The Kneebone Boy

by Ellen Potter

  “And anyway, why would she have signed the letter to Dad ‘your loving aunt-in-law, Haddie Piggit’?” Lucia asked.

  “Maybe it was a code. In case one of us saw the letter. Maybe she’s been writing to him all along, for years and years.”

  “Ridiculous!” Otto said so vehemently that he startled Chester, who jumped out of his arms.

  “It is, you know,” Lucia said. “Ridiculous, I mean. Mum is gone, Max. Gone as in dead, most likely. She’s not coming back. I don’t know why you can’t accept that. We do.” She looked over to Otto for agreement but he wasn’t looking at her.

  “How did Haddie introduce herself to you?” Max asked Lucia suddenly.

  “I don’t remember. Why?” Lucia replied.

  “Think,” Max urged.

  So she did. So much had happened yesterday that it was hard to pull out one piece and remember it exactly. She thought back to the conversation she’d had in Haddie’s bedroom.

  “She didn’t introduce herself,” Lucia said finally. “I asked her if she were Great-aunt Haddie and she said she was.”

  “There!” Max jabbed a triumphant finger at her.

  “There, what?”

  “You told her who you thought she was, and she just agreed,” Max explained.

  “Maybe she’s a total stranger then,” Otto suggested.

  That sent a little chill through them until Lucia remembered:

  “No, she knew my name without my telling her. She even pronounced it right. And she knew which one of you was which.”

  “She’s not Mum!” Otto said, his hands moving angrily. He grabbed Chester up off the floor and stalked out of the room.

  They were quiet for a moment out of pure astonishment.

  “Why is he so angry?” Max asked.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Lucia said.

  And it was. Very. Because she had no idea.

  Chapter 11

  In which there are no vampires or ghosts but you’ll like this chapter anyway

  They found Otto sitting on his bed in the dungeon. Chester was curled in Otto’s lap, but Otto wouldn’t pet him. He wouldn’t get up either, not even when Lucia and Max said they were going to explore the castle folly for the secret passageway. Not even when Lucia demanded that he get up.

  This annoyed Lucia greatly. “Fine! Stay here and act like a giant dope,” she said.

  But Max sat down on the bed beside him, which made the rat come out of the ceiling and scuttle across the floor. Chester looked at it but didn’t even bother to get up. You can fool a cat only so many times.

  “Come on, old man,” Max said gently, putting his arm around Otto. “We’ll do some exploring and maybe find something for your collection. There’s bound to be some weird bugs or something like that.”

  But Otto wouldn’t even look at Max. He raised his knees so fast that Chester tumbled out of his lap. He crossed his arms on top of his knees and laid the side of his face against his arm. There he sat, in a gloomy funk, and he looked so much like a real prisoner in a real dungeon waiting for his execution that Lucia laughed, which was probably wrong of her. In any case, it didn’t help matters. He wouldn’t budge.

  In the end, Lucia and Max went exploring without him. They travelled through hallways that twisted and turned and made them fear they were hopelessly lost until they realized they had passed the same big china jug that was used as an umbrella stand five times. They tried every stairway. One whirled tightly, up and up, until they were sure it would lead them to one of the towers, only to find that the stairwell ended disappointingly at a stone wall. Other stairwells opened into small, strangely shaped rooms—octagonal or hexagonal—with moth-eaten tapestries on the walls and wormy wooden cupboards whose drawers contained exactly nothing at all, except for a bee spray in one. Max and Lucia used the spray can to tap at the walls, listening for the hollow sound of a secret passageway. All the while they looked, they thought about Haddie and about their mum, and wondered.

  “The thing is, if it really is her,” Lucia said suddenly, “why wouldn’t she just say so?”

  “She may be afraid to,” Max answered very promptly, because he’d been thinking the same thing.

  “Afraid of us?” Lucia said doubtfully.

  “Afraid what we’ll think of her,” Max said.

