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Ell could hardly stand still—so he didn’t. He leapt into the air, soaring up the stacks past the buttresses and the spitfire study desks with their green lamps blazing.
“Wait!” called September. They had to stay together—who knew how far Tanaquill and the others might have gotten by now?
“Looking for clues!” he shouted down while he darted all round the tip-top shelves, where there are precisely no books on the Heart of Fairyland. Human novels are kept on the top shelves of the Mystery section. The Great Grand Library did not have many books from the human world. She had to wait until some traveler who happened to bring along a paperback dropped it or traded it for a fourth wish or left it carelessly on a bedside table—with the spine split and pages dog-eared! The Library’s spies could never stand such abuse. Whenever she heard a book cry out in vain, the Great Grand Library sent someone to liberate it on the double quick. This is just what happens when you cannot find the book you were only just yesterday eagerly reading.
“Agatha Christie!” Ell cried. “Jules Verne! A whole mess of people called Brontë! I’ve never heard of any of these! They definitely sound magical. September! Are these friends of yours? Do you know them? Oh, I want to read all of them!”
But September could not answer. She was busy being glared at with cold ferocity by a gigantic brass ball. The ball, greened over with age, had two suspicious eyes carved into it and a narrow, pinched mouth. Numbers, both Roman and regular, were etched all over the rest of it, framed by a fan of hour hands from an antique clock like a peacock’s tail. It could raise and lower itself on a long brass pole in the center of the room.
“Do you have a library card?” the ball hissed down.
“N-no?” September called up.
“Then you are not allowed! Intruder! Brigand! Tourist! Begone or I shall set the book bears on you! Vandal! Hoodlum! Critic!” The brass ball spun furiously round his pole. “Ooh, I’ll bet you scribble in the margins, don’t you? You fiend! You devil! I can see it in your beady little non-spectacled eyes! You’re just the type of monster who uses an innocent book to prop open a door or straighten a table with a wobbly leg. Or maybe you only read magazines? Savage!”
“Oh, get off yourself,” barked Blunderbuss. “I’ve eaten more books than you’ve shelved in your whole weird pinball life and I enjoyed every last one, thanks very much.”
“EATEN?!” screeched the brass ball.
“Yes, eaten! How else do you think a wombat reads? I never trust my eyeballs. I trust my belly. Chomp, chomp, chomp, ooh, the vizier did it, what a surprise! Yum, yum, so that’s how you build a transistor radio! Bring on the poetry for dessert! Now quit your wheezing and introduce yourself like a civilized person. Ball. Thing.”
The brass ball shot down the length of his pole to get a better glaring position. September and Saturday might once have shrunk away from his outraged gaze, but they stood up straight to him.
“I am Greenwich Mean Time, thank you very much, Guardian of the Great Grand Library, Overdue Books Reconnaissance Officer, and Chief Babysitter to the Prime Meridian. That’s Latitude and Longitude’s strapping lad. They go out on the town so much these days—and they’ll leave their boy with me until he learns to stop pulling the Equator’s tail. I’ll ask you not to make any sort of ruckus, or you’ll wake him from his nap. And I will also thank you to leave, for you have no card, and therefore you are trespassing, and therefore you are my enemy!”
September stepped forward and refused to be shamed. “My name is September, this is Saturday and Blunderbuss. We do not use books as doorstoppers nor scribble in the margins, and we came with a Librarian, a member of the Catalogue. He’s just up there, the bright red fellow scarfing up Jane Austen.” September pointed toward the ceiling, where Ell was flipping pages at speed with one delicate claw. He looked up, chagrined, blushing orange. “We are racing in the Cantankerous Derby, and we need your help. Or somebody’s help. Where might we find the Reference Desk?”
