Amy ran her fingertips over the plain cloth binding. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Even though I could have jumped into it whenever I wanted, I still must have read it the normal way about a hundred times.” Why couldn’t he have just left it at that? Why had he insisted on jumping and messing up the book world?
“Some stories are like that. I’m like that with Momo and Pride and Prejudice,” said Amy. “I prefer the characters in those books to real people, to be honest.” A shadow flitted across her face. The way she was sitting there huddled up on the sofa with her knees close to her chest and the book clasped in her skinny hands, she reminded Will of a butterfly whose wings somebody has tried to crush.
“Is it true your mum never told you about your gift?” he asked. “That you didn’t find out about it till you came back to Stormsay?”
“Mmm,” said Amy. “Though we haven’t exactly come back—we’re just spending the holidays here.” The shadow in her eyes darkened.
“It is kind of weird how you two turn up here out of the blue and—”
“Next thing you know someone’s dead?” She folded her arms across her chest. “Are you saying me and Alexis—”
“No,” he interrupted her. “That’s not what I meant. I—”
“It’s okay.” She sighed. “Today is not a good day.” She breathed deeply for a while until the last of the shadow had vanished from her face. Then she opened the book and, in a pure, clear voice, began to read aloud the opening sentences of Peter Pan. Will rested his head on the arm of the sofa, closed his eyes, and listened to the stream of words that told of Peter, of the lost boys, of the evil Captain Hook, and of the fairy Tinker Bell with her magic fairy dust.
* * *
Lennox House was dark and silent by the time I tiptoed back to my room a little after midnight. I’d left Will asleep in his cottage; now I, too, needed somebody to comfort me. Lots of strange things had happened over the past few days. But the death of Sherlock Holmes was more shocking even than my experiences in the book world. I couldn’t get my head around the fact that we really had found the great detective’s body on the beach of Stormsay. Whether he’d been murdered or killed in an accident, it was a terrible thing to have happened. A man had died, albeit a fictional one. Although I was completely exhausted I had no intention of going to sleep. I slipped into my pajamas and through the tiny bathroom into Alexis’s room.
I needed to talk to her about what had happened. The image of the seaweed caught in the dead man’s hair had burned itself into my memory, and so had the sloshing noise the waves had made as they’d washed his feet repeatedly against the wreckage. I’d never seen a real dead person before. I’d only ever seen dead bodies in thrillers, and there’d been something immensely reassuring in the knowledge that all the blood coming out of them was just movie blood. The red stain on Sherlock’s chest, however, had not been the work of a makeup artist.…
I padded across the room, tripping over bits of furniture and clothing that lay strewn across the floor, until I reached a four-poster bed very similar to mine. I carefully drew back the curtains. “Alexis?” I whispered into the darkness. “Alexis? It’s me, Amy. Something bad’s happened. I really need to talk to you.”
Alexis didn’t answer.
“Alexis?” I tried again, a little louder. I felt for the edge of the bed and my hand grazed the sheet. The quilt lay flat and cool on top of it. I bent down, groped my way up the bed to the pillow, and stopped short.
There was nobody there.
In three quick strides I was back by the doorway, but when I switched on the light the room was still empty. My first thought was that she might not have been able to sleep. So I went out into the hallway and prowled around the house for a while, checking the sitting room and the conservatory and hoping eventually to find her in my grandmother’s library reading a book. But there was no sign of her there either. Unfortunately, my next thought was that this was how it had started with Holmes. He, too, had disappeared without a trace.
When I came down to breakfast the next morning, however, after a sleepless night of anxious tossing and turning, I found Alexis sitting at the table talking to Lady Mairead.
“Where were you?” I burst out.
Alexis put her head to one side. “Good morning, little giraffe,” she greeted me. “What do you mean where was I?”
“Last night. I went to your room and—”
“Ah.” She waved her hand dismissively.
Now Lady Mairead looked curiously at her, too, eyebrows raised.
