Even now that he knew the truth.
Even now he knew that he himself was the monster.
The knight was the monster.
The monster was the knight.
Had the princess known all along?
18
THE KNIGHT
“STOP IT!” I SCREAMED. “STOP IT!” I didn’t know myself whether I was talking to the monster or the princess.
The monster’s three heads dipped toward me. Strings of drool hung from their mouths.
I closed my eyes like a child who thinks that if you can’t see someone, they can’t see you. But of course the monster would be able to eat me whether I looked it in the eye or not. I felt its hot, moist breath on my face.
But still I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want to see Will like this. I stumbled backward, lost my balance on the slope, and fell. I landed roughly on my left shoulder. Then I rolled down the hill a little way, hit my head on a stone, and lost my bearings for a moment.
The monster plunged down the hill after me. I felt a rush of air as one of its three heads came swooping toward me, its powerful jaws aiming straight for my heart. With the last of my strength I flung myself aside, but I knew it was too late. There was no escape. Sharp teeth pierced my sweater. Nobody could stop the creature Will had become.
Except the princess.
The princess laughed. Then she clapped her hands. “Good boy!” she cried, and “Shhh, that’s enough.” And: “Well done.” And: “Come!”
The teeth released their hold on me.
The monster stamped its clawed feet so hard that the earth shook. But then its rasping breath quietened and eventually fell silent altogether. When I opened my eyes, the beast was gone and the shimmering ingredients were back in the princess’s hand.
Will was lying in the grass beside me.
He was asleep.
His nostrils had shrunk back to their normal size and his tousled hair, as usual, was sticking up at crazy angles from his head. And it was just the one head, attached to a perfectly normal neck. I bent over him and touched his cheek with trembling fingers. It felt like Will.
He opened his eyes and stared at me blearily. “Amy!” he yawned. “What happened? Did I … fall asleep?”
I stroked his face and kissed his forehead. “No. The little girl changed you.”
He sat up. “Changed me?”
“For a while you weren’t you anymore—you were her monster. And before that—before that she tried to make you her knight.”
“I didn’t try to do it,” whispered the princess suddenly, right in my ear. “I have already done it.”
The uneasy feeling in my stomach intensified, and a bitter taste spread across the roof of my mouth. But my brain still hadn’t grasped what she meant. I was too busy spinning around to grab hold of her—I was going to grab hold of her and I was going to—
But she wasn’t behind me anymore. She had gone chasing off after a white shadow that was hopping through the flowers a little way away, seemingly in a great hurry.
“Oh dear!” cried the White Rabbit as he glanced at his watch. “I shall be late, oh dear!” He ducked out from under the princess’s hands and went bounding off toward the castle gates.
“I command you to stop,” panted the princess. “At once!”
The rabbit froze midhop and belly-flopped onto the grass. The princess picked him up and clamped him under her arm. “Good boy!” she told him, in the same tone of voice she had used to the monster a few minutes earlier. The rabbit opened his eyes wide with fear, but didn’t say another word.
My knees went weak as the princess turned to face us.
“It was easy to make Will my knight,” she explained, fondling the rabbit’s neck. He was trying to play dead, and I wished I could have done the same. It was far too absurd to be true. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. Instead I felt fear clawing at my throat again. The same fear that had come crashing in on me a few days before, the morning I’d suspected Will of being the thief.
“I first met him two days before you arrived on Stormsay,” the princess continued as the world fell away around me. Will, the Will I had fallen in love with, was … he was … the thought hurt too much to think it.
I stared into the rabbit’s eyes, the blood roared in my ears, the fire on the horizon crackled. But still I heard the princess’s words as clear as glass in my head. Words like blades. “Will was walking on the moor with a huge dog. I hid behind a bush and as he came past I sprinkled my poison on him. I let it seep into his mind and I forced him to obey me from that moment on. The next day I had him kill a couple of geese in a fairy tale, as a test. But the poison had not taken full effect—something inside him was still rebelling. So much so that he wrote something on his wall in the dead birds’ blood. As a warning to himself or a threat to me. I don’t know. But he wrote the same words on the rocks inside my cave. Perhaps he wanted to show me I did not own him. But there, of course, he was wrong.”
