The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

They argued like this for some time, since it was preferable to actually knocking on the little castle’s door and waking up an old lady who might not be happy to see them. And who might have gruesome breath, like old Mr. Abernathy, who stocked the shelves at the supermarket back in Little Tunks.

  “What if she won’t let Chester in?” Otto said.

  “Who’s Chester?” Lucia asked.

  “The cat. I’ve named him Chester. What if she won’t let him in?”

  Chester the cat had been circling Otto’s ankles, and now he stopped and looked at the little castle speculatively.

  “Then she’s a nasty old cow,” Lucia declared. She needed a dose of righteous anger to make her braver. So she was the first to march up to the edge of the moat, looking for a way across it.

  There wasn’t one.

  Although this castle was not as big as the first one, the moat was just as wide as the first moat. They did spot a drawbridge, but it was clapped up against the side of the castle.

  “We could swim it,” Lucia suggested.

  “We could, but there’s nothing to take hold of once you’re across,” Max said.

  It was true. There was nothing to grip on to by the castle. And though you could jump off the bank into the water, it would be very difficult to climb back up since the bank had such a long, deep drop.

  “We could yell for her to let down the drawbridge,” Lucia suggested.

  So they did. They sounded like a right pack of idiots too. Still, the drawbridge remained up and not a single light came on in the castle.

  “Maybe she can’t hear very well,” Max said.

  “Or maybe she’s ignoring us,” said Lucia, “hoping we’ll just go away.” She narrowed her eyes at the castle. She felt as though she were being dared. “Wait here,” she commanded.

  Slowly, she walked the perimeter, examining the steepness of the bank, the sides of the curtain wall, the trees that flanked the moat. There was a very tall wooden tower as well, so tall that it loomed over several of the trees. It was made of crisscrossed timbers, set on wheels. A narrow, rickety-looking ladder was bound to the timbers, leading up to a roofed platform. It was while Lucia was looking up at the platform that she saw something unusual. Dangling high above her head was a bicycle, floating in the night sky, waiting for someone to hop on.

  “Bloody hell,” she whispered. But as I said before, this is not a book about magic—not the kind you’re thinking of anyway—so Lucia came to her senses and asked herself, “How is it that a bicycle appears to be floating in the night sky?”

  After a careful investigation into the matter, she discovered that the bicycle was attached by hooks to one of two slender cables that ran from the wooden tower all the way across the moat and to the upper part of the castle.

  “I’ve found it!” she called out to her brothers. “I’ve found a way in!”

  They hurried over, Chester jogging alongside, and she pointed up to the bicycle. She didn’t explain to them about the cable right away. She wanted them to think it was magic at first, like she had. She understood that even when you don’t strictly believe in magic, it’s always nice to think it’s possible, just for a second.

  “It looks exactly like it’s enchanted,” Otto said, staring up at the bicycle.

  “It looks exactly like a Tyrolean traverse,” Max said flatly. “In fact, it is one.”

  “Nonsense,” Lucia sniped. “Look, it’s attached to a cable. You can ride it straight over the moat.”

  “Like a Tyrolean traverse,” Max muttered.

  “In any case”—she lowered her eyelids to half-mast and flared her nostrils at him—“it will get us in the castle. It’s attached to the top of that left-hand tower. One of us can slip in the house through the roof and let down the drawbridge for the others.”

  “Someone’s watching us,” Otto said suddenly.

  “Great-aunt Haddie, do you think?” Max asked.

  “No. Someone else.” Otto wasn’t looking at the little castle, but at the large castle that loomed behind them in the blackness. His eyes were wide with alarm. It made them all feel squirrelly—even Chester stood very still, his tail curled like a question mark—so they told Otto to cut it out.

  “I don’t know,” Max said, staring back up at the bicycle doubtfully, his spidery arms crossed against his chest. “It seems a sneaky way to get into the house.”

  “You were going to sneak into Angela’s house,” Lucia pointed out.

  “Yes, but she wasn’t home at the time,” Max said.

  “Well, if Great-aunt Haddie didn’t want people to use the bicycle, why would she leave it up there in the first place?” Lucia said.

