Charlie Bone and the Invisible Boy

by Jenny Nimmo

  “You remember when Manfred locked me in the attic? Well, someone let me out, and whoever it was had a passion for jam. I heard Manfred teasing him about it. I know this sounds peculiar but he, or she, seemed to be invisible. And then there was this boy, Ollie Sparks, who was lost in the attics ages ago. He got out eventually and everyone thought he’d gone home, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was punished. Maybe he’s still up there.” She glanced up at the tiled roof of the academy.

  “Hm. So what do you want to do about it?” asked Olivia.

  Emma shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  A hunting horn sounded across the garden and the two friends agreed to talk again at the afternoon break.

  Emma’s next lesson was French, but first she ran to the art room. It was empty, and she was just sneaking the letter onto Mr. Boldova’s desk when he walked in.

  “Emma?” He looked surprised. “Shouldn’t you be in another lesson?”

  “French, sir. But, it’s just that I … well, I’m really sorry, but I read your letter and …” Suddenly, Emma found herself telling Mr. Boldova about the invisible presence in the attic, the person who liked jam.

  Mr. Boldova listened intently and then he sat at his desk and said, “Thank you, Emma. Thank you very much. Will you promise not to tell anyone else about this?”

  “But I’ve already told Olivia Vertigo, and she might tell some of our friends.”

  “Can you trust them, Emma?”

  “With my life,” said Emma.

  Mr. Boldova smiled. He looked like a rather outdoor sort of person for an artist. His face was tanned and his dark brown hair was drawn back in a ponytail, somewhat like Manfred Bloor’s, only Manfred’s hair was black and stringy.

  Emma said, “What happened to Ollie, sir? We thought he’d gone home after he escaped from the attics.”

  “I’m afraid not,” sighed the teacher. “Our parents live a long way from here. Dr. Bloor agreed to put Ollie on a train in the company of the matron’s sister, a Miss Yewbeam. She told us that Ollie went to get an orange juice from the station cafeteria and never came back.”

  “I bet he never even got as far as the train,” said Emma hotly. “Those Yewbeams are evil. They’re Charlie Bone’s great-aunts, you know, and they make his life a misery.”

  “Ah, Charlie Bone,” Mr. Boldova said thoughtfully.

  “I’d like to help Ollie,” Emma went on. “He helped me, you see, and I could probably find the place where he’s kept.”

  “Better leave it to me, Emma. It could be dangerous.”

  “Sounds like it could be dangerous for you too, sir.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Mr. Boldova said cheerfully. “Now run along to your French lesson.”

  Emma went, but she didn’t hurry. She had too much on her mind. She was ten minutes late for her French lesson, and Madame Tessier was furious. She was an excitable woman and always hated the first day of the semester. She missed the sunny French city where she had been born and complained constantly about the gloomy, gray academy, with its creaking floorboards, erratic heating, and poor lighting. She was only there because Dr. Bloor had offered her a salary she couldn’t resist.

  “Go! Go!” she shrieked at Emma. “You don’t want my lesson, you don’t come in. It eez too late. So allez — allez!” She waved her long fingers at Emma. “Get out!”

  Emma got out — quickly.

  “You, too,” came a husky whisper.

  Emma looked down the corridor and saw Charlie Bone standing outside the history room. He had just said that Napoleon was the emperor of Russia. Mr. Pope, the history teacher, had screamed at Charlie, telling him he was an ignoramus, and he didn’t want to see him in his class a minute longer.

  “I didn’t really hear the question.” Charlie’s loud whisper echoed across to Emma. “I was thinking about a dog.”

  Emma glanced up and down the corridor. There was no one around. “What dog?” she whispered.

  In as quiet a voice as he could manage, Charlie told Emma about Benjamin and Runner Bean. “Why were you sent out?” he asked.

  “I was just late,” said Emma. She recounted her conversation with Mr. Boldova.

  Charlie’s eyes gleamed with interest. Yet another mention of someone dangerous on the move. Was it possible that they were one and the same? “So you think Ollie Sparks is in the attics?” He paused and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Let’s go and look, shall we?”

  Emma was horrified. “What, now?”

