The corners of Glenn’s mouth twitched.
Betsy took this as agreement and went on: “And anyway it’s pretty obvious who it must have been. Given that Will isn’t jumping at all anymore, there’s only one other person it could have been—someone inexperienced and naïve enough to go sneaking into books at night.”
I turned to face her.
“Someone who doesn’t give a crap about Stormsay and our family traditions. Someone who doesn’t have the true book-jumper blood of the Macalisters running through their veins,” Betsy went on.
“What do you mean? I’d never go to the stone circle at night to jump,” I said, and in my head I added: because I don’t need the stone circle to get to the book world.
“Are you and Desmond sure this person was using the portal?” Will put in.
“We are,” said Glenn.
“Perhaps there’s another book jumper that we don’t know about. A distant relative or something,” I mused aloud. “Perhaps that person is the thief as well.”
“Thief?” inquired Glenn. “What thief?”
I told him about the strange goings-on in the book world and the fairies’ theory that somebody was stealing the core ingredients of stories. To be on the safe side—not wanting to arouse Glenn’s wrath by telling him about my unauthorized excursions—I made out that the fairies had just popped up in The Jungle Book recently. But by the time I’d finished, Glenn, Betsy, and even Will looked more amused than alarmed.
“You do know you can’t trust fairies, don’t you? They probably just made it up as a prank,” said Will.
“But we—er—they saw it with their own eyes! The White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland can’t talk anymore and—”
“And it’s not as if Alice in Wonderland is full of crazies that like to play tricks on people,” Betsy interrupted with an affected little laugh.
“At any rate, you do not seem to be doing what you are supposed to be doing, which is concentrating on The Jungle Book,” Glenn remarked. “I cannot condone that. Do you not think you need any training?”
I looked down at my desk. “It’s not that. But the book world and what the other characters have to say is so exciting.”
“I think we can all understand that sentiment. But from now on you must do as you are told and focus on the characters from your own story, do you understand?” Glenn looked a little friendlier now.
“Yes,” I said. “So is it not even a possibility that there might be other book jumpers out there we just don’t know about yet?”
Glenn shook his head. “Who else could there be? This island is tiny. We would know if somebody new arrived, wouldn’t we?”
An hour later, Glenn issued us detailed instructions for our jumps and sent us off to the portal. But no sooner had we left the classroom than I almost collided with Desmond, who came careering around a corner with a pile of heavy books. He managed to pull up just in time, but the tower of books he was carrying started swaying dangerously and he had to weave to and fro for a few seconds to steady them.
“Amy!” he exclaimed. “Er … could I talk to you for a moment?”
I looked at his scarred cheeks and the freckles on his nose. His gray eyes shone through the haze of dancing dust motes that filled every corner of these underground passageways. For all intents and purposes he seemed like a nice guy. But under the present circumstances … “I don’t see what we could have to talk about,” I said, lifting my chin.
“See—he thinks it was Amy too,” Betsy whispered to Will. The two of them were walking behind me.
I left Desmond standing there with his pile of books, his shoulders sagging as he threw a helpless glance at Will, and marched on toward the exit. Just as I was wondering whether Betsy was telling the truth about never having jumped in secret when she seemed to think she was by far the best of the three of us, Will dragged me without warning into a gap between two shelves.
“You go on ahead,” he called to Betsy, drawing me deeper into the dusty thicket of the library. He finally came to a stop in a corner between some frayed rolls of parchment and a weird painted globe.
“Look, Amy—I know this sounds weird, but Desmond is older than he looks, okay?” he whispered, suddenly so close to me that the smell of moorland and soap filled my nostrils. Will spoke quickly, as if that would make what he had to say less implausible. “He’s not a real person—he’s a book character. So are Glenn and Clyde. All three of them have been living here in the library for nearly three hundred years. Our clans rescued them from the burning manuscript.”
“They’re book characters?” I stammered. “They seem so … real and everything.”
