The Grimm Legacy (4 page)

He frowned. The light from the reading lamp threw shadows on his high cheekbones and around his nose, giving him an arrogant expression—or maybe that was just how he looked. “Why do you want to know?” he asked. He sounded either stuck up or paranoid.

“No reason—I was just making conversation. Is it a big secret or something?”

“No, not really,” he said. “This is one of the world’s great repositories. It’s an honor to work here.” He looked at me for a few seconds like he was sizing me up. “How did you get the job?”

Was he implying I didn’t deserve it? “My social studies teacher, Mr. Mauskopf. He used to work here himself when he was our age. He knows Dr. Rust and Ms. Callender.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Fisher.”

“Oh, with Marc Merritt.” Now he sounded even more suspicious and disapproving. What was wrong with this guy? Everyone else here seemed so friendly.

“Yes, Marc’s in my class,” I said.

“How nice for you,” said Aaron. What an unpleasant person, I thought.

A pneum came rattling through the pipes and thumped into the basket. Aaron pulled out the slip and handed it to me. “Let’s see how you handle this,” he said.

“You sure you trust me?” I was a little surprised at my own sarcastic tone. This guy really got under my skin.

“Not yet. That’s the point. The last page, the one you’re replacing—she was a disaster. I’m a senior page. I have responsibilities. I need to see how you work.”

“Was that Mona?”

“No, Zandra. What do you know about Mona?”

“Nothing, really—just that Anjali told me she disappeared. Who’s Zandra, and why was she a disaster?”

“Never mind Zandra. She was a disorganized mess-up and a liar and a thief, and now she’s gone. Let’s see if you’re better.”

Wow, I thought, this guy could be related to my stepsisters. “Fine,” I said. I read the slip, a request for a Chinese headdress. I found the right cabinet easily enough, despite the dim room. But when I reached up for the elaborate headdress, Aaron hovered so close I was afraid he was going to step on my feet. I tilted the headdress to slide it off the shelf.

“Careful! It’s fragile; those bobbles are glass,” he said.

“Back off, you’re making me nervous,” I snapped. “I’m not going to hurt it.” I lifted it down. “See? Safe and sound.”

“All right,” said Aaron. “I just had to make sure.”

I checked the label and carried the headdress down the hall to the staging area, where Aaron showed me how to file the call slip.

The next request was from someone named John Weinstein from Dark on Monday Productions. He wanted to borrow a doublet.

“Who are these people, and why are they borrowing these things?” I asked.

“This guy’s from a theater company, so chances are he’s getting ideas for costumes. Probably Shakespeare. They always borrow doublets when they do Shakespeare,” he said. This time he stood back and let me take the doublet out of the cabinet without comment. We ran a few more slips—my favorite was a delicate mask, with feathers curling around the upper half of the face. Aaron watched me closely, but he didn’t find anything to criticize. He was pretty intense, but I was impressed at how seriously he took his job.

When it was time to take my break, Ms. Callender took me upstairs to see the Main Examination Room. “This is where patrons come to get the items they requested,” she said. “They can sit and work at the tables.”

“Like the main room in the library,” I said.

“Exactly.”

It was a striking space, with tall ceilings, massive, imposing tables, and an elaborately carved staging area where Anjali and the other pages and librarians were bustling around, putting away slips and stacking pneums. I finally got a chance to see the Tiffany windows, but since it was a gloomy afternoon, I couldn’t make out any shapes or patterns in them.

I sat at one of the tables and did homework, then went back downstairs to Stack 2 when my break was over.

One patron requested antique Navajo rugs from New Mexico and kilim rugs from Turkey. They were heavy—it took both me and Aaron to carry them. We spread them out on the big table to check their condition before sending them upstairs in the big dumbwaiter.

“Look at how similar these two patterns are, with those triangles and diamonds and rectangles,” I said. “They’re from different continents, but they look like the weavers knew each other.”

“That’s just because of how they’re woven,” said Aaron. “The yarns cross each other at right angles, so it’s easier to make straight lines than curves.”

“Yes, but it’s more than that,” I said. “The colors are completely different, but look at those zigzags and that border. And the rug from Iran we sent up before looks nothing like either one of them.”

“I see what you mean,” said Aaron. “I wonder what made them choose the same patterns.”

“I wish we could go back in time and ask them,” I said.

“Me too.”

Aaron was much nicer when he was talking about rugs than when he was scolding me about not breaking things, I thought.

Around five, the fire door opened and Anjali came in, pushing a large cart full of objects. “Returns!” she called.

Aaron went running over to help her.

They wheeled the cart over to the center of the stack, Aaron pushing and Anjali steadying it.

“How’s it going, Elizabeth?” she asked. “Having fun?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Good. Don’t let Aaron work you too hard.” She winked at me and vanished through the stack door. Aaron stared after her with a look of naked longing.

“She seems nice,” I said, to break the silence.

He turned to me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “What? Yeah . . . yeah, she’s very . . . nice,” he said.

Seeing the transformation in Aaron made me wonder how it would feel to have someone—even a not-so-nice guy like Aaron—look at me the way he looked at Anjali.