I swallowed hard, my fear hardening into a pebble in my throat. It rumbled down through my chest and left a bloody graze on my soul.
Will, I thought. Will, the knight? Will, the thief?
Will, whom I had trusted.
Slowly I turned to face him. He was still sitting beside me. Still looking slightly dazed. Staring into space as if he wasn’t taking in a word of what the princess was saying.
“After that I ordered him to steal the first idea for me—my talking rabbit here. It worked beautifully. But then that fool Holmes turned up. He realized at once that it was Will’s own handwriting on the wall of his cottage, put two and two together, and tried to help Will. We had to get rid of him,” the princess sighed. “Fortunately by that time my knight was entirely obedient to me.”
My soul was bleeding, and the loss of blood was making me dizzy. “No,” I whispered.
“Yes,” said the princess.
“Will would never have done anything to hurt Holmes. And he helped me look for the thief. Why would he have done that if it was him all along? I don’t believe you.” I couldn’t believe her. I wouldn’t believe her.
But I did believe her, and I hated her for it.
The princess clamped the rabbit even more tightly under her arm and bent over Will, who still wasn’t moving. She fumbled for a moment with his right boot, then pulled something out from inside it. Something silver. Something with a glittering, jewel-encrusted handle.
The dagger shone with a ghostly gleam in the firelight.
Mechanically, Will put out his hand to take it. His fingers closed around the handle as the princess leaned forward and whispered something in his ear.
The White Rabbit seized his opportunity while the princess was distracted to hop out of her arms and make a run for it.
My feet, however, seemed to have fused with the hilltop so that all I could do was stand there and wait. Wait to see what the princess had come up with this time, where this next whim of hers would take us. Because I understood now: she was playing with us. And she was enjoying it. It was her story and she could do whatever she wanted. In here, she controlled us all.
Me, the rabbit, the storm, and Will.
Will the knight, who was now advancing slowly toward me.
Something told me that this time she wasn’t going to tell him to stop at the last moment.
* * *
He was having his recurring nightmare.
Holmes lay dead in his armchair and Will chased the murderer. He chased him across the island and through a bizarre landscape that seemed to be on fire at the edges. This time, though, the murderer didn’t have a black cloak but a red ponytail.
It was all very strange.
The murderer had stopped just a few feet away from him. He was staring at Will with large, shining eyes. The murderer was afraid. Will could see him trembling. It served him right.
Will weighed the weapon in his hand—the weapon that was like a friend to him. The metal molded itself to his fingers. It felt good. Strong. Liber
ating. He could hardly believe it: at last, the moment had come. Soon he would have his revenge.
Will moved closer to the murderer, forgetting the red ponytail. The murderer’s eyes, nose, and mouth blurred until he was nothing more than a shimmering silhouette. A flickering shadow who didn’t deserve to live.
Will thought of Holmes and raised the dagger.
Then a rabbit came lolloping through his nightmare.
Will blinked in surprise. For a brief moment he was distracted. The murderer, emerging from his trance, took to his heels and ran. He ran through the gates of a castle and into a courtyard, skirted around a well, tried to hide behind the tendrils of a climbing rose-bush. But Will would not let him escape. He ran after him, the weapon still clutched firmly in his hand. The murderer had no chance. He had run into a blind alley and in his panic had got caught up in the thorns.
Will smiled.
The murderer was trying to struggle free of the thorns but was only succeeding in getting himself more and more tangled up in them. He was shouting, calling out things Will didn’t understand. They were not important.