  “I can’t think of a better time,” said Charlie. “We’ve got half an hour before the end of the lesson. Everyone else is in class, so who’s going to see us? I’m bored stiff hanging around out here.”

  Before Emma could think of an excuse, Charlie had sprinted off toward a staircase at the end of the corridor. Emma wished she hadn’t told Charlie about the attics. He was inclined to rush into things without thinking them through. But she felt she had no choice but to follow.

  They crept up one staircase after another. Once they bumped into Dr. Saltweather, who interrupted his humming to ask where they were going. “We’ve been sent to get books from the library,” said Charlie. And Dr. Saltweather waved them on, although they were nowhere near the library. But Dr. Saltweather was oblivious to everything but his precious music.

  They ran along dark passages and through empty, creaking rooms and, as they drew near to the west wing of the building, Emma became increasingly nervous. She still had nightmares about the night when her only escape was to become a bird and fly.

  Memory, or instinct, led her to the cell-like room where Manfred Bloor had once imprisoned her. Light from a tiny window showed dark walls patched with green slime, a narrow bed covered in filthy blankets, and black, broken floorboards.

  “What an awful place,” Charlie murmured.

  “Manfred locked me in,” said Emma. “But then someone turned the key on the other side, and the door opened. I rushed to see who it was but there was no one there. Manfred caught me and brought me back, but — and this is the strange part — he said to someone, ‘Any more trouble and you won’t get jam for a week.’ That’s why I thought it might be Mr. Boldova’s brother, Ollie. Because he liked jam.”

  “Perhaps he’s been locked in some other gruesome room like this one.” As Charlie turned to the door it suddenly slammed shut. Charlie lifted the latch and pulled. Nothing happened. The door appeared to have jammed. “Must have been a draft,” muttered Charlie.

  “There isn’t any draft,” said Emma.

  “But what else could it have been? No one came in. We’d have seen them.”

  “Maybe they were invisible.”

  “Hey!” called Charlie. “Is anyone there?”

  No reply.

  “What on earth are we going to do?” cried Emma. She looked at her watch. “We’ve only got twenty minutes.”

  “This is stupid.” Charlie rattled the door while Emma pulled the latch.

  “It must be Ollie,” said Emma. “Ollie! Ollie Sparks, are you there?”

  Silence.

  “Ollie, we’ve come to help,” Charlie explained. “If you’re there, open this door, please!”

  Emma and Charlie waited. There was a soft creak. A key turned in the lock. Charlie pulled the door and it swung inward. There was no one in the passage outside.

  The two children stepped out. They squinted down the shadowy passage, searching for a door, a recess, any place where someone could be hiding. Emma’s foot touched an empty jar and it rolled away, filling the passage with a loud rumble. When the jar finally came to rest, faint footfalls could be heard receding into the distance.

  “He’s running away,” Emma whispered.

  They chased the footfalls down the passage, up a rickety set of steps, and into a long room with a narrow skylight. The floor was littered with empty jam jars and comic books. At the far end of the room there was a bed with a pillow and a patchwork cover. An oil lamp sat on a small bedside table and a huge cabinet stoo
d just inside the door. There was nothing else in the room except a spindly chair and a battered desk that had been placed beneath the skylight.

  “Ollie,” Emma said softly. “Ollie Sparks, are you here?”

  “What if I am?” said a rather mournful voice.

  “Why can’t we see you?” asked Charlie.

  There was a pause before the voice replied, “’Cause I’m invisible, aren’t I?”

  “What happened to you?” asked Emma.

  “The blue boa got me.”

  “Boa?” said Charlie and Emma.

  “Snake,” went on the mournful voice. “Awful thing. I saw it, see. No one’s meant to see it. It’s a secret. A secret weapon.” There was a croaky laugh. “Once I’d seen it, they weren’t going to let me tell about it, so they brought me back here, and it — well, I was like a guinea pig — they let the boa squeeze me, only I didn’t die, I just got invisible.”

  “Yikes!” gasped Charlie.

  “It didn’t get all of me.” A breathless sort of giggle shivered on the air. “It missed my big toe.”

  In horrified fascination, Charlie’s eyes were drawn toward the floor. Emma couldn’t help screaming. She had already seen it: a small pink blob lying just a few steps away from them.

