Bookweird

by Paul Glennon

  It was obvious that Serendipity was going to be Amelie’s summer project. Like her mother, Amelie had always loved horses. No matter how her father tried to keep her away from them, she was drawn to them. And this horse was special. Amelie could tell just by looking at him, the way his bold brown eyes met hers and returned her gaze so constantly. He knew her too. It was like finding your best friend.

  Amelie looked after Serendipity for weeks, feeding him, encouraging him to test his wobbly legs and watching him grow into a frisky and fearless little colt. This was a bitter sweetness. Every day that the colt grew stronger was another day closer to the one when he would be sent away. Amelie was desperately attached to Serendipity and would have done anything to keep him. She knew it was impossible, and she didn’t dare ask her father, but it didn’t stop her wishing it.

  Perhaps it was only her anxiety over losing Serendipity, but Amelie was having trouble sleeping. Three nights in a row she was awakened after midnight by the sound of strange animal calls—a low hoot or growl that she did not recognize. Each night she stood at her open window and tried to pick out the animal in the darkness, but every time she went to the window, the noise halted, as if the animal had spotted her. Only once did she hear anything further, and that was just a bit of rustling in the long hay behind the stables. It could have been a raccoon, or maybe even the wind swirling through the long grass.

  In town at the grocery store that week, Amelie overheard a strange conversation. A talkative lady who always seemed to be at the cash register was rattling on to the clerk about gypsies. They were on their way through again this year, she announced in her busybody’s voice. Better lock up your chickens and hide the jewellery. You know what happened last year. Amelie couldn’t help scoffing. She didn’t think that there really were any gypsies hereabouts. Amelie had only ever heard of gypsies in movies about carnivals and soothsayers. Her father had some classical music that he called “gypsy music.” He played it so loud sometimes that it upset the animals outside. She hated dad’s gypsy music almost as much as the animals did. It jangled and screeched and made you nervous inside, but it seemed to make her dad very happy, so she never complained about it.

  For Norman, all this talk about gypsies and bad classical music was almost as annoying as the music was supposed to be. Norman’s dad had a few intolerable CDs himself, so Norman could sympathize.

  The town gossip about gypsies reminded Amelie of something else. Several times that summer she had seen a young girl playing by the riverbank near the horse meadow. She looked only eight or nine, but she always appeared to be alone. This seemed so unusual to Amelie that she had twice approached the girl to see if she was all right. Each time Amelie had tried to speak to her, the girl had run away. The first time she had run right into the bush on the other side of the river, fleeing as if she were being chased. The second time, though, the strange girl had stopped at the top of the opposite riverbank and stared back at Amelie. Her nut brown face had shown no fear, and her dark eyes had glistened with curiosity. The two girls stared at each other silently from opposite sides of the river until Amelie called across, “What’s your name?” The younger girl did not answer, just held her stare a moment longer before slipping into the woods and disappearing.

  Amelie dreamed of the girl that night, dreamed about gypsies and about her horse Serendipity. In her dreams, he was already her horse, and each time the animal sounds outside woke her, she was saddened to realize that in reality, this would almost certainly never happen.

  The whole farm was awakened that morning by the shouts of the farmhands in the stables. The new foal was gone. Amelie bolted from her bed, unsure whether the shouts she’d heard were in her dream or not. Her foal gone? Serendipity? The entire household had congregated down at the stables. The stablehands formed an impenetrable barrier between Amelie and the foal’s stall.

  “Let me through,” she cried. “Let me see.” But the men did not budge. Georges Saint-Saens turned and shook his head solemnly at her.

  “Somebody call the police,” he barked, turning his back again to Amelie. A stablehand rushed off immediately to do as ordered.

  “There’s so much blood,” somebody whispered.

  “Surely the poor thing couldn’t survive that.”

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “It’s sick.”

  “I’ll bet you it’s those gypsies. They’ve been sneaking around folks’ farms all week.”

  “This must be one of their rituals. I can’t wait until Sheriff Wilkyn gets his hands on those greasy scumbags.”

  It was driving Amelie crazy. What had happened in that stall that had outraged them all so much? Finally she squeezed her way through. An arm grabbed her, but it was too late. She stood there gaping at the scene in the stall. Blood was everywhere, soaked into the hay, splashed on the boards of the stall. Vomit surged into her mouth. She rushed blindly from the stable out to the cruel grey morning.

