by Ellen Potter
“ ‘Right, here’s the part where you could fall and die,’ he said. ‘So keep your back to the wall and shuffle along sideways until we tell you otherwise.’
“I shuffled very carefully, my heart beating like mad, careful to keep my spine pressed hard against the wall. We went this way for some time. The water sounded very, very far below and I could smell the emptiness of the air around me. Once I tipped the toe of my shoe forward and found that it touched nothing at all. I was terrified the entire time, right up until when the girl said, ‘All right, we can walk normal now.’
“But it wasn’t quite normal. We were soon walking up steps that were very tricky. Under my feet, they felt bumpy and lopsided. The person holding my hand—it was the girl, much to my embarrassment—kept having to steady me as I fumbled along, tripping every few minutes. We went up and up and up. I was growing winded, and I could hear from their huffing and puffing that they were as well. Then suddenly we stopped.
“They warned me that if I made a single sound they would leave me there all alone, never to be found again, so you can be sure I was quiet as a tomb. They took off my blindfold. We were standing in a tiny little alcove no bigger than a lift. Apart from the rough-cut stairs that we had just climbed, we were completely surrounded by a solid stone wall. At first I thought it must be some trick and they’d led me all this way for nothing. But then they got down on their knees and began to feel around the wall.
“ ‘Found it,’ the girl said, and all together they shoved very hard.
“A section of the wall began to move. It swung open as if it had a hinge, though I couldn’t see one, and light began to fill that little alcove. We crawled through the opening, which I soon realized was actually the back of a large fireplace. Once through, I stood up and found myself in a room, clean and bare except for a heavy canvas curtain that stretched from one wall to the other, blocking a section of the room from view.
“I looked around carefully, searching for a misshapen creature that might be crouching behind a chair or in a shadowy corner, but the room seemed perfectly empty of anything alive.
“ ‘Is he here?’ I whispered shakily.
“ ‘Shh!’ the older boy ordered.
“ ‘Charlie?’ the girl called out. ‘Charlie, sweetheart, we’ve come for a visit.’
“From behind the curtains, I heard the most awful noise I’d ever heard in my life. It was an animal sound but no, not quite an animal . . . it was too full of frustration and grief. It was so deeply shocking that I was ashamed to hear it, ashamed and terrified. I told them I wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let me spoil their fun so quickly.
“ ‘Don’t be stupid. He can’t get at you. He’s tied to his bed,’ the older boy told me.
“He dragged me over to the curtain while his sister and brother shoved me from behind.
“ ‘Say hello to Charlie,’ the girl ordered. They all watched me carefully. I said hello to the curtain, very quietly. In an instant there was a terrific wailing and rattling—it was the bed, I guess, as The Kneebone Boy struggled to get free. I leapt backwards, convinced the thing would tear free of his ropes and come at me. I ran to the opening in the fireplace and scrambled through. The kids laughed but they had rushed out through the hole too, nearly as fast as I had.
“Except for the younger boy. He still stood by the fireplace, staring at the curtain.
“ ‘Let’s let him out,’ he said. ‘Just this once. He’s only angry because he’s tied up. We could take him out to the woods and let him run about.’
“ ‘Get out of there, will you!’ his brother said and he reached through the opening in the wall and yanked the youngest one’s trouser legs till he tripped and nearly cracked his skull against the mantel.
“When we were all on the other side, they pushed the wall back into place and we stood there for a moment, catching our breaths and our wits too.
“ ‘We’re perfectly normal,’ the older boy told me. ‘It’s just the firstborn son, you know. And he won’t live very long, they never do. Sixteen at most. Are you going to tell your friends about this?’
“I wasn’t sure if they wanted me to or not. Maybe both. I said I wouldn’t though, and they put the blindfold on me and led me back to the folly, and as you can imagine, I never went back there again.”
That was the end of Mr. Pickering’s story. The Hardscrabbles were silent for a few moments, thinking.
