The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

  The last time they had eaten had been at the Indian restaurant, so they all bit into the sandwiches eagerly. After a few chews, however, they all pulled faces of disgust and swallowed with difficulty. Haddie was watching them, fascinated.

  “Don’t like it, do you?” she asked happily.

  “What is it?” Max asked.

  “Peanut butter and jelly.”

  “Jelly?” Lucia wrinkled her nose. “You mean that wiggly stuff?”

  “She means jam,” Max said; then explaining to Haddie, “Our jelly is Jell-O.” He opened up the sandwich now and studiously examined the gloppy mess inside. “Americans love this stuff, don’t they?”

  “And British people don’t, huh?” Haddie raised one eyebrow and nodded significantly. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Max agreed. He loved to think. In fact, he went so far as to take another bite of the repulsive sandwich so as to think more about it.

  “Do you have anything else to eat?” Lucia asked, looking around the kitchen doubtfully.

  “I’ve got canned soup. Loads of canned soup. In case there’s a siege. Do British people like soup?” Haddie said.

  They told her that they did. She opened the oven door and pulled out two cans of soup and a can opener. Then she opened a box that was sitting on top of the little refrigerator. The top of the box said Young Mad Scientist and had a picture of a boy with dishevelled hair wearing a lab coat and holding a test tube. From inside the box, Haddie pulled out a Bunsen burner, two test tubes, and a box of matches. After flipping a lever on the bottom of the Bunsen burner, she struck a match. The burner began to hiss and when Haddie touched the match to the air above the barrel, a blue flame shot out. She opened up the can of soup and carefully poured it into the test tube. Then, with a pair of tongs clamped around the tube, she held it over the flame and the soup began to cook.

  “This is a castle folly, isn’t it?” Max said.

  “That’s what they told me when I rented it,” Haddie said.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, what on earth is a castle folly?” Lucia asked in a very irritated tone.

  “It’s a sort of play castle,” Max answered.

  “It’s exactly a play castle,” Haddie said.

  The Bunsen burner cooked the soup rather rapidly, which was a good thing considering that Haddie had to cook six test tubes full of soup in order to feed them all. As she did, she told them about the castle folly.

  “The castle across the way, Kneebone Castle, is very, very old, built in the 1300s for Lord and Lady Kneebone. Apparently the Kneebones liked to have loads of kids but didn’t enjoy being around them. They built this folly for the kids to live in, with their own servants and tutors and enough to do so that they wouldn’t bug their parents. Nice, huh? Anyway, generations of Kneebone kids have grown up here. The last bunch were real pigs. I spent the first few days here digging filthy socks out of the garden hose and scraping gum off the floor. But it’s a castle, hey? I always wanted to live in a castle, ever since I was a kid. I can’t afford a real one, but I could afford to rent a fake one for the summer. And I was told that there are hidden tunnels and a secret passageway.”

  “So this place doesn’t have any history, then?” Lucia asked. “No bloody battles or poisoned goblets or anything?”

  “Nah. Not here in the folly,” Haddie said as she tipped a test tube of soup into Otto’s pink plastic bowl. “Now if it’s tales of blood and gore that you’re after, the Kneebone Castle across the way is—” She stopped as though she remembered something.

  “What?” Lucia asked eagerly.

  “What?” Haddie responded blankly.

  “You were going to say something.”

  “No, I wasn’t.” She stared back at Lucia challengingly. “But you were just about to tell me why, at half-past midnight, you’ve all suddenly arrived at my home.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Lucia said.

  “Well, don’t you think it’s time you did?” Haddie said.

  So they told her the whole story, and she listened beautifully. While she listened, she pulled her feet up on her chair and picked at a scab on her ankle. She picked at it until it bled, but she was so interested in the story she didn’t even notice. She looked admiringly at the Hardscrabbles during the parts about Frog Nose and taking the ride from Saint George, though Lucia may have exaggerated the element of danger just a bit.

