The Hidden Library (32 page)

S
EVERAL HOURS LATER, AFTER another nap and a long, shared shower, Alice and I make our way to the conference room. It’s hard to believe just yesterday she was paralyzed. There’s no shakiness, no weakness. There’s only the strong, confident Alice she’s always been.

When we arrive, there’s already a crowd gathered. The White King and Cheshire-Cat, now nearly as large as a pony, are present. The Five of Diamonds waits in the hallway, his pike at full attention. My father glances up from the laptop he and Marianne are hunched over. “It’s good to see you on your feet again, Ms. Reeve.”

She smiles wryly. “It is good to be upon them. I’m sure you can contest that those infernal wheelchairs are dreadful.”

“Indeed they are. Worse yet when they are unneeded, and children keep forcing them upon you.”

“I don’t see what the problem is.” Mary does her best to keep a straight face. “You two were pushed around and totally pampered like royalty.”

Grymsdyke, dangling from a massive web he’s built in a corner, says, “The Queen of Diamonds
is
royalty and thus should always be treated as such.”

Several people warily glance up at the spider. More than a few seem puzzled by his ardently stated fact, but the majority are basically terrified in general there’s a talking spider with massive fangs hanging out in the conference room.

Mary smiles brightly. “Grymsdyke and I have been getting to know one another. He’s delightfully droll. Victor could learn a thing or two from him.”

Victor sighs heavily.

“I am much encouraged by your visage,” the White King is saying to Alice. “The Cheshire was insistent that you would recuperate quickly, but one never knows with these things.”

She waves her hand dismissively. “Now that I have had time to reflect upon it, I am greatly troubled by the use of a boojum. I must admit I’d thought them to be little more than superstition meant to frighten children keen for thrills and chills.”

He smiles wanly. “You are not alone in such thinking.”

“This brings us to the point of how Hearts obtained a boojum,” the Cat interjects. It hops onto a chair. “And more importantly, how she was able to pass it off to someone outside of Wonderland. And most importantly, why there is no tea here at the table.”

The room goes quiet as all ears turn toward him. Brom sends word for tea to be brought up.

“Until the Queen of Diamonds returned from exile recently, none knew of any existence other than our own and that of Her Majesty’s beyond the rabbit holes and looking glasses. During my tenure in the Hearts dungeon, there was no indication of her knowledge of this.” To the White King and Alice, he adds, “She was obsessively focused on the war. Anyone in her Court who voiced anything to the contrary of her beliefs or spoke of other matters was immediately executed or imprisoned. Songs were sung, plays enacted. Paintings were commissioned, highlighting desired results of her campaigns.”

The White King sits in the chair next to his advisor. “And yet, we know it must be Hearts who supplied the boojum. The description matches perfectly, and who other than she or someone from Wonderland could supply the beastie?” He looks to the crowd joining him at the table. “Unless snarks are indigenous to other Timelines?”

“Well, parasites are common in most,” Victor offers. “And other creatures that are similar. For example, we have these worms that I think act a bit like the boojum. Leeches subsist on blood. Tapeworms feed on raw meat and blood. But I have never seen anything like a boojum before.” He shudders. “That face.” To the group, “It had a face. Like, a legitimate
face.”

My blood boils at the thought of that thing being in Alice.

“I look forward to dissecting it,” Mary says cheerfully. “It’s currently in my freezer.”

Brom strokes his short beard. “I must admit, the more we uncover in our quest toward the perpetrators behind the Timeline deletions, the more complex the web grows.” His eyes meet mine. “Victor and I questioned Todd extensively during your absence, and he is unfortunately still sleeping off the vast amounts of serum pumped into his system.”

Victor tugs on his collar. Coughs.

“He had no concrete answers to give about his association with the Queen of Hearts, other than to say they had met on a pair of separate occasions and spoke of nothing except Ms. Reeve. Additionally, he has no solid answers to give on any matter. He has never met the person assigning which catalysts he was to obtain or which ones to destroy. He presented a series of names we are in the process of researching and claimed the voice he occasionally spoke to on the telephone changed depending on the day. All communiqués were either typewritten or simply torn pages from books or newspapers.”

