The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

  Off in the distance she heard a rumble. It was so faint that she thought nothing of it, but as she walked the rumble grew louder. She glanced over the stretch of fields to her right, in the direction of the noise. At first she saw nothing. But by the time the lane turned into paved road, and more houses appeared, huddling closer and closer together as the road progressed, Lucia heard a whistle and saw flashes of metal in the distance, appearing between the trees. The train!

  She began to run now, knowing full well that it was an impossible race. Yet it was the only thing she could think to do. The train was roaring through the town so loudly that she could barely hear her own shoes as they pounded on the pavement.

  She spotted Saint George’s shop, noting the CLOSED sign out front, and sneered even as she ran past. Still, her mind was so full of Otto there was hardly room in it to hate Saint George properly.

  In the heart of town, she passed several people who stared at her suspiciously as she darted by. This was the sort of town, like Little Tunks, where a kid couldn’t run without someone wondering if she’d just pinched something at the store.

  The train’s roar subsided then stopped altogether. Otto would be boarding the train now. Without her. She kept up her pace anyway, even though the station was still far off, too far for her to make it in time. Her legs were aching and her breath came in wobbly gasps, the sound of which made her feel more desperate. Why desperate? you are probably thinking. But you have never been the sister to a brother who is very odd and unpredictable. And you have never been the sort of sister who has rarely been more than a few rooms apart from her odd brother, and is not sure what would happen to either of them if they ever were.

  By the time Lucia reached the station, the tail of the train was winding around the curve on the track. At the far end of the platform a man in a brown suit and carrying a briefcase walked past the station building and down the steps, but apart from that the platform was empty. Lucia stared after the train despairingly, watching it whip around the final bend and disappear from view.

  Did all grand adventures go so utterly wrong? Sometimes they did in books, but in real life they feel far worse. In real life you can’t put the book down and collect yourself with a piece of charred toast and butter. You have to keep on feeling bad, and hungry too, if you haven’t had any breakfast, which Lucia had not.

  She stood there for a moment, her breath still drawing in hard, shivery gulps from her run. Out of the corner of her eye, from behind the brick station building, she saw a slender black ribbon twitch in the breezeless air then disappear as though someone had yanked it back. She stared curiously at the spot where it had been.

  A few seconds later a black cat appeared from behind the building, its tail curled into a question mark and a fifth leg swinging right in front of its hind one. Lucia opened her mouth to call out in joy, then ran instead, laughing while the cat watched, its tail unravelling then re-forming its question mark. Scooping up Chester, Lucia peered around the side of the station building. And there he was! There they both were! Otto, sitting on a bench bolted to the building, with a disgruntled look on his face, and Max standing in front of him with his hands tucked into his back pockets.

  “You didn’t leave! Oh, thank goodness! How did you get here so fast? Saint George is despicable. You’ll hate him when I tell you . . .” She spoke to Otto then to Max then to both, all the while clutching Chester to her chest. She was so excited that she squeezed the cat too tightly. It yowled in complaint. Otto rose to snatch him out of Lucia’s arms, then collapsed back onto the bench.

  “They wouldn’t let him on the train without a cat carrier,” Max explained.

  “Thank you, cat,” Lucia said to Chester, smiling.

  Otto scowled up at her, and her smile faded.

  “If I’d known that was the rule, I would have put him in my shirt when I tried to buy the ticket,” he grumbled.

  It hurt Lucia that he had wanted to leave so badly; that he felt he could manage the train ride and the strange faces, even Mrs. Carnival, without her with him.

  “What took you so long to get here?” asked Max.

  “Well, I don’t have wings, do I?” she said, preferring to be irritated instead of hurt.

  “Neither do I but I’ve been here a solid twenty minutes ahead of you. You must have taken the wrong path. The castle’s gatehouse was facing us when we arrived last night, didn’t you notice?”

  “Of course,” Lucia said (she hadn’t).

  “Then why didn’t you take the path opposite?” Max persisted.