  “Maybe she didn’t think anyone would be brave enough to try,” Max said.

  (I’m going to interrupt here to let you know that Lucia was not really fooled by this ploy. She knew that it was Max’s way of getting her to be the one to ride the bike over the moat. She knew it subconsciously, so even though it appeared that she was tricked, deep down she knew exactly what he was up to.)

  “Well, Great-aunt Haddie hasn’t met someone like me, has she?” Lucia declared. Then she began to climb the ladder. It was a very rickety ladder. It was a very tall tower. Midway Lucia had to stop climbing for a minute to compose herself and steady her racing heart. It was then that she remembered what Otto had said about someone watching them. She felt it too. Or maybe she just imagined it. Often Otto felt things while she just imagined she felt them.

  “All right?” Max called up.

  “Of course!” Lucia called back and resumed her climb.

  Rung by rung, she made her way to the top of the tower until she was able to step onto the platform. The bicycle was right in front of her now, its back wheel touching the platform’s railing. The bike was old and crusted with rust. The tires looked a bit soggy too, though that didn’t matter really since she’d be riding on a cable, not on wheels. Lucia looked down at the moat far, far below. It was a nasty drop. If the cable didn’t hold, or she lost her balance, the fall would mean several broken bones. If she was lucky.

  Courage, Lucia, she told herself. Think of the Sultan of Juwi. Think of how he refused to hide from Dr. Azziz. How he sat on that fountain every day. Now that was courage! Surely she could find the courage to cross a silly moat.

  Leaning over the railing, she gave the bicycle a downward tug. It seemed secure enough. Carefully, she eased herself over the railing and with one swift movement she lunged forward, catching hold of the handlebars and lowering herself onto the bicycle seat. The bicycle bounced a bit and the cable dipped under her weight.

  “Steady on, Lucia!” Max called up. She nodded but didn’t look down at him.

  Nothing happened for a second. She wondered with some relief if the thing was busted. But then she started to move. It went slowly at first. Above her head she heard the tentative shiiishing sound of the hook rubbing against the cable. But then it picked up speed. A lot of speed. In the space of a few seconds, the bicycle was shooting down the cable alarmingly fast. Lucia held her breath. Her fingers squeezed the handlebars so hard that her knuckles ached, and the wind blew her dark hair into her eyes. It was right about then that she realized her mistake. She had assumed that it would be a fairly tame ride over the moat and the curtain wall; that when the bicycle reached the castle tower, it would be a simple matter of climbing onto the roof. But now she saw that she was going far too fast for a gentle landing. At this rate of speed the front tire of the bicycle would hit the castle wall with such force that she would certainly bounce back violently and be pitched into the moat. Her brain scrambled for solutions, but she could only think of two and neither one was very happy. “Jump now or crash in the wall, jump or crash, jump or crash—”

  “Stay put!” a voice called out. It wasn’t a voice in her head. It wasn’t the voice of either of her brothers. It was a strange voice that seemed to waft by her on a breeze, from a distance off.

  So she stayed put, held her breath, and watched as the s
tone wall came closer and closer at terrifying speed. A second before the bicycle slammed into the castle wall, Lucia squeezed her eyes shut and screamed (you would have done the same, you know you would!).

  Suddenly everything stopped. Even with her eyes closed Lucia was pretty sure she was still on the bicycle and that she was all in one piece, although she had heard about people who had fingers cut off in factory accidents and didn’t feel a thing until they saw the blood.

  “You might have just knocked on the front door, you know,” a voice said from somewhere below her.

  Lucia opened her eyes. She was inside the castle folly, still sitting on the bicycle but dangling high off the ground. The cable ended in the middle of a round ceiling, right beside a chandelier that was not very clean. Directly below her was a bed. And lying on that bed, gazing up at her, was a young woman. She was dressed in a white T-shirt and black sweatpants, and she held a paperback book in her hands while a package of chocolate biscuits lay in her lap. Her hair was blond and cut very short, like a boy’s, and she was slim and slight and narrow-hipped. In fact, if you were nearsighted, you could easily have mistaken her for a self-possessed fourteen-year-old boy.

