23

The Great Mouse Orchestra

ANASTASIA, THE VOICE murmured. It was the lovely lullaby voice of a mermaid singing many fathoms below the sea. Your dreams long for you almost as much as you long for them. Tinkling music prickled her eardrums.

When had she ever been so cozy, so comfy? Half-dream thoughts wandered her mind, dancing to the tinkling tune. The music reminded her of the snow globes tintinnabulating in Drybread & Drybread’s emporium, which in turn reminded her of their swelling rodent population. Every school day at noon, Gus dispatched a mischief of mice from his lunch box and into Ollie’s pockets, so the Dreadfuls now had dozens of subjects for their science project. Their science project! The Pettifog science fair lurked around the corner, and they hadn’t done a lick of work. What can we do about our science project? Anastasia wondered. What can we do…what…

“Anastasia!” Gus shook her arm.

“Where are we?” She blinked. Why! They were onstage at the Cavepearl Theater! Phonographs jumbled the floorboards. A phonograph, if you don’t know, is a sort of old-timey music machine. A round disc called a record swivels atop a table turned by a crank, and the grooves in this record transmit music up a needle and into an enormous horn. However, the phonographs puffing their brassy throats onstage didn’t have cranks. And, unlike most phonographs piping music across the globe, a single mouse stood at attention atop the record of each of the music machines Anastasia now beheld.

Ollie trotted forth from the curtains, pulling a conductor’s baton from his pocket. Each mouse hunkered down. The Shadowboy swooped the baton.

Tinkle jingle tinkle tinkle…

A wild ruckus jangled from the phonographs as the records spun beneath the galloping mice.

Jingle, tinkle, tinkle!

An invisible audience erupted into cheers.

“Bravo!”

“Amazing!”

“SQUEEEAK!”

Anastasia’s eyelids stuttered. “Pippistrella?” The last fanciful figments fizzled from her brain and she sat up, rubbing her peepers.

“She says it’s almost dinnertime,” Ollie said. “And that your aunt and uncle will come looking for us if we don’t show up in the dining hall.”

“Did you dream?” Gus asked eagerly.

“Yes. But it wasn’t anything about the Silver Hammer. It was about mice.”

“Mice?”

“And the opera house, I think….”

“So just a normal dream,” Ollie concluded. “A bunch of weird nonsense. Let’s go.”

Anastasia gazed around Drybread & Drybread’s and sighed. The music boxes tinkled toward the ends of their metal melodies, and the Dreadfuls were no closer to finding the Silver Hammer. They were no closer to tracking Nicodemus or his magical tattoo. Anastasia’s throat tightened. She calculated: she hadn’t snuggled into a cozy dad-hug, or listened to a bedtime story about guinea pig fairies, or eaten a signature Fred McCrumpet waffle for over three months. And perhaps she never would again.

Meanwhile, the days since her unfateful nap in the Canopy had trickled by in classes and quizzes and worry about the upcoming science fair, which loomed the following Monday. Anastasia dug in her pocket for the note Saskia had flicked to her desk that afternoon:

If your science project stinks as bad as your petticoats, you’re going back to third grade.

To be honest, Anastasia had issued a silent yet epic flabbergaster not one minute before Saskia scribbled the vexing epistle. Nonetheless, the snipe flooded her with righteous indignation.

She lifted a snow globe from the shelf and shook it, watching the flakes within dance a spritely jig. Then her focus shifted to her reflection, gossamer and ghostly upon the glass sphere’s curve. Aisatsana! Would Anastasia never escape her evil twin? Any slip of glass conjured the contrary girl.

Anastasia huffed an exasperated puff onto the globe, coating her reflection with a patch of steam. There. Farewell, Aisatsana! The fog evaporated from the glass in a trice, but not before tickling Anastasia’s memory into coughing up a few crumbs from her stint at St. Agony’s. Her ponderings flashed to the twinkly pictures her breath had tinseled upon the madhouse’s glassy bits and bobs. Had the chilly filigree really been, as Penny and Baldwin assured her, some sort of mirage? Anastasia thought not; she remembered it so clearly. If only Ollie or Quentin had witnessed the frosty phenomenon!

Anastasia startled. Perhaps the Shadowboys hadn’t glimpsed the peculiar rime, but someone else had—and that someone was now staring her right in the face. In the clammy depths of St. Agony’s, Aisatsana had mimed Anastasia’s antics in mirrors and darkened windows and the glass breastplates of picture frames. If Anastasia had truly spangled the asylum with frozen designs, Aisatsana would have seen her do it! She could simply ask—

“Electric eelmaidens!” Ollie cried, shoving a book under Anastasia’s nose.

“What?” She snapped from her reverie.

Ollie tapped the page. “They’re like mermaids but with eel tails. And they shoot electricity out of their eyes.”

Anastasia studied the illustration of a golden-haired eelmaiden. “That can’t be real.”