  “Because I spotted something more interesting on another path,” she said. It was not exactly the truth, but never mind.

  “What was it?” Max asked.

  “The Kneebone Boy,” Lucia said. She waited for Max to ask her to explain.

  “There’s no such thing,” Max said. “The Kneebone Boy is just a fairy tale.”

  “You’ve heard of him?” Lucia immediately regretted the shock in her voice.

  “Of course. There’s a whole section about him in Binwater’s Castle Myths and Legends and the BBC had a show on monsters of the British Isles last summer. Covered in hair. Bat’s ears and claws, locked in a secret room, once ripped out the lungs of a doctor who came to see him. . . .”

  Lucia hadn’t heard that last part.

  “Yes, well, the thing I saw in the woods was real enough,” she said. “Saint George saw him too.”

  And she told her brothers the entire story, winding the whole thing up with a finger jab at Max’s face. “So you see, genius, there is such a thing as The Kneebone Boy.”

  Max told her to take her stupid finger out of his face, which made her poke it into his forehead. This was headed in a bad direction and things might have gotten ugly if Otto hadn’t suddenly said, “Do you think you could find them again?”

  “Find what?” Lucia asked, noticing that Otto’s one visible eye was looking especially alert.

  “The two birch trees. You know, the spot where you saw . . . the boy.”

  “Yes, I think so,” Lucia said slowly. “Why?”

  “Well, maybe we could find him.” There was a sheepish tone in Otto’s voice, which Lucia understood immediately.

  “Well, we must find him, mustn’t we?” Lucia said with sudden energy. “What kind of people would we be if we didn’t at least try to warn him about Saint George’s traps?”

  Max says that Lucia was being shamelessly mercenary here. He says that she knew searching for a boy with claws and bat ears and whatnot would be irresistible for Otto; that it would keep his mind off of leaving Snoring-by-the-Sea.

  Lucia, however, maintains that sometimes you have to start a thing for all the wrong reasons in order to discover the right ones.

  Chapter 14

  In which Mr. Pickering tells us a story

  So we’ve come to the part of the book in which the Hardscrabbles begin to be less ordinary and more heroic. I wish it had come sooner, so you didn’t see us arguing about stupid things so much. And also because of Mr. Dupuis.

  “Two important points, old man,” Max said, sitting beside Otto and draping his arm across his shoulder. “Number one, I don’t know what it is Lucia and Saint George saw, but I’ll guarantee you it wasn’t The Kneebone Boy.”

  “Shut up, why don’t you?” Lucia hissed at him.

  “And number two,” Max went on, ignoring Lucia completely, “whatever it was she saw, is not going to be hanging around, waiting for us to find it.”

  That was true, actually.

  “There must be some way to find him,” Lucia said.

  They sat on the bench and thought, including Max, who could never resist a good think.

  “Do you remember,” Max said after a while, “how Prince Andrei tamed his black fox?”

  “He set a proper table by its den, didn’t he?” Lucia said, trying to remember what their father had told them. “And he ate his meals there.”

  “Right, and he set a plate for the fox too, filled wit
h chicken eggs. And after a while the fox began to get used to the idea of the prince and they ate all their meals together.”

  “All right,” Otto said.

  “All right,” Lucia agreed.

  Max look alarmed. “I didn’t mean to literally do it. I only mean that if one was going to try to make friends with a wild boy that’s how one could do it, but I certainly don’t think—”

  “There’s a corner store down the road. We could buy some food,” Otto said, rising from the bench, holding Chester.

  “Well, that’s a complete waste of money,” Max objected.

  It was two to one, so Max had to go along with it, though as they walked to the corner store he kept grumbling that the birds in the woods would eat the food in the end, and there goes the last of their money, into bird guts.

  Lucia on the other hand was well pleased that Otto was going to spend the last of their money. It meant that there wouldn’t be any left to pay for his return ticket to Little Tunks.

  Outside the market, Otto tucked Chester under his shirt, arranging his scarf to hide the bump. They bought a loaf of bread, sliced cheese, a package of chocolate digestive biscuits, four bottles of cola, and four packages of cheese-and-onion crisps.

