.
“Our revels now are ended!” I called out, quoting Shakespeare’s Tempest. Quoting one book inside another book is the easiest way to get pushed out of a story. It’s sort of the storycraft equivalent of thinking about kissing your ex while on a date with a new guy. Not that I would ever do that.
As if swept up in a miniature tornado, we breezed out of Arthur’s Britain and landed back inside the stockroom of Words, Words, Words.
Duke reeled and caught himself on a bookshelf.
“I had forgotten,” he said quietly, “how much I hate that part.”
“Sorry,” I whispered back. “Been too long since we story-hopped together.” I snapped my umbrella closed with a satisfying whoosh and snick.
“Far too long. Now you two wait here. I’ll check the shop.”
Koshka and I huddled in the employees only restroom while Duke went on reconnaissance.
Two long minutes later, he returned and called out, “All clear.”
We reconvened in the darkened stockroom.
“Shall we go?” Duke asked. “Wonderland awaits.”
“We can’t,” I said. “Right before that cop got here, I checked the book.” I held up the copy we’d nabbed from the children’s section. “It won’t let us in.”
“Why not?” Duke asked.
“Because I’d completely forgotten that Alice in Wonderland is a Code Red Ink book.”
“And that is?”
“Not good,” I said. “For us anyway. You know that enchanted lock on my grandfather’s desk? Code Reds are also kept under lock and key since they’re considered V.I.T.”
“V.I.T.? Do I want to know?”
“Very Important Titles.”
“Of course. I should’ve guessed.” He rolled his eyes.
“They’re books that Burners are always trying to destroy for one stupid reason or another.
Alice in Wonderland was the first major children’s book that wasn’t written to teach kids any moral lessons or anything like that.
It was pure entertainment. Changed children’s literature forever.
Any book that turns kids into lifelong readers is going to be under constant threat from Burners. ”
“So we can’t get into Wonderland to speak with the March Hare?”
“Without the right key, there’s no way—”
“Nonsense,” Duke said, empathically. “You ferried me to Camelot with a click of your heels. You can do anything.”
“It was more a flick of my finger, but I get what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying that I know you can find us a way into Wonderland. Think. Use that gorgeous brain of yours. Is there a back door? Or…I don’t know…a French translation?”
Koshka, resting his chin on my foot, raised his head and hissed.
“I meant a Russian translation,” Duke said. Appeased, Koshka put his head back down again. “Or one of those, what did you call them? E…books?”
A back door into Wonderland? Another version of the book? A translation? I considered our options.
“Translations won’t work. Or ebooks or audiobooks. The story is the story no matter what language or format it’s in.” I began pacing the stockroom floor. “Any version we go into will be monitored. Unless…wait. Wait one single second…”
“What?”
“Pops told me a story a long time ago,” I said, “about the first case he worked after my mother died. A Burner had gotten into Ray Bradbury’s novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.
There are villains in the book, evil carnival performers who tempt you with your deepest desires.
Pops’s deepest desire back then was to have my mother back, of course.
The evil carnival barker, Mr. Dark, cornered Pops in the town library. ”
“What did he do?” Duke asked.
“He realized he was in a library. A fictional library in a fictional town, but the books on the shelves had all the pages, all the words. So instead of escaping back to the real world, he escaped into a novel in the library!”
“He went into a book…in a book?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Pops jumped into one of the library books. A copy of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.
He hid out in one of the unused servants’ rooms for an hour and then popped back into Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Mr. Dark had given up by that point so Pops could finish his mission and come home. ”
“Would that work? Going into a novel with a fictional library and using a fictional copy of Alice in Wonderland ?”
“It should,” I said. “If it’s a fictional copy in a fictional library, we wouldn’t be able to change it in the real world. Neither can Burners. But we can go into it.”
“What about that book your grandfather used— Something Wicked ?”
“Too dangerous,” I said. “The villains are soul stealers. We need a library in a book that’s slightly less deadly. And one that isn’t under a Code Red.”
