Dragon Keepers #3: The Dragon in the Library (8 page)

84

snoring, a guinea pig rustling in its wood shavings, and a hamster jogging in its squeaky wheel.

Jesse wiggled his fingers and keyed the words "Goldmine City Historic Houses" into the search box. The next minute, a single title popped up on the screen:
The Grand Historic Homes of Goldmine City
.

With her hands resting on Jesse's shoulders, Daisy leaned toward the monitor and scanned the description along with him. Jesse tapped the screen. There was a listing for the Presidential Palace, built in 1901 by someone named Skinner, who was the head of the Pacific Mountains Mining Company. The address was listed simply as Old Mine Lane. Daisy pulled her wildflower notebook out of the backpack, tore a corner from a page, and copied down the book's call number. Then she stuffed the notebook into her backpack and slung it over her shoulders.

Emmy led the way toward the stacks. She seemed to know her way around, which was a good thing, because Jesse and Daisy felt like strangers where the shelves were higher and the books were thicker and darker and altogether more serious-looking.

The cousins followed Emmy into the aisle marked NONFICTION. Emmy went halfway down

85

and halted, turning to face the shelves on the left-hand side. She looked up and wagged. Jesse and Daisy followed her gaze up to where it rested on the fourth shelf.

Jesse started on the left and scanned the call numbers. In the exact spot where the book should have been was a wide gap. Jesse rose up on his tiptoes to see if the book had gotten pushed to the back of the shelf.

Jesse gasped as a head popped out and a voice said "boo!" right in his face.

It was the shelf elf!

Reeling backward, and forgetting all about his library voice, Jesse let out a startled yelp. Daisy clamped her hands around Emmy's jaw to keep her from doing the same.

The elf stuck his head out even farther and, with a long finger pressed to his lips, said, "Shhhhh!"

Daisy whispered furiously, "Shh yourself! Who are you, anyway?"

The shelf elf popped back into the gap and disappeared.

Emmy scrambled around to the next aisle over, with Jesse and Daisy right on her tail. But there was no shelf elf to be found.

"Psssst!"

86

They spun around. The elf was standing at the head of the aisle, hands on his hips. Then he leaped into the air and sped away.

"After him!" Jesse cried in a fierce whisper.

They took off in hot pursuit, their stocking feet skidding to a slippery halt as the elf hopped up on top of a reading table, slid the length of it, hurtled over the backs of three chairs, bounced on the seat of a fourth, and dived headlong into the fiction section. Emmy, Jesse, and Daisy ran around the table, giving chase to the shelf elf up one aisle and down another. But the nimble little man always managed to stay at least half an aisle ahead of them. Finally, at the end of the
R
to
Z
aisle of the nonfiction section, the shelf elf stopped and spun around to face them, backed into a corner at last.

"Got you now!" Jesse whispered, and he started to close in on the shelf elf.

Just as they were almost upon him, the elf shot up into the air and dived into a small hole in the floor by Jesse's feet.

"Whoa!" said Daisy.

"How did he do that?" Jesse asked.

The cousins and Emmy leaned over the small hole, then stared at each other in disbelief: How could that small elf have fit into this even smaller hole?

87

Daisy got down on her hands and knees and peered into the hole, trying to see where the elf had gone.

"I don't see anything," she whispered.

As Jesse watched, something started moving inside the pack on Daisy's back. A second later, it rolled out the top.

"The Sorcerer's Sphere!" Jesse cried, lunging to catch it.

"Get it!" Daisy said as the sphere bumped off her shoulder, rolled down her arm, and disappeared into the hole with a hollow
pop
.

All three of them shrank back, shielding their eyes from the blinding white light that suddenly poured out of the hole and flooded the entire library. The next minute, the stone floor beneath them gave way, like an elevator in free fall, taking them down with it. Faster and faster they fell, the cool air whistling past their ears. They screamed, then squeezed their eyes shut, rolled themselves up into tiny little balls, and prayed for a gentle landing.