Will pulled one of the scrolls from the shelf behind me and unrolled it carefully. “Where do you think they got those burn scars from?”
I remembered how sad Glenn had looked when he’d told me about the fairy tale that had caught fire. So that had been his home. No wonder he found it difficult to talk about. “Can’t they go back?”
Will’s fingertips glided over the text. “No. Because their story was destroyed, they’re trapped forever in the outside world.”
“Oh,” I said, and now I, too, ran my fingers over the porous parchment. It was weird how valuable a scrap of paper like this with a few symbols on it could be. “I didn’t think book characters could live in the outside world permanently.”
“They don’t, normally. But they can. Though they never feel properly at home outside the book world because they’re different, and always will be. You don’t notice it at first glance. But they’re stronger than us, for example, and they don’t sleep. Every hundred years or so they have a kind of nap for a few years, and then they’re ready to go again. Oh yeah—and they don’t age.” Will looked me straight in the eye. His thumb brushed the back of my hand and a shiver ran through me. A lovely shiver. I looked down, embarrassed. “Desmond only looks young, on the outside. So if your mum does want to be with him, there’s no—”
I let go of the parchment and pushed past Will. “That’s no excuse!” I said. “She went behind my back and basically threw herself at the nearest guy she could find, okay? The whole reason we came here was because she got her heart broken. Dominik literally just broke up with her. And she was devastated by it, but now she seems to have completely forgotten about that all of a sudden and I really don’t understand what’s going on with her.” I couldn’t help it—tears welled up in my eyes. I blinked furiously at the ceiling.
“That’s why you came back to Stormsay?” asked Will.
I nodded. “Alexis was so down about Dominik and I…” My mouth went dry. “I needed to get away from it all too. Have a change of scene.”
“That’s easy to do when you’re a book jumper.” Will rolled the ancient parchment up again and placed it back on the shelf. He gazed at it a moment longer, then took a deep breath. “Don’t get me wrong, I think book jumping is a very good way to distract yourself when you’re feeling sad,” he began, and it sounded as though he’d been planning for days what he was going to say. “But do me a favor and be careful. It’s easy to underestimate how much damage you can do. I learned that the hard way.”
“Mhmm,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”
“That’s what I thought. And now Sherlock’s dead.”
“I won’t bring any characters to the outside world, don’t worry,” I reassured him. “All I want is to have a look around their stories.” I couldn’t suppress a grin. “To be honest, I’ve been to a few other stories as well as The Jungle Book and Oliver Twist. This really is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Will’s face remained solemn. “And what if you do end up disrupting something?” he asked. “What if the White Rabbit has lost his voice because of you?”
“So you do believe me? That there’s something going on in the book world—that somebody’s stealing the ideas?”
“No, I don’t. But I do worry that you’re not taking your gift seriously enough.”
“Rubbi
sh,” I said. “I’m just doing a bit of exploring. I know exactly what I’m doing.”
“You mean sneaking into books at night.”
He suspected me! I folded my arms. “And what if I was?” I sniffed. “Just because you made a mistake, that doesn’t give you the right to judge me. And just because you suddenly think it’s wrong doesn’t mean we all have to stop jumping.” I glared at him. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? You’d prefer it if me and Betsy stayed out of the book world too.”
Will shrugged. “At least that way we could be sure nobody else would die.”
“Sure,” I said. “But I’m not going to give up the book world just because you’re feeling guilty. It’s too amazing. I won’t give it up. Ever.”
Will nodded jerkily. “I get it,” he snapped. “Just wait till you do something stupid and destroy a story, then. I won’t warn you again.”
“Is that a promise?”
He turned and stomped off without another word.
The dagger’s blade was cold and silver.
And it was sharp. It seemed to slice even through the moonlight that glanced off its surface.
The knight reached for the jewel-studded hilt.
It molded itself to his hand, as if this dagger had been forged especially for him. As if it were part of him—a part of his body, long believed lost, and now returned to him. “I thank you,” said the knight.
His eyes still rested upon the weapon.