“So if The Kneebone Boys die young, that one that you met must be dead by now,” Max said.
“Probably.”
“There may be a new one, though?” Lucia asked.
“I hope not, but yes, there may be. Poor thing. You know, I never did tell a soul about him. Not until now. It’s just that your brother . . .” He looked at Otto, his brown eyes frowning. Mr. Pickering pressed two fingers against his mouth as though to stop himself from saying something. “He seemed to want to know so much,” he said after a moment.
Lucia could only guess what Mr. Pickering was going to say. But it was a respectable guess because she had thought that very thing as Mr. Pickering had told the story: that Otto reminded her of The Kneebone Boy. Not on the outside, obviously, but deep, deep within. A strange boy without words.
Chapter 15
In which the Hardscrabbles wait for their “black fox,” and then discover that there is not enough time
The thing about the woods is that unless you are a badger or a sparrow or something critter-ish, it’s very hard to say exactly where you spotted something.
“It was here, I think,” Lucia had said for the fourth or fifth time, and each time she really meant it. She thought she recognized the two silver birch trees until she found another pair just like them a little farther on. Then another.
Chester’s tail also became a source of anxiety. It was questioning every noise, curling up so tightly that the tip formed a circle. Otto made it worse by saying spookily, “There’s something here. Chester feels it. I do too.”
It made the backs of their necks feel very defenseless. Lucia and Max hurried along, but Otto kept stopping and listening. His slouch straightened out and his chin lifted. He even pushed his hair back away from his eyes, revealing a forehead that people rarely saw. It was on the high side.
“What? What is it?” Lucia and Max asked nervously each time he stopped. It was never anything they could see though.
It’s a funny feeling to be searching for someone and at the same time scared that you will actually find him. Still, Mr. Pickering’s story had made the Hardscrabbles even more determined to help The Kneebone Boy.
“Are you sure it was here? Lucia, think!” Otto shouted after the sixth time that she was “certain” she’d found the spot.
She knew he was shouting by the way he punched his left thumb knuckle against his solar plexus for “think!”
“I’m positive. This is the place,” Lucia said, feeling hurt that he’d yelled at her, and she walked off the path to the twin birch trees with more confidence than she really felt.
They set the tablecloth on the ground, fixed four cheese sandwiches, and placed the sandwiches on the plates (they had purchased the special Kneebone Castle plate for The Kneebone Boy. For themselves, they bought three Christmas plates because they were half price), along with the bags of cheese-and-onion crisps, and several chocolate digestives. The sodas were placed at the corners to hold the cloth down in case of a breeze. Otto rolled up the napkins and tucked them under the edge of the plates. It all looked nice, really.
If I were The Kneebone Boy, Lucia thought, and had been treated like a mangy dog my whole life, I would feel quite chuffed to have people making such a fuss over me.
They sat on the ground, on the edges of the tablecloth, and listened. The forest, they found, was a very polite place. When the wind made the leaves speak, the birds were silent. When the lark sang, the woodpecker paused to take note. Then the woodpecker tick-tocked and the lark shut up. There were times when the sounds came fast and furious but if you
really, really listened, they never interrupted one another.
Max pretended to look bored, but really he was listening for the sound of a fingernail frantically scratching at a mosquito bite under the heel of a cotton sock. Once, a tree branch snapped nearby, but that might have been anything, and a few times they heard scurrying through the underbrush but it came to nothing.
“Maybe it’s not the right spot after all,” Lucia said.
The next moment, though, Otto began to tap urgently against his ear.
They all kept perfectly still and listened. Well, Chester padded around a bit, his tail still questioning but less rigidly. Otto picked him up and held him in his lap. For some time all they could make out was the distant beep-beep of some bird.
Then they heard it. Whispering. It sounded like the breeze passing through the leaves, only there were words in it, though they couldn’t make out what the words were. It was so eerie it made the napes of their necks feel all squibbly. Chester too seemed anxious, his ears swivelling this way and that. The children looked up at the shifting canopy of leaves and all around through the shadowy green depths of the woods, but they couldn’t see anything that looked like a boy. It was as though the whispering had melted into the air around them.