I hoped that someday I would find out.

Chapter 4:

I meet the Beast; Marc Merritt acts squirrelly

That Saturday the arctic weather softened slightly. I was walking in Central Park after my morning shift at the repository when a bear came bounding toward me across the snow. I froze.

Not a bear, I saw as it got closer, but a bear-sized shaggy dog making the frozen air echo with its barks.

“Griffin, stay!”

The dog skidded to a stop in front of me. I took a step back. It was wagging its tail—that was reassuring. It put its huge wet paws on my shoulders and tried to lick my face.

“Do I know you?” I asked the dog, trying to duck away.

“Down, Griffin! Don’t knock Elizabeth over!” said a familiar stern voice. It was Mr. Mauskopf. He snapped his long fingers at the dog.

This, then, must be the Beast.

The dog subsided onto its haunches, put its head to one side, turned its ears forward, and looked up at me with eyes as big as saucers. It didn’t have to look up very far; we were practically at eye level. It raised a big, hairy paw and offered it to me.

“How do you do?” I said, shaking the paw. It felt as heavy as a sack of onions.

The Beast took that as an invitation to put its paws on my shoulders again.

“Down, Griffin! I said down!” barked Mr. Mauskopf. The dog subsided again. “He seems to like you.”

“Good dog,” I said, amused. For all his famous sternness, Mr. Mauskopf didn’t seem to be too good at making his dog obey. He must be more of a softy than he let on. I patted Griffin’s lumpy, shaggy brown shoulder. He put his tongue out and wagged his entire hindquarters.

“Nice day for a walk,” Mr. Mauskopf said.

“At least it’s warmer than yesterday. I just finished my shift at the repository.”

“Yes, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that. How are things there?”

“I love it. It’s like getting to take things out of museum display cases and actually touch them.”

Mr. Mauskopf smiled. “I remember that excitement,” he said. “Before I started working at the repository, I never thought much about objects. To me a spoon was just a spoon. Then my supervisor put me on Stack 9, and I saw those thousands of spoons, all different sizes and shapes and patterns and uses. I realized they didn’t just appear by magic. Someone had thought about each one and decided what it should be like, what shape, what to make it out of. It was like a whole new world opening up. I think that’s when I became interested in history.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Ms. Callender showed me Marie Antoinette’s wig. It makes you realize that Marie Antoinette actually existed.”

He nodded. “And what does she have you doing? Martha Callender, I mean, not Marie Antoinette.” Wow, a joke from Mr. Mauskopf!

“Mostly running call slips, reshelving, that sort of thing.”

“Good, good.” A pause; Mr. Mauskopf glanced at the Beast. Griffin gave a single bark, almost as if he and Mr. Mauskopf were exchanging words. Mr. Mauskopf turned back to me. “Tell me, have you seen anything to alarm you?” he asked.

“To alarm me? What do you mean?” Was he talking about the gigantic bird?

“My friends at the repository tell me there’s something . . . not quite right. I wondered if you’d noticed anything that could be helpful.”

“What’s not right? One of the pages—Anjali—she told me she’d heard about a . . .” It sounded so unlikely. Could I really tell Mr. Mauskopf? Wouldn’t he think I was an idiot to believe it?

“A what?”

Well, I’d started—no stopping now. “An enormous bird. It’s supposed to be following people around and stealing things.”

To my surprise, Mr. Mauskopf nodded gravely. “Yes, I’ve heard that too. Have you seen this bird?”

“No . . .”

“Did the page who told you about the bird see it? Anjali was her name, right?”

“She said she didn’t.”

“Hm. And have you seen or heard anything else that concerns you?”

“Well . . . I heard that there was a page who got fired.”

Mr. Mauskopf paused, as if trying to decide how much to say. “That’s right. Dr. Rust had to fire one of the pages. She tried to take a vase without signing for it or leaving a deposit. But that’s not all. Apparently, some more objects have disappeared since Zandra was let go, and I’ve heard of objects similar to the ones in the repository turning up in private collections.”

“Do they think another page is still stealing stuff?” This was alarming. “Or is it the bird, like Anjali said?”

“Nobody is quite sure what is happening. I have trouble believing that a gigantic bird, even if it exists, could get into the repository on its own and steal things. There must be people involved. So keep your eyes open for anything suspicious, and if anybody approaches you and asks you to remove any items outside of proper channels or even if you just get an uncomfortable feeling, please come to me or Lee Rust right away. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I had an uncomfortable feeling right now about the whole thing, in fact, but I didn’t think that was what he meant.

“Thank you, Elizabeth.” He turned to go.

“Hey, wait a minute, Mr. Mauskopf. Can I ask you a question?”

“Certainly. As the Akan proverb says, always ask questions.”

“Why are you and the librarians always quoting Akan proverbs, anyway?”

“Oh, that. It’s sort of a private joke. One of the pages when I worked there was descended from the Akan people—your friend Marc Merritt’s uncle, in fact. He liked to quote the proverbs, and the rest of us picked up the habit. I’ve always thought the proverbs chimed nicely with the Grimm stories. Was that your question?”