As Ell descended through the Human section, past Biographies, Autobiographies, and Crypto-Biographies, past Histories, Lies, and Assorted Trickeries and back down into the Mystery Kitchen, one of the airborne study desks detached from its unit and zoomed down after him. An Oxtongue Fairyish Dictionary lay open on it, the pages riffling like propeller blades, its green pull-chain lamp flashing like the lights on the tips of aeroplane wings. They landed neatly side by side.
“No, no! Bad desk!” screeched Greenwich Mean Time. “They don’t belong! Don’t answer their questions! Get back up there and get ready for Re-shelving Maneuvers!”
But the Reference Desk did not budge. It tilted upward at A-Through-L, thought for a moment, and then purred, rubbing affectionately against his great scarlet leg. A-Through-L reached up under to the patch of rough fur that covered the place where his wing joined his body, where they’d secured their little bit of luggage for the race, since Ell could carry a giant’s suitcase and hardly feel a thing. The Wyverary, after a moment’s fiddling, produced a large copper shield on a heavy chain. He whirled it round his neck in one practiced movement.
“I have a card, Mr. Greenwich,” said the Wyverary proudly, “and I am quite sure you will find my account current and in the black, with not so much as a whisker overdue.”
The brass ball scowled at Ell’s shield, which showed the sharp crescent of Fairyland’s Moon resting on its side, full of books, surrounded by a ring of all the letters in the alphabet.
Greenwich sighed flamboyantly. “Oh, very well. I did so want to thr
ow someone to the bears today. It’s a thankless life I lead! Fine! If you must insist on speaking to me and being alive and wanting things and all that rot, so be it. As I have said, I am Greenwich Mean Time. I safeguard the Library’s Time. I am the most precise, the most exact, the most correct timepiece ever born! I was the first colt sired by Piebald, the Stallion of Time, and I came of age in the harsh climes of the Hourglass Waste. I hunted wild chronologies and drank from the Ticking Stream, which turns the wheel of the Bygones Mill. Christopher Wren himself lassoed me while I slept and brought me to Meridian to look after the Library. I hate him for it and love him for it by turns—this is a loving century, but soon I will spit at his portrait again! I keep the Watch. I set the Due Dates and the Hours of Business. My precise and impeccable calculations determine how long any one person with jam on their fingers is allowed to spend in the Special Collections Pantry. My left cheek is tracking the time for the Cantankerous Derby as we speak.”
Saturday leaned forward eagerly. “How are we doing? Has anyone won yet? Are we behind or ahead of the pack?”
“Won? Aren’t you an impatient little inkblot! There’s plenty of time yet for winning and for losing. I would say you’re a little behind the pace, though I’m not meant to tell you any such thing. But I do like folk to know when they’re failing. But I won’t say more! No! I alone hold the time! All Fairyland clocks take their measure from me!”
“All clocks?” said September sharply, recalling a room in the Lonely Gaol crammed to the ceiling with clocks of every kind, each clock belonging to a human child in Fairyland …
“ALL. And don’t think your Hourglass has stopped, young lady. Plink, plink, plink go the sands!” Greenwich Mean Time laughed cruelly. His clock-hand tail shook with delight.
“I don’t know why you need to be quite so mean,” Saturday scowled defensively.
The brass ball grew serious and quiet. “All time is mean, young man. It takes and does not give, it rushes when you wish it would linger and drags when you wish it would fly. It flows sullenly, only in one direction, when it might take a thousand turns. You cannot get anything back once time has taken it. Time cheats and steals and lies and kills. If anyone could arrest it, they would have time behind bars faster than you can check your watch.”
September felt very hot in the dim light of the Mystery Kitchen. I got something back from time, she thought. But it’s all jumbled up. When I was old I felt young, I felt myself, as I am now, and whenever I looked into a mirror I got a shock like a bit of lightning in my cheeks. But now that I am young again, I feel old, I feel myself, as I was when I was the Spinster, quite grown up.
Yes, September. We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one ought to let him in to dinner.
“We need to find the Heart of Fairyland,” September said. “We thought it might be here, in the middle of everything.”
