The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

  “This must be it,” Max said. “Give us some light in there, Otto.”

  It looked like a cave at first glance but the torch found a set of crudely carved stairs along the back wall. The stairs rose up, through a vertical tunnel of stone, twisting round and round at a steep incline.

  “Ready to climb?” Max said.

  Lucia and Otto nodded. Up they went, Max at the lead, Lucia in the middle and Otto holding the torch upwards from his position at the bottom. The stairs were shallow and the space was tight. They had to press their hands against the walls for balance as they climbed. Round and round they went in the most dizzying way, higher and higher, until their thigh muscles felt like they’d been pummeled.

  “How much longer to the tower, do you think?” Lucia asked, panting.

  “The tower? I doubt we’ve reached the castle’s dungeon yet,” Max said, also breathless.

  They continued on, with Otto staring up at Lucia’s bum, Lucia staring up at Max’s bum, and Max having the lucky bumless view. Suddenly the rock face changed. The stones were now the rough-cut lumps of the castle wall. Up close they were mud brown with red veins creeping across them, and they gave off the smell of long-buried coins.

  “Okay, we’re in the castle,” Max whispered. There was no reason to whisper really, but it did make them feel eerie to be inside. It was like travelling beneath the skin of a giant. The castle’s stones even felt different from the cliff’s rock. The stones were warmer beneath their hands, and there was a smoothness to the lumps, like great, clenched muscles. They could hear sounds now too, a faint humming from somewhere deep in the bowels of the castle and once, as they climbed higher, the sound of someone crying. That made them stop in their tracks until the crying ceased. Then, without a word to one another, they kept climbing. There was nothing else to do after all. Not really.

  “There’s something up ahead,” Max whispered suddenly. “Here. Otto, pass me up the torch.”

  The torch was passed and Max shined it above his head, waving it this way and that.

  “Bad,” Max said finally.

  “What? Bad what?” Lucia cried.

  “They’ve built an extension,” Max said.

  It was a close thing. Lucia had even formed a fist and was about to make contact with the back of Max’s thigh when Otto squeezed her ankle to keep her from doing it.

  “That’s not funny, Max!” she said. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “No, it’s not funny,” Max said. “Don’t you understand? The extension blocks the stairs. Look.”

  Lucia climbed a little higher and gazed up. He was right. There was a narrow space between the wallboard and the stone wall but then it was blocked off altogether by wooden beams and, above that, solid wood planking.

  “But how do we get to the sultan then?” Lucia said.

  “I don’t know,” Max said.

  At first she thought he was joking. Max always knew what to do next. She waited for him to say, “Never mind, just wanted to see you squirm. Here’s what we do.” And then he would tell them his brilliant idea.

  But he didn’t.

  “Well, there must be something!” Lucia said. “We can’t just turn back now.”

  “I don’t see what else we can do,” Max said.

  They stood there, all three of them, not quite believing their bad luck and hating extensions in general and wondering bitterly, and out loud, why a castle as big as the Kneebone Castle would even need an extension to begin with.

  It was Otto who surprised them and began to climb again. He squeezed past Lucia, then Max, grabbing the torch out of his hands.

  “It’s no use, Otto,” Max said.

  But Otto kept going until he came to the narrow space between the stone wall and the wallboard. With a hop, he pulled up his legs and pressed the soles of his trainers against the wallboard while pushing his back against the stone wall. Now off the ground, his body forming an L, he began to shimmy up the wall. He managed to shimmy all the way to the top of the wallboard wall before he could go no further.

  “Come on down, Otto,” Lucia said. “It’s no good.”

  Instead of coming down, though, the torch light suddenly went out and Otto vanished in the darkness.

  “Otto?” they called up blindly.

  There was no answer. Of course.

  Lucia felt the first stirrings of panic beginning to set in.

  “Go, go!” she said, pushing at Max’s leg.

  They both hurried up the stairs as best as they could in pitch blackness. Max yelped suddenly, and Lucia cried out, “What is it?”

  “Hit my head on the wallboard,” he said.

  Suddenly light shone above them, seemingly from nowhere, illuminating the narrow space. Otto was nowhere in sight but they could hear a soft knocking against the wall, on the inside.

  “He’s in!” Lucia said. “But how—? Oh, look, there are spaces between the beams. He slipped in through there.”

  “Well, who could see it from down below?” Max said sulkily.

  “Otto did somehow,” Lucia said.

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Oh, budge up and let me pass if you’re just going to stand here and whinge about it,” Lucia said.

  That made Max move. They both shimmied up the wall, just as Otto had done, and when they got to the top they squeezed between the beams. Max went headfirst, which was unfortunate because it was a long drop to the floor. Otto caught him seconds before he cracked his head open. Lucia turned on her stomach and put her feet through the opening, then lowered herself slowly. She dangled for a minute before she had the courage to let go. Otto caught her too.

  Then they looked all around to see where they had landed.

  Mr. Dupuis says that at the start of every chapter, the author must ask him- or herself this question: What’s the most important message you want to convey to your readers here? I have thought about this quite a bit. I gave it a solid twenty minutes anyway, while I was waiting at the dentist’s office and couldn’t find a decent gossip magazine.