  That brought up a very important point. What should they think of a mum who has left her kids? The question made Lucia feel very squirmish in her gut. It was one thing to assume that your mum had met some tragic end. It was quite another to think that she had simply packed up her things and left you deliberately.

  “Well, anyway, Otto says it’s not her.” Lucia tried to sound decided.

  “How would he know when he doesn’t even remember her?” Max replied.

  “Maybe not consciously, but he’d know. Deep down.”

  She thought that would put an end to the whole thing. Of course it didn’t, as you’ll see, but it made her feel much better, and she began to search the rooms with more gusto.

  Finally, they did manage to find something remarkable. Tucked away in one of the towers was a small round room with a little carousel in the center. The beautifully painted wooden horses were clad in armour, like knights’ steeds. The lip of the platform and roof were carved with tangles of leaves and flowers, painted gold, and in the center of the carousel was a painting of a smiling king and queen and three haughty-looking princesses.

  “Does it work, do you think?” Lucia asked Max.

  Max walked around the carousel until he found a lever, which he yanked up. Immediately, the carousel began to move and the room was filled with plinky carousel music. Lucia and Max wasted no time in hopping up on the platform and each mounted a horse. Of course, carousels are completely for infants, but if you had discovered one unexpectedly and you didn’t have to pay for a ticket, you would have ridden it too, you know you would.

  They rode until they had circled the royal family a dozen times or so, and then they grew completely bored.

  “I can’t imagine that the Dusty Old Children used this thing too much,” Max said as he and Lucia dismounted, then made wobbly leaps off the platform before pulling down the lever.

  “No, I think it’s one of those things that seems like a good idea before you actually have it,” Lucia agreed.

  They continued their search, coming to a cozy, dark-paneled library. There was a small marble fireplace and squat, tooled-leather chairs, and a spinning globe. The shelves were full of children’s books—some of which they’d heard of but most they had not—and a child-size ladder rolled around the edge of the shelves. They took turns pushing each other around the room on the ladder, spun the globe for a while, and then, just to be thorough, checked behind a tapestry on the wall for a secret passageway.

  They found something.

  It wasn’t a secret passageway. It was a small alcove, and on the floor was a hole with a flat brass ring circling it. Engraved in the brass was this poem:

  IF THERE’S SOMETHING YOU WANT TO LOSE

  BROCCOLI, SMASHED VASE, UGLY SHOES

  DROP IT HERE IN THE ABYSS

  THE ONLY RULE IS PLEASE NO PISS

  Lucia dug in her pocket and pulled out ten pence and dropped it in. She listened for a plunk but it never came.

  “Well, that was waste of money,” Max said. He knelt by the hole and put his eye to it. “I can’t see the bottom.”

  “Hence, the Abyss,” Lucia said.

  “Hang on. I see something.” He adjusted his body so that he lay flat on his right side and shoved his arm down the hole. After a moment of pawing around, he sat up grasping a stick.

  “A stick. Oh, well done, Max,” Lucia said.

  “It’s not a stick,” Max said. “It’s an arrow.”

  Indeed, on closer inspection it was an arrow. Its shaft was green and it had grimy white feather fletches bound to the end.

  “The tip was wedged in the side of the hole,” Max said, wiping dirt off of it. The tip was gold colored and
was all jaggedy along one edge as though someone had bitten it.

  “Weird-looking thing,” Lucia said.

  “Otto might like to see it,” Max said.

  “I’m sure he would,” Lucia readily agreed.

  So they decided to head straight back to the dungeon. They were tired of exploring, and truth be told, they had an idea that their explorations were doomed to failure because Otto wasn’t with them. He knew how to find hidden things, whereas Max and Lucia did not. He would have no doubt led them to the secret passageway without any trouble.

  Finding their way back to the dungeon wasn’t easy. The stairwells tricked them again and again, some of them ending in walls at the bottom, some of them twisting about so that suddenly they were going up again. It was pretty maddening. Finally, they went down a stairwell that led them straight into a small foyer. At the end of the foyer was a low wooden door.

  “Probably a broom closet.” Max sighed.

