Andromeda Klein (24 page)

“That’s the Ritual of Exorcism,” she whispered. Best not to recite ancient banishing incantations in a temple consecrated to gods and planetary demons, thank you very much. The last thing she needed was to chase off the King of Sacramento just when he was beginning to show himself. Her disciple had a lot to learn.

“No way,” said Byron. “Spooky. Someone bookmarked it.”

It was true: someone had bookmarked the exorcism section long ago with a tiny scrap of paper, now quite yellowed.

“Why does the library even have that?” said Byron.

It was a terrific question, in fact, and Andromeda Klein was rather shocked to realize that this was the first time it had occurred to her.

Just then the overhead lights in the Children’s Annex flickered twice, seemed about to go out, then came back on. Such flickers happened on occasion, but the timing made this an extremely weedgie synch.

“Daisy?” said Andromeda, sniffing. She could detect no Daisy scent whatsoever. Then she tried: “King of Sacramento?” The lights stayed on, but Andromeda felt, between her shoulder blades, two distinct shivers in quick succession, which certainly seemed like a yes.

“King of Sacramento,” she said, nodding.

Byron was staring at her with his head cocked to one side and his eyes narrowed, waiting for an explanation.

There was no way to explain, so Andromeda simply shrugged.

“You’re scary,” he said.

“Who’s your boyfriend?” Marlyne asked, as soon as Byron the Former Emogeekian had checked out his fifteen books and left. Anyone seen talking to anyone was “your boyfriend” or “your girlfriend,” or potentially even “your Latin Loe-ver,” in Marlyne’s vocabulary. “He’s cute,” she added, revealing, for perhaps the first time in recorded history, that there was a way to say that phrase that implied “He’s too short for you.”

“I’m helping him with his homework,” said Andromeda.

“Yes, I noticed he had all your spooky books that nobody ever checks out. He majoring in Andromeda Studies?”

Andromeda had Den’s stack of fifteen books ready for him when he came in, but after the conversation with Marlyne she decided to switch out a few to make it less obvious and more age-appropriate. Some kids’ books wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway. She removed
A Wicked Pack of Cards
and the
Voynich Manuscript
and replaced them with
Five Children and It
and
Story of the Amulet
-they deserved to be saved too, after all, and they had led quite a few children, including herself, to
ouijanesse
. The
Magical Papyri in Translation
would have to be saved too, certainly, but just to be on the safe side she also replaced it and Wright’s
History of Caricature and the Grotesque
with a couple of the more popular kids’ books about wizards and dragons. There was little chance that Den was going to read any of them, though. He just wasn’t a reader.

Den was extremely disappointed that there was no bagel worm agony for him, as she had promised. Andromeda had gone to school directly from Rosalie’s house and had come to the library straight afterward, so there had been no time to visit the dad’s sad little magazine box. She tried to interest Den in the illustrations of William Blake’s
Book of Urizen
, which were rather sexy to her, but Den didn’t have the right kind of imagination for that. He gave her a withering look and accepted with resignation her promise to make it up to him.

Den had brought her some treasures, though: things he had managed to dig up from around the house. There were four Daisy items: (1) a sock with a heavy object inside that turned out to be a small, smoky crystal ball; (2) Daisy’s old cell phone, which, sadly, looked like it had been smashed beyond repair and would no longer work; (3) a little radio or music player of some kind, with headphones and cord wrapped around it; and (4) one of Daisy’s old, and rather beat-up, teenage vampire books. (Their interest in vampires had been short-lived but intense at its height when Daisy had been diagnosed, sparked by the notion that milky leukemia blood might be rejuvenated by mixing in some regular blood. None of the blood magic they had tried had had any effect, however, and neither, for that matter, had any of the bone magic they had attempted in order to reorganize Andromeda’s collagen.)

“What’s that? More ninety-three stuff?” he said, noticing the
bet
Byron had drawn for her.

“It’s for a tattoo,” she said, explaining how you copy a design onto transfer paper and then to your skin to guide your ink-stabbing. “It’s going to go here,” said added, raising her arm and pointing to the spot. “A nice little
bet.”
She pulled out her damaged cards and thumbed through them to show the Magician, who hadn’t come out too badly from Rosalie’s hot chocolate and schnapps soaking.

Den dutifully checked out the fifteen books, but said he’d never be able to carry them all, so Andromeda said he could put the ten she judged the least crucial right back in the bin. At least she had managed to save the
Turbo Philosophorum
and Giordano Bruno’s
Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
, if nothing else.

“Don’t let your mom see,” she said as he left with a whispered-over-the-shoulder “Ninety-three.”

Fifteen books to Byron and fifteen to Den. Thirty books a go wasn’t bad at all. She would have new ones ready for them on Tuesday, so that would be thirty more. Until then, Andromeda decided to focus on the least crucial sections in pulling the Sylvester Mouse books, leaving the 133s and other important areas on the shelves till she could arrange to have them checked out, and thus saved. Still, it was sad, whatever books they were. Who knows when you might want to look up something about entomology, biophysics, or even knitting or papier-mâché crafts?
The History and Social Influence of the Potato. Rewinding Small Motors
. What if a small motor ever needed rewinding? How would anybody know what to do?