Alexis sipped her coffee and pretended not to notice. “Mr. Stevens has just told us what happened to Sherlock Holmes. It’s awful!” she said, without looking at me.
“Yes,” I murmured as I sat down. What was going on with Alexis? Her hands jittered as she spread jam on a slice of toast, which she then wolfed down in a couple of mouthfuls before jumping up from the table. “Have a nice day, Amy,” she called, still chewing, and disappeared through the door.
Lady Mairead and I exchanged a puzzled glance.
* * *
In the Secret Library, too, the sole topic of conversation that morning was the death of the famous detective. Betsy and I looked on as Glenn gave Will one hell of a telling-off, stressing again and again how irresponsibly Will had behaved in secretly bringing Holmes through the stone circle into the outside world. “This is a dark day for the venerable book-jumper clans,” he declared at last, for the third time. “You are here to protect the literary world. You are supposed to prevent accidents, not be so reckless as to cause them,” he admonished us.
Betsy, of course, nodded all the way through Glenn’s lecture with an expression on her face that made it clear she’d been about to say exactly the same thing herself. Will, on the other hand, sat pale and silent at his desk as he endured the sermon.
“The other Sherlocks from the rest of the Holmes books will take over Holmes’s duties in The Hound of the Baskervilles. The worst possible outcome, the destruction of an entire story, has thus been avoided,” Glenn went on. “From now on, however, you will have to work twice as hard to compensate for your mistake. Other book jumpers before you have failed, but the death of a literary character remains a particularly grave sacrilege. I hope you know that.”
“Of course I do,” said Will. Those were the first words we’d heard him speak all day. He cleared his throat and stood up. “I know that,” he said in a firm voice. “And that’s why I made a decision last night: I’m stopping. I’m not going to jump anymore.”
“What? No—you … you have a duty to use your gift!” cried Betsy. “You were born a book jumper—you can’t just cast that aside.”
“My parents did.”
Betsy had leaped out of her seat now too. Two red spots appeared on her cheeks. “Your parents abandoned you. They went away and left their only child behind. Have you forgotten that?”
“I remember the day they left quite clearly. They wanted to take me with them. But I chose to stay behind.”
“Because you chose your gift! You have to carry on, Will. You—”
“I stayed because I knew it was the right thing to do. Just like I know what I have to do now. It’s the only way, if I ever want to be able to look myself in the face again,” said Will, reaching for his jacket.
“The Laird will not agree to this,” Glenn added.
But Will merely shrugged. Then he left the classroom.
Betsy was about to go after him, but Glenn motioned to her to stay put. “He will calm down once he is over the shock,” he said, heaving a huge tome onto his desk. “And we must not let this prevent us from concentrating on the work we still have to do, must we? This is the family chronicle of the Lennox clan, which is what we are going to look at today.”
“Oh, great,” muttered Betsy, rolling her eyes.
“Come here.” Glenn opened the fragile cover and unfolded something that looked like a map. As we moved closer, I could see that it was in fact a family
tree. A family tree in the shape of a pair of antlers, whose prongs looped across the paper in countless little squiggles, illuminated in gold and various shades of green that must have been applied with an extremely thin paintbrush. In between the antler prongs were tiny painted portraits. The words Eoghan of Lennox, the Great Reader captioned a picture of a man with a red beard and a bald head right at the bottom of the tree. From there, the main stem branched off toward Ronald of Lennox—a rather fierce-looking man swinging an ax above his head—and Aidan of Lennox, who was dressed in a ruff and a shimmering robe. It went on to depict a whole series of redheaded men and women ending, at the top of the tree, with the portrait of a young and beautiful Lady Mairead. But no, wait—Glenn was unfolding another piece of paper featuring a picture of Alexis, her face framed by her dark red hair. From there, a thin branch led on to a portrait of a young girl with large eyes and shining hair. The words Amy of Lennox had been written with a flourish underneath. The little painted Amy was even wearing my navy woolly sweater!
“Desmond finished it yesterday,” said Glenn. “Do you like it?”