“Who’s there?!” Max shouted, his voice all nerves. It made Otto and Lucia jump. The whispering stopped. Secretly, Lucia was glad but when she looked at Otto, she saw that he was frowning.
“What did you do that for?” Lucia griped at Max, on Otto’s behalf. “Now you’ve scared him off.”
“Good! It gave me the shivers,” Max said.
“I thought you said The Kneebone Boy was just a myth,” Lucia said.
“Well, someone is out there, I don’t know who, and I don’t like the way they’re sneaking about.”
They waited a few minutes more, then ate their food and drank their sodas, remembering that it had taken Prince Alexei several tries before the fox came out of his den and joined him for a meal. They left The Kneebone Boy’s food for him, just as the prince had left the eggs for his fox, and were about to head back to the folly when Lucia remembered.
“Wait!” she said. “We have to warn him about Saint George. Who has pen and paper?”
No one did.
“Give us those Pixy Stix then.” Lucia held her hand out toward Max.
“What Pixy Stix?” Max tried to look honest.
Lucia made a fast lunge at Max and whipped the bundle of colored straws out of his side pocket.
“Oi! That’s nerve!” he cried.
But Lucia ignored him. She scoured around until she found a nice, flat rock and she placed it at the base of one of the birch trees. Kneeling in front of it, she carefully wrote a message with the Pixy powder on the rock.
It is very hard to write legibly with colored sugar. She had to do some editing with spit and her forefinger until she was satisfied with the message:
“BEWARE OF TRAPS BY BIG MAN WITH BRAIN,” Max read, and looked at Lucia. “What?”
“Braid, not brain,” Lucia said. Then she did some more editing with her pinky.
They left the site feeling far less spooked than they originally had. Max led, since he knew how to cut through and find the path that went straight to the folly. Lucia carried Chester the whole way because he was dragging his poor fifth leg along the underbrush, but also because she was so grateful to him for being a cat without a cat carrier.
“When we get you back to Little Tunks,” she whispered to Chester, “you’ll have a garden full of other cats to fight with and mice to torture and when you’re tired of it all, you can come inside and we’ll spoil you silly.” She whispered this so as not to remind Otto of Little Tunks in case he changed his mind.
Once in the folly, they heard tinny music playing from somewhere inside. They followed the sound up a set of stairs and down a hall until they spotted a swirl of colour through the doors of a little round tower room. The carousel was turning, the beautiful polished horses sliding up and down on their poles in front of the smiling royal family. Haddie was perched on a white horse with a red mane flying backwards in little twists, and she was talking on the phone. She sounded annoyed.
“If I make them go back to Little Tunks now, don’t you think they’ll start asking questions. They’re not stupid kids, you know, and anyway maybe it’s time they got some answers. They’re old enough to handle it. And Otto already knows. What? Yes, I’m sure he knows, I’m positively sure . . .” The rest was lost because Haddie’s horse had spun around to the other side of the carousel, away from the Hardscrabbles. When she came around next she noticed them standing there, smiled a tight little smile, and mouthed, “Your dad.”
They each felt a sudden lump of disappointment in their bellies. It wasn’t that they were unhappy to hear from their father. It was just that hearing from their father meant he had tracked them down and now he’d likely ship them back to Mrs. Carnival pronto.
“As a matter of fact, they’ve just come in, Casper,” Haddie said into the phone. “You can talk to them your—” then Haddie disappeared momentarily as the horse spun around the other side. When she appeared again, she was holding out the phone. None of the Hardscrabbles stepped forward, so Haddie tossed the phone into the air. Six hands reached out to save it because somehow it was like she had thrown their father in the air. Lucia caught it. Then she realized the trick and tried to hand the phone off to her brothers, but they had backed up and waved their hands against the thing.