The princess closed the velvet-lined casket and replaced it on her dainty little dresser.
“Kill it,” she whispered.
8
A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER
“NOW HOW THE WINDS SOAR, and they rush, and they whirl,” sighed Werther, looking out at the wet fields and the swaying trees at the edge of the wood. Rain came pelting down on us. It was dark, and we were standing somewhere in the fictional version of a nineteenth-century British shire. The downpour had left me and Werther soaked to the skin. Within seconds my sweater had been completely saturated with rainwater and now hung heavy on my shoulders. Werther’s linen shirt had turned see-through and was sticking to his chest, and his stockings and velvet knee breeches were spattered with mud. We shivered as the water continued to trickle inside our clothes. But I wasn’t ready to go and warm up in another, drier story just yet.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the dark-haired young woman lying on the doorstep of a small house nearby, crying. Her dress was filthy from days of wandering across country, and her shawl looked just as sodden as my sweater. But none of that seemed to bother her. Her eyes were closed and she was waiting for death. Luckily, however, I knew that she was about to be rescued. Because this was Jane Eyre, who had recently fled from Thornfield Hall and her beloved Mr. Rochester after discovering a dark secret from his past. Soon the clergyman St. John Rivers would appear and he and his sisters would take Jane into their home. I was determined to wait and see it happen. Luckily, the rain was finally starting to die down.
“Such weather always brings to my mind the poem ‘Spring Celebration,’” Werther declared. “Is not Nature wonderful after such a downpour?”
“Yes,” I said. But more wonderful, in my opinion, was the fact that St. John Rivers had just appeared and taken poor Jane inside the house. Yet again I had to remind myself that this wasn’t a dream—I really was inside one of my favorite stories.
“Do you know it? It is by Klopstock,” said Werther, suddenly giving me a strange sideways glance.
“What? Oh, the poem. No, I’m afraid not,” I murmured. Werther seemed very disappointed by this, so I added hastily: “But it sounds nice.”
“Yes?” he asked hopefully. “Then you love Nature just as I do?”
“Er—of course,” I said. “Nature and literature.”
Werther smiled and was about to launch into another speech about poetry when something very small and very blue came plummeting out of the sky toward us and landed on Werther’s nose.
“The thief has struck again,” piped the fairy. “We saw him. He’s wearing a cloak, and sneaking through The Wizard of Oz!”
“We’re on our way!” I called.
The fairy went zooming off and we followed her at a run.
We arrived a few minutes later at the gray farm where Dorothy lived with her uncle, her aunt, and her dog, Toto, and all four of them came running out to meet us in great agitation.
“He was here!” cried Dorothy’s uncle, a man with gray hair and a gray face to match.
“The thief was in our story—he stole the cyclone that’s supposed to carry off Dorothy and our house,” explained Dorothy’s aunt, who looked just as colorless as the farmland around her.
“Who was it?” I asked. “How did he do it?” How on earth did somebody steal a cyclone?
“We couldn’t tell—all we saw was a shadow!” sobbed Dorothy. “He was so far away. He came sneaking though our pages, right at the edges, and then over there on the horizon he broke something out of the story. Something that lit up. He tucked it inside his cloak. Then all of a sudden he was gone.” She sniffed hard, and Toto howled. “Since then the cyclone’s been missing.”
“What would anybody want with a stolen cyclone?” I asked.
Dorothy shrugged.
“It is a mystery to me,” murmured Werther.
We looked out at the horizon. Not so much as a breath of wind was stirring.
* * *
Will lay on his threadbare sofa and tried to imagine what it must be like to be dead. Had Holmes stopped existing completely or had he just passed on to another place? What was it like there? Was he angry with Will for bringing him to the outside world and putting him in danger? Question after question whirled through his head as if there were a storm raging inside his skull. He couldn’t concentrate.