  With a cantankerous look on his face, Max eyed the ten-pound note Otto handed to the clerk. Once they were outside, he grumbled, “Fine. Now let’s make a few sandwiches, leave them in the woods, and say good-bye to good money.”

  “We’ll need plates,” Otto said. “And a tablecloth.”

  “That’s right,” Lucia said, happy at the thought of more money spent. “We’ll set a proper table like the prince.”

  Max groaned.

  They found a little shop in town called Pickering’s This ’n’ That, which sold odds and ends and smelled of the fusty old curtains in the school’s assembly hall. It was so cluttered with knickknacks that for a few minutes they assumed they were alone in the shop. Otto let Chester out of his shirt and they all wandered through the narrow aisles, hands behind their backs so as not to break anything, gazing around at the shelves of kitten statuettes and flowered jugs and tiny cannons no bigger than a baby’s finger, and salt and pepper shakers and porcupine quills trapped in Lucite disks. They fingered through masses of ancient postcards in which people wrote about their cousin Henry who was down with the flu, and that the weather was unseasonably warm or frightfully damp, which shows that the really interesting letters are always thrown away, like Haddie’s to Casper.

  “Ah, it’s a cat!” a thin voice said. “I thought it might be a small dog at first, and they’re not allowed, but a cat . . . a cat knows its way around knickknacks. Did you want something in particular?”

  It took some looking round to discover who was talking. Sitting on a battered white armchair in the corner of the room was a man in a white button-down shirt that was yellowed around the collar. He had nice, worried brown eyes, very little hair, and crooked eyeteeth.

  “Yes,” Lucia said. “We need plates.”

  “Plates. Well,” the man slowly rose from his chair. He wasn’t very ancient—maybe in his fifties or so—but he moved carefully, like he was quite elderly. The children assumed he was Mr. Pickering, and in fact he was, so we’ll call him by his name now. “I do have a few plates,” said Mr. Pickering.

  He guided them to the back of the store where there was truly the hugest assortment of plates the Hardscrabbles had ever seen: flowered; gold-rimmed; plates with roosters on them; souvenir plates of the Eiffel Tower; plates with Marilyn Monroe on them; and on and on.

  “What sort are you looking for?” Mr. Pickering asked, using his thumb to wipe a bit of dust from the edge of a plate festooned with dancing mushrooms. They thought for a minute.

  Otto said, “Something majestic.”

  “Something majestic,” Lucia translated.

  “Majestic is off to the right, up above the chubby angels, there you are.”

  There were plates with the Queen’s face on it and a few lovely ones of Princes William and Harry and some of Buckingham Palace and others with the royal crests, which were nice and colorful. But the one that caught their eye showed a lumpy castle on the edge of a cliff.

  “That’s Kneebone Castle!” Lucia pointed.

  “Oh, yes,” Mr. Pickering said, “there have been quite a few souvenir plates done of Kneebone Castle. Here’s one with the original Lord and Lady Kneebone.” He pointed to a pale blue plate with two portraits, each inside little gilded ovals. Lord Kneebone had no chin and Lady Kneebone had two of them.

  “This one here is of Kneebone Castle as well, but it’s very unusual.” He took down a plate and held it out for them to look at more closely. “Do you see the red things hanging from windows?”

  The Hardscrabbles nodded.

  “They’re scarves. Famous incident that happened way back in the late 1800s. I’m assuming you know about The Kneebone Boy?”

  It took all their self-control not to make eyes at one another. They simply nodded and tried not to look quite as interested as they felt.

  “Well, there had been talk about this monster child for many years. That he’d been locked away in a hidden room in the castle. So some smart fellow who was visiting Lord Kneebone waited for him and his lady to leave the castle and then quickly went from room to room, hanging a red scarf out of every window in the castle. When he stepped outside in the courtyard to examine the windows, he saw exactly what he hoped to see: one of the windows had no scarf hanging from it. He hadn’t missed it. Oh, no, he was very thorough. It was simply that the room was tucked away, with a secret entrance that was very hard to discover. Right in there.” Mr. Pickering tapped one slender white finger on the plate’s scarfless window. “That is where The Kneebone Boy was kept prisoner.”

