The Librarians and the Mother Goose Chase

  Still, I thought he’d gotten better about checking in with me.…

  “Well, keep me posted if you hear from him,” she instructed Jenkins, trying not to let her disappointment show. She and Flynn had become more than just Guardian and Librarian; they really had something special, or so she liked to think. And then he pulls another vanishing act like this.

  Jenkins nodded. “You may rely on it, Colonel.”

  He carefully lifted the idol from the table and headed off into the deeper reaches of the Library. His footsteps had fully receded into the distance when, without warning, the Clippings Book acted up. A large hardcover tome packed with old-fashioned press clippings, such as newspapers employed back in the predigital era, the Clippings Book was the Librarians’ early-alert system when it came to supernatural matters demanding their attention. It thumped atop its stand as an unseen force turned its pages.

  “Uh-oh,” Baird said. “No rest for the wicked.”

  “Who are you calling wicked?” Ezekiel quipped. He was seated at the far end of the conference table, with his sneakers up on the table. A ringtone came from his phone. “Hold on, I’m getting an alert, too.”

  Each of the new Librarians had been gifted with their own personal Clippings Book, smaller and more portable than the hefty, leather-bound volume kept at the Annex. Ezekiel, who had little patience with old-school, analog technology, had naturally converted his Clippings Book into an app for his phone.

  “Me, too,” Stone announced, sitting up straight. He fished a pocket-sized scrapbook from his back pocket. Bound pages flipped themselves.

  “Me, three!” Cassandra sprang to her feet. “Or four, I guess, counting the big book.”

  “That’s unusual,” Baird said, frowning. “Are we talking four different alerts, or just an all-points bulletin?”

  “Good question,” Stone said. “What have we got here?”

  Ezekiel peered at his phone. “Mine’s about some mutant rats—”

  “A miraculous escape from death,” Cassandra interrupted, talking over Ezekiel.

  “A giant pumpkin?” Stone said. “What the—?”

  “Whoa there! Not all at once.” Baird held up her hands to quiet the overlapping voices. “One at a time, please, starting with the office copy.”

  The original Clippings Book sat open atop the table. Approaching it, she saw that, as usual, a new clipping had appeared on a previously blank page. She read the headline aloud.

  “No Happy Endings. ‘Mother Goose’ Theme Park Scheduled for Demolition.”

  A quick scan of the press clipping revealed that a long-abandoned amusement park in New Jersey, Mother Goose’s Magic Garden, was soon to be bulldozed over. A black-and-white photo accompanying the article showed a dilapidated fun house in the shape of a giant shoe—as in “There was an Old Lady,” presumably. Baird raised an eyebrow at the word magic. She used to think that real magic only existed in fairy tales.

  Now she knew better.

  “Your turn,” she told Ezekiel.

  “Local Woman Assailed by Rodents,” he read from his phone, before summarizing the rest of the article. “A woman, who lives in some hick town in Ohio I’ve never heard of, had a run-in with some bad-tempered rats. Had to fight them off with a knife, actually. But here’s the freaky part: according to her, the rats didn’t have any eyes. Like they were deformed mutant rats from some pitch-black underground lair or something.”

  “Ugh.” Cassandra shuddered. “Not a big fan of rodents, eyeless or not.”

  “Can’t blame you there.” Baird made a mental note to read Ezekiel’s clipping herself at some point. She nodded at Cassandra. “What have you got, Red?”

  The rat-phobic Librarian, whose interests included math, science, and sorcery, glanced down at her own notebook.

  “Lucky Tree Trimmer Survives Unlucky Fall,” she recited. “Seems a tree trimmer in Miami was blown off an elevated cherry picker by a freak gust of wind, falling more than eighty feet, but, miraculously, he landed on a kid’s trampoline in a neighboring backyard and walked away unharmed.” She lifted her gaze from the clipping. “Wow, what are the odds.…”

  Her gaze turned inward, and Baird could practically see her starting to calculate exactly what those odds were. Cassandra’s brain was like a computer, but sometimes she could get lost inside it as she got carried away by the ideas and equations flooding her mind.

