We came to a standstill.
“Welcome to the end of the world,” said Will, putting an arm around me.
I sighed. I admired the harsh beauty of the crags, but I was slightly afraid to go on. Surely with my levels of coordination it would be a miracle if I made it to the end of any of these headlands in one piece.
The same thought seemed to have occurred to Will. He cast a glance at my canvas pumps. “We have to be careful. Under the surface there are loads of rocks with sharp edges. So if you fall in—”
“Relax,” I interrupted him, forcing a smile. “We’ll be fine. Fortunately, I happen to be very coordinated.”
Without a moment’s hesitation I clambered up onto the nearest of the jutting rocks and promptly slipped on a clump of long-haired seaweed. A second later I was up to my knees in the water with grazes on both my hands.
“You’re right,” said Will, hoisting me back up onto dry land. “This is going to be a piece of cake.”
For the next few hours we scrambled along each of the headlands in turn and peered into every cave and behind every ledge we could find. It was a sweaty business. The wind jostled us roughly and the crags did not, unfortunately, get any less slippery. I kept missing my footing and having to be rescued by Will. Once I came so close to falling that if Will hadn’t managed to grab hold of my elbow and pull me back just in time I would surely have plunged headfirst into the sea and cracked my head open on the shimmering underwater rocks below.
Will (when he wasn’t saving me from certain death) explored the fissures in the rock with his flashlight, illuminating even the very narrowest crevices. But all we found were little pools of still, greenish water and abandoned birds’ nests. On the first two headlands, anyway. It wasn’t until the afternoon, when we reached the outermost point of the third headland, that the beam of Will’s flashlight suddenly fell upon something else. Something that didn’t belong there.
The cave lay hidden behind a curtain of seaweed. We would never even have spotted it if one of the puffins hadn’t poked its brightly colored beak out through the greenery just as we were passing by the cave mouth. It flew away in fright as I took hold of the curtain. We pushed through the moss and seaweed and left the daylight behind us. It wasn’t a particularly large cave—little more than an alcove, really—and the child wasn’t there. But there was no doubt that we had found her hiding place.
Will gave a sharp intake of breath.
“What?” I whispered, but he didn’t reply.
The roar of the waves was muffled in here, as if it came from far away. The cave walls were damp and almost completely covered in lichens. Only one part of the wall, directly above what looked like a primitive sort of bed, had been scraped clean. The flashlight beam came to a halt on this patch of wall, snagged on the glistening red letters.
I HAVE AWOKEN
Goose bumps ran down my spine.
There were grooves in the rock where the red stuff was, as if somebody had tried to scratch it off. Will stared long and hard at the words. I could see from his face that he was thinking about Holmes.
I left him and went over to examine what I’d assumed was a bed. The first thing I realized was that it wasn’t actually a bed at all. It just looked like one. The floor of the cave was carpeted with moss and tendrils, and seaweed and seashells had gotten tangled up in them; they must have built up over time to form a layer as thick as a mattress. In the middle of this mass of plants and sludge was a small hollow, an imprint left by a body. The imprint was the size of a child. And it looked as though the child had lain here on her bed of seaweed for a very long time—so long that the tendrils had started to grow up around her. You could distinctly see the curve of the head, the shape of the shoulders, even the impressions of the hands and feet. As if the body hadn’t moved an inch. How long did somebody have to lie still for something like this to form?
I felt among the tendrils and seaweed for the shimmering glass spheres, but the ideas were nowhere to be found. I did come across something else, however—a sort of semicircular metal bar, jagged and overgrown with moss and weeds along one side. I pulled it out of the tangle of plants.
“Give me some light,” I said to Will. The flashlight beam darted toward me.
What had looked at first glance like fragments of seashell were in fact stones, which seemed to be set into the piece of curved metal. Dirty stones. As I scraped at the layer of mud that covered them, something gleamed suddenly red beneath my fingers. I dipped the object in a puddle on the ground and rubbed it with the sleeve of my sweater until the dirt began to come away. Rubies appeared. The curved object in my hands was no random piece of flotsam. It was a diadem.
