The Grimm Legacy

“Come. I’ll show you.” 

We walked down the aisles again, past rows of glass bottles, bowls of all shapes and sizes, dozens of spinning wheels, and on and on until we came to a chest full of cloths carefully folded and labeled. Doc took one out and shook it open. It was ragged and dirty. 

“Wait, Lee! Test it first!” said Ms. Callender sharply. 

“Don’t worry, I’m going to! That’s why I chose this bandage. I want to show her how very dangerous the objects in this room can be. Elizabeth, did you see the bottles we passed?” 

I nodded. 

“If you opened the wrong one without thinking, a spirit might come out and cut off your head.” 

“Why couldn’t I trick him back into the bottle like in the story?” 

“That only works once,” said Doc. “Our bottled spirits know better—they would never fall for that again. So don’t assume anything in here is harmless or manageable. Everything is dangerous in a different way, but everything is dangerous.” 

Ms. Callender was nodding her round face in agreement. “Even the stuff that sounds safe is dangerous,” she said. “Like the pot in ‘Sweet Porridge.’ When you say, ‘Cook, little pot, cook,’ it makes sweet millet porridge. Sounds harmless, right?” 

“Yes, I remember the story,” I said. Nobody told the pot to stop cooking until it had filled half the houses in town with porridge. The householders had to eat their way out. The story didn’t say whether anybody drowned. 

“Okay, Lee. Show her the rag,” said Ms. Callender. 

Doc took out a pocketknife, unfolded it, and—to my horror—made a deep cut across the base of one finger. 

“Martha, will you do the honors?” Doc held out the rag. “I don’t want to drip blood over everything.” 

“Sure.” Ms. Callender took the rag. “Elizabeth, do you have some small object you could spare? A penny or a pen or something?” 

I felt in my hoodie pocket and found an acorn I’d picked up in the park a few weeks ago. “How’s this?” 

“Perfect.” She rubbed it with the rag. Nothing happened. She turned the rag over and rubbed it again, with the other side. She held it up, smiled, and handed it to me. 

It was heavy and cold, white-gray and shiny. It had turned to silver. 

“Wow!” I said, staring. “It’s so—so cute! It’s like a perfect little silver acorn.” 

“It is a perfect little silver acorn,” said Doc. 

“Now give me your hand, Lee. Elizabeth? You watching?” 

I had still been staring at the acorn, admiring the tiny silver scales on the cap, but I turned to watch the librarians. Ms. Callender had taken Doc’s hand and was rubbing it with the cloth. 

The cut closed up as if it had never been there. 

“Wow! Can I see your finger?” Doc held it out. I inspected it closely. I couldn’t see any sign of the cut. 

“I remember the rest of the story now,” I said. “One side of the bandage turns things into silver, and the other side heals wounds.” 

“That’s right,” said Doc. “And if Martha had used the wrong side, I would now have a silver hand. Pretty, but useless.” 

“But that thing could save lives! Why is it here? Why don’t you give it to a hospital or something?” 

“Yes, it could save lives,” said Doc. “But it would certainly also cost lives. Not just by turning people into silver, but by starting more wars than it could ever heal the wounds from.” 

“I would say that’s the most important lesson of the day,” said Ms. Callender, folding up the cloth and putting it back in the chest. “Not only are the objects here extremely dangerous, but so is the knowledge of them.” 

“That’s right,” said Doc. “Remember, Elizabeth: tell no one about the magic here. At best they won’t believe you. At worst, they will.” 

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul. But lots of people must know about the magic. You do, and now I do. And I’ve seen people take objects out of the Grimm Collection when I was up in the Main Exam Room. Who are they? Do they know about the magic?” 

“Yes,” said Doc. “There’s a far-flung, exclusive community of people like us—now, people like you. People who recognize magic and wield it.” 

“Do they borrow things from the collection? Magical items?” 

“Yes, members of the community can earn borrowing privileges.” 

“Even the pages?” Maybe I would be allowed to borrow magical items myself! 

“Some of them.” 

“Wow!” Imagine having a magic cloth that could change things to silver in your own home! Or a cloak of invisibility. “Can I take things out too?” 

“Eventually, I hope. But that’s another step for another day. Give yourself a chance to digest what you’ve learned first.” 

“All right,” I said. Thinking about everything that could go wrong, I wasn’t sure I was ready for that kind of responsibility, anyway. 

“Aren’t you going to tell her about . . . you know?” said Ms. Callender. 

“The thefts. Yes.” Doc turned to me. “Elizabeth, unfortunately there have been some thefts of Grimm objects recently. And now we’ve been hearing about items that sound like ours turning up on the open market or in private collections.” 

“Somebody’s robbing the collection?” I said. “That’s terrible!” 

“It is,” said Doc. “And they seem to be replacing the stolen items with fakes—some of them, anyway.” 

“Oh, no!” I said. Fakes, I thought, like the unmagical boots Marc had me trade the real ones for! Was Marc . . . ? I shuddered away from the thought. “But what can I do?” 

“We need trustworthy eyes down here. We need to be able to rely on everyone who’s working here. If you see anything out of place, please let us know.” 

“Of course I will,” I said. “And how do you decide which pages to give the test to?”

“It’s a combination of things. Watching how you do your work in the repository. Recommendations from former pages and other members of our community, like Stan Mauskopf.” 

“Although the page we had to fire recently did have a recommendation from Wallace Stone, one of our patrons,” put in Ms. Callender. 

“I don’t want to blame Wallace,” said Doc. “He was devastated when I told him we had to fire Zandra. He took it hard. He’s one of our most generous donors.” 

“What did Zandra do?” I asked. 

“Besides spreading chaos, we caught her substituting a new vase for a valuable old one,” said Doc. 

“A magic vase?” 

“No, just a Ming dynasty vase on Stack 7. But that’s quite bad enough,” said Ms. Callender. 

“Wallace Stone felt so bad about the whole thing that he donated a group of related porcelain to the repository. He’s an art and antiques dealer, and he’s done a great job helping us round out our collections,” said Doc. “He was especially generous after the Zandra incident. I told him we didn’t blame him, but he still wanted to make amends.” 

“So Zandra’s gone now and things are still disappearing,” I said. “She couldn’t still be stealing, could she?” 

“No, I don’t think so. But it’s unlikely she was working alone. A kid like Zandra wouldn’t have the resources to dispose of a Ming vase. Whoever was behind it must have found some other way in—into the Grimm Collection, which is even worse.” 

“Anjali said there was another page who vanished. What happened to her?” I asked. 

“Mona Chen. She was one of our best workers,” Doc said. “She passed all the tests with flying colors, and she had some really good ideas about how to keep the Grimm Collection call slips safer. We’re trying to locate her.” 

“Where do you think she went? Did she return the key?” 

“Yes,” said Ms. Callender. “She dropped it off with Lucy Minnian. She said her family was moving, but she didn’t say where, and it’s surprising not to hear from her at all. Most of our alumni, especially Special Collection