Mississippi River Blues (2 page)

“Four, actually,” the librarian said calmly. “But you can't read
Tom Sawyer
quickly. Oh, no, that's no good.”

As we pushed into the workroom, my eyes instantly spotted an old broken set of library security gates standing against the back wall of the room. They looked like two sides of a doorway with no top.

“Zapper gates,” Mrs. Figglehopper calls them. Busted, she says they are. Not true, say Frankie and I. Frankie and me. I. Me. Whatever. The point is, those zapper gates aren't exactly as busted as Mrs. Figglehopper says they are.

How do I know?

I know, because Frankie and I were in the library workroom once before. And we found out the extra-hard way that those gates can do something very weird.

And very impossible.

“Before you go, let me show you something,” the librarian said. She pulled an old green book from one of the many shelves. “This is one of the very first copies ever published of the book you should have read. It's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain.”

“It's too thick,” said Frankie, shaking her head sadly. “We never could have finished it, anyway.”

“This book is over a hundred and twenty-five years old,” the woman said. “And every bit as fresh now as the day it was written.”

I sniffed. “Doesn't smell so fresh.”

“True, and the covers are slightly cracked,” said Mrs. Figglehopper. “But look here!” She opened the book gently and turned to the very last page. On it someone had written something in thick black ink.

“Hey, even I know not to scribble in books,” I said.

Mrs. Figglehopper chuckled. “This is no ordinary scribble. It is the autograph of the author, Mark Twain. Having Twain's autograph in the book makes this one of the most valuable in our whole collection. I consider it a priceless treasure!”

The phone at the front desk began to ring.

“Go ahead, read the first page,” she said. “But be careful, some of the pages are loose. You have a few minutes before your test. Let me answer the phone, and then I'll be right back.” She left the room, trotting for the front desk.

The moment I turned to the first page, Frankie raised her head. She was looking at the zapper gates.

Her expression told me that she was remembering the weird thing that had happened the last time we were in the library workroom. I remembered it, too.

It had happened a couple of weeks before, in this very room.

One minute, Frankie and I are fighting over a book; the next minute the book falls between the gates, and—
blammo!
—the gates go all fizzy and sparkly and there's this huge blue light and a weird crack opens in the wall—in the wall!—and of course we go into it and—
shazzam!
—we are not in the library anymore.

We are in the book.

In the book!

That's right. Somehow we got dropped right into the story, with all the characters and everything! The worst part was that we couldn't escape the book until we read all the way to the last page.

Talk about brutal. Talk about exhausting. It's enough to make your head explode!

“Dev,” Frankie whispered, still staring at the zapper gates. “I've been thinking.…”

I looked at the gates, too. “Well, stop it,” I told her. “Thinking just gets kids like us into trouble. Besides, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you can think of something else.”

“It worked once.”

“Don't go there, Frankie!” I protested. “Okay, sure, maybe the gates worked once, but remember how we almost got totally deep-fried? I'd rather take a test.”

Frankie chuckled. “That's not a line you say often.”

“We're not going anywhere near the gates, Frankie.”

“Okay.”

“Because it'll probably turn out way bad.”

“I said okay.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Because I have an even better plan! I saw a show once about a guy who could read a fat book in, like, two minutes. All he did was run his hand down the page, and his brain did the rest.”

Frankie snorted. “Do you have his brain handy? Because I don't think yours will work the same.”

“Do you have another way out of this?”

Frankie looked at the clock. She chewed her lip.

“I thought so.” I began sliding my hand down the pages, flipping them over quickly as I went.

“Are you getting anything?” asked Frankie.

“A little,” I said.

“So what's
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
about?”

“There's a kid named Tom … and a closet and a wooden fence … there's a girl in here, too.…”

“This is not helping—” She reached for the book.

“Treasure … there's treasure!” I pulled it away.

“Give it to me!”

“You give it!”

“No, you!”

“Careful!”

“Oh, no!”

