The Keepers (6 page)

Horace wandered away from the podium, determined to wait. He wasn't about to risk leaving anyway, not with the thin man outside. He examined the bins he'd glimpsed yesterday. But the bins had been rearranged. Many of them were new.

Odd-Shaped

Ship-Shaped

Shape-Shaped

Implausible

Palpable

Often Lost

Never Found

Tourmindae

That last one was extra mysterious. Horace was just about to reach out for it when, once again, a strange voice—a man's voice this time—stopped him short: “One moment, if you will.”

Horace spun around, almost stumbling against some shelves. An old man stood beside the podium, gazing pleasantly at Horace—or at least, his gaze
seemed
pleasant. It was hard to tell. He wore thick glasses with perfectly round lenses, which made his gray eyes appear unnaturally large—especially on the left side, where his eye was magnified to the size of a golf ball. He wore a long red vest covered in pockets—dozens of them, scores of them, all shapes and sizes. The vest, in fact, seemed made entirely of pockets. The man's hair was wild and white, his skin wrinkled and pale.

“One moment, young man.” The man had an accent—German, maybe? He pushed his thick glasses into place as he bent over the guest book. “Ah yes, very interesting. Oh, I see. Yes, yes.” At last he turned back to Horace and smiled. “Mrs. Hapsteade was right, of course. She is a formidable woman. Terribly efficient. Does wonders with the inventory. Now come, let me have a look at you.” He waved Horace over, and Horace obliged, reluctantly. He looked Horace up and down,
as though he was shopping for a car, trying to decide whether or not Horace might be a good bargain. Then he stuck out a knobby, gnarled hand. “Allow me to introduce myself—I am Mr. Meister.”

Hesitantly, Horace held out his hand. The old man grasped it and gave it a single firm pump. His skin was cold and dry. Horace noticed he wore a multicolored metal ring on his middle finger, a thick band with a neat twist at the top. It was a Möbius strip, Horace realized—a strip with a half twist that meant you could trace a line all the way around the thing, inside and out, and come back to where you started.

“And you are Horace Andrews,” Mr. Meister said, and then concern creased his face. “You have had an encounter this morning, I believe.”

An encounter. Was that the word? Really, there had been more than one encounter, if you included the girl in the green hoodie. “You could say that,” Horace managed. He wondered suddenly how valuable the leestone had been, and if the old man knew he'd destroyed it. And should he tell him about the girl?

“I will want to hear more about it shortly. In the meantime, you say you seek answers. Many answers, it seems. Sometimes we are so full of questions, we cannot choose, yes?”

Horace could only nod.

“Just so. If I may suggest, let us return instead to the question you posed yesterday: ‘Where am I?' An excellent
question, very sensible. One must always try to stay oriented.” He swept one arm theatrically across the room. “This is a warehouse, one of many. But also it is a market, of sorts. It is a museum. A refuge. A subterfuge. For some—like you, I confess—it is a trial.”

“A trial? Like a test?”

“Yes.”

“Am I passing?”

Mr. Meister laughed in a friendly way. “You passed one test when you first came through the blue door. As for the rest, it is not a matter of passing or failing. Rather, it is a matter of determining facilities, affinities, aptitudes.”

Horace felt himself relaxing, his curiosity taking over, even if he didn't really understand what Mr. Meister was saying, exactly. “Yesterday Mrs. Hapsteade said I was in the right place.”

“That much is marvelously clear.”

“She also said she was the keeper of something. The Vora, I think? Do you know what that means?”

Mr. Meister's bushy eyebrows rose. “I do,” he said, and then he turned abruptly and strode deeper into the room. Horace hurried to follow. “Horace, I believe the circumstances demand that we act first and speak second. Therefore, the warehouse is now yours to explore. Perhaps you will encounter what you came here to find. After all—above all—that is the purpose of this place.”

“What I came here to find,” Horace murmured, still
recalling his conversation with Mrs. Hapsteade. “It's the thing the thin man wants, isn't it?”

Again the eyebrows went up. “Dr. Jericho wants a great many things, none of which we intend to let him have.”

“That's his name? Dr. Jericho?”

“It's what he calls himself, yes.”

“He's a doctor?”

“Not in the way you might suppose. But you must put him out of your mind for now.”

“I'm not sure I can.”

“Try. Lose yourself in the warehouse. Search, and perhaps you will find.”

“Is this a part of the test?”

“It is a part of the journey—the most important turn you will ever take. But do not fear. You cannot fail this test, Horace.” He stopped short, looking at Horace gravely. “Do not touch what you do not want.” He put one hand against the wall, took an alarming step forward, and vanished. Horace stared. There was a dark panel set in the stone—it must have been a secret door of some kind. Horace pushed and called out, but only silence came back.

He stood there for a moment, gathering himself. The old man had come and gone like a ghost.
“Perhaps you will encounter what you came here to find.”
Great. If only he had the slightest idea what that was.

Horace began to look around, browsing uncertainly through the bins, careful to touch nothing. Most were full of objects
that were either utterly foreign or utterly unremarkable. A bin labeled
FLAT
was full of nothing but blank sheets of paper. Another, labeled
SUBTLE
, contained just a single object—a delicate arm-length sliver of metal, so thin Horace couldn't see it from the side. A bin marked
UTENSILS
was full of all kinds of oddities: a corkscrew two feet long and as thin as a finger, a double-headed hammer, a pair of scissors whose blades were sharp on the outside instead of the inside, and something that looked vaguely like an ice-cream scoop—if you wanted scoops of ice cream as big as your head.

