The Grimm Legacy

Marc stood in the doorway.

“You two know each other, right?” said Dr. Rust.

“Yeah, we met downstairs,” said Marc.

“Actually, we’re in health ed together,” I said. “With Ms. Reider.”

Marc had the grace to look embarrassed.

“Good,” said Dr. Rust. “Take Elizabeth up to Stack 9 and show her the ropes.”

“But the ropes are on Stack 2.”

“I meant metaphorically.”

Could it be possible—did Marc wink at me? The great and famous Marc Merritt winking at me? If so, he did it very quickly.

“And send Martha Callender a pneum,” continued Dr. Rust. “She’ll want to do her orientation thing and work out the schedules. Glad to have you with us, Elizabeth. We’ve been shorthanded lately—we can really use the help. If you have any questions, you know where to find me.”

I had a billion questions, in fact, but I followed Marc down the hallway and through a door marked Staff Only.

“What’s a stack?” I asked.

“A floor where the holdings are stored.”

“And what’s a pneum?”

“Pneumatic tube carrier,” said Marc.

“Okay, what’s a pneumatic tube carrier, then?”

“You’ll see. Watch your head here.”

We went through a low door—Marc had to duck, but my head was in no danger—and up a staircase, flight after flight after flight. The brownstone couldn’t possibly have so many floors—we must have gone way past the roof, into some sort of penthouse addition. I was panting hard, but Marc looked as cool as ever, like the black king in my chess set.

At last he opened a door marked Stack 9. We stepped out into the middle of a long room with rows of cabinets stretching away on both sides. Near the door was a pair of desks facing a trio of elevators: a tiny one the size of a microwave, another the size of a dishwasher, and a third the size of a small refrigerator. Beyond them thick pipes snaked off in several directions. These were painted white, black, and red, and each had a small oblong door at elbow height. One of the pipes ended like a bathtub faucet over a wire basket.

“The staging area is basically headquarters on each floor,” said Marc. “You can hang up your coat over there.” He took a white slip of paper from a tray of different-colored slips, wrote something on it, and folded it in half.

As I stood looking around, one of the pipes began to cough and thump, as if a tiny elephant were panicking inside. Something hurtled out of the open end of the pipe and landed with a thud in the wire basket beneath. Marc held it up to show me: a transparent plastic tube like a skinny soda can, with thick felt padding on both ends.

“See? A pneum.”

The pneum had a sliding panel in its side. Marc slid it open, reached into the pneum, extracted a piece of paper, and replaced it with the note he’d written. He pulled open a door in one of the pipes. I heard a soft roaring, like a wind in a canyon. He slipped in the pneum and let the door clap shut. The pipe banged as the pneum shot through it.

“Where did it go?” I asked.

“Upstairs to the pneum routing station.”

“How does it work?”

“The pipes are full of pressurized air. It’s like a tiny hurricane inside the pipe. The air pushes the pneums through the pipes, all around the building.”

“So you could send that pneum anywhere?”

“It goes where the pipe takes it. You have to pick a pipe that’s going where you want to send the pneum. I better run that call slip,” he said. “Wait here. If Ms. Callender shows up, tell her I’ll be right back.” He headed off down a row of file cabinets.

I hung up my coat, wandered over to a cabinet stenciled with letters and numbers, and peeked in. Inside I saw shelves of tea-cups. The next cabinet had shelves of coffee mugs. From time to time I heard a pneum gallop through the pipes in the ceiling.

Soon Marc came back with a pair of packages each the size of a shoe box. He put the first one in the smallest elevator, shut the door, and pressed a button.

“Was that a book?” I asked.

“What? No, it’s a chocolate pot. Sorry, I should have showed you. The patron requested a hot-chocolate set. Here’s the cream and sugar.” He opened the second box and showed me a fancy, swirly cream pitcher and sugar bowl packed in fluffy stuff, like cotton. He delicately tucked the fluff back around the set.

“Can I ask you a question?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. Like Doc says, ‘The one who asks questions does not lose his way,’” he answered in a credible imitation of Dr. Rust’s high-low voice.

“Okay, so this job. What am I supposed to be doing? Am I like a dishwasher?”

“A dishwasher!” He hooted with laughter. “Why would you be a dishwasher?”

I bristled. Being laughed at was bad enough—being laughed at by Marc Merritt felt doubly bad. Besides, it didn’t seem like such an unreasonable question to me. “Well, Dr. Rust asked me how often I do the dishes and if I break a lot of china. And there’s all this china around. What is the job, if I’m not washing dishes?”

“You’re a page.”

That made less sense than a dishwasher. Was he making fun of me? “You mean a medieval page, like an entry-level knight? Are there swords and dragons hidden away in some of these cabinets?”

He hooted again, but I didn’t feel as bad. At least this time you could argue he was laughing at my joke. “A library page,” he said. “When a call slip comes, you go get the item the patron requested. Did you ever use the reference library on Forty-second Street? You know how they keep the books locked up and bring them to you when you request them? Did you ever wonder who gets the books? That’s the pages.”

“Okay, so if this is a library, where are all the books?”

“Books? There’s some on Stack 6. Most of them are in the Document Room or the Reference Room. And, you know, here and there.”

Not many books? “What kind of a library is this?”

Before he could answer, the staircase door opened and a woman walked in. “Hi, Marc,” she said. “Elizabeth, right? I’m Martha Callender.” She tucked a lock of straight brown hair behind a little round ear. Everything about her, in fact, was round: her cheeks, her figure, her collar, the big buttons on her jacket, even her haircut, which roundly framed her round face and kept getting in her round eyes.

“Welcome, welcome! It’s great to have you here,” she told me. “We’ve been very shorthanded—we lost two pages in the last two months—and Stan told Dr. Rust you’re a hard worker.”

“I love his class. It’s worth working hard in,” I said, flattered.

“I bet he’s a great teacher. How is he doing? And the Beast?”

“Mr. Mauskopf is fine. I’ve never, um, met the Beast.”

“No? Well, that’s something for you to look forward to.” She beamed at me. “Did Marc give you the grand tour?”

“Not yet, I was running a call slip,” said Marc.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll show you around, then. Did you have any questions to begin with?”

“Yes,” I said. “What is this place?”

“I’m not sure what you mean—which place? Stack 9? The Stack 9 staging area?”

“No, I mean the whole institution, the repository.”

I didn’t expect a real answer. Whatever this place was, it seemed to be full of people who told you to ask