The Grimm Legacy (21 page)

For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then I felt the itching Marc had described. All at once the world looked as if I’d shaken free of it and was falling down, down, down through exploding space.

The world was so big that I couldn’t get my bearings. What were all those looming shapes? Which way was the door? Where was Marc? Was that perilously swaying skyscraper Aaron? How would I negotiate all this with no sense of direction?

The green light snapped off and the insane sensation subsided.

“Elizabeth? Are you okay?”

Aaron’s voice sounded strange. I could pick out the individual vibrations. It took me a moment to put them together into words.

“Fine, I guess . . . I’m fine.”

“You sure? You look a little . . .” A huge hand came swooping toward me from overhead.

I ducked frantically. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Sorry. You’re just so tiny and delicate . . . I wanted to make sure . . . Here, do you fit in this, or should I make you smaller?”

A pneum barreled through the air and stopped beside me. Aaron’s hand held it steady as I slid the door open. It looked crudely made and worn. The plastic was scored with deep scratches, and the felt was battered. Could it possibly protect me as it went banging through the pipes?

Wedging myself in, I pulled the door shut around me, then slid it open again without trouble and eased my head and shoulders out.

“Aaron? I’m going to close this thing. Can you lay it down with the door facedown, just to make sure I can get out?”

“Sure.”

His vast hand! Ugh, with a hangnail on his index finger. He tipped me over with a dizzying lurch, like a Ferris wheel before it really gets started. It wasn’t easy getting the door open—I had to throw my weight back and forth to rock the pneum onto its back—but I managed it and climbed out.

“Time for the pipes?” Aaron said.

I nodded.

“Okay, get in your pneums. I’ll have to take you up to the MER. There’s no direct pipe to the Grimm Collection from here.” He brought his face close to us. “Buckle up,” he said.

We traveled to the MER in Aaron’s pocket, swaying and bumping with each step. “I think I’m going to be sick,” said Marc.

“Please don’t,” I said.

Sarah was on pipe duty in the Main Exam Room.

“Mind if I just get in there for a sec, Sarah? I need to send something downstairs,” said Aaron.

“Sure,” she said. “Actually, while you’re here, could you watch the pipes for me while I run to the ladies’?”

“Of course,” said Aaron. We heard Sarah walk away.

“Send me first, and give me five minutes to get out of the way before you send Elizabeth,” said Marc.

I heard the hiss as Aaron opened the pipe and sent the two pneums of supplies down. Another hiss and a thump as he sent Marc down. Then a long pause—five minutes is forever when you’re in a plastic tube in somebody’s pocket, waiting to go crashing through space.

At last, Aaron’s hand appeared again and pulled me out of his pocket.

The blood rushed to my head. “I’m upside down!” I yelled.

Aaron lifted me to eye level again, holding me so I was lying on my back, and whispered, “I know. You have to start out upside down or you’ll land on your head. The pipes go up before they go down.”

“Oh, great,” I moaned.

“Sorry,” said Aaron. “It’s not my fault, it’s geometry.” He turned me upside down again and pulled the pipe door open. “Well, bye, Elizabeth. Travel safely,” he said, and let go.

Chapter 21:

The Golden Key

Fans of roller coasters and water slides would love traveling by pneumatic tubes. You shoot through the pitch dark, bumping and spinning until you have no idea which way is up—especially if you’ve left your sense of direction in a
kuduo.
But the worst is when the air pressure suddenly drops away, and so do you, falling with a bone-wrenching thump into a wire basket.

I’m not a fan of roller coasters.

I lay there stunned, facedown, my cheek pressed against the plastic, trying to get used to the light and the silence before I faced the job of rocking the door free. I had just about caught my breath when my pneum lurched.

It was Marc. He slid my door open. “Wasn’t that awesome? Better than snowboarding!” He held out his hand and pulled me out.

“Thanks,” I said, leaning against the edge of the wire basket.

There was something funny about Marc—he looked different. He frowned at me appraisingly. “You’re so tall,” he said.

I laughed. “Yeah, six whole inches,” I said, but I knew what he meant. Aaron had made us both the right size to fit snugly in the pneums, which meant we were exactly the same height. It was weird being the same height as a basketball star. It made me feel impossibly tall.

The pipes rattled ominously overhead. “We better move before we get hit on the head with a pneum,” said Marc.

We climbed out of the basket. Marc gave me a leg up. We might be the same size, but he was still way stronger. We emptied the pneums and stuffed our backpacks with the string, paper clips, and other supplies. Marc tied one end of a length of twine to the basket, tossed the other end off the shelf, and climbed down.

“Come on, Elizabeth,” he called up from the floor.