“Is that a crown?” asked Will.
I shrugged. “Could be.” I rubbed one of the gemstones with my thumb. “Yes, I think it is.”
“What does that mean?”
My eyes were drawn back to the imprint of the little body. The child had lain here in the cave, then—presumably for quite a long time. Years, even? I thought for a while as Will inspected the diadem. “She’s a book character,” I said at last. “She must be. A kind of princess or something. And I think she comes from the same legend as Glenn, Clyde, and Desmond.”
“What?” Will exclaimed. “What makes you think that?”
“Well—she stole those scraps of the manuscript. And before that she must have been lying here for a very long time, don’t you think? Look how the plants have grown up around her body. Didn’t you say all book characters have a long nap once every hundred years?”
“Yes, they do, but—a three-hundred-year nap? Anyway, Glenn, Clyde, and Desmond were the only ones to be rescued from the fire.”
“Perhaps in all the commotion our ancestors lost track of who was rescued?”
“Yeah, sure.” The corners of Will’s mouth twitched. “She escaped without anyone noticing and when she woke up three hundred years later she immediately made a note of it here on the wall and then came and graffitied it above my stove? Is that it?” He lowered himself onto the slippery bed of seaweed.
“Okay—it is pretty weird,” I admitted. But I felt as though the puzzle pieces in my head were gradually starting to slot together. “But I still think that’s what happened. She’s a princess from Desmond’s fairy tale and she wants to go back there. That’s why she needs the ideas from the book world, do you see? She wants to repair the manuscript!” A wave of relief flooded through me as I finally understood what was going on. Suddenly I knew what we had to do. “If we can find out more about the story that got burned,” I told him, “I’m sure we’ll be able to see a pattern, and stop her, and then—”
“Amy, what are you talking about?” Will interrupted my torrent of words. “What kind of pattern? And what makes you think there’s some way of repairing the manuscript all of a sudden?”
I sat down beside him and told him all about Werther’s theory and his list of stolen ideas. “Werther says that if the thief managed to get hold of ten ideas then he—she—would be able to create a whole new story. So surely it would be even easier to use the ideas to patch up an existing story, wouldn’t it?”
Will looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Okay. So, assuming she’s found a way into the book world and she’s trying to repair the legend … if we can find out which two ideas she still needs to steal…”
“Then we can get there first, and intercept her.”
A look of grim determination settled over Will’s features. His stormy-blue eyes glittered. “Let’s do it,” he said. “And then we’ll see what she has to say for herself about what she did to Holmes.”
I took his hands in mine and squeezed them. Will’s jaw tightened; the muscles in his face twitched. “Come on,” I said, and led him out of the cave.
* * *
We searched the fourth and fifth headlands for the princess, too, just to be sure. It was possible, after all, that she was hiding from us somewhere close by. But in none of the other caves did we find anything l
ike a bed made of seaweed or a crown of bloodred rubies, or even so much as a child’s muddy footprint on the rocks.
It was evening by the time we finally headed home, and every muscle in my body ached. As we walked along the beach, past Macalister Castle and the rusty submarine graveyard, my head was still spinning with thoughts of the princess and her plan. On the one hand I felt relieved that we’d finally stumbled upon a clue we could use, but on the other hand I got the feeling there was still something I was missing. But what? Hazy images of our hunt for the thief swirled through my mind. There was an insight somewhere in this muddle of thoughts that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And the harder I tried, the further it slipped away from me.
Will, too, looked pensive—his gaze seemed to have turned inward. We probably both needed some time to digest what we’d found out. And there was so much to think about. Important clues that we just couldn’t quite seem to make sense of.
At the Secret Library, Will kissed me on the cheek and headed off down the spiral staircase to question Glenn and Clyde about their legend. But I, having bunked off lessons that day, thought it best to stay out of Glenn’s way and carried on toward Lennox House to grill Desmond. He’d spent the day with Alexis and was probably still there. Perhaps he’d be able to give me something to go on.