Will was here for one reason alone. He raised his weapon again. Then he lunged, and the blade hummed through the air toward the murderer. Will closed his eyes and thought of Holmes. For you, Sherlock, he thought. But the Sherlock in his mind shook his head and said something—a name, very short, only a few letters long. The name felt familiar to Will. It was a name with red hair and large eyes.
The blade stopped just before it reached the murderer’s chest.
A … M … Y, read Will from Holmes’s lips. Amy? What did that mean?
“Good boy,” whispered a voice beside him, a little girl holding a captive rabbit tightly under her arm. “Do it,” she whispered. “Do it now.”
Will gripped the weapon with both hands. The tip of the blade touched the murderer, pressing against fabric and skin and bones and a beating heart. The murderer sobbed. Tears rolled down the blurred contours of his face and dripped onto the ground.
“You don’t know what you’re doing, Will!” cried the murderer. “It’s me! How can you not recognize me?”
What was he talking about? Of course Will recognized him. This was the murderer he’d been hunting for so long, wasn’t it? The Holmes in Will’s mind shook his head even more vehemently.
Will let out a breath. This had happened before in another of his nightmares—a midsummer nightmare. He’d almost done the deed but had faltered at the last minute. He still didn’t understand why. But something had stopped him from avenging Sherlock’s death. It had been a strange feeling, an intuition, which he now felt creeping over him again.
“Do it,” commanded the child beside him.
Will’s hands trembled. Everything in him cried out to ram the blade into the murderer’s heart. It was right. He had to do it, he … But still he hesitated.
“It’s me—Amy!” the murderer implored. “Amy!”
Amy, thought Will. But—of course! Amy! Like a cool cloth the name slid across his eyes and wiped away the veil that had obscured them. At last he could see clearly again. At last he remembered the significance of those strange three letters. Amy!
He blinked.
Amy stood before him.
She was tangled up in a thorny bush by the wall of the castle. There were bloody scratches on her arms—she must have been struggling frantically to get free. There were tears in her beautiful eyes.
“Will,” she whispered.
He stared at her. What had happened? “You,” he stammered as his eyes fell upon the dagger in his hands. A dagger? Why was he holding a dagger? And why the hell had he been pointing it at Amy? “I … this…” He lowered the blade.
What had he done? It was as if somebody had tipped a box full of puzzle pieces into his brain. Puzzle pieces made of blurred memories. Puzzle pieces that showed him plundering the book world.
All of a sudden he felt icy cold.
* * *
“You must obey me,” declared the princess, folding her arms across her chest so that the rabbit was nearly crushed. “You are my knight. If I tell you to kill her, you will kill her.”
“Of … of course,” stuttered Will, but I could see in his eyes that he had come back to me, that he had finally realized. There was horror in his eyes.
“Good,” said the princess as she hopped up onto the edge of the well and began to walk along it heel to toe. She pranced away from us, the rabbit in her arms quietly gasping for breath.
Will and I looked at each other. It was over. He was Will again, my Will. Another sob welled up in my chest. He gently loosened the thorny tendrils from around my wrists and eased me out of the bush. I wanted to fall into his arms, but he shied away from me.
“I understand it now,” he said tonelessly, his chin quivering. “He’s pointing to me.”
“What?” I asked. “Who?”
The princess was humming to herself. She still had her back to us. Will fished something out of his pocket, a crumpled sheet of paper—a letter. He unfolded it and handed it to me. It wasn’t a written letter but a drawing. A picture of Sherlock’s corpse surrounded by the inhabitants of the island. In the foreground stood Brock, pointing at the cluster of people as if he was counting them. But when you looked more closely you could see that Brock wasn’t just pointing at random. He was pointing at Will.
How could we have been so blind? How could we have failed to notice? Had Will always just thought he was asleep when in fact he’d been out doing the princess’s bidding? Stealing ideas from the book world? I remembered how Werther, Shere Khan, and I had followed the thief from The Little Prince to Pride and Prejudice. Hadn’t I found Will asleep at the stone circle that day? And another thing: how could I not have noticed that Will had never been there, not once, on any of the occasions Werther and I had encountered the thief?