“Ack. It’s a long way down!” Rope climbing was never my favorite part of gym.

“Loop the rope around one leg and take your weight with your feet,” said Marc. “Good—no, your feet! Not your hands, your feet!”

I scraped my palms pretty badly—it’s amazing how rough a piece of ordinary string can feel when you’re only six inches tall—but I reached the floor without falling. “Where now?” I said.

“Call number I *GC 683.32 G65—this way.”

Dust flew up and resettled at our feet; it was like walking through feathers and packing peanuts. Was the floor always this dusty?

Marc grabbed my elbow as I made yet another wrong turn. “Over here,” he said. He stopped in front of a gray metal locker the height of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

“Great,” I said. “How are we going to get the door open?”

“Lasso the handle,” said Marc, tying a loop in the string.

He was pretty good at throwing the lasso, but it kept slipping off the handle. “Enough,” I said eventually. “It’s not working.”

“Got any better ideas?” he said. “It’s not like I can fly.”

“Hey,” I said, “what about using some of the objects in here? Like the flying carpet?”

“Huh.” He stuffed the lasso into his backpack. “Not the carpet—we could never get it unrolled, and anyway, it’s on a high shelf—but the Hermes shoes are on a low shelf.”

“The Hermes shoes?”

“You know, the winged sandals. Come on.”

Another long, dizzying walk between the vast cabinets. “Here,” said Marc, tugging me by the elbow. He stopped beside an open tower of shoes. The lowest shelf came to our armpits. I found myself nose to nose with a scuffed ballet slipper the size of a small rowboat, with dozens of others moored beside it. I *GC 391.413 T94 c. 1—c. 12 read the labels. The twelve dancing princesses’ twenty-four dancing shoes.

Marc swung himself easily onto the shelf, shouldering slippers aside. “Come on,” he said.

Maybe I could have pulled myself up when I was still doing ballet, but my arms weren’t strong enough anymore. “What if I wait here?”

“Fine.” Marc piled up some slippers and climbed up two shelves. I heard him moving back and forth up there.

“Found ’em!” He stuck his head over the edge a little farther along. “I’m coming down. Get under cover so I don’t hit you with a shoe,” he called to me.

I crouched beneath the shelving unit, flinching away from the dust bunnies. Bunnies, ha—dust ogres was more like it. A tangle of hairs like monstrous, scaly wires. Clumps of green and yellow fibers, lots of pale, flaky stuff, and ugh, was that a fly wing?

I turned my back on the mess and looked out from under the shelf. Overhead I saw the sole of one sandal, wings beating at its heel. Its mate was suspended by its straps, flapping in a panic.

“Easy there,” said Marc softly, leaning out of the steady sandal to put his hand on the panicked one. “Hey, boy—nice and easy. Steady now.”

The sandal continued to thrash in the air.

“Elizabeth! Can you grab the straps?”

The frightened sandal dove and bucked. Marc threw me one of its leather straps, and I caught the end. That seemed to panic the sandal even more; it flapped away, dragging me along the floor. I hung on, pulling it down with all my weight as Marc landed his own sandal beside me.

“We’d better switch,” he said. “Yours is freaking out. It’s the left one—the pair must be right-handed.”

“Right-handed?”

“Okay, right-footed.” He stepped out of the right sandal, where he’d been sitting like a kayaker with his legs stretched out in front of him along the sole and his back against the heel, where the wings attached. He held the straps in one hand like reins.

“Stay,” he told the right sandal sternly, handing me its straps and taking mine. He turned to face the shoe I’d been struggling with. “Now, you! Lefty! Are you going to behave for me?” He pulled hard on both straps, and the left sandal subsided beside him, its wings twitching. “That’s better. Good boy.” He stepped in and sat down, holding the straps with both hands. The sandal gave a little flutter but obeyed. He patted its side.

“Well? Get in and buckle up,” Marc told me. I jumped to obey. The man was a born leader.

Unfortunately, his shoe wasn’t. It wanted to follow mine, its dominant mate. That would have been fine if I’d still had my sense of direction. As I lifted off, I heard Marc yelling behind me, “Elizabeth! Stop! The other way!”

I tugged at the reins to turn my sandal around. I could tell it was doing its best to obey, but I didn’t know how to guide it. Should I pull the left strap to go left and the right to go right, like a charioteer? Should I pull left to go right and right to go left, like a sailboat helmsman? Which way
was
left, anyway?

“The other way! The other way! No, the
other
other way!” I turned and collided with him.

“This is like having two left feet,” he muttered.