I rub at my hair, frustrated. “What about Wendy? Was there any legit connection there?”

“Todd had no answer when it came to dealings with Ms. Darling. That said, he did claim he’d been in touch with someone who bore a striking resemblance to the perpetrator in our security footage.”

“What does Wen has to say about this?”

My father purses his lips. “Ms. Darling has said nothing at all since her seizure.”

“She’s fine, though,” Victor interjects. “As far as I can tell, nothing’s physically wrong with her right now.”

I ask my father, “Are we really thinking that . . .
guy,
for lack of a better word, was Peter Pan?”

It’s the A.D. who answers. He’s sitting next to Brom, taking notes on a tablet while a recorder lies on the table between them. “It has to be, right? Wen wouldn’t betray us for just anyone.”

“Mr. Dawkins, there is no concrete proof that the person in the security footage was Peter Pan. In all our dealings with 1904BAR-PW, no Society member has ever successfully made contact with this person. We have not even been able to breach Neverland.” To Alice, he offers a rueful smile. “I’m afraid it was much like your Wonderland. Unlike Wonderland, though, 1904BAR-PW’s catalyst was not located within Neverland. Once we obtained it, we had no need to breech Neverland’s borders.”

“I am curious. How many years did the Society attempt to locate Wonderland?” the Cat asks.

“Several,” Brom admits. “Eventually, we shifted our focus to finding someone who had been to Wonderland yet now resided in the world beyond. Ms. Reeve was always our first choice. I believe we searched for her for . . .” His eyes flick to me. “Two years. Had we known, of course, that she wasn’t even in England and still in Wonderland, it would have saved us many frustrating trips and searches.”

“You mean it would have saved Finn many frustrating searches.” Victor elbows me. “Poor sod. You had him and Sara in their so-called free time traipsing all over the bloody country in their search. There was one point I thought he would rip somebody’s head off if they ever said Alice’s name in his presence. She was like a ghost or urban legend to the Society.”

Sometimes, my brother doesn’t know when to shut his damn mouth.

Alice touches my arm. “You searched for me for years?”

“I already told you this.” I did, didn’t I?

She says more softly, “Yes, but you
searched
for me.”

I love her, truly love her, but this makes not a lick of sense.

“Nonetheless, the point I was making was, we have no idea if it was Peter Pan who Wendy was communicating with, let alone if he even exists anymore.” Brom taps his fingers against the desk. “Unfortunately, the video has no sound, so we cannot confirm this, but we must not rule out the possibility that the person in question hypnotized Ms. Darling into offering up our secrets.”

I snap my fingers. “The pipes.”

“But then, how do we connect the possibility of Peter Pan to Sweeney Todd?” Brom continues. “And to a Sweeney Todd who was supposedly hanged?” He swipes a finger across the table. “And from there to the Queen of Hearts—a person who, by all accounts, knows nothing of Timelines and yet was seen by someone outside of Wonderland? Unfortunately, Todd has provided us no answers to any of these questions. Rosemary and Jenkins know even less than he. Incidentally, I had Rosemary moved to her own room in the containment ward, next to Jenkins.’ I don’t want any of them to communicate with the others.”

“Would the Queen of Hearts have edited from Wonderland?” Marianne muses. This is the first she’s spoken so far. “From the reports I have perused on the matter, it is believed none can edit directly from that land but must instead rely upon travel to England or Wales first.”

Taking in the group in the conference room, I notice a face is missing—the one that actually might have the answer to Marianne’s question. “Where is the Librarian?”

“She has,” Brom says carefully, “gone to acquire a piece for our collections.”

He might as well have dropped a bomb on the Society members sitting at the table. The Librarian has, in the entire time I’ve known her, never left the Institute. Going outside is stepping onto a patio or the rare trip to the roof. In the winter, she pulls out those Seasonal Affective Disorder machines, and for years, we all laughed about it because how was winter any different for her than any other season? Her entire life is lived out within these walls. She does not know how to drive. I highly doubt she’s ever been in a car. I asked her about it once, and her answer came with a straight face. “Why would anyone entrust their life to a steel trap such as an automobile?”

“What do you mean, she’s gone to acquire something?” the A.D. asks.