  Norman stopped reading. Even he could see that this didn’t belong. It might happen in one of his mother’s creepy murder thrillers, but gruesome murders didn’t happen in a little girls’ horse book. Small wonder his sister didn’t want to read any farther. Norman wasn’t sure he wanted to continue himself. This had to have something to do with his Undergrowth book, and the missing page. Had Dora eaten a page of her own book, he wondered? Was it a contagious disease, a mania that caused the entire household to start eating their books? What if Dora had fallen into her book the way that Norman had fallen into his? Once he’d got this idea into his head, he couldn’t get it out. What if Dora was there now with those horse-murdering gypsies? Norman got up and tiptoed to his sister’s room. She was lying there asleep, twisted in blankets, snoring just slightly. Is that what Norman had looked like while he was in Undergrowth? He crept closer to her bedside and listened to her breathing. She seemed genuinely restful. It was hard to imagine that she was really in a land where people killed horses and knocked kids unconscious with shovels. Well, maybe not too hard to imagine. Norman shook his sister’s shoulder.

  “Wha…whasamatter?” Dora rolled over, opened her eyes momentarily and gazed at him sleepily, before her lids snapped shut again.

  “What are you dreaming about?” Norman asked in an anxious whisper.

  Dora grumbled something incomprehensible. He repeated the question. “What are you dreaming about?”

  Dora groaned, and answered slowly, in a barely discernable mumble, “Candy.”

  Norman felt as foolish as he did relieved. Had he really believed that his sister had been transported into a book? He was beginning to wonder whether it had actually happened to him. As he climbed into his bed, the red LEDs on his alarm clock flashed exactly 2:00.

  “I better get to sleep,” he told himself. He wouldn’t admit it to himself, but he was a little too creeped out to keep reading in the dark.

  Don’t Mind Me. I’m Just the Reader.

  The tickle of something inside his nostril finally woke him up. He sniffed and snorted without opening his eyes. It smelled musty, like the basement or a hamster cage. Had he sleepwalked to the basement perhaps? I’ve got to stop staying up all night, Norman thought. It was two o’clock when I put Dora’s book down last night. I don’t even remember getting out of bed this morning. That’s how bad it’s getting. Maybe if I just open my eyes slowly and don’t yawn, no one will notice I fell asleep again.

  He did open them slowly, keeping his head leaned against the wall. It became clear what had been tickling his nose: straw. He was lying in straw. He knew exactly what had happened. He wanted to pretend he didn’t, but he knew exactly.

  “Tell me I’m not in my pyjamas, tell me I’m not wearing pyjamas,” he muttered to himself. It might be acceptable among rodents, but real people, even fictional ones, thought it was weird if you went out in your pyjamas. He let out a sigh of relief. There was something to be said for falling asleep with your clothes on. He stood up cautiously, brushing the straw from his jeans and T-shirt. H
e was in a barn. He was pretty sure he knew which barn, too. Sun was streaming in through the only window in the stall, illuminating the loose bits of dust and straw floating in the air. It was morning, sunrise, in Dora’s stupid horse book.

  He had to stand on tiptoes to see out the window. He could see the farmhouse from here. It was exactly as he imagined it, a big two-storey house of red brick. A white porch was wrapped around it, and a copper weather vane turned slowly and silently on the highest of its steeply pitched roofs. A neatly raked path led from the house to the barn, and the grass on either side was a uniform shade of bright emerald green. Everything in this book was flawless. No weeds grew on the gravel paths. Nothing seemed dirty. It was as if every piece of wood, every fence rail, every barn board had been freshly painted that morning. Norman had been to a real farm and knew they were never like this.

  The smart thing would have been to walk up to the house, introduce himself somehow to Amelie and try to explain why he was here and how he could help. The trouble was he had no idea why he was here and what he could do to help. He had to think of a story for Amelie. He couldn’t just say, “Don’t mind me, I’m just the reader. I’m here to help.”

  Instead, Norman told himself he just needed some time to think and do a little investigation. Maybe he could figure out what the gypsies had done with the horse. It was a little girls’ book, after all—how hard would it be to solve the mystery?

  The horse barn was just as perfect as the rest of the farm. The door hinges didn’t even squeak when he pushed his stall door open. This is what little girls like Dora imagined farms should be like, clean and fresh, smelling more like wildflowers than horse manure. It was probably just as well. From what Norman remembered, the smell of horse manure wasn’t all that pleasant.

  All this clean, tidy perfection made the scene in the last stall all the more disgusting. The stench struck Norman between the eyes as he opened the stall door. It was dark and oppressive, a bit like vomit, a bit like incense in the church his grandmother sometimes took him to. It made his stomach churn and his head spin. He had to grab the railing to make sure he didn’t faint. He’d seen a little too much killing for a kid his age, Norman thought. When he’d caught his breath, he raised his head and took another look. It looked as grim as it smelled. The blood had dried now, staining the straw a sickly brown colour, like an old cola stain. It was everywhere. Georges Saint-Saens was right: there was no way the horse could have survived all that. But why? Why would anyone do that?

