Bookweirdest Part 17

Jerome ground his own coffee beans right there on the rocks. If ever his father complained about the lack of an espresso machine, he would have to remind him of this. The archivist gathered straw and wood fragments that had fallen through the cracks from the cellar, and with Malcolm's help, he built the tiniest fire Norman had ever seen. He placed the beans and a small amount of water in the travel-sized coffee pot G.o.dwyn had given him.

"Watch the pot for me," Jerome told him. "This fire needs more fuel." It was the first time Norman had heard the other boy speak so gruffly. Maybe he really did need his coffee.

Norman did as he was told and stood guard over the little coffee pot. His father had offered him espresso once. It was just about the worst thing that he'd ever tasted, and this was from a kid who ate books as a hobby. He wondered now if his father had ever tried eating a book.

Jerome and Meg were farther down the pa.s.sage, scavenging straw and wood fragments. Malcolm sat on the other side of the fire, watching it with him. The stoat caught his eye as Norman reached for his knapsack.

"Might as well get a start on this," Norman said.

He selected a page he'd written describing the Shrubberies. He could have chosen his room, but for some reason, he'd found it easier to describe the kitchen at breakfast time, with his sister being her usual annoying self and his father grumpy before his first coffee.

He ripped the page into strips as he usually did. It felt good to eat paper like a ribbon of pasta or a long roll of liquorice, feeding it slowly into his mouth and letting it dissolve before he chewed off the end.

Malcolm watched as Norman fed two strips into the top of Jerome's coffee pot. The stoat's eyes widened into an unspoken question. Norman just shrugged. It could work, couldn't it?

They watched the pot until it bubbled over and Jerome plucked it gingerly from the flames. From inside his cloak, he removed a tiny porcelain cup, smiling as he poured the thick brown sludge into it. "Does anybody else want some?" he asked. Norman and Malcolm were quick to shake their heads. Norman had to stop himself from grimacing.

Meg took a single polite sip and handed it back. "That's plenty for me. You have it."

Jerome knocked it back in two quick gulps and smacked his lips. "Let's get back to that escape route," he urged, as if just the taste of the coffee had revived him.

The three human children took turns boring the hole for Malcolm to slip through. Norman tried to do his part, but Jerome was taller, stronger and more determined. When everyone else decided to give up for the night, Jerome insisted on pressing on just a little bit longer. Norman sat on the floor of the tunnel and watched the boy who would become his father work at their escape route. He had pitied Jerome once, felt sorry for the orphaned boy locked up in the library. Now he didn't know how he felt.

The dirt floor of the tunnel was surprisingly comfortable to lie down on. Weariness can make any bed comfortable, but it was getting cold in the tunnel. Meg was already dozing under Jerome's cape when Norman pulled on his sweater and covered himself with his knapsack. It helped when Malcolm curled up on his chest. Norman felt the warmth of his body even through the sweater.

"I'll be back for you," Norman whispered. It killed him to have to bookweird away without his friend.

"I know," the stoat replied confidently. He seemed to settle down to sleep for the night, but after a few moments, he spoke up again. "That trick with the paper in the coffee? Do you think that'll work?"

"I doubt it," Norman replied with a yawn. He really didn't think it had much of a chance.

A Final Waking.

Norman could tell without opening his eyes that he was back at the Shrubberies. He knew the sound of the sparrows by now, and the smell of pancakes downstairs told him something else: his mother was home. He knew this not just because he thought Kit was incapable of making pancakes. After all, Esme could probably have managed, and they would be tiny, perfectly delicious rabbit-sized pancakes. No, a boy knows the smell of his mother's pancakes. There was just one doubt that kept him in bed, unwilling yet to discover the truth. Would his father be here too, or was he stuck in the tunnels beneath San Savino, still unaware that he really belonged in a whole other time and place?

He rolled over and dangled an arm over the side of the bed. As he dragged his fingers across the floor, they brushed against a pile of bedclothes. He opened his eyes to find a small figure asleep beneath a flowered comforter. His first thought was of Malcolm, but the lump was too big to be a stoat. He finally spotted the tattered stuffed yellow dinosaur and the little pink fingers that clutched it. Dora. What was she doing curled up with her comforter and her old stuffed animal on the rug beside the bed?

He woke her gently, and she surprised him by wrapping her arms around him and clinging to him tightly. Norman wasn't used to hugging his little sister, but he decided he was enough of a hero to manage it. When Dora smelled the pancakes she quickly released him, as if she'd just realized what she was doing, and rushed downstairs. Norman followed her more slowly, prepared for anything.