  When Lucia was finished, Haddie sat in silence for a moment. They thought she was most probably contemplating their bravery and quick-thinking. Finally she said, “I have one question.”

  Lucia nodded eagerly. She loved talking about the day, because all in all it sounded like a tremendous adventure.

  But Haddie’s gaze slid over to Otto. “What I want to know is why you don’t remove your scarf?”

  The question took them all by surprise. It had been many years since someone had asked Otto that question.

  “He won’t answer you. He doesn’t talk,” Lucia said.

  Haddie ignored her and kept looking straight at Otto. “Come on,” she said to him. “What’s up with the scarf thing, Slick?”

  There was a long silence while Haddie waited for Otto to answer. He looked away, stroked the cat in his lap, fiddled with his scarf, then went back to eating his soup. But beneath his overgrown hair, his eyes were scooting around nervously. Still, Haddie waited. It was unbearable for Lucia, who was used to answering for Otto promptly.

  “He just really likes his scarf, that’s all,” Lucia said finally.

  Haddie leaned across the table so that her face was inches from Otto. In a quiet voice she said, “We know better, don’t we, pal?”

  Otto looked up from his soup, startled. He opened his mouth as though he were about to say something. Lucia’s and Max’s eyes grew wide. Then he shut his mouth again.

  “It’s late,” Haddie announced. “Finish up the soup, then time for bed. And seeing as you are invaders in my castle, I think I’ll put you in the dungeon. You don’t mind dungeons, do you?”

  It was hard to say since they’d never been in one. But Lucia, at least, thought it sounded gruesome, so she said, “Not at all. We like them actually.”

  Haddie gave them T-shirts and shorts to wear for pyjamas and a tube of toothpaste, but they had to use their fingers for that since their toothbrushes were back at the willow tree. In a real castle the restroom was just a hole in the floor, called a garderobe, and all the nasty stuff fell through a hole and out onto the ground or in the moat. Thankfully, this castle had a real restroom, though it was so tiny you had to keep your arms close to your side or you’d hit the walls.

  Afterwards, Haddie led them back out through the hallway, down one of the dark, winding stairwells, and into a room with bare stone walls and one slitty little window high up the wall with a iron grill over it. Hanging from the ceiling by chains were three pallets with thin mattresses on them. While the Hardscrabbles had been changing and brushing their teeth, Haddie had put out some blankets and pillows on the beds.

  “Try to keep still-ish during the night,” Haddie said.

  “Why?” Max asked.

  “Because if you keep still, they will too.” Haddie walked to the door and then turned back. “You’ll stay for a while, won’t you? You won’t skedaddle back home tomorrow?”

  “Our dad won’t be back for several days,” Max said. “We have nowhere else to go.” (Not quite true.)

  “Excellent,” Haddie said.

  Then she shut the dungeon door. And bolted it. The Hardscrabbles weren’t too happy about that part. Still, as Lucia said, what was the point of sleeping in a dungeon if the door was left unlocked?

  “What do you think they are? The things that will keep still if we do?” Max asked.

  “You’re scared, aren’t you?” Lucia asked. She didn’t ask this in a taunting way. She asked this in a hopeful way, because it’s always more satisfying to be brave when someone else is afraid. Especially if it’s someone who is occasionally brav
er than you are.

  “Not exactly. I’m just slightly . . . restive,” Max said.

  “That’s crap. You’re as nervous as a pigeon,” Lucia said.

  “That’s what I said,” said Max.

  “No, you didn’t. You just said you were tired,” Lucia replied.

  There was silence in the room. Dungeons are exactly as dark as you think they would be, by the way.

  “Restive doesn’t mean tired,” Max said finally. “It means nervous.”

  It does actually. I looked it up later. However, I wouldn’t advise using that word because it will only annoy people, and they will think you are a giant-size prat.

