I didn’t dare look down. Instead, I focused on my prize, only two shelves away now. The backs of the bookshelves appeared to have holes that showed only in my peripheral vision. When I looked straight at them, all I saw were dark lines in the wood.
At last, I was at the highest shelf. Nervous tremors shook my hands. For comfort, I leaned in to nuzzle the doll’s soft yarn hair. She smelled of detergent and vanilla. I drew back, grinning, then spotted a clown next to her, propped against the back of the shelf. Something about its jolly smile called to me. I reached toward it, the fingernails of my other hand digging into the wood for extra balance.
“Ouch, you’re pinching!” A shout came from behind the clown, gritty and breathy, like two pieces of sandpaper rubbed together. There was movement where the dark lines I had mistaken for wood grains formed a set of lips. They yawned open to reveal a cavernous hole with splintery teeth and a bumpy gray tongue.
The shelf had a mouth …
“Ease up, would you?” it barked at me.
Startled, I almost fell backward but gripped the shelf even harder with both hands just in time.
“Want to play rough, eh?” the mouth screeched at me, its breath as rank as a compost heap. Without warning, jagged teeth—embedded in black gums—snapped out of the wood like an old man spitting up his dentures. Biting down on both toys, the jaw retracted back into the mouth and the rag doll and clown disappeared. The hole vanished, too, leaving only the wood grain and an empty shelf.
Terrified, I lost my balance. Morpheus caught me in midair before I could even scream. As we drifted toward the floor, the mouth and teeth seemed to chase us down the back of each consecutive shelf, catching and swallowing the display items.
“You just had to wake the shelves,” Morpheus scolded the moment we landed. “Don’t you know that tulgey is the most irritable of all kinds of wood? You’d best hope whatever you wanted to play with so badly doesn’t come back to haunt you.”
“Come back?” I asked, my heartbeat still scattered from my almost-fall. “But they’ve all been eaten!”
“No. A tulgey’s throat is a two-way portal to another dimension. A place called AnyElsewhere … the looking-glass world.” Morpheus tapped his fingers on his knee nervously. “If the items that went through are turned away at the gate, they’ll be sent back. And once something is spit back out, it rarely returns the same way it left. It’s changed. Forever.”
“Drat it all.” Mr. Lamb’s complaint carried from across the room. We couldn’t see him for all the aisles between us, but the clack of knitting needles had been silenced and a mechanical whir rang out. Metal feet ground along the stone floor as he came around the corner.
He took one look at the empty shelves, then pointed to the door with several of his brassy fingertips. “Get out!” he demanded. A loud belch from behind us masked the echo of his voice. We all turned to the lowest shelf, where the wood-grain mouth had reappeared. With another belch, it coughed up everything it had swallowed.
The items were mangled—altered nightmarishly. The Christmas ball had withered down to a black coal. A large bloodshot eye opened in its middle, glaring at us. It rolled toward me, but Morpheus kicked it away. The magnifying glass had shattered and blood leaked from the cracks. The silver handle wailed so loudly my spine shook. The stuffed yellow canary—now pale pink and featherless—opened its beak and squawked. Eight wire legs sprouted from the cage’s base and shuffled the raging bird toward us.
We backed up. The clerk said a word his mother would’ve spanked him for and clambered toward the cash register, mumbling something about nets.
Morpheus took flight and left me alone on the ground.
“Help me!” I cried up at him. My heart pounded in my chest, making it hard to breathe.
“I can’t always be there to carry you.” The jewels under his eyes were a sincere blue. “You must figure out how to escape.”
Something pecked my ankle, and I jumped back with a yelp, facing the screeching canary. I shoved the cage over. The wire dome rocked and the metal legs squirmed in midair, like a turtle rolled onto his shell.
More freakish mutations surrounded me.
The white crockery jars spewed up thousands of beetles with snapping pincers, nothing like the smiling ladybugs painted on their fronts. The doorknob had been transformed into an old man’s hand and pulled itself closer with bent and gnarled fingers, while the vinyl doll heads on the candy keepers snapped their teeth—tiny and sharp like straight pins.
I took several cautious steps backward, keeping them in my sight as I made my way to the front of the store. “Morpheus!” I screeched again, but now I couldn’t even see him overhead.