“Oh, fine,” she said, glowering. She took a breath and put the phone to her ear.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Lucia!” he said in the same way people say, “Thank heavens!”
It gave Lucia an idea.
“We were stranded in London, Dad!” She tried to sound traumatized. “Angela wasn’t there—”
“Yes, yes, Haddie told me,” he said,
“And there was this awful man covered with tattoos and he roughed up Otto.”
“Good heavens, is he all right?”
“Yes, but we had to literally run for our lives.”
“Oh, Lucia, I’m so sorry. I was rushing when I called Angela and it was all a stupid mistake—”
“We left our bags and everything under a tree, including our return tickets. We were too terrified to go back for them.” She paused here, waiting for a sound of sympathy. It came as a sort of moan.
Haddie had slipped off her horse and turned off the carousel to hear better.
“But thank heavens, Haddie took us in,” Lucia went on. “If she hadn’t, well think. I mean, think!”
This may have been overly dramatic. Lucia noticed Haddie wince.
“Now look, Lucia.” Casper’s sympathetic tone took a sudden nosedive. “It’s a lucky thing that you all are fine, and even that you wound up at Haddie’s, although I still don’t understand how that happened. But you need to return to Little Tunks right away. Tell Haddie to buy you all tickets back and I’ll tell Mrs. Carnival to expect you this evening on the six o’clock train.”
Lucia thought very swiftly and decided that, at this juncture, a straightforward approach would be the best.
“Why don’t you like Haddie?” Lucia asked.
“It’s not that I don’t—is she standing right there? She’s standing right there, isn’t she, Lucia?”
“Yes,” Lucia murmured, now convinced she had taken the exact wrong approach.
The phone was suddenly yanked out of her hands.
“Lucia’s been out in the sun all morning,” Haddie said into the phone. “I think she’s a bit dehydrated. Now, listen, Casper, they’re perfectly fine here. Why not let them stay? I promise I’ll keep them out of trouble.”
There was a long silence, during which Haddie said, “Yes,” “I know,” and “Understood,” and then finally Haddie hung up.
“He says you can stay until tomorrow. Then he’s coming to pick you up himself and take you back home.”
“Tomorrow?” Max wailed.
&nbs
p; “But it’s not enough time!” Lucia said.
“No, it isn’t. Not nearly,” Haddie said, and she smiled very sadly. It wasn’t at all like the gentle and adoring smile of Empress Amalie of Schwartzenstadt-Russeldorf, but for some reason each Hardscrabble suddenly felt a soft pinch around their heart area, both achy and pleasant. Otto included.
Chapter 16
In which something awful happens but I can’t say what it is
The Hardscrabbles were so anxious to see if The Kneebone Boy had eaten their food and seen their message—perhaps even left one of his own (although Max reminded them that it was unlikely, since he probably couldn’t read or write)—that they had to keep from heading back to the woods immediately. They busied themselves, instead, by searching the folly. If they had to leave tomorrow, at least they might discover a secret passageway. They travelled the same confusing tangle of hallways and went up and down the illogical stairwells, just as they had when they searched for the passageway yesterday. Only today, they had Otto with them. Max and Lucia were positive that he would find it. Plus, they were armed with a hint from Mr. Pickering. He had heard the tap-tap-tapping sound, then scraping, then the hiss before they’d entered the passageway.
“By the way, Otto,” Max said as they walked down a hallway, “what is it that you already know?”
“What?” he asked.
“Haddie told Dad that you already knew something. What is it?”
“How should I know what she’s talking about?” Otto answered. It instantly plunged him in a bad mood, so Lucia brought the subject back around to the task at hand.
“I’m guessing that the scraping sound was probably a panel that the Dusty Old Children slid open,” she said. “And the tapping . . . don’t you think we ought to have a go at tapping the walls, Otto?”
Otto didn’t answer. He was standing perfectly still now while Chester weaved around his ankles lazily.