  Otto sat down on one of the pallets, making the chain squeal a bit. Right after there was a sound of something skittering across the floor and up the wall. Startled, Lucia and Max leapt up on a pallet too—the same one—and the skittering continued for a few seconds more. Chester was the only one who thought it was a good idea to see what was crawling about. He had bounded off Otto’s lap and was running around on the floor, chasing something that they could not see in the blackness. He didn’t catch it, because he jumped back in Otto’s lap and there was nothing hanging out of his mouth. The fifth leg probably slowed him down.

  “I guess that was the they she was talking about,” Max said when all went quiet again.

  “Otto?” Lucia asked. Through the darkness, she could see his scared, pale face staring back at her. “It’s okay. It’s probably just mice.”

  “Crawling up the wall?” Max said.

  Lucia punched him in the thigh.

  “Let’s just go to sleep,” Lucia said. She jumped off the pallet and climbed into the empty one. Suddenly they heard the skittering again, fast and furious. This time it seemed to come from the opposite side of the room, crawling down the wall and across the floor, then back up the wall. Chester leapt off Otto’s lap and chased the thing again, making a flying leap for it as it climbed the wall, then landing on his side with a thump. After that, he stood vigil by the wall, waiting for it to skitter back down again.

  “Did you hear what she said about underground tunnels and secret passageways?” Lucia said, for Otto’s sake mostly, to keep his mind off the thing in the room. “Tomorrow we should explore.”

  Otto nodded, but Max only replied, “Hnnn?”

  “We should explore, I said,” Lucia repeated.

  “Right,” Max said, but he sounded preoccupied. He was thinking deeply and importantly. Lucia knew from experience not to interrupt him when he was thinking deeply and importantly. If you let him alone, he would eventually tell you something very interesting.

  Finally, he said, “I was just thinking about Haddie.”

  “What about her?” Lucia asked.

  “Did you notice something odd about her?” Max said.

  “Well, she’s awfully young for a great-aunt, but it works out if you do the math,” Lucia said (though she still hadn’t been able to).

  “No, no, not that,” Max said.

  “She seems lonely,” Lucia said. “She really wanted us to stay.”

  “Maybe,” Max said. “But that isn’t it.”

  Max could be infuriatingly slow to come to the point sometimes. Lucia was forced to lean across and smack him on the head with her pillow. “Oh, for goodness’ sakes, could you just tell us already?”

  “Ow! You didn’t need to do that, you know,” he said.

  The skittering started up again, and this time Lucia saw the thing. Her eyes must have adjusted to the dark. It was a rat. Quite large and running down the wall. A noise came out of her mouth that Max says was a shriek but really it was just a gasp of surprise, with some extra sound to it.

  They all sat up in bed then and watched the rat race along the bottom of the floor, with Chester right behind it, then up the wall. It went straight up, like a spider, all the way until it disappeared into the ceiling. Chester sat by the wall and stared up, his tail curled into a question mark.

  “Rats can’t climb walls,” Lucia whispered.

  “I know,” Max whispered back.

  Suddenly he jumped up on his bed noisily and leapt off of it, then rushed to the center of the room. The sound of skittering started up and sure enough, the rat was climbing back down the wall. This time Chester crouched low and pounced just as the rat hit the ground. But the rat flew out from between his claws, apparently unhurt, and shot across the floor again. With a leap, Max threw his whole body down on the creature, much to Lucia’s disgust and awe. He stayed on the ground for a few moments, holding the rat beneath him with great difficulty. The creature was crying out with a strange whining sound, until it shot out from beneath him and hurried back across the floor and up the wall.

  “I can’t believe you did that!” Lucia cried. “Did it bite you?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lucia. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “This isn’t a real castle. Or a real dungeon. Or a real rat. It’s a toy. Spring-loaded, I think, and it’s triggered by the bed chains’ movement. It runs on a little track.”

