I rattled the door handle as I sang the rhyme and tried the barrette at different angles, but nothing worked. Had I gotten the rhyme wrong again? I didn’t think so—I was using the same one that had opened the door before.
Maybe that was the problem. I wasn’t out this time; I was in. Maybe I needed to tell that to the door.
“In is in and shut is shut, turn the key and crack the nut. Pull the door and break the shell: let me out and all is well,” I sang hopefully. I took a deep breath and tried the handle.
Still nothing.
Forget secrecy. Now it was time to panic.
I banged on the door. It hurt my hands, but it barely made a noise. I banged again harder and hurt my toes kicking, but I couldn’t hear anything except the hum of the lights and that strange hum behind the hum.
My cell phone had no signal. I walked up and down the aisles looking for a phone to call for help, but I didn’t see one anywhere, just metal shelves and cabinets laden with sinister objects. No other doors, and no windows, either.
What if there were a fire? What if the ceiling collapsed? What if I were stuck here forever?
I sat down and leaned against the door, telling myself to calm down. I took stock of my supplies. I had a granola bar and half a bottle of water in my jacket pocket; at least I wouldn’t die of starvation and thirst even if I had to stay overnight. Someone was bound to come, I told myself. The worst I could expect would be a boring few hours, followed by getting caught and losing my job.
What if I needed to go to the bathroom, though?
As soon as I thought of it, my bladder started making itself noticed.
Well, there might not be a ladies’ room in the Grimm Collection, but there was sure to be something I could use, like a witch’s cauldron. I checked the card catalog for cauldrons and found three of them, call numbers I *GC 133.44 H36, I *GC 133.44 M33, and I *GC 133.44 T47. They were shelved with bowls, cauldrons, and brooms in a row of cabinets facing the picture rack.
I was reaching for the smallest one—not to use it right away, just to make sure I could, if worse came to worst—when I remembered Anjali’s warning. If the thought of me touching the stuff on the shelves was enough to make her frantic with worry, what would she say to my using one of the items as a Porta Potti?
On the other hand, maybe that wouldn’t be so inappropriate after all, I thought bitterly. The urine of a terrified maiden sounded like exactly the sort of ingredient witches liked to put in their cauldrons.
A thud came from the front of the room, making me jump.
When the thumping sound came again, I recognized it: a pneum falling into a basket in the front of the room where the GC had its staging area.
Of course! I kicked myself for not thinking of it sooner. I could send Anjali a pneum asking her to let me out.
Anjali—help, I’m locked in, I wrote on a blank call slip. I didn’t put in any details in case the note fell into the wrong hands. I wrote Anjali Rao, Main Exam Room, tucked the slip into an empty carrier, pulled the tube door open, slid it in, and let go. The pneum vanished after a small struggle, like a mouse down the gullet of a snake.
Now that I had taken some action, I felt much calmer. I strolled around opening cabinets and looking in, careful not to touch anything. There were knives and combs, laces and walking sticks, lamps and bottles. All sorts of shells: eggshells, nutshells, seashells. A whole cabinet of balls, mostly golden, but some made of wood, or rubber, or red or black or blue stone. Dresses sewn from cloth of copper, silver, and gold; dresses spangled with sparkly stones; dresses made of fish scales or feathers or the skins of animals I couldn’t identify. Lots of objects in sets of three—either one copper, one silver, and one gold, or one brass, one silver, and one gold, or one silver, one gold, and one spangled with diamonds. Boxes. Tiny cages. A sinister-looking oven the size of the largest dumbwaiter, big enough to hold a medium-size child.
If only there were a dumbwaiter down here—maybe I could fit inside if I scrunched up small. But the nearest dumbwaiter was out past the locked door.
At last, a pneum thumped into the basket. I ran to get it and pulled out the slip. I can’t believe I forgot to teach you the exit rhyme! I’m SOOOO sorry! It’s just like the entry rhyme, only backwards.You have to sing the tune backwards too, she had written.
“Well is all and in me let: shell the break and door the push. Nut the crack and key the turn, shut is shut and out is out,” I sang. But it was no use. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get the tune right.
I sent Anjali another pneum: It’s not working. I suck at music.
OK. Send up the key. I’ll come down and get you as soon as I can, she wrote back.
I wrapped the barrette carefully, taped it inside a pneum, and slipped it in the pipe. The vacuum sucked it away with a whoosh like a sigh of relief.
Anxious and bored, I distracted myself again by strolling around. Something moving behind me caught the corner of my eye. I spun around and froze.
Whatever it was spun and froze too.
To my relief, I saw it was just me—my reflection in a large mirror hanging on the picture rack. Did I really look that haggard and grim?
I made a face at myself. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” I said.
My own lips moved in the mirror and I heard a voice just like mine answering:
“You have to ask, Eliza Rew?
Then listen up: it isn’t you.”
I think of myself as a pretty savvy person. I grew up in New York City; I’ve seen a thing or two. I’m not the sort of girl who confuses fairy tales with reality. But as soon as I heard the mirror speak, I knew I wasn’t imagining things—it really was magic. I knew it the way you know which way is up, the way you recognize your mother’s voice, the way you know to pull your hand away from a hot stove before your brain registers the pain. My heart began pounding with excitement—excitement, but not doubt.
As soon as I had accepted this, other things started dropping into place in my mind. I could almost hear them, a light, sparkling clatter like ice crystals falling in a frozen street. The moving freckles, the ensorcelled door—all magic. My heart beat hard with the thrill of it. The boots too. That must be why Marc had borrowed them, why it was so important that I get them put back. And the smell, that vivid, shifty smell: the smell of magic.
