Polly Shulman - The Grimm Legacy

Pointless or not, I ran. The air, the speed, the motion—forward! forward!—the world melting to background, ice to my one-footed gliding as I threw myself into the thrill of speed. My mismatched footwear gave me a syncopated rhythm: a step and a leap, a step and a leap. I had no idea where I was going. I followed my feet. At every other step the world reassembled: a town square, a highway, a front yard, a frozen lake, a forest, a parking lot. Mr. Stone was always there, a step behind me.

“You won’t get away,” he called. “I have the other boot.”

I didn’t care. I was in love with motion. The pneum ride had made me sick with its headlong helplessness, but this was different—I was in control.

“Faster, Libbet!” yelled Andre happily, banging on the kuduo lid with his fists. A step and a leap. A step and a leap. A mountainside, a snowy beach, a cabin, a frozen stream lit only by the moon.

“Stop!” shouted Mr. Stone. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere,” I called back, running.

A pale, moonlit wasteland all around us. I paused to catch my breath. Mr. Stone was panting hard, Andre laughing. In the moonlight the ground sparkled like stars or shattered glass. No houses, no trees, no roads—just the glittering ground and the moon.

“Elizabeth,” said a gravelly voice. I spun on my bootless foot, feeling tiny pebbles through my sock, and saw a small woman dressed in layers of cloth. A familiar woman—the one I’d seen dozing in the Main Exam Room, the one I’d given my sneakers to long ago, it seemed, on the day Mr. Mauskopf assigned me the paper on the Brothers Grimm.

“Where am I? Where is this?” I said.

“Nowhere. Nowhere special,” she said. “Have you come for your sneakers?”

Pale white light filled the air, like the moon shining behind a cloud, but there were no clouds. The sky blazed with zillions of stars, more and more dense wherever I looked. I recognized constellations from the freckles on Dr. Rust’s face: a triangle, a cartwheel, a butterfly. They seemed to be spinning slowly—or was I the one spinning? I couldn’t tell.

“Put me down,” said Andre, scrambling out of my arms. He set the kuduo on the ground so he could draw pictures in the sparkling dust.

Mr. Stone looked bewildered and rumpled. He lifted his arm and made a gesture as if throwing something at me, but nothing left his hand.

“That won’t work here, Wallace,” said the homeless woman.

“Grace!” said Mr. Stone. He made another threatening-looking gesture.

“Neither will that. Give me the boot.”

“And be stuck here? Not a chance!” Mr. Stone turned and ran, but the boot took him no farther than boots usually do. He tripped and landed in a heap.

“The boot, Wallace,” said Grace, holding out her hand. Slowly, as if against his will, Mr. Stone unlaced the boot and handed it over.

Grace turned to me. She had looked sad and tattered back home, but here she was clearly nobody to pity. She looked strong and calm and powerful. Even her clothes hung straighter.

“Your boot too, Elizabeth,” she said, holding out her hand to me. I pulled off my boot and handed it over. “Thank you. Here.” She held out my old sneakers, with my old tube socks, now clean, tucked neatly under their tongues.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Grace Farr. We’ve met before.”

“Yes, but . . . Where—what is this place?”

“I told you. Nowhere.”

“But how did we get here?”

“Ah, that’s simple enough. You’re missing your sense of direction, aren’t you? Nowhere’s about the only place you can go. Or could, without your sneakers. With them, I think you’ll find you have no trouble getting home.”

“Why? Are they magic? Did you enchant them or something?”

Grace smiled. “No. You did, by giving them to me.”

“Libbet?” Andre was pulling at my sleeve. “Libbet!”

“What is it, sweetie?”

“Libbet, I gotta go.”

“We’re going soon—oh! You mean go. ” I turned to Grace. “Is it okay—?”

“Of course.”

“Go ahead, Andre,” I said, turning my back to give him some privacy.

“And then you’d both better go. They need you at the repository.”

“What about Mr. Stone?”

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about him again.”

“All right.” I hoped it was safe to believe her. “How do we get home?”

“The same way you got here: just follow your feet. Your sneakers will take you—that’s their magic. Don’t forget your kuduo. ”

I turned back to Andre. “All done?”

“I made a sun,” he said proudly, pointing to a wet circle in the dust.

“Wow, I can see that,” I said.

When I turned around again, Grace was gone. I could see Mr. Stone in the distance, growing dimmer.

Andre picked up the kuduo and I picked up Andre. I put on my backpack and began to walk, choosing the direction at random.

I walked for what seemed like hours. A strength of purpose flooded up through me from my sneakers. Andre fell asleep in my arms, hugging the kuduo. He felt as light as a paper doll. The stars seemed to be falling around us, like glittery specks of dust.

After a while I found I was walking through trees with dim, bare branches. The air began to take on a tinge of pink, and the specks of dust in the air grew rosy. They rested on my shoulders and Andre’s hair, like flower petals. They were big for dust, soft like petals, and lightly cupped; when I looked closer, I saw they were, in fact, petals.

The tree branches took on a greenish tinge. Little leaves sprouted. I heard the sound of running water on our left—or was it our right?—and went to meet it. Dragonflies darted. A deer flashed its tail and soared out of sight. Andre woke up and yawned. “Where are we?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think we’re Nowhere anymore, but I don’t know where we are.”

Ahead of us a fountain tossed water in the air. Leaning against the fountain, looking bored, sat Aaron. Nearby, Jaya was doing a headstand.

“Elizabeth! There you are!” she shouted, flopping over and sitting up. “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting here for ever !”

Andre scrambled down and ran over to her. “Look, it’s Jaya!” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “Where are we? How did you get here?”

“We used the Golden Key, of course.”

“On what?”

“The door. It’s a gate, on this side.”

“Hello, Elizabeth,” said Aaron. “I was starting to worry you’d never show up. You have petals in your hair.”

“Where are we? What is Jaya talking about?”

“We’re in the Garden of Seasons.”

“ This is the Garden of Seasons?”

He nodded. “The mirror said that’s where we would find you. So we used the Golden Key to open the door—you know, down in the Dungeon, near the elevator. From that side it’s just like all the other doors in the repository, but from this side it looks like an iron gate in a stone wall. How did you get in?” Aaron continued. “You don’t have the key. Is there some other way in?”

“We didn’t come through any walls or gates; we came straight from Nowhere,” I said. I looked around for a wall, but I didn’t see any. I had a weird sense of familiarity, as if I’d spent hours and hours here, although I knew I’d never set foot in the Garden of Seasons before.