  So the Hardscrabbles spent the next twenty minutes jumping on their beds and making the rat run across the floor, behaving exactly the same way that generations of Kneebone children had behaved in the dungeon, until poor Chester looked like he would collapse from heart failure.

  Thus, they all forgot about the strange thing that Max had noticed about Haddie. All but Max, of course, who lay awake in bed long after the others had gone to sleep, thinking deeply and importantly.

  Chapter 9

  In which the Hardscrabbles worry about the title of this book and other things

  The thing that’s been bothering me about this book so far is that we all seem very ordinary. A few times I tried to make us sound more dashing and heroic, but one of us (I won’t say who, but I bet you know) made me take those parts out because they weren’t factual. He said that we started off ordinary and became remarkable because of everything that happened, and people need to know the truth.

  “The truth is a slippery fish,” I replied.

  “You don’t even know what that means,” he said.

  “You can bloody well stuff it,” I told him.

  Things got ugly after that.

  The other thing that’s been bothering me is that we haven’t yet mentioned The Kneebone Boy and he is the title of this book. That seems like a serious flaw. Still, it can’t be helped because that’s the way things worked out, and anyway he’s coming in very soon. We’re not overly worried about you in particular, because we’re guessing that the castle folly and our missing mum is enough to keep you happy for a while. We are slightly worried about Mr. Dupuis, however, who might have some harsh things to say about sloppy plotting.

  Chapter 10

  In which the Hardscrabbles find out some things about their mother, Max eats a Pixy Stix, and then makes Otto angry

  It was hard to tell when it was morning. There was only the sliver of a window with the iron grill over it and it was way high up on the wall. If the day was overcast, as it was that morning, the dungeon was nearly as dark as it was in the middle of the night.

  Chester was the first to get up. He stretched out his supple black body, then sat on top of Otto’s chest and cleaned himself thoroughly, paying special attention to his fifth leg.

  The Hardscrabbles all did essentially the same thing, but it took them a lot longer. They stretched and groaned, their bodies cramped from the thin mattresses. They stared at one another dumbly for a while, silently putting together the events from yesterday.

  “We ought to ring Mrs. Carnival,” Otto said. “In case Dad rings her looking for us when he can’t get through to Angela.”

  Max shook his head. “She’ll make us go back to Little Tunks.”

  “We can just tell her that we’re all right.”

  “You know she’ll ask questions,” Max droned.

  “If she does, we’ll just hang up.”

  It was the right and responsibl
e thing to do, so they put it off until later.

  Max wanted to explore the castle folly, but Lucia was anxious to look at the sea. She had felt the sea tugging at her since they’d first arrived. It gave her a sloshy feeling between her ears.

  Much to their surprise, the dungeon door was unlocked. In fact, they discovered that it didn’t lock at all, it only made a sound like it was being bolted shut when you closed it. They all used the restroom until they were reasonably clean and since Haddie was nowhere to be found, they decided to go directly to the seaside.

  Outside, the air was already warming and all around was the smell of the sea. A rolling carpet of fog concealed everything below their knees, so that often all they could see of Chester was the top of his question-mark tail. A combination of the sea smell and the fog gave Lucia the delicious sense of time collapsing. She imagined that she could hear the cannon fire of great ships of war, the splash of Viking oars, even the slow-motion footsteps of dinosaurs pressing through primordial forests.

  Their walk toward the sea took them right past Kneebone Castle. In the daylight, it was even uglier than it had appeared the night before. Its stones were an oily-looking brown, fat and lumpy and uneven, like enormously thick hamburger patties stacked on top of each other. Only the windows and crenellations were neatly hewn out of the stone. The drawbridge was up and the portcullis was down.

  “What an awful-looking place,” Lucia said, gazing up at the towers. She was enchanted. “Do you think it’s open to the public?”

  “I’m sure it’s not,” Max said.

  “How do you know?” Lucia said, winching her brows at him.

  “The curtain wall has been patched up recently,” Max said. “Look along the top.”