He was tired of the bookweird, but if his father wasn't there, he would have to go back. He would save him from the fire all over again if he had to. He'd stop the duel in the cellars. He'd tell Malcolm to aim for Black John's right hand first, and if it came to it, he'd dig out the floorboards of the cellar himself. He wasn't going to let the bookweird hurt anyone he loved again.

And so it was a relief to see Edward Vilnius standing there in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a cup of coffee and a grin.

"Good morning, Spiny," he said, raising his coffee cup as if in a toast. "Slept well, as always, I see."

"Better help yourself to some pancakes before they're all gone," his mother told him.

He didn't move right away. He was watching both his parents, observing their expressions and their gestures, seeing if he could pick out any echoes of the childhood versions. Maybe something in the way his father stooped, almost apologetically, echoed something he'd seen in Savino-the tall youth ducking under the huge beams of the library, the boy hiding away among monks. His mother's eyebrows, raised in bemused expectation as he stood there thinking, was something he'd seen in the childhood Meg, but there was a softness in her eyes that hadn't been there in the young girl he'd met in the desert fortress.

"Thank you for watching Dora last night. That was very mature of you. I didn't see any emergency messages on my mobile phone and there are no reports of police or fire being called to the scene, so all in all a good night. Did Mrs. Lamley from next door at the Hedges look in on you like I asked?"

Norman wasn't sure what to say. Did his mother really believe that this was what had happened, or was she asking him to go along with her cover story? He took a largish bite of pancake and made a sound that could have been either "uh-uh" or "uh-huh."

"Where did you guys go last night, anyway?" Dora asked.

"We went to an opera," his father replied, singing the word "opera" in a deep baritone.

"Yes," his mother added breezily. "An opera based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe."

"I think I might have fallen asleep," Edward said, "but I'm pretty sure the butler did it."

"I'm sure you fell asleep," Meg scolded playfully. "The people in the box next to us thought your snoring was part of the score. And it was the Prussian field marshal who did it, not the butler."

"I should have known," his father replied, snapping his fingers as if mad at himself for missing it.

Norman could feel himself grinning. They were back, both of them exactly as they were supposed to be. He didn't care how it had happened-whether it was the trick of the paper in the coffee, or if Meg had managed it herself. He didn't even care if Kit was somehow behind it. For all he cared, it could even have been another accident of the bookweird. He was just glad to have them here as adults, back in the real world.

Malcolm! The thought struck him and wiped the smile off his face. What had happened to Malcolm? Was he stranded alone in the tunnel beneath San Savino?

His mother had been watching him out of the corner of her eye the whole time.

"We got you something at the bookstore while we were out-one of those Tattersnail or Bramblebush books. I'm not sure if you've read this one."

She removed a thick paperback from her purse and slid it across the counter. His mother knew very well that the series was called Undergrowth, but it amused her to pretend not to. It used to bother Norman, back when he didn't have bigger things to worry about. He grabbed the thick paperback from the counter and sat down to read the back cover, holding it in his left hand while he shovelled pancakes into his mouth with his right. It was hard to smile with pancakes stuffed in his mouth, but as he read, Norman did.

Legacy of the Mustelids: In the much-antic.i.p.ated sequel to The Brothers of Lochwarren, readers are returned to the mountain kingdom of the stoats, so recently wrested from the hands of the vicious Wolf warlords. While the prodigal Prince Malcolm wanders distant forests, indulging his taste for adventure, the kingdom he inherited languishes. Prince Regent Cuilean lies ill, felled by a mysterious illness. The legions of the Great Cities have marched home, and the stoat armies have been disbanded. The weasel king, Guillaume, continues to press his dubious claim to the Mustelid Empire by means both legal and nefarious. Will no one stand in the way of his grab for power? Is Prince Malcolm's return too late and too little? Is the ancient doc.u.ment he carries enough to prove the legitimacy of his rule? And if it comes to a fight, is his small band of Santandarian archers enough to seize the throne back from the treacherous weasels?

Malcolm's disappearance from Lochwarren and the loss of the map had turned into a whole other book! Part of Norman wanted to jump right into Legacy of the Mustelids, not just to start reading it but to fight at his friend's side again. He was ready to run right upstairs and start eating the prologue, but then he remembered with a pang of regret that he'd sworn off the bookweird. He'd come so close to losing everything. He'd be an idiot to start messing with that now. Maybe he'd just read a few chapters and see if he was needed.

Was that small band of Santandarian archers enough, or did he need the help of the legendary giant Norman Strong Arm? And surely that band of archers wasn't just a coincidence. They had to be the rabbits of Willowbraid. Norman had done nothing to get them back to Undergrowth. Was it Kit who had helped them-fickle, unpredictable Uncle Kit-or was it just another accident of the bookweird?