As if it were a basketball game and our fingers were straining to gain possession of the ball, we wrestled for the book. Then it happened. A page suddenly slid out of the book and fluttered across the room.

I gasped. “Oh, no! It's the scribble page! With the author's signature! It's valuable! It's priceless! We're dead meat if it gets torn!”

We tried to grab the page, but our hands clutched only air. The page floated swiftly across the room, then took a nosedive like a bad paper airplane. It twirled in a wild tailspin right between the zapper gates near the back wall.

“Nooo!” Frankie shouted, leaping for the page.

KKKKK!
The whole room went as bright as an exploding star. The next instant it was as dark as if someone had shoved a box over our heads. Suddenly, there was this huge crackling sound, and we saw the back wall—the wall just behind the zapper gates—crack right open.

Flickering blue light and wispy white smoke poured into the workroom.

“It's happening again!” I said.

Frankie's eyes were huge. “Boy, are you in trouble!”

“No, you!”

“No,
you
!”

“Frankie! Devin!” the librarian called out. “Time's up! Mr. Wexler wants you back in class!”

She started tramping back toward the workroom.

“Oh, man,” I said. “We've got to get that page back!”

With pretty much no other thought in our heads, Frankie and I dived into the dark, smoking crack in the wall. We tumbled over and over until we hit something.

Something that said, “Hey! Get off my toe!”

Chapter 3

I blinked.

In the dim light I could see that Frankie and I were in our second closet of the day. Luckily, it wasn't a stinky one. But it wasn't empty, either. By the slim crack of light around the door, I could see a third person crouching in there with us, peering out. It seemed to be a boy.

I nudged Frankie. “Where are we?” I whispered. “And don't tell me we're in the book.”

“We're in the book,” she said, tapping the book's cover. “The zapper gates must have zapped us again.”

“You're still on my toe!” whispered the boy. “Get off!”

“Sorry!” I said, jumping back next to Frankie.

The boy was about our age, dressed in rumpled jeans, a white shirt that had once been a lot whiter, and a tattered vest of brown flannel. Also, he was barefoot.

“Just for the record,” asked Frankie, “who are you?”

“Hush!” said the boy. “My aunt Polly's just outside. She'll find us.”

There was a scuffling sound outside the closet. “Tom!” cried a voice.

The boy chuckled softly. “Aunt Polly's all mad because she thinks I stole her fresh strawberry jam that took her so long to make. But I swear I never had a lick.”

“Y-o-u-u—Tom!” cried the voice from outside.

“Tom's me,” he whispered. “Tom Sawyer. I never saw you in my closet before.”

“I'm Devin. This is Frankie,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you,” Tom said. Smiling, he stuck out his hand for me and Frankie to shake.

It was sticky.

“What's that stuff on your fingers?” asked Frankie.

“Jam,” said Tom. “Now, shhh. We can sneak out if we're careful.” Holding a finger to his lips, which he then took a moment to lick, Tom gently pushed open the closet door.

Thwack!
A thin hand came down from nowhere and grabbed Tom by his vest and hung on tight.

“There!” snapped a voice. “I might have thought you were hiding in that closet! Out into the light with you!”

Tom, Frankie, and I tumbled out into what looked like a small, old-fashioned kitchen. Aunt Polly stood there, her feet planted on the floor. She was a thin, strong-looking, old-fashioned lady. She glanced at us over a pair of old-style spectacles perched on her nose, scowled harshly at Tom, and refused to let him go.

“Well, what have you been doing in there?” she snapped.

“Nothing,” said Tom, wriggling in her grasp of steel.

“Nothing? Look at your hands. And your mouth. What is that?”

“I don't know, Aunt Polly,” said Tom, his eyes wide with fake innocence.

“Well, I know what it is!” the woman said. “It's the jam I told you not to touch. So help me, I'll swat you!”

She reached for a stick that was leaning against the kitchen table—probably just for the purpose of swatting Tom—and held it over his head.