  But when they opened the door they found that it led directly outside, into the grassy courtyard. It wasn’t where they wanted to go, but they were grateful for the rush of fresh air. They both collapsed on the grass and let the cool sea breeze dry the sweat on their faces. It was very pleasant, and Lucia considered that she and Max had spent more time alone together that day than they had in ages, playing in the sea and exploring the castle folly, and that it had been rather fun.

  She cleared her throat. “You’re not at all bad company,” she told him.

  “I don’t mind you either,” he replied.

  That was very sentimental for them, you understand. It changed things too. They still fought afterwards, of course, but things never got quite as ugly as they had before.

  “What say you, prisoners? Can I ask for a partial refund?” Haddie was standing just behind them, a large purple rucksack hung over one shoulder, limp with emptiness.

  “We didn’t find anything, but Otto hasn’t had a go yet,” Max said.

  “Tell him not to strain himself.” She yanked the slipping rucksack straps back on her shoulder. “Well, I’m off to the post office.”

  “You must get an awful lot of letters,” Lucia said, eyeing the rucksack. All the while a small voice in Lucia’s head murmured, Are you Mum? Could you be? No, not possible. Are you Mum?

  “Letters? Pfff! I go there for my groceries. Nibblies Imports of London sends me a shipment every week. American food. Fluffernutter, Twinkies, root beer, Pixy Stix, Hershey’s Kisses. How else would I survive in this wilderness? Well, behave yourselves. And whatever you do, stay off of the siege tower.”

  They climbed the siege tower as soon as Haddie was out of sight.

  In broad daylight, the climb up the tower was much more frightening than it had been at night. Now you could see the ground below, which was very far down indeed. Lucia went first, with Max right behind her. Several times she stopped during the ascent to collect her nerves. Each time Max would make some comment like, “The view to the sea is perfect right here” or “You can see clear over the treetops, can’t you?” as though Lucia was stopping to sightsee. Maybe he thought she was, or maybe he was just being polite. Either way, she was grateful.

  Finally, they reached the top of the tower and stepped onto the platform. Haddie’s binoculars lay on a shallow shelf just below the tower’s east-facing side, the side that looked out onto Kneebone Castle.

  They had a brief struggle over the binoculars.

  “What are those lumpy things in the courtyard?” Lucia asked.

  “Urns,” Max said, staring through the binoculars (Lucia hadn’t put her whole into the struggle for them, since Max hadn’t been a complete prat about the climb).

  “But do you see anybody?” Lucia asked impatiently.

  “Nobody. The courtyard is empty. Wait! What’s that?”

  “What?” Lucia pressed her head against Max’s as though she could see what he was seeing that way.

  “Never mind. It’s just a statue,” Max said.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Lucia grabbed the binoculars out of Max’s hands and looked through them. The courtyard was indeed empty. Although the castle folly was a duplicate of the Kneebone Castle, the two courtyards couldn’t have been more different. The grand castle’s courtyard was spare and uninviting, with not a single flower or hedge. There were several stone urns with no plants in them and there were statues scattered about, in the form of dancing naked women and fat babies playing instruments. Lucia thought that they looked rather pathetic, the way their music teacher Mrs. Blixton looked when she pranced around clapping her hands, in an attempt to get the class excited about music. The front door was like the castle folly’s, only much larger, and was enclosed by a sort of cage made of wrought iron.

  Max had been right. It didn’t look as though the owners of the Kneebone Castle were interested in having any visitors.

  Lucia moved the binoculars up to scan the castle windows. Many of them were covered with curtains. The windows she could see into showed dark interiors, walls covered with wainscoting and, here and there, pieces of heavy furniture. In one window she could see a desk with piles of paper covering it. Sitting behind the desk, his back to the window and his head bent over the papers, was a black-haired man. Every so often the man leaned back in his chair and scratched at his head furiously, then bent his head over the papers once again.

  “Anything interesting?” Max asked.

  “Not really.”

