Glenn nodded. “Good. We’ll be in the library if you need our help.”
He, Clyde, and Desmond left the scene of the accident now, too, and Will was left alone with Amy. The heather was red where Lady Mairead had lain, and Amy was still trembling. Will took off his sweater and gave it to her. Amy slipped it on. Immediately afterward she grabbed his hand again as if it was the only thing stopping her from drowning in the heather.
“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I don’t want to be on my own.”
“Of course.”
Together they made their way toward the castle.
* * *
Macalister Castle was just as uncomfortable and drafty on the inside as it looked from the outside. The sea breeze whistled through the cracks in the walls; the windows were dirty and so tiny that they hardly let in any light at all. They were probably former loopholes, now fitted with panes of glass. The muzzle of a cannon would have fitted through them: sunbeams not so much.
Will led me along the corridors of the castle which felt, to me, like a labyrinth of shadows. I still couldn’t believe what had happened. My poor grandmother! I began to tremble more violently. But it wasn’t fear making me quiver anymore—it was fury. How could somebody just stab another person in the chest like that, in cold blood?
Rage ran hot through my veins, pulsing at my temples. I was sure the princess was the perpetrator—who else on the island would have attacked my grandmother? What the hell was wrong with this child? I pictured myself finding her at last, shaking her till she told me what this was all about. Stealing from literature was one thing. It was awful. But attacking a human being? The mere thought of it—walking up to somebody and sticking a dagger in them! Rage burned behind my eyes and my fists clenched. But the princess, of course, was not here. My anger wasn’t helping me right now.
I let out my breath and decided to take a leaf out of Werther’s book for once and think logically about what had happened. I concentrated on suppressing my anger as Will and I mounted a long flight of stairs to the top of one of the formidable turrets. It took me several floors, but it worked: the clues made more and more sense to me with every flight of stairs we climbed. By the time we reached the top of the tower I’d made a list in my head, similar to Werther’s:
Attempts to kill me
1. Poisoned cake in Alice in Wonderland
2. Falling boulder at the stone circle
3. Dagger attack in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
4. Dagger attack on Stormsay (mistaking Lady Mairead for me)
It had occurred to me some time ago that somebody might have been trying to poison me with that cake in Wonderland. My grandmother had been adamant from the start that food in the book world couldn’t go bad, and since it turned out not to have been the only time someone had tried to kill me, it no longer seemed all that far-fetched to suppose that I might have been given the cake on purpose. Only the poison obviously hadn’t been strong enough to actually kill me.
After that I’d narrowly avoided being crushed by a falling boulder at the stone circle. The fact that a stone which must have been sitting up there since time immemorial had suddenly fallen off at the precise moment I was standing underneath it seemed a tad too improbable to be a coincidence. I was lucky Will had shoved me out of the way in time.
And thirdly there’d been the dagger attack in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which had quite clearly been intentional. As had the attack on the moor last night. The first time the princess had failed to do what she’d set out to do, but the second time the dagger had found its mark—except that the princess had got the wrong person. I didn’t know why I felt so sure of it but I was almost certain the attack had been meant for me. After all, my grandmother and I had been wearing almost exactly the same sweater yesterday. And Lady Mairead had been found right next to Will’s cottage. In the dark, the princess had probably thought it was me on my way to see Will. What would my grandmother have been doing out there, after all? Wait a minute … what had she been doing out there? I banished the thought from my mind for the moment. All in all I felt my list made quite a lot of sense, and I decided to write it down when I got home and show it to Werther later on. Only one question remained and that, unfortunately, was the most important one of all. Why?
Will and I entered the tower room. It was musty and somber. The walls were hung with portraits of the Macalisters’ ancestors. Behind a massive desk sat the Laird with an accounts book, totting up numbers from a pile of receipts which Betsy was handing to him one by one. The Laird grimaced when he saw me at Will’s side, but said nothing.
“What’s happened?” asked Betsy.
Will told them.
The Laird listened in silence. The look on his face remained grim, but his nostrils flared at the mention of Lady Mairead’s name. “I hope she pulls through” was all he muttered when Will had finished speaking, and at these words something inside me plummeted from my chest into the backs of my knees. The fact that my grandmother might … that her injuries might be too serious, was something I’d been trying not to admit to myself until now.
Betsy, too, had grown paler and paler with every word Will had spoken. The pile of receipts had slipped out of her hands and fluttered to the floor, and she was now gripping the edge of the desk so hard that her knuckles had gone white.
I looked searchingly into her eyes. “Was Lady Mairead on her way to meet you again?”
Betsy swallowed hard. “W … what are you talking about?” she croaked.
The Laird turned his head to look at Betsy, and his eyebrows crept angrily up his forehead like hairy caterpillars.
“I … I have no idea what Amy means,” Betsy protested, her voice shaking. “I—” She bit her lip.
“You know where she was going,” I declared.
She didn’t answer. Instead she let go of the edge of the desk and took two unsteady steps toward the door. Then, all of a sudden, she lurched past us and down the stairs. I turned on my heel and gave chase, and as I ran I could hear the Laird ordering Will to pick up the receipts.
