Mammoth Books presents The Books (2 page)

“Brutal crowd, kids,” he told us, lighting his joint at one of the torches. “Watch your rhythm.”

But we were kids and we could ignore all the grownups in the world shouting, so we grabbed our prop baskets and ran out and put on our act. Myko stalked up and down and waved his sword and yelled his lines about being the brave and dangerous Captainio. I had a little pretend guitar that I strummed on while I pretended to look at the moon, and spoke my lines about being a poor fool in love with the princess. Sunny came out and did her princess dance. Then we juggled. It all went fine. The only time I was a little thrown off was when I glanced at the audience for a split second and saw the light of my juggling torches flickering on all those glass lenses or blind eyes. But I never dropped a torch.

Maybe Myko was bothered some, though, because I could tell by the way his eyes glared through his mask that he was getting worked up. When we had the sword duel near the end he hit too hard, the way he always did when he got worked up, and he banged my knuckles so bad I actually said “Ow” but the audience didn’t catch it. Sometimes when he was like that his hair almost bristled, he was like some crazy cat jumping and spitting, and he’d fight about nothing. Sometimes afterwards I’d ask him why. He’d shrug and say he was sorry. Once he said it was because life was so damn boring.

Anyway I sang my little sad song and died of a broken heart,
flumpf
there on the pavement in my buffoon suit. I felt Sunny come over and put the rose on my chest and, I will remember this to my dying day, some old lady was yelling to her old man “ ... and now the little girl gave him her rose!”

And the old man yelled “What? She gave him her nose?”

“Damn it, Bob! Her
ROSE
!”

I corpsed right then, I couldn’t help it, I was still giggling when Myko and Sunny pulled me to my feet and we took our bows and ran off. Backstage they started laughing too. We danced up and down and laughed, very much getting in the way of Uncle Monty, who had to trundle all his parrots and their perches out on stage.

When we had laughed ourselves out, Sunny said “So ... what’ll we do now?”

That was a good question. Usually the Show was at night, so usually after a performance we went back to the trailers and got out of costume and our moms fed us and put us to bed. We’d never played a matinee before. We stood there looking at each other until Myko’s eyes gleamed suddenly.

“We can explore the Lost City of the Sands,” he said, in that voice he had that made it sound like whatever he wanted was the coolest thing ever. Instantly, Sunny and I both wanted to explore too. So we slipped out from the backstage area, just as Uncle Monty was screaming himself hoarse trying to get his parrots to obey him, and a moment later we were walking down an endless street lined with looming giants’ houses.

They weren’t really, they had big letters carved up high that said they were this or that property group or financial group or brokerage or church but if a giant had stepped out at one corner and peered down at us, we wouldn’t have been surprised. There was a cold wind blowing along the alleys from the sea and sand hissed there and ran before us like ghosts along the ground but on the long deserted blocks between there was gigantic silence. Our tiny footsteps only echoed in doorways.

The windows were mostly far above our heads and there was nothing much to see when Myko hoisted me up to stand on his shoulders and look into them. Myko kept saying he hoped we’d see a desk with a skeleton with one of those headset things on sitting at it but we never did; people didn’t die
that
fast when it all went down. My mom said they could tell when they were getting sick and people went home and locked themselves in to wait and see if they lived or not.

Anyway Myko got bored finally and started this game where he’d charge up the steps of every building we passed. He’d hammer on the door with the hilt of his sword and yell “It’s the Civilian Militia! Open up or we’re coming in!” Then he’d rattle the doors but everything was locked long ago. Some of the doors were too solid even to rattle, and the glass was way too thick to break.

After about three blocks of this, when Sunny and I were starting to look at each other with our eyebrows raised, meaning “Are you going to tell him this game is getting old or do I have to do it?”, right then something amazing happened: one of the doors swung slowly inward and Myko swung with it. He staggered into the lobby or whatever and the door shut behind him. He stood staring at us through the glass and we stared back and I was scared to death, because I thought we’d have to run back and get Uncle Buck and Aunt Selene with their hammers to get Myko out, and we’d all be in trouble.

But Sunny just pushed on the door and it opened again. She went in so I had to go in too. We stood there all three and looked around. There was a desk and a dead tree in a planter and another huge glass wall with a door in it, leading deeper into the building. Myko began to grin.

“This is the first chamber of the Treasure Tomb in the Lost City,” he said. “We just killed the giant scorpion and now we have to go defeat the army of zombies to get into the second chamber!”

He drew his sword and ran yelling at the inner door, but it opened too, soundlessly, and we pushed after him. It was much darker in here but there was still enough light to read the signs.

“It’s a libarary,” said Sunny. “They used to have paperbacks.”

“
Paperbacks
,” said Myko gloatingly, and I felt pretty excited myself. We’d seen lots of paperbacks, of course; there was the boring one with the mended cover that Aunt Maggie made everybody learn to read in. Every grownup we knew had one or two or a cache of paperbacks, tucked away in boxes or in lockers under beds, to be thumbed through by lamplight and read aloud from, if kids had been good.

Aunt Nera had a dozen paperbacks and she’d do that. It used to be the only thing that would stop Myko crying when he was little. We knew all about the Last Unicorn and the kids who went to Narnia, and there was a really long story about some people who had to throw a ring into a volcano that I always got tired of before it ended, and another really long one about a crazy family living in a huge castle, but it was in three books and Aunt Nera only had the first two. There was never any chance she’d ever get the third one now, of course, not since it all went down. Paperbacks were rare finds, they were ancient, their brown pages crumbled if you weren’t careful and gentle.

“We just found all the paperbacks in the
universe
!”
Myko shouted.

“Don’t be dumb,” said Sunny. “Somebody must have taken them all away years ago.”

