The Librarians and the Lost Lamp (3 page)

It was time to go home.

 

2

2006

New York, New York

One of the world's great research institutes, housing more than six million books and twelve million documents, the New York Metropolitan Library was Flynn's home away from home. The landmark building, with its elegant brick and marble façade, looked out over a spacious plaza in midtown Manhattan, which was guarded by a pair of dozing marble lions. Wide steps led up to the library's grand entrance, which was supported by towering Corinthian columns. A banner stretched above the entrance advertised a new exhibition on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Hah,
Flynn thought, glancing up at the banner.
If only we could reveal the full story there.…

Jet-lagged and dog-tired, he passed through a bronze front door into the library's magnificent marble entry hall, which was flanked by a sweeping double staircase leading upward. Flynn recalled standing in an endless line on the left staircase on that fateful day, only two years ago, when he had answered a mysterious invitation to apply for a “prestigious position” at the library. Little had he known at the time that his life was about to change forever and that the world was infinitely stranger and more fantastic than he ever could have imagined. Before then, he had been a professional college student, accumulating degree after degree—twenty-two in all—while studiously avoiding going out into real world. Sometimes he wondered what he'd be doing now if he'd blown off that interview.

Something safer, probably, but a lot less interesting.

Most visitors headed up to the Main Reading Room on the third floor, but Flynn veered off to drop into a spacious, sparsely furnished office that always struck him as being several times bigger than it needed to be. A woman was seated at a large, hand-carved mahogany desk at the far end of the office. She looked up from a ledger as Flynn entered.

“Oh, you're back,” Charlene greeted him coolly. An unsmiling, thin-lipped woman of a certain age, she fit the stereotype of the stern, humorless librarian much better than Flynn did. She wore a pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a severe expression. Strawberry-blond hair was fading to gray. “I was wondering what was keeping you.”

Flynn was used to her brusque manner by now. He'd stopped taking it personally … mostly.

“Good morning to you, too,” he said, yawning. He had come straight from JFK International Airport after catching a red-eye flight from Heathrow. He couldn't wait to crash at his modest bachelor apartment in Brooklyn, but first he wanted to get the long-lost Stevenson manuscript safely stowed away in the Library, which had
much
tighter security than his apartment building. Heck, the Library's security made Fort Knox seem as safe as a convenience store at three a.m. It was one of the most impenetrable places on Earth.

Removing the manuscript from his satchel, he plopped it onto Charlene's desk. “Mission accomplished,” he bragged. “The first draft of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
safely under wraps.”

“I prefer the musical version,” Charlene said, unimpressed. She shifted the manuscript out of the way, to maintain the neatly arranged order of her desk, and held out her hand.

“Receipts?”

Flynn rummaged around in his pockets. “Hang on. I'm pretty sure I've got them in here somewhere.”

“Don't let me rush you,” Charlene said dryly. “In the meantime, you owe $1.62 in library fines.”

“Fines? What for?”

“That
Traveler's Guide to Hawaii
you checked out a few weeks ago. It's four days overdue.”

Flynn vaguely remembered losing the book in question while escaping an erupting volcano in Sumatra. “That was work related.”

“Submit an expense report,” she said, unmoved. “Itemized, of course.”

“Seriously?” Flynn hadn't slept in hours, thanks to a crying baby on his flight and a snoring tourist from New Jersey in the seat next to him; the last thing he needed right now was Charlene nickel-and-diming him as usual. “We're an age-old, secret organization guarding some of the great treasures of the world. Can't you loosen the purse strings once in a while?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied archly, “why don't I just pawn the Ark of the Covenant for petty cash? Or hawk Pandora's Box on eBay or Craigslist?” She peered at him over her spectacles. “You know better than that. Large expenditures attract unwanted scrutiny, sometimes from the wrong quarters. And careful bookkeeping is the key to a well-run organization.”

“So you've told me,” Flynn said wearily, too tired to argue the point one more time. “Look, I'll pull together those receipts after I've had a few hours of shut-eye.”

“I've heard that before,” she scoffed. “Oh, Judson wants to see you. Something's come up.”

Flynn groaned. “Can this wait, Charlene? I
really
need to get some sleep.”