  “Sorry,” said the voice. “It used to have a bit of sock and shoe on it, but the shoe got too small, and the sock wore out. A toe’s a bit disgusting on its own, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” said Charlie cheerfully.

  “They tried to get all of me back,” said the voice. “They made me drink revolting potions and threw smelly liquid over me, and once they covered my bed in spiderwebs while I was asleep.”

  “That is so gruesome,” said Emma.

  Charlie said, “Ollie, why don’t you escape? The door’s not locked. You could easily run away. No one would see you.”

  “You try it.” The voice sounded very aggrieved. “I came out once. People walked into me, knocked me down — some of them screamed. I couldn’t get out of the main doors; no one can. I didn’t feel safe, so I came back here.”

  “It must be so horrible, all alone,” said Emma. “What do you eat?” She was actually wondering how Ollie ate but was too polite to ask.

  “The food’s mostly disgusting, but Manfred gives me nice jam. I suppose he does it to keep me quiet. And, in case you’re wondering, I eat just like anyone else. Only you can’t see the food once it’s inside me.”

  Emma hoped Ollie couldn’t see her blush.

  Charlie had an idea. “If you come down to the dining hall at dinnertime, we’d all be sitting still. No one would bump into you, and I could make room for you between me and my friend Fidelio. The food’s not so bad on the first day of school.”

  Silence. Perhaps Ollie was thinking.

  Emma remembered the most important thing of all. “Ollie, your brother’s here,” she said. “He’s come to look for you.”

  “What? Samuel? I can’t believe it. Wow!” Suddenly, the pink toe jumped into the air and there was a small thud as two feet landed back on the floor.

  “So, if you come down to dinner, you can see him,” said Charlie.

  “Yes. Oh, yes …” A pause. “But I won’t know the time. I haven’t got a watch.”

  Charlie took off his watch and held it out. “You can borrow this.”

  It was disturbing to see a watch gradually disappear into thin air.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll come back when I take it off. Everything I wear becomes invisible,” Ollie explained. “Everything I eat or hold or put on.”

  Emma glanced at her own watch and cried, “We’ve only got five minutes. We’ll never make it.”

  She dashed out of the room and down the steps while Charlie followed, calling, “Sorry, Ollie. Got to get back to class. Hope to see — er — hear you later!”

  Emma and Charlie tore down the empty passages, often taking the wrong turn or the wrong staircase but ending up, at last, on the landing above the entrance hall. Their relief was short-lived. Approaching them from the other side of the landing was Dr. Bloor.

  The big man strode toward the children. “Why aren’t you two in class?” he boomed.

  Emma and Charlie froze. They couldn’t think of an explanation.

  Dr. Bloor stared down at them with cold, pale eyes. Suspicion was written all over his big face with its dull, gray skin and thick, bluish lips. “Well, I’m waiting.”

  “We — er …” Charlie floundered.

  “Ah, there you are,” said a voice, and Mr. Boldova appeared behind the headmaster. “I’ve been looking for these two,” said the art teacher. “Did you find it?”

  Charlie swallowed. “Um …”

  “That rat’s such a rascal.” Mr. Boldova turned to the headmaster. “I brought it along for the children to draw, but it keeps escaping. When I saw these two idling away I asked them to look for it. Any luck, Charlie?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And now we’re late for our next lesson,” said Emma meaningfully.

  “Dear, oh dear,” said Mr. Boldova. “I’d better explain to your teachers. All my fault. Come along, kids. Sorry about this, Dr. Bloor.”

  Mr. Boldova propelled the two children past Dr. Bloor toward the corridor that led to the classrooms.

  Dr. Bloor swiveled around to watch them go. “That rat must be found,” he shouted. “See to it, Mr. Boldova.”

  “Of course, Headmaster.”

  As soon as they were out of earshot, Charlie whispered, “Thanks, sir. I guess we were heading for detention.”

  “Keep walking,” the art teacher said quietly.

  But Emma couldn’t remain silent any longer. “We found Ollie,” she said softly.

  Mr. Boldova almost tripped. He gripped the children’s shoulders and said, “What? Tell me how — where?”