“Oh yeah?” Myko turned and ran further into the darkness. We followed, yelling at him to come back, and we all came out together into a big round room with aisles leading off it. There were desks in a ring all around and the blank dead screens of electronics. We could still see because there were windows down at the end of each aisle, sending long trails of light along the stone floors, reflecting back on the long shelves that lined the aisles and the uneven surfaces of the things on the shelves. Clustering together, we picked an aisle at random and walked down it toward the window.

About halfway down it, Myko jumped and grabbed something from one of the shelves. “Look! Told you!” He waved a paperback under our noses. Sunny leaned close to look at it. There was no picture on the cover, just the title printed big.

“Roget’s. The. Saurus,” Sunny read aloud.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

Myko opened it and tried to read. For a moment he looked so angry I got ready to run, but then he shrugged and closed the paperback. “It’s just words. Maybe it’s a secret code or something. Anyway, it’s
mine
now.” He stuck it inside his doublet.

“No stealing!” said Sunny.

“If it’s a dead town it’s not stealing, it’s salvage,” I told her, just like the aunts and uncles always told us.

“But it isn’t dead. There’s all the old people.”

“They’ll die soon,” said Myko. “And anyway Uncle Buck already asked permission to salvage.” Which she had to admit was true, so we went on. What we didn’t know then, but figured out pretty fast, was that all the other things on the shelves were actually big hard
books
like Uncle Des’
Barlogio’s Principles of Glassblowing.

But it was disappointing at first because none of the books in that aisle had stories. It was all, what do you call it, reference stuff. We came out sadly thinking we’d been gypped, and then Sunny spotted the sign with directions.

“Children’s Books, Fifth Floor,” she announced.

“Great! Where’s the stairs?” Myko looked around. We all knew better than to ever, ever go near an elevator, because not only did they mostly not work, they could kill you. We found a staircase and climbed and climbed for what seemed forever before we came out onto the Children’s Books floor.

And it was so cool. There were racks of paperbacks, of course but we stood there with our mouths open because the signs had been right – there were
books
here
.
Big, hard, solid books but not about grownup stuff. Books with bright pictures on the covers. Books for
us.
Even the tables and chairs up here were our size.

With a little scream, Sunny ran forward and grabbed a book from a shelf. “It’s Narnia! Look! And it’s got different pictures!”

“What a score,” said Myko, dancing up and down. “Oh, what a score!”

I couldn’t say anything. The idea was so enormous: all these were ours. This whole huge room belonged to
us .. .
at least, as much as we could carry away with us.

Myko whooped and ran off down one of the aisles. Sunny stayed frozen at the first shelf, staring with almost a sick expression at the other books. I went close to see.

“Look,” she whispered. “There’s
millions.
How am I supposed to choose? We need as many stories as we can get.” She was pointing at a whole row of books with colored titles:
The Crimson Fairy Book. The Blue Fairy Book. The Violet Fairy Book. The Orange Fairy Book
. I wasn’t interested in fairies, so I just grunted and shook my head.

I picked an aisle and found shelves full of flat books with big pictures. I opened one and looked at it. It was real easy to read, with big letters and the pictures were funny but I read right through it standing there. It was about those big animals you see sometimes back up the delta country, you know, elephants. Dancing, with funny hats on. I tried to imagine Aunt Nera reading it aloud on winter nights. It wouldn’t last even one night; it wouldn’t last through one bedtime. It was only one story. Suddenly I saw what Sunny meant. If we were going to take books away with us, they had to be full of stories that would
last.
That had – what’s the word I’m looking for?
Substance.

Myko yelled from somewhere distant, “Here’s a cool one! It’s got pirates!”

It was pretty dark where I was standing, so I wandered down the aisle toward the window. The books got thicker the farther I walked. There was a bunch of books about dogs but their stories all seemed sort of the same; there were books about horses too, with the same problem. There were books to teach kids how to make useful stuff but when I looked through them they were all dumb things like how to weave potholders for your mom or build things out of popsicle sticks. I didn’t even know what popsicle sticks were, much less where I could get any. There were some about what daily life was like back in olden times but I already knew about that, and anyway those books had no
story.

And all the while Myko kept yelling things like, “Whoa! This one has guys with spears and shields and
gods
!” or “Hey, here’s one with a flying carpet and it says it’s got a
thousand
stories!” Why was I the only one stuck in the dumb books shelves?

I came to the big window at the end and looked out at the view – rooftops, fog, gray dark ocean – and backed away, scared stiff by how high up I was. I was turning around to run back when I saw the biggest book in the world.

Seriously. It was half as big as I was,
twice
the size of
Barlogio’s Principles of Glassblowing,
it was bound in red leather and there were gold letters along its back. I crouched down and slowly spelled out the words.

The Complete Collected Adventures of Asterix the Gaul.

I knew what “Adventures” meant, and it sounded pretty promising. I pulled the book down – it was the heaviest book in the world too – and laid it flat on the floor. When I opened it I caught my breath. I had found the greatest book in the world.

It was full of colored pictures but there were words too, a lot of them, they were the people in the story talking but you could
see them talk.
I had never seen a comic before. My mom talked sometimes about movies and TV and they must have been like this, I thought, talking pictures. And there was a story. In fact, there were lots of stories. Asterix was this little guy no bigger than me but he had a mustache and a helmet and he lived in this village and there was a wizard with a magic potion and Asterix fought in battles and traveled to all these faraway places and had all these adventures!!! And I could read it all by myself, because when I didn’t know what a word meant I could guess at it from the pictures.

I settled myself more comfortably on my stomach, propped myself up on my elbows so I wouldn’t crunch my starched ruff, and settled down to read.