“Er—yes, yes of course I do,” I stammered. Desmond had been pretty flattering in his depiction of me, it had to be said. I looked almost pretty.
“Good,” said Glenn. “And now I would like you to observe the terrible consequences that can result from a failure to take your role as protectors of literature seriously enough.” He folded the chart up again and began to leaf through my family history, stopping at a chapter headed The Great Fire.
Betsy and I were soon lying side by side in the stone circle on the hilltop. We’d both tried to protest when we’d realized he wanted us to jump together, but Glenn had been implacable. “Senseless conflicts between your two families have done enough harm already. It is time you finally realized that you can achieve far more by working together. Now off you go!” With these words he’d heaved the weighty tome containing my family history onto our faces. The letters swam before our eyes and the story took hold of us. By now I was used to the strange feeling I got at the moment of jumping.
We landed in a very old, vaulted cellar. The musty smell crept up my nose and I was still trying to get my bearings in the dim room when Betsy stood up and brushed the dust off her dark red minidress. I, too, got slowly to my feet, swaying slightly.
“Have you been here before?” I asked.
Betsy put a finger to her lips and shook her head with a reproving frown.
We looked around. The cellar was pretty dark—the only light came from the fire in the hearth, over which a suckling pig was roasting on a spit. A young man with a red beard was dozing in a carved armchair by the fireside. He wore a kilt and an old-fashioned shirt. A pair of boots lay on the floor beside him, and his grubby bare feet were stretched out toward the flames. His eyes were half closed and he had a pile of books balanced on his stomach.
We were about to go closer when a door flew open with a crash at the other end of the cellar, and in burst two boys with dark eyes and tousled hair. They were wearing kilts, too, but with a different pattern. They looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old and extremely pissed off.
Betsy and I retreated silently into the shadows.
“Malcolm Lennox!” roared one of the boys, drawing his sword. The blade flashed in the dancing firelight. “What possessed ye?”
The man in the armchair sat up with a jolt. “Cailean! Tevin! Who let ye Macalister rats in here?” he murmured. “And what do ye mean by this foolish swordplay, Cailean?”
The two boys were upon him now, and pulled him to his feet. The pile of books clattered to the floor. “Stand an’ fight like a man,” Cailean demanded, holding the tip of his sword to the man’s throat. “Or die like a coward.”
Malcolm Lennox quickly made up his mind in favor of the first option, and now he, too, drew his sword. The two blades clashed, and metal rang against metal. Malcolm and Cailean dueled their way across the room.
“Might I ask why ye are trying to kill me? Did yer Ma drop ye on yer heads again?” asked Malcolm nonchalantly.
“Ye have sinned. Ye did it. Ye brought them here!” hissed Cailean.
“What?” Malcolm almost forgot to parry a thrust, raising his sword hastily at the last second. He staggered back a few steps toward the fireplace. “Brought who where?”
“Don’t play the innocent,” roared Cailean. “We know about the mermaids!” He spat the word at him. “Ye took them down to the shore! We saw them an’ meant to return them to their book, but the beasts were too quick an’ swam off long before we could reach them.”
“I rather think ye were too slow to catch the lassies. I hope they had a good laugh at ye?”
“Pah,” said the second Macalister, Tevin, who up to this point had hung back from the fight. But now all of a sudden there was a dagger in his hand and he, too, was bearing down on Malcolm. “Mythical beasts in the outside world—how could ye?” he cried. “They could be anywhere by now! Folk’ll see them! They’ll think they’re real.”
“Well, they are real. In books.” Malcolm grinned, despite the fact that he was now being attacked from both sides. He could only have been a few years older than his assailants, but he was a much more skillful fighter than either of them. He whirled around the room with ease, and his sword seemed to be everywhere at once. But the Macalisters did not give up. Their assaults on Malcolm grew ever more desperate.
“The Laird will surely be angry to find ye out of bed at this hour,” teased Malcolm, sidestepping them elegantly.