There were only a few dozen or so books under Code Red, most of them political, foundational to the canon, or beloved by children worldwide—the Alice books, of course, plus 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Don Quixote, the Odyssey, The Tale of Genji, Things Fall Apart, To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, Frankenstein, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and literally everything Shakespeare penned.
“A good library,” Duke said. “A large, well-stocked library.”
“And one that’s not being used. A private library.”
“So a library more for show than for reading. The private library of someone with money, someone showing off,” he said. “An aristocrat. Or someone pretending to be…”
“And somewhere we can sneak in without anyone noticing us.”
“We’d need a lot of people there,” Duke continued. “A crowd we can join.”
“A party?”
He nodded, smiling.
“The library of someone rich, someone showing off, someone who throws lots of house parties…” I said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Together we said the most famous name in American fiction.
“Gatsby.”
—
“Perfect idea, darling,” Duke said, nodding. “I’ll pop into the shop and find a copy—”
“Won’t work. I can’t go to a Gatsby party dressed like this. Even you look underdressed.”
His mouth dropped open. He gestured at his suit. “This is Savile Row!”
“Sorry. It’s not a tux. You need a tux and I need…” I looked down at myself. “Anything but leggings.”
“I see the issue here. Best pop home.”
“So much for sneaking my umbrella back into the supply closet. I’ll have to take it with us and risk getting caught.”
“Halt. I have a brilliant idea,” Duke said. “Per usual.”
He disappeared again. A moment later, he came back, holding another black umbrella in his hand.
“Lost and found box,” he said.
“You are as brilliant as you are handsome.”
“Yes, I know.”
It wasn’t exactly the same make and model, so to speak. Mine was wood and steel and this one had a plastic handle, but unless they looked too closely, no one should notice the difference.
Duke returned the fake umbrella to the supply closet, and we met Koshka at the back door.
“It’s going to look very suspicious—a man in a suit, a woman with an umbrella not in the rain, and a cat sneaking out of a bookstore at dawn. So play it cool. Walk, don’t run to my car,” I told the boys.
Koshka whined in protest.
“Right, very short legs,” I said. “You can run. If we see anybody, just smile and nod. Oh, and pray the car starts. I’d rather not walk home.”
“Because we might get spotted?” Duke asked.
“No, because it’s six blocks uphill.”
Duke pushed the door open, and we slipped outside. He took me by the arm and escorted me through the fading mist of the story magic. As the sun slowly rose, the books fell silent, waiting like wallflowers at a ball for a new suitor to come and claim the next waltz.
No thieves, robbers, petty crooks, shoplifters, assassins, or pickpockets ever snuck away from the scene of the crime as sneakily as we snuck to my car.
My head faced forward but my eyes ping-ponged in all directions to make sure we weren’t being watched.
We made a beeline for my Sun Buggy. If the car didn’t start, Plan B was walking.
There was also a Plan C, because I always have a Plan C.
Plan C is, of course, crying.
We got lucky. The car started. I could have Plan C–ed with relief, but I was in too much of a hurry to get us home and out of the cold and damp.
“Good job, team,” I said as I drove us up the hill to Pilcrow House. “Well done. We didn’t get arrested. Yet.”
“ Gatsby isn’t a Code Red Ink book, is it?” Duke asked.
“It’s not. Long story but Burners tend to leave it alone.”
“And you do have a copy of the book at home, yes?”
I gave him a look, the one where you keep your lips in a perfectly straight line, the look that tells the person you’re looking at that you’re questioning either their intelligence or their sanity—or both.
“Right,” Duke said. “Of course you do.”
“Yes, a house of Book Witches has a copy of the most famous American novel of the twentieth century.”
As famous as it is now, The Great Gatsby had been a poor seller, practically a flop when it came out.
The story caught a second wind during World War II, however, when a nonprofit sent free books to soldiers.
After the war the book became a staple on high school and college reading lists and hasn’t left them since.