“Without the right key, there’s no way—”
“Nonsense,” Duke said, empathically. “You ferried me to Camelot with a click of your heels. You can do anything.”
“It was more a flick of my finger, but I get what you’re saying.”
“I’m saying that I know you can find us a way into Wonderland. Think. Use that gorgeous brain of yours. Is there a back door? Or…I don’t know…a French translation?”
Koshka, resting his chin on my foot, raised his head and hissed.
“I meant a Russian translation,” Duke said. Appeased, Koshka put his head back down again. “Or one of those, what did you call them? E…books?”
A back door into Wonderland? Another version of the book? A translation? I considered our options.
“Translations won’t work. Or ebooks or audiobooks. The story is the story no matter what language or format it’s in.” I began pacing the stockroom floor. “Any version we go into will be monitored. Unless…wait. Wait one single second…”
“What?”
“Pops told me a story a long time ago,” I said, “about the first case he worked after my mother died. A Burner had gotten into Ray Bradbury’s novelSomething Wicked This Way Comes.There are villains in the book, evil carnival performers who tempt you with your deepest desires. Pops’s deepest desire back then was to have my mother back, of course. The evil carnival barker, Mr. Dark, cornered Pops in the town library.”
“What did he do?” Duke asked.
“He realized he was in a library. A fictional library in a fictional town, but the books on the shelves had all the pages, all the words. So instead of escaping back to the real world, he escaped into a novel in the library!”
“He went into a book…in a book?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Pops jumped into one of the library books. A copy of Hawthorne’sThe House of the Seven Gables.He hid out in one of the unused servants’ rooms for an hour and then poppedbackintoSomething Wicked This Way Comes.Mr. Dark had given up by that point so Pops could finish his mission and come home.”
“Would that work? Going into a novel with a fictional library and using a fictional copy ofAlice in Wonderland?”
“It should,” I said. “If it’s a fictional copy in a fictional library, we wouldn’t be able to change it in the real world. Neither can Burners. But we can go into it.”
“What about that book your grandfather used—Something Wicked?”
“Too dangerous,” I said. “The villains are soul stealers. We need a library in a book that’s slightly less deadly. And one that isn’t under a Code Red.”
There were only a few dozen or so books under Code Red, most of them political, foundational to the canon, or beloved by children worldwide—the Alice books, of course, plus1984, Fahrenheit 451, Don Quixote,theOdyssey, The Tale of Genji, Things Fall Apart, To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved, Frankenstein,the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and literally everything Shakespeare penned.
“A good library,” Duke said. “A large, well-stocked library.”
“And one that’s not being used. A private library.”
“So a library more for show than for reading. The private library of someone with money, someone showing off,” he said. “An aristocrat. Or someone pretending to be…”
“And somewhere we can sneak in without anyone noticing us.”
“We’d need a lot of people there,” Duke continued. “A crowd we can join.”
“A party?”
He nodded, smiling.
“The library of someone rich, someone showing off, someone who throws lots of house parties…” I said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Together we said the most famous name in American fiction.
“Gatsby.”
—