  “Earth to Cassandra.” Baird snapped her fingers in front of the other woman’s eyes. “Stay with us here, Cassie. We’re going to need your help figuring this out.”

  Cassandra blinked and her eyes came back into focus. “Sorry. Little distracted by the various probability factors at play in this scenario, including wind velocity, rate of downward acceleration, the surface tension and structural integrity of the trampoline, and so on. There’s a lot to look at here.”

  Baird knew Cassandra was speaking literally. When her brain kicked into full gear, Cassie could actually see mathematical equations and figures swirling before her eyes in the form of visual hallucinations. A grape-sized tumor in her brain gave Cassandra something called synesthesia, which caused her senses to get cross-wired in unique ways. Numbers were colors, math had a smell, science rang in her ears like music … or so Baird understood.

  “I get it,” Baird said, “but let’s stay focused on the big picture before you go too deep into the specifics.”

  Cassandra nodded. “Don’t worry. You have my full attention.”

  “I never doubted it,” Baird said. In fact, Cassandra had gained a lot more control over her condition since her early days as a Librarian, only a few years ago. It took a lot to make her go into meltdown mode these days. “Okay, Stone, you’re up. You said something about … a pumpkin?”

  “A big pumpkin, apparently.” He read from his notebook: “Modern-Day Cinderella? Area Woman Wakes Up in Pumpkin.” He scowled as he reviewed the article. “According to this, a college professor in England went to bed one night and awoke to find herself trapped inside a prize pumpkin at a nearby farmers’ market. She managed to kick and punch her way out, with some help from other shoppers who heard her yelling for help, but … how does something like that even happen?”

  “You can still ask that?” Baird said. “After everything we’ve seen on this job?”

  “You got me there,” Stone conceded. “But … rats, pumpkins, a trampoline? How does it all add up, and is it even supposed to? Are we talking one big case or four completely unrelated ones?”

  “My money’s on the former,” Baird said, “but I’m not seeing the pattern yet. What connects all these incidents?”

  “The pumpkin and rats point toward Cinderella,” Cassandra observed, “but I’m not sure where my lucky tree trimmer fits in.”

  Baird groaned. “I thought we were done with Cinderella after that business with the fairy tales a couple years ago.” Embarrassing memories of her morphing into a swooning princess type surfaced from her memory. “God, I hate reruns.”

  “I don’t know,” Cassandra said with a grin. “Being Prince Charming was kind of fun for a while.”

  “Easy for you to say. You weren’t stuck being a damsel in distress.”

  Stone walked over to inspect the primary Clippings Book. “Forget Cinderella,” he said. “I think that’s a red herring. I’m guessing that this clipping is the key to the puzzle since it was directed at all of us.” He pondered the newspaper article newly pasted into the book. “Mother Goose’s Magic Garden.” He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Mother Goose…”

  “Right!” Baird sensed they were on the right track; it was the same gut feeling she used to get when she was closing in on a terrorist base or black-market WMDs. “Mother Goose, not the Brothers Grimm. Nursery rhymes, not fairy tales.”

  “The eyeless rodents!” Stone exclaimed. “The Three Blind Mice.”

  “Good! Now we’re getting somewhere.” Baird seized on the electricity of the moment, urging her Librarians on. “And the woman in the pumpkin?” br />
  “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater,” Ezekiel chimed in. “Had a wife but couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell … yada, yada, yada.”

  “Nice!” Baird was impressed and a little surprised; Ezekiel was great at computers and heists, but was hardly the most literary of Librarians. “Good work, Jones.”

  “No problem.” He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “What kid didn’t learn those rhymes growing up?”

  Baird turned toward Cassandra. “What about your skydiving tree trimmer? Any ideas?”

  “Give me a minute.” Cassandra closed her eyes, the better to leaf through her photographic memory. Her hands traced odd patterns in the air, as though she was sorting through hallucinatory files only she could see, while using her amazing brain as her own personal search engine. “Heights, falling, gravity, trees, wind…” Her eyes snapped open. “I’ve got it! Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows—”

  Baird saw where she was going and rushed ahead to the end of the rhyme. “The cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all!”