“Well, I suppose I
could
tell him that you came all the way into the Library but couldn't be bothered to swing by long enough to check in with him.…”

“Okay, okay,” Flynn said, giving in. “Which way?”

“I believe he's in the Large Collections Annex, tending to odds and ends,” she said. “Don't keep him waiting. None of us are getting any younger, you know.”

Flynn was tempted to ask Charlene just how old she really was, but he decided against it. He started away from her desk, but he only got a few steps before she called him back.

“Not so fast.” She indicated the manuscript resting atop her desk. “Aren't you forgetting something?”

Flynn reclaimed the package and stuck it back into his satchel before exiting the office. A short hike brought him to a deceptively normal-looking reading room, where two stone-faced guards were posted to either side of a well-stocked bookcase. Telltale bulges beneath the guards' jackets suggested that both men were more heavily armed than you'd expect at the average library.

“Hi, Bud. Hi, Lou,” Flynn greeted the guards, who let him approach the bookcase, where he casually tugged on a leather-bound edition of Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
just as he had the first time he'd come this way, right after being selected as the new Librarian. The motion activated a hidden mechanism that revealed a secret vestibule behind the bookcase, facing a concealed elevator. The two guards stepped forward in lockstep, and each inserted a key into a slot on opposite sides of the elevator door. They turned them simultaneously, as though following nuclear launch protocols.

As Flynn understood it, the Pentagon had gotten the idea from the Library.

The elevator opened to admit him, and he settled in for the
long
ride down to the actual Library, which was buried deep below the public library. Tired as he was, the trip seemed to take even longer than usual, but at last the elevator dropped him off outside two frosted-glass doors. He slid back a wall panel to expose a hidden touchpad. Running on autopilot, he keyed in the password, and the doors swung open automatically on pneumatic hinges.

Home sweet home,
Flynn thought.
More or less.

Stone steps, carved out of the very bedrock and guarded by a pair of golden lions matching the marble felines up top, led him into a vast, cavernous chamber. Dark wooden shelves and wainscoting lined the walls, while row after row of glass display cases held some of the long-lost wonders of the world: the Spear of Destiny, the Philosopher's Stone, da Vinci's secret diaries, a crystal skull from lost Atlantis, and many other marvels and relics. The
real
Mona Lisa
hung upon one wall, not far from the actual Shroud of Turin. A unicorn neighed somewhere in the depths of the Library, impatient for his daily portion of virgin oats and olive oil. Vaulted barrel ceilings stretched high above Flynn's head.

The Library, Charlene had once told him, was always as big as it needed to be, and the awe-inspiring view before him was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. (The actual tip was on ice in a special refrigerated vault elsewhere in the Library.) Even after two years, Flynn was still stumbling onto new sections of the Library that he had never discovered before. At times he wondered if he would
ever
uncover all the mysteries filed away in the Library.

He had barely gotten a few steps into the stacks when a shining silver sword came whistling toward him, propelled by some unseen force. Sighing, Flynn ducked beneath the fifth-century English blade, which proceeded to dance around him expectantly. The fact that the sword was floating of its own accord, without anyone wielding it, did not faze him.

“Hi, 'Cal,” he greeted the fabled sword of King Arthur. “I'm happy to see you, too.”

Excalibur feinted at him playfully.

“Sorry, pal. I'm too tired to duel right now.”

Under other circumstances, Flynn might have borrowed another sword from the Library's extensive collection of antique weapons and enjoyed a vigorous bout of fencing with Excalibur, but not when, as presently, he was dead on his feet. Instead, having anticipated this encounter, he fished a small rubber ball from his pocket and hurled it away from him with as much force as he could muster.

“Fetch!”

Excalibur gleefully chased after the bouncing ball, taking off down a seemingly endless corridor. With any luck, that would keep the sword occupied long enough for Flynn to make his way to the Large Collections Annex. A shortcut through the Hall of Fame, which was lined with painted portraits of all the previous Librarians, dating back to antiquity, brought him to an even more capacious chamber stuffed with oversized relics too big to fit comfortably within an ordinary bookshelf or display case. Noah's Ark loomed ponderously over the collection. The Fountain of Youth gurgled nearby. Flynn eyed the sparkling waters wistfully. He was thirsty from his walk, but not enough so to risk ending up in kindergarten again. He had graduated from
See Spot Run
a long time ago.