“No, but it’s connected—to the Grimm stories, at least. What is the Grimm Collection? Does it have anything to do with the Grimm fairy tales?”

“The Grimm Collection! Did one of the librarians tell you about that?”

“I overheard one of the pages talking about it with Ms. Callender, and then everybody got all weird when I asked about it.”

“Ah. Well, then I’d better let Dr. Rust explain. Don’t worry, if you do a good job at the repository, you’ll learn about all that soon enough. I have every confidence . . . Griffin, stop! Griffin! I’m sorry, Elizabeth, I . . . must run . . .” Mr. Mauskopf crashed through the snow after the big dog, who was urgently pursuing some important matter.

The following Tuesday, I planned to leave school as quickly as possible, hoping to get to the repository and see Dr. Rust before my shift started. But I passed the gym on my way out and paused to watch the basketball team practicing. The coach was making Marc do defensive drills with three of the guys.

Marc looked as if there were wings on his feet, he moved so lightly and stayed aloft so long. He even smiled at me from midair before he turned to snatch the ball out from under Jamal Carter’s nose, making my heart jump too. I smiled back, but he was no longer looking at me.

When I got outside, it was snowing hard, flakes creeping under my coat collar where the top button was still missing. I really needed to sew on the new one, but I wasn’t that good at sewing. I put my head down, turning it as little as possible to keep from exposing my neck as I hurried to the library. I shouldered the heavy door open. Through my steamy glasses I saw Anjali behind the circulation desk again. She waved me upstairs.

Marc was at the time clock, punching in ahead of me.

“Hey, Marc. Didn’t I just pass you in the gym? How’d you get here so quickly?” I asked, sticking my card in the clock to be chomped.

“I walk fast.”

“That fast? You hadn’t even finished basketball practice.”

“Long legs,” he said dismissively, heading for the stairs.

Was I prying? Had I annoyed him? I put my card back in the rack, kicking myself.

Ms. Callender sent me down to Stack 2. “It’s going to be a slow night with this weather,” she said. “You might as well sweep the shelves.”

“Okay—is there a broom down there, or a brush or something?”

She laughed, her cheeks bunching up into balls. “It’s not that kind of sweeping. Ask a page to show you. Marc or Aaron. Gumdrop?”

“What?” Was this a new endearment—had she gotten tired of “honey”?

“Gumdrop?” She held out a bag.

“Oh, thanks.” I took a green one and rode the elevator down, chewing.

When I got to Stack 2, Aaron was at his usual desk, reading; Marc was nowhere in sight.

“Hi, Aaron. Where’s Marc?”

“Downstairs, why?”

“Ms. Callender said one of you should show me how to sweep the shelves.”

Aaron looked irritated. “And you’d prefer Merritt, is that it?”

“No, I just—he came down the stairs ahead of me; I thought he’d be here.”

“Great. Another member of the Marc Merritt fan club.”

“No . . . well, of course I think he’s cool and all, but I’m not actually in the fan club,” I said.

Aaron gave me a look that, in other lighting, would probably have suggested that he couldn’t believe he was stuck on Stack 2 with such an idiot. Under the desk lamp’s dramatic highlights and shadows, though, it suggested that he was an ogre about to eat me.

“I mean,” I explained, “most of the kids in the fan club are a lot younger.”

The highlights and shadows shifted. Now he looked like an ogre who was going to choke up the idiot he had eaten.

“Some of their little sisters are in it too,” I said.

“You can’t be serious! You mean there’s an actual Marc Merritt fan club?” he said.

I was starting to get irritated myself. “Of course there is. I’m sure you could join, since you take such an interest. All those girls would probably enjoy having an older guy around, even if it’s just you.”

Aaron stood up and said coldly, “Sweeping the shelves means making sure there’s nothing out of place. Check the labels and look for gaps between items or for anything that doesn’t belong where it is. Make a note of any anomalies you find. You start on that end and I’ll start on this.” He strode off into the darkness.

I spent a painstaking hour examining shoes, rows and rows of them, enough to keep every homeless toe in the city toasty. Did you know that in seventeenth-century France shoes were one-shape-fits-both-left-and-right? Or that ancient Egyptians gave their mummies shoes made of papyrus and palm leaves? Or that in fourteenth-century Poland, shoe toes grew so long and pointy that fashionable gentlemen looked like they were wearing snakes on their feet?

I didn’t find anything out of place in the shoe section. There was a gap where a patron had borrowed a pair of size 12-D pumps, but I found a call slip for it on file.

Checking a row of platform shoes from Renaissance Venice, I turned the corner and was surprised to find Marc Merritt with a pair of brown work boots in his hand.

“Oh, so you
are
working on this stack today?” I said.

“No, I’m down in the Dungeon,” he said.

“What’s the Dungeon?”

“Stack 1.”

“So what are you doing up here, then?”

“Returning these.”

“Oh, okay. Want me to file your call slip?”

“No, I . . . I didn’t fill one out. I just borrowed them for a little while—my shoes got wet and my feet were cold. I figured nobody would notice they were gone. Don’t tell, okay?”