Betsy sprinted down the stairs two at a time, turned off into one of the corridors, and went zigzagging through the rooms of the castle. But she couldn’t shake me off, no matter how hard she tried. This seemed to dawn on her eventually. At last she skittered into a room with rose-patterned wallpaper from which there was nowhere else to run. She sank breathlessly onto an upholstered stool beside a dressing table, folded her arms, and cocked her chin defiantly as I approached. Her blond hair shone in the illuminated mirror behind her. “What do you want?”
Absolutely exhausted, I stood there trying to get my breath back so I could question her. How on earth had Betsy managed to emerge from this sprint through the castle looking like a candidate for Germany’s Next Top Model about to pose for her next photo shoot? I put my hands on my hips and felt the sharp stab of a stitch in my side. “What … what do you know?” I panted.
“Nothing.”
“Betsy!” I moved closer until I was standing right in front of her. “My grandmother is in the hospital. Someone tried to stab her to death, okay? So do me a favor and stop pissing about.” My heart hammered against my ribs. “Why was she out on the moor last night? What are the two of you up to?”
Betsy put her head in her hands and exhaled slowly. “I was helping her,” she muttered. “She came to me a few weeks ago and asked me to … take care of a few things for her. In the book world. She wanted me to jump there at night and, well, steal some stuff. A bit of gold, a few treasures, just a little bit here and there—so people would hardly notice.”
I gasped. “You stole from literature!”
“No, we … Okay, fine, we stole the stuff. But only for Stormsay. And we never laid a finger on any of the ideas, I swear. Plus, I only went to the novels and fairy tales where they’ve got more than enough gold already. The Sultan from Aladdin can easily spare a few kilos of gemstones. Have you seen how rich he is? And anyway, we took everything back a few days
ago because your grandma suddenly got cold feet.”
“Or because she realized how immoral the whole thing was.”
“Oh yeah?” sniffed Betsy. “Would you prefer it if there were no book jumpers left at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your clan has run out of money. You’re bankrupt. How much do you think it costs to sit around on an island for hundreds of years doing nothing but reading? For a long time the families were very wealthy, but over the years … Your family’s broke. After your castle got burned down and you had to build a new mansion your finances went downhill pretty rapidly. And my family is in more or less the same boat. We’ve got a bit more money in reserve because our castle is still standing, but that will run out eventually too. Your grandma and I wanted to secure the clans’ future by giving the Lennoxes a bit of a cash injection, and the Laird a little nest egg, too. So that we can stay here. So that we can keep jumping and taking care of the book world, Amy.”
I stared at her. Apart from the fact that I’d been wondering for some time now how good it actually was for literature to have us jumping around in it, this whole thing was outrageous! “We can’t just help ourselves to stuff from the book world. It’s a good thing you took those treasures back,” I declared.
“Pff,” said Betsy, tilting backward on her stool against the edge of the dressing table. The arsenal of little pots and tubes piled up on it began to wobble. Only now did I realize that this must be her bedroom. It was a lot more homey than the rest of Macalister Castle. Beside the bed were piles of books that wouldn’t fit on the shelves, and on the bedside table was a photo of a woman in a blue summer dress who looked exactly like Betsy.
“I thought literature was so important to you. Will said you’d do anything to protect it.”
“Would you prefer us to have to leave Stormsay?” said Betsy tonelessly. “That’s what’ll end up happening sooner or later, Amy. And that will be the end of everything our clans have built up over so many generations. We’ll never be able to jump again!”
I shrugged. This wasn’t the right time to tell Betsy about my gift. And anyway, the families’ financial woes were not exactly top of our list of priorities right now, given that my grandmother had nearly been murdered and might be fighting for her life at this very moment. “If the treasure is back where it belongs, then what was Lady Mairead doing out there last night?” I returned to the issue at hand, and Betsy went white again.
“That was my fault,” she said, her shoulders sagging. “I asked her to meet me at the stone circle again. We can’t give up Stormsay and the book world—they’re my home! I wanted to try to persuade her that we should take a little bit of gold from the fairy tales after all. But she … she didn’t come.”
“Because somebody stopped her.”
“Yes.” Betsy lowered her eyes.
* * *
When Will and I landed in the book world later that morning we could see from Werther’s face that something else had happened. In the Inkpot we brought each other up to speed on recent events. It looked as though the princess had made full use of the previous night not only to stab my grandmother but also to acquire the ninth idea, as we now learned that the evil was missing from Wuthering Heights. Werther told us it was almost unbearable to see the characters suddenly so polite and kind and completely lacking in vengefulness. There was basically no plot left at all.
We talked for a while about our lists and our suspicions. The princess only needed one more idea, then. But what kind of idea? Which story would she raid next? Will and I hadn’t managed to find out anything new about the burned fairy tale the previous night. All we knew was that it was about a knight who was sent by a princess to fight a monster and who died at the end of the story. Both the knight and the princess had escaped the flames, as we now knew. Both were living on Stormsay.
“What about the monster?” asked Will at last. “If it was burned along with the manuscript, won’t she need a new one?”