“Your aunt lent us this book.” Ollie flipped the cover to display the title: Pliny the Eldest Elder’s Compendium of Creatures. “It’s full of all kinds of animals: unicorns and dreameaters—Pliny says they have funny noses to snuffle up dreams, but there isn’t a picture. And—”

“I don’t think Penny gave us that book for our project, Ollie,” Anastasia said. “She knows you like fairy tales. I told you, she misses being an elementary school librarian. Last night I caught her making book lists for imaginary children.”

“We don’t have time to talk about unicorns and dreamcatchers,” Gus grumped. “We have to decide what we’re going to do with these mice.”

“We could figure out what kind of cheese they prefer,” Ollie suggested. “Our findings could help cheesemongers everywhere!”

Gus shook his head. “That’s not much of an experiment. Our parents will expect a Nobel Prize after all the time we’ve supposedly worked on this project.”

“Well, at least we visited the Moonsilk Canopy,” Ollie said cheerfully. “Anastasia, tell us about your dream.”

Anastasia groaned. “Again?”

“I like the part when the audience cheers.”

“We were onstage, and there were a bunch of mice….” Her eyes shifted to a cluster of rodents sitting around a music box tinkling “Edelweiss.” “You know, these mice really do seem to love music.”

“It’s probably those super-sensitive whiskers, picking up the sound waves,” Gus said.

“Hello, scientists! How are your rodents?” Mr. Drybread said, sidling over to dust a snow globe display. “My goodness! They’re getting pudgy. Ollie, what have you been feeding them?”

“Well, they get their pellets, and then I also give them crumbs.”

“Crumbs?”

“Like cupcake crumbs. And pancake crumbs. And just-plain-cake crumbs.”

“Ollie, you can’t feed your mice cake!” Mr. Drybread said. “You’ll make them sick!”

“But they like it.”

“Of course they like cake. Everyone likes cake. But mice don’t have the same tummies as we do,” Mr. Drybread scolded. “From now on: pellets only.”

“Don’t they run on their exercise wheel?” Gus asked.

“Nope.” Ollie reached out and spun the neglected hoop. “They each gave it a whirl, but I guess the fun ran out.”

“Too bad we can’t make the wheels play music,” Anastasia mused, thinking of the mice in her dream galloping on gramophone records. “I once read about people who hooked their TVs to treadmills so they had to exercise to watch their favorite shows.”

“Oh,” Ollie mourned, “I miss TV. I watched it all the time back in Melancholy Falls.”

Anastasia picked up a glass music box and turned its crank. The brass cylinder rotated, its freckles plunking the teeth of a musical comb. Her eyes twitched over to the mouse wheel. “Mr. Drybread, how exactly does a music box work?”

He set down his duster. “I’m so glad you asked! The inner workings of a music box are fascinating!”

“Oh bother,” Ollie muttered.

“There’s a compressed spring inside the box,” Mr. Drybread explained. “When you wind it up, it twists the spring tighter and tighter. And then the spring needs to uncoil, and when it does that, it makes the musical cylinder spin. When the spring uncoils all the way, it stops working the cylinder, and that’s why the tune runs out.”

“Could you make a music box that didn’t have a spring?” Anastasia asked.

“Sure,” Mr. Drybread said. “But you’d have to wind the crank constantly if you wanted to listen to music.”

“What if you had a big music box with no spring, and you attached the crank to that mouse wheel? Would the music box play when you spun the wheel?”

“I don’t see why not,” Mr. Drybread said. “It would be pretty easy to fix up.”

“That’s it!” Anastasia turned to Ollie and Gus. “We can make a mouse-powered music box for the science fair!”

“Brilliant!” Gus cried. “We already know the mice love music!”

“And your mice certainly need the exercise,” Mr. Drybread said. “I’ll go fetch some parts from the back room and you can start building.” He disappeared into the depths of the shop.

“Hooray!” Ollie cheered. “Anastasia, it’s just like your dream! Mice playing their own music!”

Gus gave a little leap. “Do you think the Canopy made you dream about the mouse orchestra to give you the idea for our science project?”

Anastasia’s eyes rounded. “I—I don’t know.” She thought back to her nap in the Moonsilk Canopy. “I was worrying about the science fair before I drowsed off.”

“Well, that settles it. You were thinking about it anyway, so of course you dreamed about it,” Ollie said.

“Or,” Gus whispered, “that’s how the Canopy works: you ask it a question before you fall asleep, and then you dream up the answer.”

The Dreadfuls stared at each other. Hope throbbed anew in Anastasia’s chest.

“We can try again on Saturday,” she said. “I was going to invite you over anyway. It’s my birthday—”

“Your birthday?” Ollie squealed. “Now you’ll be eleven!”

“And we’re having a party. Penny said you could come over early and we could play games while everyone else was setting up the palace.”

“Oh my golly,” Ollie breathed. “Are you going to have a huge, princessy party? With hundreds of guests and a gigantic cake?”

“I guess,” Anastasia admitted. “But I don’t like…you know…parading around with people looking at me.”

“I wouldn’t like it, either.” Gus shuddered.

“Anyway, everyone at the palace is going to be running around putting up decorations, which means we”—she wriggled her eyebrows—“will have plenty of time to visit the Moonsilk Canopy again.”