A minute or two later, they alit at the bottom like feathers, upright and flat on their feet. Giddy with relief, Jesse opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was Emmy, in dragon form, with the silver paper princess tiara slipped over onto the side of her head. An even funnier sight was Daisy. Her long

88

blond hair was standing straight up in the air. When he reached over to touch it, it crackled and sent a zing of static electricity up his arm.

"Sorry," said Daisy. "Yours looks pretty funny, too. Look at that." She pointed.

Standing before them, on a tall pedestal that resembled an oversize golf tee made of gold, was the Sorcerer's Sphere, but it was no longer a rusty sphere. It was now a beautiful, sparkling, multi-faceted ruby.

"Wow. What is this place?" Jesse said, looking around.

It had the airy indoor-outdoor feel of an enormous sports stadium or a cathedral. The ceiling--if there was one--was obscured by a blanket of thick golden fog. It smelled as sweet and rich as the air in his mother's favorite spice shop in Bangalore, India.

"It's a library," Daisy said, turning in a slow circle. "But it's not the Goldmine City Public Library."

It was a library on a gargantuan scale. They slowly set out down its broad central aisle, which was nearly as wide as Goldmine City's Main Street. They stopped here and there to peer down the side aisles. The aisles stretched out to eternity, lined with bookshelves rising to dizzying heights and jampacked

89

with books as massive as the one stolen from Miss Alodie's parlor--and some of them a good deal bigger. The massive tomes were bound in a rainbow of leather hues so dazzling, Jesse wanted to run his fingers along them like the keys of some fantastic piano.

Daisy rummaged in the backpack, then wrestled her hair into a bun and skewered it with a pencil. "Well," she said, when she had managed the feat, "at least now we know where that big red book came from."

Jesse wasn't looking at the books just then. He was looking at all the creatures scuttling overhead. They slid from shelf to shelf on a webwork of fine silken filaments, like mountaineers rappelling down a rock face. Jesse heard a droning noise. He recognized it as the sound of talking and muttering and humming.

"Shelf elves!" Emmy said. "What did I tell you two!"

"Right again, Emmy," Jesse said.

One of the elves broke away and began to hurtle downward at an alarming rate, landing before them with a crunching sound and a breathless little "Oof!" and a bow. And seemingly to himself: "Watch the knees now. My word!"

Jesse somehow knew instantly that this was the

90

same shelf elf who had led them on the wild chase through the stacks.

The shelf elf said, "Willum Wink, Chief Steward of the Shelf Elves of the Scriptorium! How may I be of service to you three today? (Or is it tonight? It's always a little hard to tell in here.)"

Something about the shelf elf's voice made Jesse want to giggle. It was high-pitched and it warbled, the way it sounds when you inhale helium from a birthday balloon.

"I, um, ah," said Daisy, and Jesse could tell by the redness of her face that she was fighting the same fit of giggles he was.

Jesse swallowed his mirth. "We're looking for a book," he said, feeling that this was the right thing to say, since it was the truth, or had been up until a few moments ago. Clearly they weren't going to find the book on historical homes here, but it might be where the big red book had come from and, just possibly, where it had been returned. Since the professor and the book had gone missing at approximately the same time, maybe there was a connection. Finding one might help to find the other.

"A book, you say? How novel! (Toss in a little shelf elf humor now and then, I always say, don't I? I do!)" Willum Wink snorted mirthfully to himself.

91

"Well, you've come to the right place! Do you happen to have the D-D-D-S-N?"

"The
what
?" Daisy asked.

Wink narrowed his eyes in a thoroughly suspicious squint. "Who are you
really
? And who sent you here? The Dragon Domain Designation System Number. What else? (What else, indeed!)"

Emmy piped up with a long string of babble that might have been a number, for all the cousins knew. It seemed to make complete sense to Willum Wink, who stroked his sharp hook of a chin and said, "Yes. No. Sorry. Do pardon me. That volume is in our collection, but she is currently unavailable."