  “How did I get inside?” Lucia asked, looking around dazedly.

  “Through the window, of course.” The young woman nodded her small round chin toward a pair of curtains across from the bed. They were made of a heavy grey fabric. The sort of fabric that, on dark murky nights, probably looked an awful lot like a solid block of stone wall. “Good thing it was open.”

  It was at this point that Lucia began to feel awkward. It’s one thing to ride a bike through someone’s window and helplessly dangle from their ceiling. But it’s quite another thing to have that somebody stare up at you nonchalantly, while eating chocolate biscuits in their bed, as though you were a funny circus act. In fact, the woman appeared to be waiting for Lucia’s next trick.

  “You might help me to get down,” Lucia said with annoyance.

  “You don’t need any help. Just jump,” the woman said. “You’ll land on the bed, unless you’re a total klutz.”

  Now Lucia began to suspect three things: one, that the woman was not British. She had a funny, nasally way of talking, which Lucia guessed was an American accent; two, that the woman probably had ridden on the bike herself more than once; and three, that Lucia had better jump onto the bed immediately or she would look like a yellow-bellied coward.

  So she jumped and landed pretty squarely in the center of the bed. The woman must have known that’s where she’d land, because she’d already bent her knees and pulled her legs back while protectively holding the package of biscuits up in one hand.

  “Well done,” the woman said. “Have an Oreo,” and she offered Lucia a chocolate biscuit. That seemed too much like a treat offered to a circus monkey, so Lucia declined, nostrils flared, then scooted off the bed.

  “You’re very uppity for someone who just broke into my home,” the woman said, taking a bite out of the Oreo that Lucia had refused.

  “I didn’t break in. We tried to get in the normal way but your bridge was up and we yelled and yelled—”

  “Oh, are there more of you?” The woman sat up a little straighter in bed as though the situation was getting more interesting by the minute. The fact that she was so unruffled by all this ruffled Lucia even more and she forgot to ask the most obvious question, which you are probably already asking in your own head.

  “There are three of us. Otto and Max are standing on the other side of the moat, waiting for me to let them in—”

  “Is that how you operate? One breaks in and then lets in the others? Clever. I’m guessing that one of your brothers is a big ugly bruiser who will smash me on the head with a shovel, while the other one, the rat-faced one with waxy ears, will rifle through all my stuff, looking for the valuables.”

  Lucia could only stare at this odd woman in confusion until she finally gathered up her wits to object: “They don’t have waxy ears or shovels or anything like that. They’re nice looking, for your information.”

  “Well, they would be. Your dad was good looking, as I remember. And your mom was always—” The woman stopped here. Suddenly, she looked a little uncomfortable. “Your mom was a peach.”

  Now Lucia thought of the question that she should have asked a few minutes ago, and the one that you have already asked in your head: “You aren’t Great-aunt Haddie, are you?”

  “I am,” the woman replied.

  “But you’re too young,” Lucia said.

  “How good are you at math?”

  “Pretty good,” Lucia said. In fact she was appallingly bad at math.

  “Your great-grandmother had me when she was fifty-two. My oldest sister was thirty-one years older than me. By the time I was born, my sister had a three-year-old daughter. That was your mother. I was her aunt, even though I was a baby. That makes me your great-aunt. Got it?”

  Lucia nodded yes, even though she didn’t. There was a silence during which Lucia was trying to do the math.

  “Don’t you think you should let your brothers in?” Haddie asked.

  Lucia nodded again, but still sat there, frowning and thinking.

  Haddie leapt out of bed. “Lucia, isn’t it?” She even pronounced it right.

  “Yes.”

  Haddie pulled on a dressing gown that was flung across an oval standing mirror. “Come on. I’ll show you how to lower the drawbridge.”