As I crossed the grounds, the sound of Alexis and Desmond talking drifted toward me on the wind. It came from somewhere very high up, and put a stop to my musings for the time being. I followed the voices upward and emerged a few minutes later through the skylight onto the roof of the house. I inched hand over hand across the tiles to the dormer window where my parents had made themselves comfortable.
They smiled when they saw me. There was a picnic basket between them and they were each holding a glass of wine. Sitting there side by side, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, they looked the very embodiment of happiness.
I sat down beside Alexis, who draped one of the old blankets around my shoulders by way of a greeting and murmured: “Little giraffe! You look tired.”
Desmond slid a plate of sandwiches over to me. “Would you like one?” he asked.
I nodded and helped myself—I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. I’d had nothing to eat since that slice of bread this morning, after all. Perhaps that was why I was finding it hard to concentrate?
Alexis and Desmond drank their wine while I wolfed down sandwich after sandwich, and the fog that had been clouding my brain lifted a little with every bite. Some of the sandwiches were vegan, with grilled vegetables and hummus, but there were some tuna and some cheese ones as well. I demolished three of each type in quick succession. As I ate I watched the sun setting over the sea and Lady Mairead, in a sweater just as colorful as mine, slipping out of the wrought-iron front gate and onto the moor. At last I felt more or less full, and ready to tell them why I was there.
“Desmond,” I began, without beating about the bush, “was there a princess in your story too?”
He choked on his mouthful of food, and coughed. “I beg your pardon? What … er, yes. Yes, there was.” He cleared his throat. “You know that, Amy, I must have told you: I come from a fairy tale. And in the fairy tale I was a knight, sent by a princess to kill a monster.”
The thing about the knight and the monster sounded familiar. But I wasn’t sure he’d ever mentioned the princess before. “So you knew her. Was she … still a child?” I persisted.
He lowered his eyelids. “Yes,” he said softly.
“What did she look like? Did she wear a crown set with rubies? How old was she roughly?”
Desmond set his glass down on the roof, much too hard. “Why do you want to know all this?” He still wasn’t looking at me. “I do not like talking about my home. It … it is still very difficult for me.”
“And I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. But it’s to do with the thefts in the book world. Will and I may have found a clue and—”
“This clue leads back to my story?” Desmond raised his eyebrows.
Alexis eyed me curiously.
“It looks that way,” I said. “Can’t you just tell me a bit more about what happened in your story? This monster, for example—was it a dragon or something?”
“No.” Suddenly he fixed me with a piercing gaze. Suddenly he seemed angry. “What have Clyde and Glenn told you?”
“Nothing,” I assured him hurriedly, and Desmond’s expression softened a little. “I … just need to find out a few things. Was there a cyclone in the story, by any chance? Or a metamorphosis? Like when Gregor Samsa turns into a beetle or when Dr. Jekyll turns into Mr. Hyde, I mean?”
“Amy,” Alexis broke in, “Desmond’s story was a fairy tale from the Middle Ages.”
“So?” I said.
Desmond said nothing. He had turned pale, and his eyes were fixed to a spot somewhere far away on the dark moor.
All of a sudden we heard a child crying in the distance. It sounded like the heartrending sobs of a little girl.
When the princess learned of the knight’s death, she wept.
She wept bitterly.
Who would protect her now?
Who would fight for her now?
The princess was afraid, and the fear was even worse than the loneliness. The fear was a monster that pierced her with its sharp claws.
A terrible monster.
16
THE PRINCESS
HE FOUND LADY MAIREAD AT DAWN.