  “Bingo!” Stone said. “That’s three out of three. This is definitely a Mother Goose thing!”

  “Mother Goose?” Jenkins reentered the office. His sober expression grew even more so. “Please tell me we don’t have a Mother Goose situation on our hands.”

  There was no trace of humor or irony in his voice. If anything, he sounded genuinely dismayed.

  That can’t be good, Baird thought. “Mother Goose situation?”

  “The details, please,” Jenkins said urgently, “with all deliberate speed.”

  Baird quickly briefed him on the clippings and their own ingenious deductions. “I take it we should be concerned?”

  “Alarmed would be the better word. Terrified works also.” Jenkins remained standing, but looked as though he needed to sit down. “From what you’re telling me, I can only conclude that the Mother Goose Treaty has indeed been broken.”

  His dire tone made it clear that this was no laughing matter.

  “The what again?” Baird asked. “Maybe you should start at the beginning, especially for those of us who haven’t thought much about Mother Goose since kindergarten.”

  “That is probably for the best.” Jenkins assumed a place at the head of the table; the role of lecturer came naturally to him. “Please pay close attention. I fear there is no time for you to repeat this class.”

  Cassandra sat back down at the table, settling in for Jenkins’s trademark exposition. Despite his ominous attitude, her eyes were agleam with excitement. “So Mother Goose is a real person, too? Like Santa Claus?”

  “Not quite,” Jenkins said. “Mother Goose is a not a person, but rather a title and a position: denoting a custodian of ancient wisdom, passed down from generation to generation as seemingly harmless nonsense rhymes. In the right hands, however, they are actually powerful charms and incantations with the ability to shape and alter reality as we know it.”

  Baird tried to wrap her head around that. “And we’ve just been casually teaching them to kids since forever?”

  “The rhymes were never meant to be written down,” Jenkins said, “let alone published. They were only to be transmitted as an oral tradition, but back in 1719, the son-in-law of that generation’s Mother Goose, one Elizabeth Goose of Boston, Massachusetts, foolishly printed a collection of the rhymes as a children’s book, inadvertently creating a spell book of frightening power.”

  “Only 1719?” Baird asked. “I would’ve thought that the Mother Goose rhymes were much older than that.”

  “Oh, many of the rhymes, in their original forms, date back to antiquity, but the first bound collection was in fact published as Songs for the Nursery, or Mother Goose’s Melodies a mere three centuries ago. And even today, tourists in Boston flock to what’s claimed to be the grave of the ‘real’ Mother Goose, blithely unaware that she was actually only one in a long line of Mother Gooses, carrying on an ancient tradition.”

  “Just like us Librarians,” Ezekiel said, “but with a much goofier name.”

  “Not an entirely inapt comparison, Mr. Jones, although I venture to think that the Library has a much broader purview, as well as a somewhat loftier mission.”

  “Whatever you say, mate.” Ezekiel didn’t exactly do lofty. “So what came first, the Library or the Goose?”

  “That is a matter of some dispute … and hardly germane to our present situation. The events leading up to the Mother Goose Treaty truly began in 1719 with the publication of that first unsanctioned volume, which put all the power of the rhymes into print for the first time in recorded history.”

  “Hold on,” Stone interrupted. “This is coming back to me now, from some research I did a few years ago on the subject of early-eighteenth-century book illustration. If I remember right, no known copies of that first Mother Goose collection are known to exist, and there’s even some scholarly debate as to whether the book ever truly existed at all.”

  “Quite right, Mr. Stone.” Jenkins sounded like a professor doling out a modicum of praise to one of his less ignorant students. “Indeed, the original 1719 printing of Mother Goose’s Melodies has been described as the most elusive ‘ghost volume’ in American letters. Many have sought it, but it exists today only as a puzzling bibliographical mystery … or so it is commonly believed.”

  “But it did exist?” Cassandra asked. “For real?”

  “It did, but the Librarian of that era managed to round up and dispose of every copy of the book, except for a single copy, which remained in the possession of Elizabeth Goose and her family, as a professional courtesy as it were. And so the crisis was contained … for a time.”