Cailean and Tevin were fuming with rage—but then, all of a sudden, their eyes widened in fear and they abruptly dropped their weapons.
“Are ye afraid the Laird will scold ye?” Malcolm laughed. “He might even refuse to read ye a bedtime story, as punishment.”
But the Macalisters simply pointed speechlessly to the hearth, where several books had gone up in flames. Malcolm must have kicked them into the fire when he’d dodged out of the way of his opponents.
Now he, too, dropped his sword. “Good God,” he murmured, plunging his bare hands into the flames. The boys did the same. They fished out one burning book after another and stamped on them frantically to try to put out the fire. I wanted to rush over and help them, but Betsy held me back with an iron grip. “You really don’t get it, do you? We don’t intervene,” she hissed as our panic-stricken ancestors fought to extinguish the blazing books.
At last there was only one book left in the fire.
Malcolm cursed and thrust his burned hands back into the fireplace one last time. The majority of the book had crumbled away to ash by this time—only a few scraps of its pages remained. As he pulled it out and his eyes fell on the title, he began to curse loudly. “It’s the only copy!” he shouted. “It’s a manuscript!”
“What?” yelled Cailean Macalister.
Tevin Macalister, meanwhile, had discovered that his coat was on fire. He ripped it off and flung it away from him and it landed on the armchair, where the animal skin that served as a cushion immediately started to smolder. A few glowing logs had also rolled out of the fireplace and set fire to some tapestries and a wooden footstool.
But neither Malcolm nor the Macalisters were paying any attention to the blaze. All three were staring in shock at the remains of the still-smoldering manuscript.
“We have to get to the Porta Litterae!” thundered Malcolm at last. “Come on! It’s our only chance of saving whatever’s left to save.”
The two boys nodded. The next moment, all three went running out of the room.
I looked around frantically. “We need something to put the fire out with!” I cried. Why was there never a bucket of water around when you needed one?
“It’s a story, you idiot!” shouted Betsy. “It’s not real, okay?”
I sniffed. It felt pretty fricking real to me. So real it was starting to scare me.
The blaze had spread rapidly—even the wooden beams that jutted out of the walls were on fire now. The w
hole room was filled with thick black smoke that stung our eyes. Every breath was torture. I blinked, unable to see a thing, and felt Betsy push me roughly forward. Coughing and gasping, we stumbled the few paces back to the spot where we’d landed.
A few seconds later we rolled back onto the woven mat in the stone circle on Stormsay, where it took me a little while to get my breath back. Greedily I drank in the fresh air and waited for the tears in my eyes to subside. My lungs were burning.
At last, Glenn helped me and Betsy to our feet.
“Could you not have told us to put on some old clothes before we went?” huffed Betsy, pointing to her soot-stained dress. Her face and hair were also coated with a layer of black dust, and I guessed I didn’t look much better. But I didn’t particularly care about that right now.
“Was that the fire that burned down my clan’s castle?” I asked.
Glenn nodded. “But that is not why I sent you there. The loss of a castle is trivial compared to what was lost forever that night,” he explained. “The manuscript that fell in the fire was the only written record of a story that, when the manuscript was burned, was erased forever. The disaster hit the families very hard. They had dedicated their lives to the protection of the book world, yet their enmity had ended up destroying a part of that world.”
I dimly remembered Glenn mentioning something about that burned book on my first day of lessons. “Since then the families have observed a truce,” I said.
“That’s right, Amy.” Glenn smiled.
But Betsy snorted. “We’ve heard that a hundred times before. You didn’t need to make me ruin my hair just for that.” She tweaked her ponytail. “I’m not stupid enough to go chucking manuscripts on the fire.”
“I wanted you to see how quickly things can get out of hand. And nobody was ‘stupid enough’ to do it that night either. Neither the Macalisters nor the Lennoxes would ever have dreamed of destroying a story. But it happened nonetheless—through carelessness. Just as carelessness allowed Sherlock Holmes to fall victim to that terrible accident,” said Glenn.
The Book Jumper Page 9