I lurched from side to side. Marc fluttered after me. We had rounded a corner into a lane of cabinets that looked just like every other lane of cabinets when Marc shouted, “Stop!” and reached over to catch my reins. “This is it,” he said. He reached out with his other hand and turned the handle.

The sandals went wild with excitement, bucking and dragging the door open. It was all I could do not to fall to my death. Marc soothed the shoes and we flew to the fifth shelf.

“I’d better stay with the sandals and keep them calm. Can you find the key yourself?” asked Marc.

“I’ll try.” Stepping off my hovering shoe a zillion inches up from the hard floor was child’s play after the trip in the pneum—or at least, that’s what I told myself.

I lost myself quickly in the forest of locks and keys. The smell of magic came off them in waves and puffs. Some were old and rusty, some elaborately carved and jeweled. Some were tiny, no bigger than my finger; others towered over my head. Many shone like gold. Which was the Golden Key?

I checked the labels and followed the numbers in what looked like the right direction only to find I had gone past the key’s call number and was wandering through an entirely different sequence of numbers.

“Find it yet?” called Marc.

“Still looking.”

This was taking forever. There had to be a better way. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The magic smelled stronger to my left, so I went that way. I sniffed my way past an ivory box the size of a coffin and a brass padlock the size of my skull.

A wave of shellfish—oysters?—was coming off a mother-of-pearl casket, masking the smell I was following. I circled it, sniffing. Another heavy reek interfered, like a butcher’s shop. I put up my hand to push through a curtain of keys and felt something warm and wet. Blood.

I hastily wiped my hand on my jeans and checked the tag on the bloody key. It was Bluebeard’s—it must be the key to the chamber where his murdered wives lay hidden! I shuddered away, trying to ignore the reek of blood, and sniffed for the subtler fragrance I’d been following. Forward . . . around again . . . there!

I had reached the back wall of the cabinet. All I could see was a blank wall, but the smell was strongest here. I shut my eyes and reached out. My hands closed on something smooth and cold. I opened my eyes and found I was holding a plain gold key the length of my forearm.

It was very heavy, but somehow I didn’t mind. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It was like when you dream of walking along a street you thought you’d never find again or like waking up on the first day of spring.

I checked the label. The numbers were right.

“I found it!”

“Great. Let’s get going.”

“Keep talking, okay? I have to follow your voice.” I made my way over to Marc where he hovered on his sandal.

“Wow.” Marc couldn’t take his eyes off the key either. “Wow, is that it?”

I nodded.

“Can I hold it?”

I handed it to him reluctantly. He leaned back against the heel of his sandal holding it and staring.

“We’d better get going,” I said. “Here.” I held out my hand for the key.

“I can carry it,” said Marc. “It’s pretty heavy.”

“That’s okay, I’ll take it,” I said.

He gave it back reluctantly. I put it in my backpack—it just fit in the biggest compartment—and buckled up. “Which way’s the door?” I asked.

“To the left, but shouldn’t we get supplies first?”

“Like what?”

“Lots of things. The cloak of invisibility. The Blue Light. The Bottomless Purse. Even the Table-Be-Set, in case we get locked in someplace without lunch,” Marc said.

“How are we supposed to carry all that? We’re six inches tall, remember?”

“Strap it to the sandals. They can carry a full-grown man.”

“Yeah, but . . . I don’t know, Marc. I don’t think it’s such a good idea. You know how fairy tales work. They punish the greedy and reward the restrained.”

“They give the hero the magic items he needs. Heroes are always stealing stuff. Like the giant’s magic harp that plays itself or the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

“Yes, but if you remember that particular story, the harp doesn’t appreciate being stolen. It yells and gets Jack in trouble.”

“Okay, so we won’t take the harp.”

“You know what I mean. We were told to take the Golden Key. Nobody said anything about lamps and purses. Remember what happened with the cudgel? Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“Oh, all right,” said Marc.

With the usual false turns and accidental zigzagging, we flew to the door. Steadying my sandal, I hefted the Golden Key and tried it in the keyhole.

It didn’t fit.

“Now what?”

“I have an idea—I think I we passed something useful near the keys,” said Marc. “Wait there.” He flew back the way we’d come.

He was gone for a while. I stroked my sandal’s wing. While I waited, I took a minute to marvel at my position: six inches tall, riding a winged sandal through a storehouse of magical items. If anyone had told me a year ago I’d be in this position, I would have laughed and then edged away.

At last Marc came back, with a stick a little taller than him propped along his sandal.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The stick from ‘The Raven.’ It opens any door you hit with it.” He flew up and tapped the door with it. The door exploded inward; our sandals got out of the way quickly.

Aaron was there waiting. “Finally!” he said. “Did you get the Golden Key?”