  Here is my most important message to you:

  All great adventures have moments that are really crap.

  Chapter 22

  In which there is a lot of toilet paper and feminine thingamathings

  The Hardscrabbles had landed in a room filled with toilets. It wasn’t a restroom, not quite yet. There were stalls, but the stalls were empty. Six toilets sat at one end of the room, along with miscellaneous pipes and nuts and bolts. A mop and bucket stood in one corner and in the opposite corner were shelves with a dozen large packs of toilet paper, several bottles of hand soap and disinfectant and, not to be rude, also boxes of feminine thingamathings.

  Otto discovered the bad news right away.

  “The door is locked,” he said as he turned the knob. So of course Max and Lucia had to try the door too and they confirmed that it was indeed locked.

  There was more bad news.

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to get back out through the beams, either,” Max said. “It’s too high up.”

  They spent the next half hour trying to balance toilets on top of one another in order to reach the beams, but you can’t imagine how unstackable toilets are. They tried to stack up on one another’s shoulders as well, but they couldn’t quite reach even then. Finally, they had to admit the awful truth of their situation.

  “We’re well and truly trapped!” Otto said, looking very panicky.

  “Now look,” Lucia said, trying to keep her voice bright even though she felt nearly as panicky as Otto, “there’ll be workers coming to put in the toilets, won’t there? They’ll probably be here in the morning, and then we can slip out and find the sultan.”

  “Remember when we had the roof mended back home?” Otto said. “The workers said they’d be there the first of June and they didn’t show up till the end of August.”

  This was perfectly true. Poor Casper had cartons of soggy sketches because of it.

  “Yes, but
you’re forgetting about the toilet paper, Otto,” Lucia said. “They’re going to need toilet paper.”

  “One thousand and one sheets to the roll,” Max said glumly, holding up a package with 1,001 SHEETS TO THE ROLL! printed on it.

  “Shut up please,” Lucia said. “Anyway, we can always yell and bang on the door until someone opens it. And you’re forgetting Haddie. She knows we went through the passage. If we don’t come back, she’ll come looking for us.”

  “In any case, we’ll be caught,” Max said. “And then who knows what they’ll do with us?”

  It certainly did seem grim. Otto collapsed on one of the toilets, rested his head against the wall and shut his eyes, though his hands moved.

  “Wake me up when someone comes,” he said.

  Lucia and Max watched him for a moment. Suddenly they too felt the full effects of a sleepless night filled with danger and anxiety, and now hopelessness.

  “Right,” Lucia said. “If we have to spend the night, we might as well make ourselves at home.”

  With Max’s help, she arranged the packages of toilet paper to form a mattress for all three of them to share. The packs of feminine thingamathings were used for pillows.

  They all lay there on their backs for a while, listening to the silence.

  “I do remember her,” Otto said suddenly.

  “Who do you remember?” Lucia asked. Her voice sounded wispy with exhaustion.

  “Mum,” Otto said.

  “You do?” Max cried. He rose up on his elbow, making the toilet paper packages crackle. “Then why on earth have you always said you didn’t?”

  There was no answer.

  “Otto?” Max nudged him sharply with his foot.

  “Let him be,” Lucia said when Otto rolled over on his side, with his back to them.

  “I just don’t see why he has to be so secretive about things,” Max grumbled. A few minutes later, Max was snoring.

  Lucia, however, was still wide awake. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something about Otto’s secretiveness that reminded her of The Kneebone Boy. Maybe it was because of what Saint George had said—that The Kneebone Boy had spent his life hidden away so that the rest of the Kneebones could live as though everything was just fine. What was it that Otto was keeping from them? What did he know? It was impossible to figure. Utterly maddening!

  She closed her eyes and tried to force herself to sleep.

  Believe it or not, lying on a bed of toilet paper is actually quite comfortable.

  But it’s a poor end for an adventure.

  It wasn’t just the fact that the Hardscrabbles had been given an opportunity to do something heroic, something really great and good, and they had botched it. It wasn’t that they would most likely never be on the telly news or have a plaque made about them. It wasn’t even that they had lost any chance of returning to Little Tunks “lurgy free.”

  What really pained Lucia was that she would never ever see the sultan’s face again. He was forever lost to her. She wouldn’t even be able to look at Casper’s sketch of him. It would be too awful to see that half smile, and to know that she had failed him. She could no longer bear to see his beautiful eyes staring back at her, daring her to do something really interesting, and knowing that she had done it and it had gone terribly wrong and that was the end of it.

  She decided she would take the sketch down immediately when she returned home.

  Then she turned her head away from her brothers and cried into a package of feminine thingamathings.

  They slept well into the morning. There were no windows in the room and none of the Hardscrabbles wore a watch, so they woke up to Max’s groan. “Cor, what time is it?”

  “Late, I think. It feels late,” Lucia groaned back and turned over to face him.

  “What happened to you?” Max said. “Have you been crying? You look all ugly.”

  “Oh, thank you very much, you ought to smell your own breath.” She turned away from him again and tried to dig out the crusty bits in her swollen eyes.

  “What?” she heard Max say to Otto. “Oh, yeah, me as well.”