Horace worked his way deep into the room.
FOR THE FEARFUL
held a thick stack of blankets and two ceramic vials twisted together like snakes, one black and one gold.
EDIBLES
was full of canned corn—at least fifty cans, all identical—while
INEDIBLES
contained half a dozen rusty gears, a nasty-looking spiked chain, and a golf club. The labels of many boxes were mystifying:
PASSKEYS
,
ASSORTED TAN
'
KINDI
,
ONGRELLONDAE
. So much meant so little to him, and as he searched he became increasingly sure—and increasingly worried—that the sheer volume of stuff would make it impossible for him to find whatever it was he was supposed to find.

Horace began to move more quickly, working his way toward the far end of the room. For the first time he caught sight of the rear wall, and was astonished—a door stood there that would have been at home in a castle, or a fortress. Ten feet high, wooden timbers reinforced with metal bands, sealed by a crossbar as thick as a leg. “A refuge,” Horace muttered,
remembering Mr. Meister's words. He wondered how long the old man was going to stay gone.

He continued down the line, now just reading the labels.

Useless

Misplaced

Displaced

Oblong

Unsavory

Tangible

Horace was just starting to think that the labels were becoming less and less sensible when his eyes fell on the label of the next bin down.

Of Scientific Interest

Horace stopped, his interest immediately roused. He leaned over the bin. A small sound nagged at his ears as he did so, a faint, low grind like the sound of a tiny motor winding down. He quickly discovered the source: a small, wobbling ball of clockwork. The size of a plum, the entire object was a seething golden mass of turning gears and whirring springs and tiny obscure mechanisms. Nearly every bit of its surface was in motion, so that it rocked slightly in place.

The
OF SCIENTIFIC INTEREST
bin turned out to be full of many such wonders. There was a human face—an exquisite
mask, thin as paper. Horace understood intuitively that the face belonged to someone, that the face was real, that the woman depicted had been someone's child, sister, mother. There was also a transparent rod, two inches thick and a foot long. Inside the rod was a fish, black as charcoal and nearly as finless as an eel. It was alive. It was almost as long and as wide as the rod itself, and it shimmied slowly, steadily, as though caught in a gentle, unending current. It could not hope to turn around inside the rod; there was not enough room. It could only keep swimming in place, all but motionless. Horace choked back a rising knot of pity. He knew that the fish was unspeakably old.

Perhaps most astonishing of all was a grapefruit-sized globe of the earth, surrounded by a glowing haze within which the globe rotated slowly. Horace watched it for a long time and very nearly did pick it up. It was, he determined at last, real. Horace knew its oceans were filled with actual water; he could see currents, and light bouncing off its surface. Its poles were made of ice that gleamed and felt cool to a fingertip hovering overhead. Its green patches were living, growing plants—microscopic trees?—and the clouds that moved over its surface drifted and swirled. It was—strange to say it—the most unworldly object Horace had ever encountered.

And then Horace spotted a diminutive leather pouch with a buttoned-down flap. The pouch was oval, golden-red in color, a little smaller than Horace's open hand. The surface was inscribed with a twining figure eight—or was it an
infinity symbol? Horace tilted his head to one side and then the other, gazing at the pouch, and then, before he even knew what he was doing, he reached out and picked it up.

He opened the flap. He pulled out what was inside—a gleaming oval box. Immediately, the globe and the clockwork ball and the impossible fish—all those marvels—slid from his mind. In many respects, the box was the most ordinary item here: quite small, made of a shimmering striped wood, shades of brown and gold and red. A line of silver snaked across the lid, and on one curving side was a delicate gleaming starburst design. Of all the objects he'd seen so far, only this box could have looked at home on the shelves of an ordinary store. Yet it was the most marvelous thing Horace had ever seen. Next to it, all the other wonders paled like cheap parlor tricks in the presence of real magic.

Horace wrapped his fingers around the box. The world dropped away, and he swooned a little, overwhelmed by the sensation that a question he hadn't asked yet had just been answered.

“This is it,” he said, though he had no idea what that meant.

T
HE BOX
'
S STRIPES SHIFTED LIKE A TIGER
'
S
-
EYE STONE
. Horace knew the name for this phenomenon—
chatoyance
. He'd done a report on it for Mr. Ludwig in the fall. Although it usually happened in gemstones, it could also be made to happen in certain kinds of wood. But he'd never seen that until now. On the side of the box, a slightly raised black ball was surrounded by a cluster of serpentine rays, twelve long and twelve short, forming a delicate silver star. It, too, glinted in the dim light.

Horace couldn't get the box open at first, until he realized the gentle S shape that ran across the lid was a seam. He pressed his thumb down gently on the center of the silver seam. He heard and felt a tiny
click
. A twist of the thumb, and the lid opened—one half swinging forward while the
other swung back, spreading wide like wings. Inside, more of the curious wood, but the bottom was made of a beautiful blue substance, transparent and laced with soft ripples that almost seemed to move.

Horace held up the open box and looked straight through it. Through the blue bottom of the box, the room came truly alive, almost as if it were a living, breathing thing. He stared, exhilarated—
the bristling texture of the rafters, timeworn grooves between the floor stones, floating specks of dust winking in and out of sight
. He turned and panned down the room—
cobwebs shining in the dark corners, straight-edged bins and boxes and crates, labels smudged out of recognition or turned sharp as knives
. Horace noticed that certain patches shifted from clear to hazy and back again. Bright spots looked dimmer, but dark places looked brighter. The whole effect was marvelous, full of clarity and mystery at the same time; full of confusion and depth. It made him feel powerful, somehow, or wise—as though he was seeing the world in a way that no one else could.