Where was Uncle Kit, anyway? Norman pushed his plate away and made for the stairs.

"Dishes?" his dad asked, tilting his head towards the sink.

"I'll look after it," his mother said indulgently. That was weird too. She was usually a stickler for ch.o.r.es.

He bolted up the stairs before she changed her mind. There was no sign of Kit. The main bedroom looked like his parents had slept there. The library was the usual mess of his father's papers, and the study was tidy, with his mother's laptop open on the desk. It was as if Kit had never been there-and of course he hadn't, hadn't been at this Shrubberies. Kit had had Norman and Dora at his own version of his childhood home, stranded and in some strange half-fictional place between the real world and a real book.

Just the thought of it made Norman check the window overlooking the back garden. No unicorn appeared to be grazing there. There was no fountain filled with dolphins, marble or otherwise, and no turret-shaped addition. In the distance, he could see the edge of the woods where the rabbits lived. Something told him that not all the talking rabbits of England had returned to Undergrowth. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but he really believed that the little town of Willowbraid still rang with the sound of church bells from the Cathedral of St. Peter the Martyr and the hammer strikes of Wayland the smithy.

But the bookweird had thrown too many surprises at Norman for him to feel safe just yet. Something still nagged at him. The image of Sir Hugh using his last breaths to bid Jerome-his father, Edward Vilnius-goodbye stuck with him. What was left of The Secret in the Library now that Hugh and John of Nantes were dead and Jerome had vanished? Norman remembered the knapsack. He rushed back to his room. Sure enough it was there, lying in a tangle with his bedclothes.

He unbuckled the leather strap quickly, shoving his hand down through the piles of figs and apples and a.s.sorted bits of paper until he felt the weave of the cloth-bound book. It still existed. The book itself had not vanished, but what of the world it contained? Figs and apples spilled out over his bed as he withdrew the book anxiously.

At first he could see no change. It looked like the same book. On flipping it open, he could still see the slim edge where Malcolm had sliced the endpapers with his rapier, but the next page was blank, and the page after that. Dumbfounded, he flipped through the rest of the book. The pages were all like that, completely empty. Norman had seen something like this before: when he'd first messed up The Brothers of Lochwarren, the letters had become unreadable. But he'd never seen the pages completely erased like this. He closed the book hurriedly and examined the blue cloth cover. It too was blank. The silver embossed lettering of the t.i.tle and the name of the author had vanished. There was no lettering at all, not on the front or the back or the spine. It was a blank bound book, like a diary or a writer's notebook. Its emptiness was almost scary. He shoved it back in the knapsack and buckled the straps tight. He didn't want to look at it.

Did the world of the book still exist now that the book itself existed only as a memory in the heads of its readers? And how few were those readers? Was his mother the only person alive who had read The Secret in the Library all the way through? Did she even remember it now that it had been erased? He wondered if he'd ever summon the courage to ask her.

The sound of a car pulling up on the driveway interrupted his thoughts. He crossed the hall to the study and looked out. A silver station wagon was pulling up. The yellow sign on the door read Taxi. The man who opened it and stepped out wore black jeans and a leather jacket. His black hair was pulled back into a ponytail. While the taxi driver removed his luggage from the trunk, the man in black frisked himself for some money to pay the fare. From Norman's angle, it was impossible to see the man's face, but he soon obliged by looking up, scanning the upper windows of the Shrubberies as if he was expecting someone to be waiting for him. The man in black smiled when he saw Norman standing there, the familiar crooked smile of his uncle. Kit waved up to him from the driveway, and Norman couldn't help waving back. It was a reflex.

Tell Us Again How You Met.

That summer in England seemed so much longer than a few months. Norman had been in and out of half a dozen books and had experienced a lifetime's worth of adventure, so it didn't seem like a vacation. The strange old country house they called the Shrubberies had begun to feel like home, and now they were leaving it, returning to their real home so that Norman and Dora could start the school year and Edward Vilnius could return to teaching at the university.

The road back to the airport was like all the other roads in England, narrow and twisty, causing his head to sway in the back seat and occasionally hit the window. Up front, his mom and dad bantered as usual, laughing at their own stupid jokes and pointing out "interesting" bits of scenery.

Beside him, Dora rattled along about whatever came into her head. "Tell us how you met again," she demanded. She'd heard the story hundreds of times, but like all little girls, she loved the romance of her parents' meeting.