  “You as well what?” Lucia turned to see Otto sitting up and looking all uneasy.

  “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “No, no, no! You can’t.”

  “But the room is silly with toilets,” Otto said.

  “Toilets with no plumbing,” Lucia said. “It’s the same as peeing in a bucket. I won’t sit in a room with pee strewn about.”

  “We don’t strew,” Max said.

  “Don’t you have to go too?” Otto asked her.

  “Of course I do. But I have self-control.”

  That was equivalent to a dare, so they held it as long as they could. Which was about six minutes, give or take. They found that the toilets all had holes in the bottom so the boys peed in the bucket in the corner of the room. They took the mop out of the bucket first.

  It is nearly impossible to hold it in when everyone else is peeing in a bucket, so Lucia did too.

  Now you know the worst.

  Well, nearly the worst.

  A few minutes later, they heard a key in the door. I am proud to say they did not try to hide. There was nowhere to hide in any case, but they didn’t even try. They stood there waiting for the next bad thing to happen. They knew that it might be very bad indeed, since the people who held the sultan were clearly not the best sort of people. And it would be very difficult to explain how they had wound up in the room without incriminating themselves.

  Otto’s hands started moving.

  “Don’t say a word,” he said.

  Which is sort of funny, coming from him. But that’s hindsight because it didn’t seem funny at the time; it seemed like good advice. The door was opened by a stout woman dressed in a pale blue uniform. She had been chewing gum when she opened the door but when she saw the Hardscrabbles standing dead center in the room, she stopped chewing. Her mouth remained open with lower jaw cocked to one side.

  “Bloody hell, who are you?” she finally said.

  The Hardscrabbles didn’t say a word.

  “How did you get in here?” she asked.

  Again, not a word.

  “Who do you belong to?”

  You would think that deliberately not speaking is the easiest thing in the world. It’s quite hard, actually. When someone asks, your natural urge is to answer, even if the answer is a lie. Lucia and Max instantly formed a new respect for Otto.

  “All right,” the woman said, her voice turning severe, “I’m locking you back in here while I go fetch someone to deal with you.” She started to leave when Lucia called out, “Wait!”

  The idea came to her in the form of a face, narrow and fine boned, with skin the color of cherrywood and nostrils that flared indignantly. The face of Princess Uzima, who had slept beneath a baobab tree on the African plains, appeared to Lucia clearly now. She felt the princess’s beautiful, clever eyes fix on her own, and remembered Casper’s words: “The Princess Uzima had nothing . . . no home, no money. Just her own wits and a vial of poison around her neck. But if she commanded a lion to sit up and beg, it would, because she was every inch a princess, down to her small toe.”

  Lucia threw back her shoulders, flared her nostrils, and said to the woman in the blue uniform, “You must take us to see the Sultan of Juwi.”

  The woman jerked her head backwards as though someone had unexpectedly flung something at her.

  “The sultan! How do you know about the sultan?” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Lucia said. She felt her brothers’ eyes on her, but she couldn’t make out their expressions peripherally, and anyway the Princess Uzima would not have cared what anyone else thought. “The point is,” she continued, “we’ve come a long way at tremendous personal risk, and we’ve had to do things that we would rather not have done”—she was thinking here about the bucket in the corner—“and we did it for the sultan’s sake. Now please, would you kindly show us the way to hi
s tower room?”

  There was a long pause, during which the woman scrutinized all their faces. She chewed on her gum two times then stopped and said, “What are your names?”

  “Lucia, Otto, and Max Hardscrabble,” Lucia said. Then she added, “Of Little Tunks,” because it sounded more official.

  “Hardscrabbles,” the woman said, nodding slowly, as though the name were significant, which was exactly what Lucia wanted her to think. “Does Dr. Azziz know you’re here?”

  “No, but Haddie does,” Max said, finally speaking up. “She lives in the folly across the way. And Saint George, he—”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, shut it,” Lucia said. Max always told too much.

  The woman glanced behind her out the door, then said whispered. “All right. I’ll do it for the sultan’s sake. But if you get caught . . . that is, when you get caught, because you absolutely will, you had better not mention me.”

  “Of course not,” Lucia assured her.

  “And I won’t speak up on your behalf either,” she warned. “You’re on your own.”

  “We’re not afraid,” Lucia said, feeling the Princess Uzima’s long elegant arm wrap around her waist in approval.

  “You say that now,” the woman replied dryly. Her eyes suddenly flitted over to the corner of the room, where the bucket of pee stood. She stared at it, then looked back at the Hardscrabbles with raised eyebrows.

  Now that was the worst.

  Chapter 23

  In which Lucia’s hippocampus is nudged

  She led them out of the room, down a winding hallway with a white marble floor and an arched ceiling, painted with scenes from Greek mythology. The hallway led into a large round vestibule with other hallways branching off in all directions and a massive set of stairs in the center.

  “This way,” the woman said briskly, starting up the stairs.

  But just as Max and Lucia began to follow, Otto reached out quickly and grabbed their arms to stop them. When they turned, he put a finger to his lips. Then he said, “We won’t find The Kneebone Boy up there.”