Andromeda did notice, however, as she was “working the list,” as Marlyne liked to put it, that there was something different about weeding these sections. She tried to put her finger on it for some time before she realized what it was: these non-Andromeda sections smelled different than “her” sections, like, say, the 133s or 296s. And the reason they smelled different was that the books in the Andromeda sections tended to be older. Older books smell stronger—better, by Andromeda’s lights—and the books in the 133s, along with certain other sections and much of the general fiction section, were older, dustier, and mustier. Andromeda had always known that the International House of Bookcakes had an unusually complete and extensive collection on magic, the occult, and religions, but she had always just counted that her good fortune, that the library happened to match her interests and needs so well. Of course, it had influenced the development of those interests as well, in the long years spent there day after day after school, moving from E. Nesbit to Tolkien, witches, dragons, and vampires, and on up to A.E., Crowley, and Kenneth Grant. But it was only now, confronted with the extremely limited and nonodiferous 700s, that she began to wonder why and how that came to be.

A search of the online catalog, sorted by call number and subsorted by publication date, confirmed this impression. There were an enormous number of 133s in comparison to the other sections, which she had really known already; the bulk of them had been published prior to 1960, and many of them much, much earlier. It was very different from other sections she sorted by, which seemed to have been built up in the eighties and nineties and later. And sorted by acquisition date, it was even more dramatic: other than
True and Faithful
, which she had herself donated to the library quite recently, very few 133s had been purchased or added to the collection since 1977. It was a very clear cutoff. So what had happened in 1977? Elvis had died, that was one thing, according to a quick Internet search. She couldn’t think what else, though. She would have to look into it.

There was also a particular notation on many of the individual records that Andromeda didn’t recognize:
JE
. There was no indication of what it stood for, and it was in the notes rather than a database field, so it couldn’t be sorted for. But she checked several important titles, like
Magick Without Tears
and
Shadows of Life and Thought
, and all had the
JE
notation.
Isis Unveiled
and
On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead
had
EJMJE
, which seemed related. Most nonweedgie titles she tried did not have either notation, though
Rewinding Small Motors
was an exception. Try as she might, Andromeda could not imagine a weedgie reason to want to rewind a small motor, but perhaps there was one.

Marlyne had no idea, nor did Eileen Thigpen, the other LA-2. Even Dorothy Glass, the head librarian, said she had no idea. Gordon suggested that it could be the initials of the person who did the data entry when they made the transition from card catalog to electronic cataloging, but if so it was the only such notation, and the enterer had only remembered to do it for the good, older, and most weedgie books. It, like the presence of the Sylvester Mouse list, was a mark of quality and distinction. She didn’t want to probe too obviously on this, because she was in the process of a campaign to sabotage the library’s weeding program and it wouldn’t do to draw attention to her interest in the matter if she could help it. It was an interesting puzzle, though; all the more interesting because it was the first time she had thought of it. How and why had the IHOB acquired its phenomenal 133 collection, and why had there been such a sudden cutoff? The person to ask would be Darren Hedge, of course, but he was the last person whose suspicions she wished to arouse by showing too much interest in what she was already beginning to call the Eejymjay Collection. He had mentioned, in their conversation in the breezeway, that the building had once belonged to a family that had donated it to the city. Perhaps, then, the books had come with the building, collected by an evidently weedgie family. JE could be somebody’s initials; or it could be a shortened form of EJMJE, which sounded more like an organization or something. Jedidiah Easterbrook. Jean Eepertwinkle. The Electric Jesus Maritime Jitterbug Establishment. These were only a few of the possibilities.

The books she had donated,
True and Faithful and Night-side of Eden
, didn’t have the notation—it would have been rather weedgie if they had had it, because she had data-entered those records herself, but of course she checked just in case.

Andromeda was in the break room eating her plum baby food and paging through Daisy’s teen vampire book when she noticed a little folded plastic cardholder inside the book. Inside were Daisy’s student-body card, her driver’s license, and her library card.

Andromeda paused to consider. The card wasn’t expired, and she doubted that canceling a dead person’s library card was something anybody ever thought of doing. Would the card work? If it did, fifteen more books could be saved right away, bringing the total to forty-five. At this rate, the “Friends” of the Library’s plan would really be in trouble. If Andromeda had been the sort of person to rub her hands together and cackle gleefully, or to punch the air, or to do a little triumphant butt-shaking dance like the mom, that was what she would have done. Instead, she clicked her tongue and said, “A.E.”

She had to choose her moment, when Marlyne went on break and she was asked to fill in. But she managed to get all the books scanned in fairly efficiently. It felt a little strange when she saw
Daisy Wasserstrom
pop up on-screen, but it did work. Was that Daisy’s scent faintly coming through the heating vent? She sniffed. Yes, very faintly, but maybe it was coming from the card.

She accepted Gordon’s offer of a ride, because all those books wouldn’t fit in her bag.

“I get off work here, the last thing I want to do is read,” he said. “And that,” said Altiverse AK, “is the difference between you and him.” It’s the difference between me and pretty much everybody, replied Andromeda’s thought waves.