Will had woken suddenly from another nightmare, drenched in sweat, and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. He’d put some clothes on and wandered out into the misty dawn. And he’d considered bringing the Hound of the Baskervilles out of his story to play fetch with him. Though he’d vowed never to set foot in any of Sherlock’s stories ever again—for the past few days Peter Pan was the only story he’d jumped into—he missed the Hound more than he cared to admit. That was why he was now carrying both books in his coat pockets wherever he went—just in case. Will could feel the books pressing against his chest. He thought of the dog’s big wet nose, its faithful eyes, and its saucer-sized paws. Was it time for a reunion?
He didn’t get the chance to answer his own question, however, because that was when he saw her. For one confused second he thought it was the dog lying there in the heather close to the cottage, curled up on the ground waiting for him. But it wasn’t, of course. Nobody had freed the huge hound from its story—it still stalked its own, fictional moor, not the real one on Stormsay. The body lying amid the tiny purple blossoms was too slim to be the dog’s, and it had no fur. It was a human body. It was Lady Mairead.
Will dropped to his knees beside her.
Lady Mairead was motionless, her eyes closed. She looked much smaller than usual—breakable, like a doll. She lay on her back, one hand resting on her stomach and the other beside her face. There was a dark stain on the yarn of her colorful woolly sweater; something wet had seeped into it, something which had once been warm and red and which came from a hole in her chest.
Like Holmes, thought Will. It was all he could think. He dug his hands into the heather and crushed the blossoms, killing them. This time no seashells cut into his skin. This time it wasn’t his best and oldest friend he was kneeling beside.
This time it wasn’t too late.
Almost imperceptibly, Lady Mairead’s chest rose and fell. She was breathing—shallowly, but she was breathing!
Will ran.
He sprinted across the moor to the stone circle. It wasn’t far. He took the stairs two and three at a time and raced through the aisles of the Secret Library. Glenn and Clyde, who’d been tight-lipped when he’d asked them about their fairy tale the previous evening, were in their workshop putting a new binding on a book of love poetry. When they saw the look on Will’s face they put the book aside immediately. As they ran up the stairs together, Will told them what had happened.
Glenn hurried after him to the patch of heather while Clyde went to sound the alarm at Lennox House.
Lady Mairead was still breathing.
Glenn felt her pulse.
Will didn’t know what to do. He rocked from one foot to the other.
Soon the others arrived. Alexis and Amy were still in their pajamas. Desmond had his arm around Alexis, and Mr. Stevens was speaking urgently into an old-fashioned radio. Then they huddled around the pale body and waited. Alexis sobbed quietly, Amy trembled. Will took her hand and squeezed it.
He’d dreamed about her again last night. At least—Amy’s name had been mentioned, hadn’t it? The memory was already fading, but he still had a vague inkling—Sherlock’s dead body had appeared in his dream, as always, but this time Will had not been the only one standing over the dead body. The princess had been there. She’d been holding a dagger, and she’d asked him something about Amy. Will couldn’t remember what it was, but the princess must not have liked his reply. Because she had immediately started to cry, loudly and piercingly like a small child.
The helicopter approached from the south. Its rotors clattered in the wind and it circled above the island as it tried to locate them. Then at last it began its descent. The heather parted beneath its skids as it landed a few yards away.
Suddenly everything happened very fast.
The emergency doctor jumped out and immediately inserted a cannula into Lady Mairead’s arm. She still wasn’t moving. The paramedics carried her inside the helicopter on a stretcher. Alexis and Mr. Stevens got in, too, to accompany Lady Mairead to the hospital on Mainland. The rotor blades began to clatter again, and the helicopter rose into the air.
They gazed after it until it was just a tiny dot on the horizon.
What if they’d found Sherlock sooner? Would he have been taken away in a rescue helicopter too? Would he have survived? Will pressed his lips tightly together.
It was Glenn who finally broke the silence. “Somebody has to tell the Laird what has happened,” he remarked, and of course he was right.
Though everybody on Stormsay must surely have seen the helicopter, the Laird would still expect an official report. And he would want to hear it from a member of his own clan. “I’ll do it,” said Will.
The Book Jumper Page 22