He’d thought it would get easier if only he didn’t have to look at those words anymore. He’d painted over the writing on the wall above the stove with white paint to stop it intruding on his thoughts. But he’d found he could still read it. And in any case, the words were already etched into his memory. He could see them even when he closed his eyes, blazing red before him:
I HAVE AWOKEN
Who the hell had left him that message? And what did it mean? He would have liked to tip another bucket of white paint over his own thoughts.
Will hadn’t been to the Secret Library for two days. Not since the argument with Amy. And why should he? He wasn’t a book jumper anymore, and nobody would pay any attention to his warnings. Instead he lay on the sofa, lost in thought, as the sun’s brief guest appearance came to an end and the air grew colder and damper.
Betsy had come to the cottage yesterday. She’d stood outside and knocked at the door and said the Laird would not allow this and that Will had to come to lessons. In the afternoon Glenn had come by and asked Will was he still alive, or had he drowned in self-pity? He hadn’t replied.
But he had to admit that he was starting to go a bit stir-crazy in here. He sat up and put on his boots. Perhaps fresh air and a little exercise would make him feel like himself again.
He didn’t realize how dark it was until he opened the door. It was nighttime already. The starry sky arched high and clear over the ghostly expanse of the moor. Wisps of fog hung in the air above the slippery paths that snaked through heather, peat moss, and sundew. He breathed in and then out again. On the wind was the tang of moist earth. Will stepped out into the darkness.
He’d been roaming this moorland since childhood, and it greeted him tonight with the same sucking, gurgling noises he’d come to know well. It covered most of Stormsay, and Will knew it concealed some treacherous depths. People even said there were lost graves from Celtic times hidden somewhere on the island. But Will wasn’t afraid—not even when the fog patches thickened and wrapped themselves around his shoulders like a clammy shawl. It soon grew so misty that the light of the stars was barely visible, and he switched on the little flashlight he always wore at his belt.
Imme
diately a beam of light sliced through the darkness around him. He could just about make out something darting away from him at the edge of his field of vision. Something big. Something that couldn’t possibly be an animal. He stood still and swung the flashlight around in a circle, trying to see what it was that had fled from him. Or had he just been scared by his own shadow?
He was about to conclude that this must have been the case when the flashlight fell on a human form. It slipped into a gap between two bushes a few yards away from him and stopped dead. In the fog, all Will could distinguish was its outline.
But it was definitely a human being.
“Who’s there?”
No answer.
“Hello?”
The figure hovered motionless in the fog.
Then Will took a step toward it. It retreated before him, farther into the darkness.
“What’s going on?” called Will. “Betsy? Glenn? Amy, is that you?” He quickened his pace.
There was a rustling laugh and then, all at once, the shadow was gone. Will ran to the spot where he’d last seen it. He shone the flashlight over the bushes and berries that grew on this part of the moor. Some of them looked as though they had been trodden flat.
Suddenly there was a whisper from behind him. “She knew,” breathed a voice, “that he would stop the monster.” The words ensnared him, enticed him, echoed strangely in his head. Will felt someone’s breath on the back of his neck. He turned around.
But there was nobody there.
In the pool of flashlight were a few pillows of moss and a mound of rotting vegetation, nothing more. Whoever had been standing behind him seemed to have vanished, in a matter of seconds, into thin air. What was going on here? Was someone trying to freak him out?
She knew, said the echo in Will’s head, that he would stop the monster. What kind of bizarre phrase was that? Had he read it somewhere?
* * *
Ever since I’d found out who Alexis was visiting when she went off on one of her long walks or snuck out of bed at night, evenings at Lennox House had gotten a whole lot quieter. Having pretended to be asleep the day before, I’d managed to avoid Alexis yesterday by locking myself in the bathroom and spending hours in the bath. But this evening at dinner Lady Mairead had announced that she wanted us all to have a game of Monopoly after dessert, which was why Alexis and I had been sitting at the table for what felt like an eternity staring down at a brightly colored Monopoly board. It was late, past midnight, and I was tired from my trips to Jane Eyre and The Wizard of Oz. But my grandmother couldn’t seem to get enough.
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