He found Judson inside H. G. Wells's celebrated Time Machine, a fabulous steampunk contraption of polished brass and oiled red leather, shaped roughly like an hourglass. The device flickered in and out of the present before powering down and settling into today. Judson climbed stiffly out of the Machine, which continued to tick away like a grandfather clock. He smoothed out the creases in his conservative black suit.

“Welcome back,” he greeted Flynn, somewhat more warmly than Charlene had. “Excalibur has been missing you.”

He was a short, soft-spoken man whose doleful, hangdog features belied his amiable manner. A bald pate and sagging skin betrayed his considerable age, although Flynn sometimes suspected that Judson was far older than he looked. A slight stutter made him seem deceptively mild-mannered and unassuming, but Flynn knew from experience that the old man was much sharper and more resourceful than he let on.

“Going somewhere?” Flynn asked, indicating the Time Machine. “Or -when?”

“No, no, not at all.” Judson shook his head. “At my age, I much prefer to stay put in the here and now. I just had to reset the Machine back from Daylight Saving Time to Eastern Standard Time; otherwise it starts losing time … literally.”

Flynn took his word for it. “Charlene said you wanted to see me?”

“In a moment.” Judson nodded at Flynn's heavy satchel. “Is that it?”

“You bet.” Flynn delivered the manuscript to his mentor. “And don't ask me what I had to go through to get it.”

Judson sniffed the air. “Do I smell … beer?”

“Probably,” Flynn admitted. “I didn't really have time to take a shower before catching my flight.”

“I, I see,” Judson said, although his bemused tone and expression said otherwise. “In any event, congratulations on another job well done.” He hefted the manuscript. “I look forward to shelving this in the Lost Drafts and Apocrypha Collection, next to Shakespeare's
Love's Labour's Won
and Aristophanes's
Women in Tents.
”

Flynn's eyes widened at those tantalizing titles, which set his Librarian's heart racing. He made a mental note to check out those volumes
after
he got a little sleep.

“No problem, but if that's all—”

“You've returned just in time, Flynn. There's a situation in the Middle East that ought to be looked into.”

“The Middle East?” A whine crept into Flynn's voice. “Judson, I just got back from Scotland.…”

“A lovely country. I hope you enjoyed the trip.” He tucked the manuscript under his arm and strolled out of the annex into an adjacent section of the Library. “But I'm afraid the world didn't stop turning while you were gallivanting about the Highlands, and a Librarian's work is never done.”

Tell me about it,
Flynn thought.

He trailed after Judson, only to be interrupted by Excalibur, who caught up with him at last, the rubber ball proudly impaled upon its tip. The animated sword hovered before Flynn, eagerly wagging its blade.

“Again?” He plucked the ball from the sword. “Okay, just one more time.”

He gave the toy another good toss, sending Excalibur zipping after it, before following Judson into a smaller chamber lined with yet more bookshelves, where Flynn was only mildly surprised to find Charlene waiting for them. He felt both outnumbered and ambushed.

“Okay, I'll bite,” he said. “What's up overseas?”

“While you were away,” Judson said, “the Baghdad Museum of Arts and Antiquities was robbed by unknown parties. It's unclear at this point who is responsible or what they were after, but there's reason to suspect that the Forty might be involved.”

Flynn gave him a puzzled look. “The Forty?”

“As in the Forty Thieves.” Judson pulled a dusty copy of
The Arabian Nights
off a shelf and laid it down atop a wooden table. He flipped through the pages until he reached an engraved color illustration of Ali Baba hiding from the bloodthirsty thieves whose treasure he had stolen from a hidden cave. Knives drawn, the Thieves scowled murderously, intent on revenge. “In reality, it's a centuries-old criminal syndicate that past Librarians have clashed with more than once, albeit a bit before your time. They haven't been heard of since they tried to get their hands on the Jewel of Seven Stars back in 1903, and I'd hoped they had finally died off, but I now fear that was just wishful thinking.”