The Wikkeling (12 page)

“It was so strange-looking,” Gary mused, still thinking about the creature. “Not like a real person at all. And its fingers, tapping everyone!” Gary held his hands out, letting his fingers droop forward limply, and then wiggled his pointer fingers. “Hey, what are you doing?” he said.

Henrietta had placed the chair on top of her desk. “You have to promise not to tell anyone about this,” she said.

“I promise,” said Gary.

Without further pause, Henrietta climbed onto her desk, and then onto the chair. She put her hand against the ceiling and pushed.

The trapdoor opened.

Gary gasped.

“Shh!” said Henrietta, glaring down at him. “Follow me, but be quiet.”

“Follow you?” he said. “But I
can't
.” The pitch of his voice rose as he spoke, like air squeaking from a balloon.

Henrietta was a little surprised. On the bus the other day, Gary had seemed fearless. But she'd also noticed he was the only student to be released from every exercise during Physical Safety. “Why not?” she said.

“I . . . could fall.”

“We'll be careful,” said Henrietta. “This kind of thing is the reason people invented carefulness in the first place.” Without allowing him another moment to protest, she grabbed the edge of the trapdoor and pulled herself into the attic.

Gary followed, reluctantly. He wrestled his squat body onto the chair, and then dragged himself up with great effort. As he emerged into the shadowy space, Henrietta whispered, “Welcome to the attic!”

Gary sat up and looked around in amazement, his eyes lighting on the bookcases, the coffee table, the windows, and finally on the wild housecat. He emitted a mousey squeak when he saw it, and held up his hands. The cat stood from its seat on the couch.

“This is a wild housecat,” said Henrietta. “It isn't particularly dangerous.” She paused. “Gary. Open your eyes.” Gary opened them a tiny bit. To the housecat, Henrietta said, “This is my friend Gary. He's not particularly dangerous, either.” The cat watched Gary with its huge green eyes.

Gary stepped forward from the trapdoor. “
Wild
housecat?” he said.

“I found it up here,” said Henrietta. “It's hurt, but it's getting better.”

“What happened to it?”

“It got stabbed,” said Henrietta, “but I don't know how.”

Gary continued looking around, his eyes probing back toward the obscure, shadowy interior behind the bookcases. “This place is huge,” he said.

“And you know what's really weird?” said Henrietta. “No one knows we're up here.”

Gary froze. His black eyebrows bunched together. He opened his mouth and stuck his tongue out, and squinted, and balled his hands up into fists. “Auuughoo . . .” he moaned. The next thing Henrietta knew, he had launched himself to the trapdoor and scrambled down to the chair. In his rush, however, he misstepped, lunged sideways, and fell onto the desk and then to the floor with a powerful thud.

Henrietta hurried after to find him sitting next to her bed, staring intently into her BedCam. Henrietta listened carefully to see if her mother or Ms. Span had heard the commotion. Miraculously, they hadn't.

“I got scared,” said Gary, his eyes glued to the BedCam.

“You sure did,” said Henrietta. “That's broken by the way.” She pointed to the BedCam. “It can't see you.”

Gary turned to her. “Really,
really
scary up there.”

“Scaredy Gary,” said Henrietta.

Gary frowned. “What?”

“It's what the kids were saying on the bus.”

“Well, it isn't true,” Gary snapped.

“Then let's go back up,” said Henrietta.

Gary set his features determinedly. “Right. Yes. Okay. No problem.”

Again, he followed Henrietta through the inky opening, being careful not to stumble off the chair. Henrietta closed the door after them and watched Gary as he turned around in the space, taking everything in.

“Nobody knows,” he said to himself. He clenched his fists. Henrietta thought he was going to panic a second time, but he seemed to fight it off. He relaxed. “I'm all right,” he said. He strode purposefully over to the windows and looked out through them.

“Remember when we were outside, when I pointed?” said Henrietta. “You can't see the windows outside—they're covered.”

“Wow!” said Gary, pointing through them.

“Shh!” Henrietta was still worried the adults would overhear.

“
Look!
” Gary whispered intently. Henrietta joined him and gazed out, down at the neighborhood outside.

The neighborhood she saw wasn't hers.

H
enrietta and Gary's new friend Rose was very smart, but most people—even her parents, who loved her—thought she was a bit dull. She'd often stare vacantly out into space, and she seemed unresponsive at times or said things that didn't make sense. But there was a reason for this. Rose could see something that other people couldn't see—a creature called the Wikkeling.

She had first encountered it when she was very young, before she'd started school. She'd been out for a walk with her father along an old alleyway behind a hospital, to her father's favorite dumpster. The dumpster was made of clean, white plastic, and it was full of unused hospital supplies such as medical tape, unopened boxes of bandages, and even surgical tools—items her father used for repairing books, which was his hobby.