  The window was high up on the last tower, closest to the sea. You know the window. You’ve seen the Hardscrabbles stare into it twice already, once when they were on the way to the beach, and again when Lucia was looking through the binoculars.

  “Have you ever seen him?” Lucia asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Seen him?” Mr. Pickering looked startled, as though it were a question he’d never expected to be asked, and so had not thought up a sensible-sounding answer. “Not seen him, per se.”

  “Lucia hasn’t seen him per se either,” Max said, then instantly looked at Lucia because he knew he shouldn’t have said it. But Mr. Pickering didn’t seem to notice.

  “But something happened,” Lucia urged him after she had made a face at Max.

  “Well, yes, but so long ago, and under such strange circumstances that I can’t be sure it was anything at all.” Mr. Pickering stopped then and there, and probably would not have gone any further.

  But then Otto did something most out of the ordinary for him. He turned to Mr. Pickering and signed to him very earnestly. Of course Mr. Pickering had no idea what Otto was saying, but he guessed that it was an appeal to hear the story. And Mr. Pickering had enough good sense to know that this was no silly appeal, but that important things were at stake. He glanced at the shop door to see that no one was coming in, then crossed his arms against his narrow chest.

  “I never saw him, but . . . my father was an electrician, the only one in Snoring, and the Kneebones hired him to wire the folly for electricity. I was about eleven at the time and my dad took me along on the first day, because I’d always wanted to see inside the folly. No one I knew had ever been in there. The Kneebone children all had tutors, so none of the other kids in Snoring had met them, though we’d see them playing by the sea from time to time. So of course I was eager to go.

  “But when we crossed the drawbridge and all three of the Kneebone children met us at the gatehouse, I wondered if I’d made an awful mistake. Three fierce faces—two boys and a girl—staring at us just as though we had invaded their castle, which in a way we had. My father didn’t notice. He said, ‘Have fun,’ or something like that and left me at their mercy.

  “They questioned me
for a few minutes and they made fun of my teeth. After that they were quite friendly. They showed me all their toys and we shot arrows from the siege tower at my cap, which they had swiped from my head and flung to the courtyard below—the younger boy was the best shot. He skewered my poor cap to bits. We even had a joust on their little ponies. I fell off right away but they played on, charging at one another at top speed, hooting and screaming. They were the most fearless, wild children I’d ever met in my life. I was dizzy with admiration.

  “Then they said, ‘There’s another one of us, you know. Our oldest brother. The Kneebone Boy, people call him.’ They had a wicked look in their eyes. That should have tipped me off right then, but I was very curious.

  “ ‘Do you want to meet him?’ they asked. I nodded, too excited and frightened to even speak.

  “ ‘We’ll take you to him,’ they said, ‘but we’re going a secret way, so first we have to blindfold you.’

  “They tied an old rag over my eyes and led me through the house. We stopped suddenly and in a moment I heard noises—a tap-tap-tapping, then scraping and grunting. After that there was a hiss that seemed to fly over my head and then an awful screech. I thought one of the Kneebones was hurt and I said, ‘Are you all right?’ but they just told me to ‘Shut it.’ They made me crouch down and pushed me through a door—my head banged against it as I went through. Then they said I could stand up again. Someone held my hand. I hoped it wasn’t the girl because my palm was so sweaty. We walked a long way—downhill it felt like. I could smell damp earth and the air was clammy and cold. I put out my free hand and felt a rock wall. After a while, I began to hear water running somewhere far below and soon after that we stopped.

  “ ‘We’ve got to cross a bridge here,’ the girl said.

  “Someone placed my hands on the shoulders of the person in front of me. Someone else put their hands on my hips from behind and we walked like that, very slowly. I knew we’d crossed when one of the boys shoved me up against a wall.