Werther wobbled his head from side to side. “Perhaps. And unfortunately, literature is only too full of terrible creatures.”
“Yes—but it has to be a story where the monster plays a crucial role. She only steals the core ingredients,” I reminded him.
For the next half hour we racked our brains trying to think which monster out of which story might fit that description. The more horror stories we came up with the more anxious Werther became—mainly at the thought of having to go inside these stories and confront the princess, as we had done in Metamorphosis. But in the end he promised, in spite of himself, to ask around and report back to us as soon as he heard anything.
Will and I, for our part, jumped back to the outside world to look for the princess. At regular intervals as we roamed across the moor we scanned the first page of Peter Pan, which was where Werther was to sound the alarm if anything unusual occurred.
The moor—the whole of Stormsay, in fact—felt more deserted than usual today. Perhaps because Alexis and Mr. Stevens were still at the hospital with Lady Mairead. Perhaps because early that evening—just to make matters worse—it began pouring down with rain. The raindrops fell thick and fast, cloaking the landscape in an impenetrable grayness which made every bush and shrub look the same.
In weather like this it was impossible to find somebody who didn’t want to be found. Within minutes Will and I were soaked to the skin and we had to accept that it was pointless to continue the search under these conditions. We decided to go back to Will’s cottage. As we approached it, however, a figure emerged from the wall of rain ahead of us. I almost screamed in fright.
It wasn’t the princess—the figure was too tall and broad-shouldered. He was wearing blue dungarees and a T-shirt with a faded picture on the front, and the fuzzy hair on his cheeks shone like the damp, shaggy fur of an animal. His close-set eyes were fixed on me.
“Amy,” said Brock. It was the first time I’d ever heard him open his mouth other than to count something. He extended his huge hand toward me. At first I tried to shake it, but then I spotted the key he was holding out to me. It was large and rusty.
“What’s that for?”
“One,” said Brock, taking my hand and pressing the key into my palm. The thing was heavier than it looked.
“One key?”
He nodded. “One key, one Amy, one princess, one knight. Be careful,” said Brock.
“What do you mean? Do you know where the princess is?”
At that he grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me closer to him, until his rough-hewn nose was almost touching mine. “Be careful,” he said again, in a whisper this time. Then he let go of me, pointed to the key, and nodded. Before I could reply he’d turned away and disappeared into the gray haze.
Will and I watched him go, openmouthed.
“What was that?” I asked. My upper arms were tingling where Brock had grabbed hold of them.
Will shrugged. “No idea. But that key looks familiar,” he murmured. “I think I know what it opens.” He brushed a strand of wet hair off my forehead. “Come with me!”
“Where?”
“To the castle.”
So we turned our backs on Will’s cottage, which was now only a few yards away, and battled our way through the storm hand in hand. The wind whipped the rain almost sideways across the island and the icy drops stung my face. But I didn’t care. The key was a promise. It would lead me to a door, and behind that door there would be another piece of the puzzle. There had to be.
We arrived at Macalister Castle and went in, leaving puddles on the corridor floors. Will marched straight through to the part of the castle that had once been the kitchens, where food had once been cooked over an open fire. There he opened a worm-eaten door to reveal a spiral staircase. A musty smell greeted us, and an age-old chill. We descended the well-trodden steps deep into the foundations of the Macalisters’ family seat, where—I soon realized—so many of my ancestors had been kept prisoner.
We were headed for the du
ngeons.
The deeper underground we went, the more uncomfortable and low-ceilinged the tunnels became as they wound their way through the rock beneath the fortress. There was no electricity down here—all we had was Will’s flashlight, its beam dancing ahead of us over the soot-blackened stone. In spite of the thick walls we could hear the soughing of the sea and I thought of the entrance to the castle from the beach, which we had passed only yesterday. Barred doors and windows were set into the walls here and there; the cells beyond lay in compete darkness. The locks were large and rusty. But the key didn’t fit any of them.
One after the other, Will shone his flashlight into all of the dungeons. They were all empty.
Why had the Macalisters needed so many jail cells? A chill ran down my spine as the flashlight beam fell upon a collection of strange instruments. The light glanced off something serrated. Something that must once have been used on the prisoners here. Sharp and painful.
I felt for Will’s hand and pressed closer to him. The ceiling was so low by now that we had to stoop, but we kept going and at last, as we rounded a corner, the tunnel suddenly brightened around us. Somebody had lit several flaming torches, mounted in brackets on the wall. The flames crackled and bathed the last of the dungeons in a flickering light.
This last dungeon was not empty.
Inside was a thin pallet and on the pallet sat a child in a tattered dress, her dirty hair spread around her like a cloak. Her dark eyes reflected the firelight. Brock had succeeded, then, where we had failed. He had captured the princess. I knew without having to try it that the key would fit.
Will dropped the flashlight the instant he caught sight of the little girl. His shoulders trembled and he gritted his teeth so hard I could hear them grinding against one another. The sound echoed through the dungeons and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The princess, however, didn’t even blink.
The Book Jumper Page 23
