“Who’s there?”

David flinched when he heard a shrill voice fill the sacred space of silence. This was the Bent Fork Public Library. Once you stepped inside, you felt you mustn’t utter a sound beyond a voiceless whisper.

The Library was housed within one room. But it was impossible to tell once inside how big that room was. Ceiling-high book shelves formed thin, labyrinthic corridors. A few Edison lights, surrounded by stained glass shades, hung from the ceiling. Their eerie glow provided the only illumination.

You entered the Library from the outside through a narrow hallway, and then a second set of doors. It was like passing through an airlock. Once inside, you were inside indeed. Armageddon could rage without and you wouldn’t know it until you had left.

“I can hear you breathing!”

A gangly man emerged from the within labyrinth. A cinnamon cat followed at his heels. The man wore a brown long-sleeved dress shirt, buttoned to the neck, but without a tie. At the waist, the shirt had been tucked into a pair of brown slacks. (David thought slacks looked a little short for the man’s height.) He was barefoot. The man held a pipe between his teeth. David could see it wasn’t lit. When he saw David, the man removed the pipe from his mouth.

He gestured toward David with it.

“Ahhhh! I’ve been expecting you!”

“Sir?” David gasped.

The man cackled. “Nah! I had no idea you were coming. But it always makes for a better entrance. ‘I’ve been expecting you!’ You should have seen your face!”

The man took a seat behind a mahogony desk, strewn with papers and books. Some of the books were open, face down. Other books were piled on those books. The cat leapt up onto the desk, then positioned itself, sphinx-like, amidst the literary clutter. A nameplate on the desk was tented beneath a coffee table book about walking tours of Turkey. David read its message.

HEAD LIBRARIAN

David was sure this person was the only Librarian here (unless you counted the cat).

The Librarian leaned back in his chair and drew non-existent smoke from his pipe. “What can I do for you, boy?” he said, still too loud for the surroundings.

“Mrs. Vargas thought you might know where these stamps came from,” David whispered. He handed the Librarian the manilla envelope he had received in the mail. The Librarian snatched it from him. He pouted, sniffed the envelope, and put on a quizzical expression.

“What do you think, Ariadne?” he said, passing the envelope toward the cat. She tapped it with her nose, then looked elsewhere.

“What did I do with my specs?” The Librarian lifted random books and papers from his desk, and peeked beneath them. Finally, he pulled a pair of bent wire reading glasses from beneath the cat. The feline objected briefly, then resumed her position of authority on the desk.

“Come here, boy,” said the Librarian. He fumbled with the distorted wire frames until he found a way to keep them on his face. David approached the desk.

“Now, about the postage, who’s to say?” The Librarian tapped the envelope several times with his index finger. David noticed thick calluses on his fingertips, —yellow smoker’s calluses. “You can buy stamps anywhere. And at any time.”

The Librarian rose from his chair. “But if you want to know where this envelope has been, you look at these markings.” He fingered the faded ink which overlaid the postage.

“These are the fingerprints of the journey. Every checkpoint: Whack! Whack! Whack!” He brought his fist down squarely on the envelope, once for each “whack.” Ariadne brought her ears back. David jumped.

The Librarian lowered his voice.

“But…. But, what really tickles my brain—what really gets my gears spinning is this. That would would come in here and ask me about postage stamps….” He uttered the last two words with a mixture of disdain and incredulity.

“… when you have a whiffle box in your jacket pocket.”

When David had arrived at the cottage early that morning, he had still been recovering from the previous night’s migraine. That, along with the poor sleep on the bus, had left him feeling dissociated, as though his whole self—body and soul— were displaced. Nana had shown him directly to his room. She left him alone there. They both knew he needed rest.

Afterward, David thought a walk and some air might clear his head. He threw on a windbreaker, and slid the wooden box into one of the pockets. He then folded the envelope into quarters and tucked it into the same pocket. It had occurred to him that Mrs. Vargas, with all her postal experience, might have something to say about the postage stamps. Perhaps she could provide a clue as to where the box had come from.

Mrs. Vargas had been equally puzzled. “I haven’t got the faintest notion!” she had said. “I’ve seen plenty of different postage stamps in the past forty years. But, I’m flummoxed.” That’s when she had suggested David might have better success at the Library.

David’s eyes widened. He retrieved the wooden box from the pocket of his windbreaker. “Do you mean this?”

“Let’s have a look.” The Librarian grinned and held out his hand. David turned it over to him.

The Librarian held the box to his cheek and peered across the top with one eye. He looked like a carpenter checking how well a two-by-four had been planed. “I heard it when you came in. They sing, you know.”

The Librarian sniffed the box. He paused, eyes upward, like he was trying to remember something.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Even you’ve heard it sing, I’m sure.”

“I… I don’t think so.”

“So! The next question is this.” The Librarian smirked. “Where’s the other one?”

“This is the only one I got,” David stammered.

The Librarian drew a long breath through his empty pipe. He continued to study box from all sides. “Whiffle boxes always come in pairs,” he said. He tapped the box and held it to his ear. “You won’t find a solitary whiffle any more than you’ll find a magnet with a north pole, but no south pole.”

David stepped back and turned away. He inhaled, thought about this, then let out a slow exhale. “I wasn’t expecting this one. Where would I even begin to look for a second one?”

The Librarian chuckled and sighed.

“You don’t go searching for a whiffle box, young man!” David turned back toward him when he said this. The Librarian brought his face near David’s. He tapped the boy’s chest three times with the pipe’s mouthpiece, emphasizing each word: “It… finds… you!”

David felt a light whoosh of air behind him. Someone had just entered.

“Like clockwork!” laughed the Librarian, shifting his gaze to the space just beyond David’s shoulders. David turned to see who had come in.

“Enter!” beckoned the Librarian, gesturing again with his pipe. “I’ve been expecting you.”