I stared around me. Everything—everything here must be magic! Boots, books, tables, telescopes—everything must have some special power! And the mirror itself . . . I turned back to it. My reflection was scary, a cold, cruel smirk. That couldn’t really be what I looked like—could it? I might not be the fairest of them all, but at least I was sure I didn’t look evil. Was it making me look like that on purpose?
“Don’t call me Eliza. My name is Elizabeth,” I snapped through my fear. I had always hated Eliza. That’s what my stepsisters called me to tease, usually in a fake English accent.
The mirror didn’t answer this time.
If the mirror really was the one from Snow White’s stepmother, no wonder it was so unpleasant—it had the excuse of belonging to somebody wicked. My skin prickled. But the Grimm stories weren’t all witches and poisoned apples. Some of them described good fairies and friendly magic, like Cinderella’s godmother. Were there any benevolent objects here?
Now the sense of magic all around me began to feel frightening, oppressive. No wonder Dr. Rust had called the objects here “powerful”!
I looked around again. On the sliding wall near the opinionated mirror hung several other mirrors and a dozen or so pictures, including one of a ship, one of a dragon, one of a hideous, leering old man, and one so dark and murky that I couldn’t make it out. None of the paintings looked particularly benign, and the dark one was positively threatening.
Anjali seemed to be taking her sweet time rescuing me. Was there anything here that could help me escape? A flying carpet, maybe? I couldn’t quite believe that I was thinking seriously about a flying carpet. But even if I found one, I was still trapped—not much use in flying a carpet indoors.
I thought about other magical devices from fairy tales. What a lucky chance I’d written that paper about the Brothers Grimm—or was it just chance? Who would have guessed all those childhood hours I spent daydreaming over fairy-tale books would pay off !
There was the cloak of invisibility from “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”—if the repository had it, perhaps I could hide by the door and slip out next time a librarian came in. Mom and I loved that story, with the trapdoor in the floor of the princesses’ bedroom that they snuck through every night to go dancing with twelve handsome princes. The girls danced until they wore holes in their slippers. I especially envied the youngest princess. She had an active social life, plenty of masculine attention, and big sisters who actually wanted to hang out with her—even if she did have to share her room with eleven of them.
Of course, there were other magical items that would be more efficient than an invisible cloak. There were tons of wish-granting objects in fairy tales. Usually they came loaded with three wishes; the trick was to formulate the wishes carefully. When I was little, I used to spend hours planning my wishes for just this day.
Which would be better: a cure for cancer? Universal happiness? Peace for all nations, forever? The people in the fairy tales always seemed to waste their wishes on ridiculous things like sausages or turning each other into donkeys and back into people again. Sometimes, though, the wishes would backfire. Someone would wish for a sack of gold and it would fall on their head and kill them.
So even if I could find a wishing ring, I wasn’t sure I would have the courage to use it. What if I wished to leave the Grimm Collection, only to be carried out in a body bag?
The whole thing was too freaky! I wanted to get away from this magic-soaked room and think about it calmly somewhere safe and normal, somewhere that smelled of daily life—like dust and dinner—not the shifting reek of enchantment. And in real life if I had been granted three wishes, I knew exactly what I would change—I would wish my mother alive, my father himself again, my best friend, Nicole, still here instead of in California.
I glanced behind me at the mirror. It was still smirking.
Where on earth was Anjali? I sent that pneum at ten to three.
Hey, that rhymed. I said it out loud:
“I sent that pneum at ten to three.
Where on earth is Anjali?”
My reflection raised an eyebrow and answered,
“Liz, are you addressing me?
She’s right where she’s supposed to be.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t addressing you, I was addressing the painting next to you,” I lied. “And don’t call me Liz either. I’m Elizabeth.”
The mirror didn’t respond, but I noticed some movement in the neighboring picture as the murky shapes inside the frame started to change form in a random, incomprehensible way. It was nothing like any video effects I’d ever seen on a movie or computer screen—more like the forms you see when you press your hands against your closed eyes or the images from a dream that fade as you try to remember it the next morning.
To my astonishment the shapes in the middle resolved themselves into a picture of Anjali, hard at work in the Main Examination Room. I felt almost dizzy watching her slide briskly on her stool, popping pneums into pipes. It looked very busy up there; no wonder she couldn’t get away.
“Wow! Can you show me anything I ask for? Like, I don’t know, my friend Nicole?” I said.
No response; still Anjali.
Rhyme, maybe? “Picture, picture, on the wall, please can you show me my friend Nicole?” I tried.
My reflection in the Snow White stepmother mirror rolled her eyes with bored scorn.
“Okay, sorry, that didn’t really rhyme, did it?” I said. I thought about it for a while.
“Picture, help me reach my goal
Of communing with Nicole.”
That worked. The picture did its dizzying thing again, dissolving Anjali into random geometric forms that shuffled themselves darkly, then brightened into a new scene: Nicole shopping with her new friends in California, trying on clothes and laughing silently—at least, I couldn’t hear them. I could imagine the squeals and peals, though. It was like watching some horrible reality show with the sound off. It made me feel more lonely and helpless than ever.
“Thanks, that’s quite enough of them!
Show me Anjali again,” I said.
Nothing happened. Bad rhyme, I guess.
“Please, just show me Anjali.
She’s the one I need to see.”
More swirling, then Anjali at the pneum station again. Then I heard a click and a creak: the door was finally opening. But it couldn’t be Anjali coming to free me if she was upstairs in the MER.
“Enough! Turn off,” I muttered to the painting. Fortunately, it accepted the almost rhyme and quieted to murk as I hid behind the picture wall.