  She tipped the binoculars up and caught sight of a person walking past one window—too fast to see anything—then through another window was a woman carrying a tray. That window must have been in a staircase because she was moving upwards. Lucia could see the top of her body, then her hands carrying a tray with a plate of food and a cup, then her rump, and finally her feet. She was wearing a uniform of some sort.

  “Anything?” Max repeated.

  “A maid, I think.”

  Tipping the binoculars up higher, she scanned more windows. More drawn curtains. A few side turrets with missing slates on their roofs. A crow perched on a window ledge that flew away a second later, as though it knew it was being watched.

  Then she spotted it. A figure in the window of the far tower. The angle was too sideways for her to see the person clearly, but she could make out a pale face and a slender body that stood very still. Too still. It gave Lucia an eerie sensation and she felt compelled to watch until the figure moved, just a little. It was like a superstitious sort of thing.

  “What is it?” Max asked.

  “A person. I think the same person who we saw before. In the tower window.”

  “Can I see?” he asked.

  Lucia hesitated. She didn’t want to stop watching until the person moved, but it was too ridiculous to say that to Max, so she reluctantly passed the binoculars to him. He moved the binoculars around to find the window while Lucia looked on. But when the binoculars kept shifting, she asked, “Don’t you see it?”

  “No.”

  “Give them here.” She took the binoculars back and aimed the lens for the tower window. The person was gone.

  This is not a book about ghosts or vampires, but there are stranger things in this world than ghosts and vampires, and Lucia had just seen such a thing, though she didn’t know it at the time.

  Incidentally, there will be a ghost in this book, but that comes in much later.

  Okay, we’re almost ready to bring The Kneebone Boy in.

  Chapter 12

  In which Haddie isn’t at all like the Empress Amalie of Schwartzenstadt-Russeldorf. Then something spooky happens to Lucia in the woods.

  Besides her disgusting American groceries, Haddie brought back some normal food for them—sausages, which they cooked over the Bunsen burner, a can of beans ditto, and a box of Jaffa Cakes. She even bought tins of cat food for Chester. She also bought toothbrushes and handed them a bag of clothes, which was very decent of her though the sizes weren’t quite right. There were pyjamas for all of them too, the tops of which showe
d a picture of a lavender hippo wearing dark sunglasses asleep on the beach with musical notes coming out of its nose. Beneath the picture it said, SNORING BY THE SEA . . . DO NOT DISTURB. The same picture and words were printed on the bum of the pyjama shorts too.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Haddie said, “it’s all they had in the shop.”

  The fresh underwear was much appreciated.

  Haddie made dinner for them but Otto wouldn’t come out of the dungeon, not even when they let him have the arrow they’d found in the hole. During supper, Lucia stole careful glances at Haddie. She checked her hands for freckles that right side up looked like a bowler hat and upside down looked like a dog with floppy ears. There were some freckles on her hands but they didn’t form any pictures. Still, Lucia supposed she might have been wrong about that particular memory. Haddie’s eyes were a different shade of blue than Otto’s. More greeny. And her chin was rounder than Otto’s. Other than that, Lucia had to admit, they were spitting images of each other.

  The funny thing about possibly finding a mother whom you lost many years ago is that you don’t necessarily fall into each other’s arms with joy. Especially when that possible mother appears to be in no hurry to admit she is your mother. If Haddie was their mother, Lucia, for one, would have liked an apology for having run off. A tearful one, preferably.

  And another thing, Haddie wasn’t at all like the Empress Amalie of Schwartzenstadt-Russeldorf, whom Lucia had secretly imagined her mother to be like. In Casper’s sketch, the Empress Amalie was tall and willowy with long, silky, flaxen blond hair and a patient, sweet-tempered face. She was perched on a large rock holding a book while birds and rabbits and hedgehogs played around her. By her feet sat a little girl with blond, curly hair and a cranky face, who was dipping a biscuit into a teacup. The empress looked like the type of person who read books out loud beautifully, which is to say she tapped her t’s and hissed her s’s and stopped reading at just the right parts.