  She led Lucia through a narrow stone hallway, lit by wall sconces, and down several twisting staircases. Everything was much smaller than it should have been. Even the ceilings were so low that a tallish adult would have had to duck while walking through the halls. Luckily, Haddie was hardly taller than Otto, so they navigated fairly comfortably. Haddie led Lucia through an impressive-looking oak door banded and studded with iron, though not nearly as tall as a normal door, and outside into a courtyard. Straight ahead was a gatehouse, the opening of which was barred by a portcullis. Though Lucia had never seen an actual portcullis, she suspected that this one was on the puny side. In her books, it often took several large, grunting men to raise the portcullis and let down the drawbridge but Haddie managed it all very easily without any grunting at all. The drawbridge creaked down on its pulleys and landed with a solid thump.

  “Be you friends or foes!?” Haddie called out to the two nervous-looking shadows on the far side of the moat.

  Lucia thought that was a nice touch.

  “Friends!” Max called back.

  “Excellent! Proceed! And watch out for the crocodile in the moat!” Haddie called back.

  “Is there really?” Lucia asked her.

  “No. But I’m considering getting one. Do you think it could survive in an English moat?”

  “I think they’re rather tropical animals.”

  “Ooo, rather!” Haddie replied, and Lucia had the uncomfortable feeling that Haddie was making fun of her.

  “Hello!” Haddie stepped forward as the boys came across to the other side. “You’re Otto, and you must be Max.”

  Otto and Max shot a questioning glance at Lucia.

  “She’s Great-aunt Haddie,” Lucia said, happy to have the correct information before Max did. “It makes sense if you do the math,” she assured them, even though she still didn’t understand it.

  “Do you know that your shirt is squirming?” Haddie asked Otto.

  Otto nodded sheepishly.

  “You should let it out, don’t you think?” Haddie said.

  So Otto pulled Chester out from under his shirt.

  “Now let’s get down to business.” Haddie looked at them all with her hands planted on her boy hips, her brows pinched into a serious frown. But it wasn’t like most adults’ serious frowns. It was like she was imitating a serious frown. “Does your father know you’re here?”

  They considered lying to her, because they all, quite suddenly, wanted very badly to stay. But before they did, Haddie answered for them.

  “No
, of course he doesn’t know,” she said. “He’d have never let you come here in the first place.”

  “Really? Why not?” Max asked.

  “Because . . .” Haddie squinted at them, then shifted her legs uneasily. She sucked air into her mouth, and worked her jaw around in a peculiar way, as though she were considering how to answer. Then she blew a spitball right into Max’s eye.

  “Hey!” Max clapped his hand to his eye.

  “Oh, sorry about that,” Haddie said blandly. She pivoted on her bare feet and said, “Onward and inward,” then headed back through the courtyard toward the house.

  The Hardscrabbles looked at one another for a moment. It was possible that the spitball was an accident. That she just meant to blow off an expressive phew and the spit simply rode on an innocent air stream directly into Max’s eye. But they all suspected that it was deliberate and still do, especially now that they know why their father didn’t want them to come visit her.

  They followed her anyway. You would have too.

  Chapter 8

  In which the Hardscrabbles gag on peanut butter and jelly and then are locked in the dungeon, where Max begins to think deeply and importantly

  In the main entranceway, the Hardscrabbles gawked at a child-size suit of armor before Haddie led them down a corridor with heavy timber beams running across the ceiling and narrow arched windows set deep into the lumpy stone wall. The Hardscrabbles’ collective trainers made an awful squeaky sound against the floor as they passed several small alcoves that half hid spiralling staircases.

  “Here we are,” Haddie said, and led them into a small round room that was a kitchen of some sort. It had a little pink play oven that reached no higher than Lucia’s hip, as well as a tiny pink play refrigerator. There was a real sink, though much squatter than a normal one. In the middle of the room was a small pink plastic table with four tiny pink chairs, the backs of which were shaped like hearts. Haddie nodded toward it.

  “Sit. Hungry?”

  They were. Haddie opened the tiny play refrigerator and looked inside. There couldn’t have been much in there, but still she stared inside thoughtfully for quite a while. Finally, she pulled out two jars of something or other and a loaf of bread. Using a pink plastic knife, Haddie slathered the bread with the contents of the jars, then handed each of the children a sandwich on pink plastic tea saucers.