He had opened the top of the dumpster and disappeared inside while Rose kept a lookout (because people don't generally like it when you steal their trash). Once she was alone, however, she felt a strange sensation, like someone was standing next to her. She turned.

Its fine, thin hair was yellow, and its face smooth and young, with a strange small nose and chin. It wore yellow pants and a yellow button-up shirt, and its body flickered like a fluorescent light.

“Who are you?” Rose said, startled.

“
I
'
M WIKKELING
,” it said. Its lips didn't form the words when it spoke—it opened its round mouth and the sound spilled out, scratchy like an old recording.

It raised one hand revealing five extremely long, waxy fingers, and before Rose could react, it tapped her on the forehead with one of them, and flicked out of sight, disappearing in an instant. Rose immediately felt nauseous. Her head throbbed. She began to cry, and her father heard her and climbed immediately out of the dumpster. As he reached her, she lost consciousness.

She awakened later in her bedroom, her parents kneeling next to her, concern clouding their features. She tried to explain what had happened, but it didn't make much sense, even to her.

After that, Rose saw the Wikkeling often. If she was in the park, it stood near the swing set. If she was in class, it walked past the coatrack. It spent most of its time tapping people on the forehead, just like it had tapped her. But other people didn't seem to mind. They didn't get headaches.

Rose was extremely frightened of the Wikkeling, and quickly learned that for some reason it rarely went into her house, so she spent as much time as she could inside, deep in the interior of the old place, which was filled with old books.

Rose lived far out on the sparkling plain of the Addition, where the homes were constructed entirely of plastic and featured amenities such as disposable bathtubs,
antibiotic tabletops, digital windows, and underground parking. But the house Rose lived in with her parents was quite unlike these. Rose's house was very, very old. It was unique in the Addition—an ancient island in a sea of newness.

Rose's parents referred to their house as the Library. The walls all through the place were lined with shelves packed tight with books of all sizes and topics. The house was enormous. The main level and all of the three upper floors were full of reading material. Some of the rooms had hand-painted signs over the doorways describing different genres, such as C
OOKERY
or C
OMPUTERS
. The house had been this way since Rose could remember, and she and her parents were rarely alone there.

Visitors often happened by to borrow or return books, and Rose knew them all by name. Her parents called them the Subscribers. They didn't look like the other people in this story, with new clothes, tidy haircuts, and the latest personal accoutrements. The Subscribers showed up in thick layers of old clothes, often spotted with grease or fringed with dirt. Their shoes looked as though they'd been repaired many times. They carried backpacks, into which they stowed the books they borrowed, and from which they produced the books they returned.

The Subscribers never entered the house through the front door. They arrived from the back, via a narrow alleyway directly abutting the plastic, windowless wall of a skyscraper behind. They were admitted only after supplying a complex secret knock that involved both knocks and scratches, and after Rose or her parents looked through the peephole at them. Once they were recognized and admitted into the kitchen, they'd be offered a cookie.

“Don't let anyone in if you don't know them, or if they don't know the
knock,” Rose's mother told her once. The Subscribers had all signed a contract after being interviewed by Rose's parents. The Library Use Agreement ran as follows:

I promise, as a Subscriber to the Library, to:

Return what I borrow

Donate new materials when possible

Conserve the Collection

Be a good friend to Rose

Conserve the Collection
meant
Repair the Books
. Once per week the Subscribers gathered to do book maintenance. Rose's father, who had been trained once upon a time as a doctor, was the lead conservator, and as such many of the repaired books somewhat resembled repaired people. Rose's father would often do his work as if in an operating theater, with Rose assisting.

“Thread,” he would say, and Rose would hand him thread.

“Glue,” he would say, and Rose would hand him the glue.

Because of all of this, Rose knew how to fix books before she knew how to read them. She'd reattached bindings, installed new endpapers, and even affixed new covers to books that arrived stripped, sometimes making her own artwork after her parents told her what the book was about.

Rose's life in the Library was also a surprisingly athletic one. The Library was so large that living in it required a healthy amount of walking, especially going up and down stairs, because the four-level place had neither escalators nor
elevators. Two levels, the main level and the second level, had thirty-foot high ceilings with bookcases stretching from top to bottom. These walls had wheeled ladders built into them, which could be rolled from place to place.

Rose's parents encouraged her to use the ladders, and she quickly displayed a natural talent for climbing that was a bit mystifying given how slight she appeared. She could climb before she could walk, and became consequently good at falling without getting hurt.

“She'll swing from her ponytail when she grows up,” her mother once predicted as she watched Rose leap from ladder to ladder.