Suddenly, Tom pointed. “Look behind you, Aunt!” The old lady whirled around, and Tom shot out the back door like a rocket. He scrambled across the yard and leaped over a dirt-splattered fence and away.

“Why, you—Tom!” Aunt Polly called out. Then she grunted to herself, turned on her heels, pulled her glasses down, and looked over them at us.

“Well, and who are you two?” she said sharply.

Frankie gulped. “Um … we're …”

“New friends of Tom,” I said. “Just passing through … your closet.”

The woman shook her head as if it didn't matter, anyway. She took a deep breath and shook her head.

“Tom's played tricks on me so many times. But, my goodness, he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I somehow ain't got the heart to punish him. But punish him I must. I know he'll steal off and not go to school today. It's mighty hard to make him work tomorrow on Saturday, and, oh, he hates work more than he hates anything else, but if I don't punish him some, I'll be the ruination of the child.…”

Aunt Polly started mumbling to herself and got back to making more jam while we scrambled out the door just as Tom had done.

Leaping over the fence, we found ourselves on a dusty street in the center of a tiny village.

Out of breath, I turned to Frankie. “We're in the book, just like last time. I can't believe it's happening again.”

“No kidding. It's the most impossible thing ever,” she said, opening the book. “But it's worse this time. We lost Mrs. Figglehopper's precious scribble page. It's a treasure, she said, so we definitely have to find it. But where? It wasn't in the closet. Or in the kitchen, either.”

“You know what?” I said. “I bet there's no way out of here without it. It's probably one of the weird rules of being dropped into books.”

“Like when you try to jump ahead to the next chapter and the whole scene rips in half?”

I nodded. “Tell me about it. Everything cracks and we get totally toasted.” I took a deep breath as we started to wander down the main street of the village. “I just hope we don't get trapped in this book forever,” I said. “Things look pretty dull around here.”

“Thanks for being so upbeat,” said Frankie. “Next time I'll just lie down under the falling books.”

As Mrs. Figglehopper had told us, the book was written about a hundred and twenty-five years ago, so that meant we were in the past. The village had a bunch of wooden buildings and houses on both sides of the street. The trees were heavy with leaves, the sun was shining, and it was fairly hot, so it was probably pretty near summer. Beyond the trees was the shore of a hugely wide river.

Frankie peeked in at the first few pages of the book. “I think this small town is next to the Mississippi River,” she said.

I laughed. Then I stopped. “Whoa, brain flash! I just realized something! This book is named after Tom Sawyer, right? Because the story is all about him, right? So all we have to do is follow Tom and we'll find the lost page!”

Frankie blinked. “Good brain flash. Where's Tom?”

We looked around. He wasn't anywhere.

“Maybe you'd better read some to find out,” I said.

“Maybe
you'd
better.”

“But you read faster!”

Frankie stared at me. “If I read faster, it's only because I always end up doing it more. Because you won't.”

But she cracked open the chubby book, anyway, and did some reading, while I breathed in the summer air.

“Well, Tom gets into more trouble,” she said after a few minutes. “He skips school, goes swimming, throws a clump of dirt at his little half brother, Sid, then wrestles a kid in fancy new clothes.”

“Sounds like Tom knows how to waste a day like the best of us.”

Frankie chuckled. “And for all that, Aunt Polly punishes him, just as she promised to.”

“Brutal. Is he back in the closet?”

Frankie snickered. “No, he's got to do some kind of huge chore—”

“Chore!” I gasped. “Well, that's gotta slow the story down. Better read ahead to a more exciting part. Like the part where we find the lost page.”

“I can't. The words are getting all blurry.” Frankie showed me the book. All the words were hazy and impossible to read.

Ah, yes, the blurry factor.

We had learned from the first time we dropped into a book that the words always get blurry when you try to read ahead of where the story actually is.

“So we know one thing,” I said. “We're right at the chore part of the story.”