“My words were not unclear, Mr. Dawkins,” Brom says evenly. “She had an errand to run. She is doing so.”

“Outside of the Institute?” an agent named Holgrave asks from farther on down the table.

“Logic would indicate so.”

Henry Flemming asks, sounding just as dumbfounded as the rest of us, “How did she leave?”

“As I was not with her when she left, I cannot answer that, Mr. Flemming. Nor did she see fit to explain it to me.”

“When did she leave?” Holgrave presses.

“While I was interrogating Todd.”

This makes no sense. The Librarian has just left? “What books?” I ask my father.

“That I do not know either.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Didn’t she run them by you?”

He gives me a meaningful look, one that leaves me edgy. He didn’t say she was going to get a book. He said she was going to acquire
something.

“Did she go to meet Pfeifer?”

Alice’s head snaps up; her eyes narrow. “Do you mean Lygari?” And then, before anyone can say anything, “You questioned Todd about his estate. You asked him about Bücherei.”

“What is Bücherei?” The Cat’s eyes focus on Alice. “And who is this person who apparently has two very different names? And where is the tea? How can any of us be expected to elaborate upon strategy without a proper cup of tea?”

As if on cue, the door bursts open with a man hauling in a cart filled with teapots and cups.

The Cat sniffs; its nose wrinkles. “This world,” it says, “is barbaric. I’m sorry, but there it is. From what I can tell, you’re trying to serve us jabberwocky urine.”

Neither Alice nor the White King even blink at this. The King himself is side-eying the tea that’s hastily being poured for them.

“You will get used to it. I did, and I am fine. As for Lygari, he is a book collector,” Alice tells the Cat, but my father is giving me a look that tells me, quite clearly, that I need to keep my mouth shut. “Finn and I were sent to purchase several volumes a number of weeks back. Bücherei translates to library, and it is a fitting nomenclature, as the estate in actuality is an enormous library filled with artifacts belonging to authors. It was most unpleasant.” She turns to me. “Why would the Librarian go see him? We were there so recently.”

It’s my turn to glare at my father. He didn’t tell her, did he?

And . . . he is utterly unapologetic.

Screw his wishes for silence. “Right after we got back from St. Petersburg, I was sent back to collect a catalyst from him. You were asleep and I was given no choice.”

Her eyebrows lift up in surprise. “Lygari collects items associated with authors, not Timelines. He made sure to elaborate upon that in vivid detail.”

The Cat murmurs quietly as it peers into its cup, “Yes. I was right. This is urine. How you all function is beyond me.”

Brom sends another message out, requesting more tea. I tell Alice, “According to the Librarian, he also had a catalyst from a book of fairy tales.”

A V forms between her eyes. “We discussed this before. While there were multiple references to fairy tales, he had none showcased in his exhibits.”

“I know. And the book they claimed it was from—”

Someone down the table murmurs quietly, “Claimed?”

“—Is one that doesn’t even have a legit origin text for us to pinpoint. Or, at least, one that’s easy to pinpoint. It’s never been one we’ve gone after before, simply because we can’t even prove the Timeline exists.”

My father says nothing during this. He simply tents his hands and listens.

“Were you successful?”

The A.D. snorts. I say carefully, “No. When we got there, the library wasn’t there anymore.”

Her eyes widen. “What do you mean the library wasn’t there?”

“It wasn’t there,” the A.D. bursts out. “There was no bloody library. None of any of the fancy stuff you and Finn reported. All that was there was an empty house.”

“
What?
”
Alice turns back to me.

In a way, her confused outrage is comforting, like it means I’m not as crazy as feared. Like my memory of the night is right. “From the outside, it looks the same. Same design. Same hedge maze. But inside . . .” I turn to face her. “Do you remember how the library stretched all three stories up? And filled most of the house? How there were those massive, carved doors, and that the floor was tiled with scenes from stories?”

There’s no hesitation. “The ceiling had frescos with eyes that followed us everywhere.”

“It wasn’t there. None of that was there. There—there were floors to the house. Three stories worth of floors. There was an indoor swimming pool where he had that damn Twain table, one that connects to another outside. There was carpet. The ceilings were just ceilings. There was a kitchen. Bathrooms. Alice, it was a
house.”