"Oh, that was a very long time ago now," her mother replied, pretending not to want to tell the story. But in truth, she liked to tell the story, even if she said only half of it out loud. Norman knew the unspoken parts now and could fill them in himself. It was interesting to him to realize that you could tell half the truth and still not reveal most of the story.

"My father knew her father," Edward began. "They worked together after the war."

"Grandpa Jespers was a university professor too," Meg continued. "He was sent to Eastern Europe to help re-establish their universities. He stayed with your father's family, and they became good friends."

"Do you remember that time, Dad?" Norman asked. He wasn't trying to be mischievous. He was curious to know what his father remembered.

"Oh, I was very young. I remember only little bits of it. I remember a little courtyard garden. I remember my father teaching me English. It seemed like such a strange language. Most of all, I remember the old archive where he worked-a dark, dusty room filled with rare books and scrolls."

Norman remembered that room a little better, and could tell him a few things about it, but if Edward remembered G.o.dwyn as his father, Norman wasn't going to contradict him.

"But that's not how you two met. Tell me how you met," Dora insisted, eager to dive to the heart of the story.

"My parents tried to help Edward's family defect. The borders were closing-the Iron Curtain and all that-and intellectuals like your father's father were being persecuted. They needed to get out. The family split up. Edward came across the border with my parents. They used Kit's pa.s.sport and pretended he was their own son. His parents were supposed to come later, but something happened. There was a car crash. They might have been chased."

"So you're an orphan," Dora said solemnly. It pleased her to feel sorry for her tragic dad.

"I hardly remember my birth parents. Mostly I remember growing up at the Shrubberies with the Jespers. They were very kind to me, and the Shrubberies was a magical place to grow up." He didn't sound at all bitter about the tragedy in his past. "And that's where I met your mother. She was my best friend. The best memories of my childhood are of the days we spent in the imaginary worlds we created together: great adventures in the desert, s.h.i.+pwrecks, forest kingdoms." He lifted his hand from the gears.h.i.+ft to touch hers gently.

Norman caught his mother's eye in the rear-view mirror. She was smiling contentedly.

"Your father eventually went to school in America on a scholars.h.i.+p. I came a few years later."

"She followed me," Edward said with mock arrogance.

"My mother got a job in America and I followed her," Meg contradicted him. "But it hardly matters. I knew eventually we would end up together. It was fate, you see."

"A storybook romance," his father said. He meant it ironically, but Norman knew better.

They drove along a little farther without saying anything more. Norman wondered if this was really what his father remembered, or if he was going along with the cover story too. Did he really not remember his childhood in San Savino? Did he really not realize that he had been born and had lived among the crusading knights?

"Do you think you'd know if you were a fictional character?" He blurted out the question at the end of the long conversation he'd been having with himself in his head. It was the sort of out-of-context remark that made him a figure of fun in cla.s.s back home.

His mother for once seemed to know what he was thinking, but that didn't stop her from answering the question, as she often did, with another question.

"Do you think you'd know if you were half-fictional?"

He hadn't thought of it that way.

"Do you know what?" Dora asked, moving from topic to topic as only a child obsessed with her own thoughts could. "I'm going to be a writer when I grow up."

"Oh, really?" her dad said. "Not a show jumper or a ballerina anymore?"

"That's kid's stuff. When I'm a famous writer like Uncle Kit, I'll buy myself a stable of horses."

"A famous writer like Uncle Kit, eh?" Their uncle had only joined them for the last few days of their summer in England, but he had obviously made a huge impression on Dora. "And what are you going to write about?"

"I'm going to write about Esme, the magic rabbit, and how she looks after all the orphan children in her house in the countryside and rescues them when they go on adventures."

"That's a book I'd definitely like to read," their father said with a chuckle.

"Oh, everyone will," Dora a.s.sured him confidently. "Then I'll be able to buy my own horses. I'll have a jumper and a hacking horse and an Arabian for show ..." Norman stopped listening to the list of horses she would one day possess. The list ended at some point, and thoughts of her future fame and fortune were enough to keep her quiet for a while.

Norman watched the countryside fly by the window-the hills, the viaduct, the winding roads that were so familiar to him. At one point, he thought he spotted a big estate that looked exactly like Kelmsworth. He had hated it in England when they arrived, but the site of the familiar estate on the hill actually made him sad to leave.

"Mom," he said, opening his mouth to ask the question before it was even completely formed in his mind, "I was wondering if maybe I could come back and spend next summer with Uncle Kit."

His mother gave him a sidelong glance of warning, then seemed to soften. "Maybe. We'll see how you do in school this year. It might be nice for you to get to know your long-lost uncle."

end.