Will appeared to be asking himself the same questions. His jaw clenched. His eyes had become hard and revealed only too clearly that he was thinking of Sherlock. He looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time.
I swallowed hard. “You didn’t know,” I said. “You didn’t know. The princess bewitched you somehow. She poisoned you. You didn’t know what you were doing, okay?”
Will didn’t answer. Instead he bent down suddenly and picked up an object that was lying in the grass. It must have fallen out of his pocket when he’d taken out Brock’s drawing. It was the key to the dungeon.
“I let her out,” he said, with an effort. “I thought I was having a nightmare. But I was actually in The Odyssey, stealing a monster, and after that I went and let the princess out of her cell. That’s why I was there this morning. I let her out.” He bowed his head. “And Sherlock … it was me who…”
“It was a curse. It is a curse,” I murmured. “The knight is the monster.” The princess had abused Will for her own ends just as she had abused Desmond in the fairy tale. But if she’d put the same curse on Will as on Desmond—if it was a fairy-tale curse—wasn’t there some way to break it? I cast my mind around frantically, trying to remember everything I knew about this story. What else had Desmond told me about how it ended?
At that moment the princess glanced back over her shoulder and saw that I was still alive. “Oh, my faithful knight,” she cried, “I wanted you to do it straightaway. Do it now!”
My breath and my thoughts faltered.
Will nodded jerkily, bent down again, and picked up the dagger. “Your wish is my command,” he said, and stabbed the dagger into the rosebush just inches from my face. As he did so he cut a single, particularly beautiful rose from among the thorns and handed it to me. Even as my fingers closed around it the flower turned back into a shimmering glass sphere. It was the Little Prince’s flower.
Will smiled sadly, and then all of a sudden his face was expressionless again, his eyes blank. As if of their own accord his hands pointed the dagger at me.
But this time I wasn’t tangled up in the thorns: they’d caught fire
the moment Will had cut the flower from its stem. And half the castle was now burning along with the rosebush. Flames licked at the walls and windows and made the air shimmer with heat. The roaring fire gave me a few precious seconds of confusion: the princess cried out, and Will’s aim was so poor that I was able to dodge the dagger and duck under his arm and away.
I ran. White-hot rage coursed through my veins. How could that devil child have done this to Will? With one hand I clutched the glass sphere and with the other I lunged at the princess, trying to knock her off the wall into the well. I missed, but that didn’t stop me trying a second time.
“Help me, my knight! You must protect me!” she shrieked, dodging another of my blows by jumping down off the well onto the cobbles of the castle courtyard. As she ran she rummaged in the pocket of her gown for the other ideas. She was probably planning to send the monster after me again. Or the evil from Wuthering Heights. But as she fought to keep hold of the violently struggling rabbit and outrun me at the same time, she was unable to find the idea she was looking for. “This is my story!” yelled the princess as I chased her up a spiral staircase to the top of one of the towers. “Everybody here does what I want. Stop chasing me, Amy! Stop it right now!” And for a moment I found myself ensnared by her words. I tasted her poison on my tongue, felt it trickle into my mind. But it was over as quickly as it had begun. “You have no power over me!” I shouted. “I’m not your knight!”
We had reached the top of the tower by now and the princess cowered against the silver battlements. I launched myself at her, wanting to claw her face, to grab hold of her and—
At the last moment she whirled around so that I only caught the hem of her dress. As I yanked at it the ancient, fraying fabric gave way and ripped. Then there was a clinking sound as the shimmering ideas dropped to the floor. A crack appeared in the glass sphere containing the cyclone, but miraculously it didn’t break. It rolled, along with the other ideas, out of the princess’s reach.
“So,” I said quietly.
The princess stared at me. Suddenly she seemed genuinely afraid of me. “My knight!” she screamed. “Kill her! Hurry up and kill her!”
The Book Jumper Page 26