  As they hurried to their classrooms, Charlie and Emma took turns telling the teacher about poor Ollie and his invisibility.

  “Ollie’s going to try and get down to dinner tonight, sir,” said Charlie. “So you might … well, he might be able to talk to you.”

  “I can hardly believe it,” murmured Mr. Boldova. “Invisible or not, Ollie’s here, and he’s alive. I thought they’d taken him to one of those awful castles of theirs. I’ve spent almost a year trying to find out which one.”

  “Do they have many, sir?” asked Charlie.

  “At least five,” said Mr. Boldova. “This is so incredible. I will take Ollie home at the first opportunity. We’ll find a way to cure him when we get home.”

  They had reached Madame Tessier and Mr. Pope, who stood fuming outside their classrooms. Mr. Boldova quickly explained that he had borrowed Emma and Charlie to search for his rat, Rembrandt, who had escaped from his cage. The two teachers grudgingly accepted his apologies and told the children to hurry along to lunch.

  “I’ll see you two at dinnertime,” said Mr. Boldova, giving the children a big smile. And he walked away, whistling merrily.

  Would Charlie’s plan for Ollie work? He was sure it wouldn’t be as easy as Mr. Boldova seemed to think.

  On his way to the dining hall, Charlie had to pass the portraits. They hung on either side of the long, softly lit passage: haughty-looking women in lace and silk, men in dark robes or wearing velvet coats and white pants. You might think that Charlie would be curious to know what they had to say, but to tell the truth, he was beginning to find their bad-tempered whispering, rude demands, and boring jokes rather tiring. He was also afraid that one of them might come leaping out at him. So he usually tried to avoid looking at them.

  Except for today. Something had jogged his memory.

  “Ah, there it is.” He stopped before a portrait of a bold-looking woman in red velvet. She had dark ringlets, and a necklace of rose-colored jewels sparkled at her throat. SELENA SPARKS read a small bronze plaque at the bottom of the frame.

  “Selena Sparks,” Charlie murmured.

  “What about her?” Fidelio said over Charlie’s shoulde
r.

  “Shh!” hissed Charlie. He waited for a voice, but Selena had nothing to say to him. Perhaps she was shy. “I knew I’d seen that name,” Charlie muttered. “All these people are descended from the Red King. So maybe Ollie is, too.”

  “Ollie who?” asked Fidelio. “I wish you’d talk sense, Charlie.”

  “Emma and me …” Charlie began.

  He was interrupted by a shout from Manfred, the head boy. “Move on, you two, you’re cluttering up the passage.”

  The boys hurried on, but Charlie, glancing back, saw Manfred stop and stare at Selena Sparks. Charlie hoped Manfred wouldn’t guess why he was so interested in the portrait.

  As they took their places in the long underground dining hall, Charlie whispered, “Can you leave a gap, Fido? Someone might want to sit between us. Someone invisible who’s hungrier than we are.”

  “Really?” Fidelio raised his eyebrows. “It didn’t take you long to get tangled up in something, did it?” He moved closer to his neighbor, leaving a small space between Charlie and himself.

  It happened to be one of the best meals Charlie had eaten at Bloor’s: morsels of chicken and bacon floated in a creamy sauce, and he was tempted to eat every scrap, but he pushed a few pieces to the side of his plate, in case Ollie turned up.

  “He can have all of mine,” said Fidelio, who was a vegetarian.

  “I’ll have it,” said his neighbor, a large boy called Morris who played the bassoon.

  “No, you won’t,” said Fidelio. “It’s for Cook’s dog. He hasn’t been well.”

  Morris gave him a funny look, then ran his thumb around his own almost-empty plate and licked it. This was against the rules.

  Charlie wondered if Ollie had gotten lost. He scanned the three long tables, looking for signs of a disturbance. He couldn’t see Emma, who sat somewhere at the art table. The drama table was in the middle, and it was by far the noisiest, even though Manfred sat at the head. Apart from Asa and Zelda, who sat on either side of Manfred, everyone in drama faced away from the head of the table. They perched rather crookedly on the benches, with the shoulder nearest to Manfred slightly raised. No one wanted to be caught by the head boy’s hypnotizing stare when they were halfway through a meal.