"Unavailable?" Jesse asked. "What do you mean?"

The elf's upturned eyes flashed. "I mean
out!
As in not here at the moment. As in not currently on the shelf. (How many ways must I put it to make them comprehend? My sweet elfin
word!)"

Jesse was beginning to see that the elf had a habit of talking to himself in the middle of talking to them and that whenever he did it, his eyes crossed, as if they were chatting with each other over the bridge of his nose.

"It's out. We get it," Daisy said. "But what I don't get is how can a book be a she or a he?"

The elf gave his dusty little tuft of hair a tug. "A

92

book can be a she or a he depending upon whether it is a female or a male," Mr. Wink said. "And this particular
she
checked herself out, let me see now (it's here somewhere, I know. Isn't it? Well, of course it is!)..." He opened a small notebook and hummed to himself as he flipped through the pages. He stopped and tapped a page with a finger that had twice as many joints as any human finger and a pointy nail. "Two terrestrial great moons ago."

"Two months ago, you mean? Checked
herself
out?" Jesse said.

"Yes, dearie. That's what books do here," Mr. Wink said absently as he tucked the notebook away inside his jacket and began dusting himself off with a tiny whisk broom. His jacket was brown checked and cinched at the waist with a tool belt filled with strange implements. The jacket had elbow patches, which was a good thing because the shelf elf had very sharp elbows. He tucked the little broom into a loop on his tool belt and went on: "Here, they are free to check themselves in and out as they please. They are
living matter
! Not dead, as are all the books they keep
up there!"
He pointed toward the fog above, by which the children took him to mean the Goldmine City Library.

Jesse didn't like to think of all the books he had read as being dead, but he didn't want to argue the

93

point now. "This is a big dark red book we're talking about," he said, "with a metal ring on the cover like a door knocker?"

"Distinctive, isn't she? She has a superb sense of style, that one. Such flair! (Unlike
some
I could name, isn't that the truth? It is!) I know exactly to whom you refer. Her name is Leandra of Tourmaline," said the elf. "Leandra is one of our finest volumes."

"Leandra?" Emmy whispered faintly. "My mother!"

Jesse and Daisy stared at each other in wonder.

Emmy said to them, "Yes, that's my mother's name. I know it like my own. And to think that she was there all the time and I never knew it!"

"Ah!" said the elf. "(Now it all makes sense, doesn't it? It does!) You must be the hatchling she was so eager to meet! But I don't understand. If she's your mother, why isn't she with you?"

"Emmy's with her Keepers!" Jesse put in quickly. "That's us. We take care of her."

"You are my Keepers and I love you," Emmy said in a tremulous voice. Then she opened her mouth and wailed, "But I WANT MY MOTHER!"

"Uh-oh!" Willum Wink took a few wary steps backward.

The next moment, Emmy exploded in a howling,

94

bellowing gale of tears and dragon snot. Daisy dug around frantically in the backpack as Emmy flung herself down and wept and ranted and raged, flailing at the stone floor with all four limbs and her tail. Daisy finally found the blue washcloth they had packed. Reaching an arm out, Emmy snagged the washcloth and soaked it with fresh torrents.

How are we ever going to get her to stop?
Jesse shut his eyes because he hated to see Emmy cry, and also because he needed to think. But before he could summon his thoughts, he felt something splatter his face and hair. At first he thought it was Emmy's tears. Then he realized it was coming from somewhere overhead. He opened his eyes, looked up, and saw that the fog was now spangled with shimmering flakes of gold that were drifting gently down onto his face and shoulders. He brushed at them.

Daisy noticed them, too, and began to brush them out of her hair and off her shoulders.

"No need to worry. (Why does everybody carry on in this fashion? My word!)" said the shelf elf. "It's just dragon dust."

The cousins stopped fussing. "Dragon dust?" they chimed.

The shelf elf looked around. "(Are we in an echo chamber? I see we must be!) Most of the volumes here are coated with the stuff. We don't even