  “Let me guess,” Baird said. “One copy of the book was still one too many?”

  “More like it wasn’t enough for all of Elizabeth’s descendants. Elizabeth Goose ultimately had six children, ten stepchildren, and innumerable grandchildren, and, over time, a dynastic struggle broke out between three rival branches of the family, with each claiming the title of ‘Mother Goose’ and the spell book as their inheritance. Matters turned ugly. Family turned against family, spells were invoked, livestock went missing, bathtubs were washed out to sea.…”

  Come again? Baird thought.

  “Thankfully, for the sake of humanity, all-out magical warfare was averted by the Mother Goose Treaty of 1918, which was negotiated by yet another Librarian. Said treaty called for the book to be split into three parts between the factions, with each branch of the family charged with guarding their portion and keeping it safe.”

  “Why three?” Cassandra asked.

  “It’s always three,” Jenkins said archly, as though that went without saying. “Except when it’s seven.”

  Baird took his word for it. She was getting used to Library logic.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why didn’t that Librarian just take possession of the book and bring it back to the Library for safekeeping? Isn’t that standard operating procedure?”

  “Ideally, yes,” Jenkins admitted, “but it was a tricky, highly volatile situation and this was judged an acceptable compromise at the time, and all the more so given that the Librarian of 1918 already had her hands full dealing with Rasputin.”

  “Wait a second,” Stone said. “Didn’t Rasputin die in 1916?”

  Jenkins snorted. “That’s what history wants you to believe.…”

  Baird decided to let that one pass for now, but she understood how an overworked Librarian might need to concentrate on an ongoing threat or adversary. A Dulaque, say, or a Prospero.

  “You mentioned the Mother Goose Treaty once before,” Cassandra recalled. “You said something about Beatrix Potter not getting it right?”

  “Forget Beatrix Potter,” Jenkins said. “You might as well consult the Disney cartoon for the truth about The Little Mermaid. We’re not dealing with cute little cottontail rabbits here. We’re talking about spells and incantations of potentially game-changing scope
and potency. If someone is truly violating the Treaty, after all these years, these seemingly trivial incidents could be merely the harbingers of a much greater catastrophe.”

  “Really?” Ezekiel asked skeptically. “It’s Mother Goose. How bad could it be?”

  “Need I remind you just how violent and perverse many of those ‘childish’ nursery rhymes are? They’re positively rife with falls, accidents, drownings, amputations, decapitations, hangings, beatings, fires, theft, murder, grave robbing, and every sort of calamity imaginable, short of a meteor hitting the Earth. There’s more cracked skulls and severed limbs in Mother Goose than you’ll find in an entire season of cable television.” Jenkins paused to let his words sink in. “Granted, as with fairy tales, many of the darker verses have been sanitized over the years, but the potential for harm still remains buried within the rhymes, just waiting to be unleashed. Don’t take this matter lightly,” he warned, “unless you want your tails cut off with a carving knife.”

  Ouch, Baird thought. “Point taken.”

  4

  The family tree grew before Cassandra’s eyes, shimmering in the air above her desk. Luminous branches, diverging in all directions, rose up and outward from the tree’s roots in colonial New England, tracing the ancestral lines of Elizabeth Goose and her myriad offspring. Cassandra could hear the branches rustling and swaying over the course of three centuries; it was like music in her ears that only she was privy to. The smell of plums and pumpkins and freshly baked pies made her mouth water, even though no such foodstuffs were actually in the vicinity. Phantom feathers tickled her skin, giving her, well, goose bumps.

  “Any progress?” Baird asked, looking over Cassandra’s shoulder. Her voice intruded on Cassandra’s attempt to track down Elizabeth Goose’s far-flung descendants. “Job one is locating those three scattered pieces of Mother Goose’s Melodies to see which one might have fallen into the wrong hands.”

  “I know, I know,” Cassandra said a bit sharply. “Just let me concentrate. I’ve got three hundred years of genealogy to map, and don’t get me started on the stepkids and their kids and their kids’ kids’ kids.…”