  Norman had a couple of theories. Most likely it didn’t have anything to do with this book at all. The missing page had disturbed the story, and things were happening that shouldn’t happen, things that didn’t belong in Fortune’s Foal at all, just like they had in Undergrowth. If this was true, then it was Norman’s fault. The missing page from The Brothers of Lochwarren had started a chain reaction. It had infected Dora’s book and changed it too. But maybe this could be fixed. Despite his intervention, the stoat rebellion in Undergrowth seemed to be going pretty much as planned. By introducing Malcolm to his uncle, Norman might have actually made things better…maybe. So maybe he just had to do the same sort of thing here. He had to fix things. But how could he fix a murdered horse?

  Obviously, he had to find out who killed the horse. He had to put that right at least. And he had to find this Amelie girl another horse. That would fix things, wouldn’t it? He wished he’d asked Dora who might have done it, who Amelie’s enemies were, who her father’s enemies were. It was probably the gypsies, but maybe that was too obvious. Norman would have to talk to Amelie carefully, see what she knew. Together they’d figure it out. But he had to get to her alone first. He had to find a way to explain to her.

  “It’s those goddamned gypsies. Those filthy horse butchers better not let me catch them.”

  Norman turned around, startled. He had heard lots of worse swearing in real life, but this was pretty harsh for one of Dora’s horsey novels. It was one of the stablehands. He spat on the ground to punctuate his threat to the unseen, long-gone gypsies.

  “Why would they do something like this, anyway?” Norman asked. Without waiting for an answer, he introduced himself. “I’m Norman, Amelie’s cousin,” he declared quickly, very much to his own surprise.

  He might as well have said that he was Zorba from the planet Omega 3 for all the stablehand seemed to care. He just nodded, as if he already knew.

  “Who knows what those savages do? Most likely they carved it up for those filthy sausages they try to sell out at the farmers’ market.” He came closer and whispered knowingly, “Though some say it’s all part of some satanic gypsy sacrifice.”

  “Satanic gypsy sacrifice?” Norman didn’t do a very good job of disguising his incredulity, but the stablehand didn’t seem to notice.

  “They say those gypsies do all sorts of mischief, devil worship and all that. Usually it’s just chickens and pigs they steal. Must be something awful big to call for the murdering of a horse.”

  Norman nodded vaguely, as if agreeing. His eye was caught by a mark on the outside of the stall door. It was new and deep. Five deep gashes had been gouged into the greying wood, exposing the fresh yellow wood beneath.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  “Gypsy signs, probably,” the stablehand said, as if he was an expert on all these things. They didn’t look like any kind of sign to Norman. They looked like claw marks, as if some huge cat had been stretching and sharpening its claws on the door.

  “Last year the Greenlys over on the other side of the river found a gypsy ritual site near their farm,” the farmhand continued. “A bunch of burned animals laid out on a big slab of rock—squirrels, rabbits, skunks even. And they’d made one of their secret gypsy signs on the grass with the ashes.”

  Norman made a grossed-out kind of face. Not that he really believed any of this, but it seemed to be the reaction that was expected of him. He didn’t really know anything about gypsies. His only reference was a novel study his class had done on The Painted Wagon, and that had been mostly about prejudice and racism. Maybe there was more than one kind of gypsy.

  “If the gypsy signs are secret, then how would you recognize them in the ashes?” Norman asked distractedly. It was hard to keep his eyes off the horrible scene in the horse stall. He couldn’t stop his mind from speculating about those long scratches on the door.

  “Well, none of us normal folks would do that,” the stablehand answered, as if it was obvious, “so they must have been gypsy signs.”

  Norman turned to see if maybe he was joking, but the stablehand stared back, nodding and rocking slightly on his pitchfork, like someone delivering the cold, hard facts.

  “I guess you’re right.” It seemed easier just to agree.

  Maybe Norman hadn’t been completely believable. The stable-hand raised his chin as if to say “so long” and continued down the long aisle of the horse barn. Norman said, “See ya,” quietly, as he strode away.

  The stablehand’s story didn’t really make sense. Norman didn’t believe it, but it was another creepy thought to consider. Devil worshipping and animal sacrifices would be a pretty bad thing to appear in a book for eight-year-old girls, and Norman didn’t like the idea that he might be responsible for their introduction. There seemed little more to discover in the horse stall. The book had described it accurately. It was an ugly and disgusting scene, but there weren’t any obvious clues. Even the scratches could be nothing—somebody accidentally scraping the door with a farm tool. If this had been one of the detective books that Norman had been into last summer, he would have spotted some clue in the straw, a foreign cigarette butt or a button or some broken piece of jewellery that the police had missed. No such luck. It wasn’t that kind of book. Even so, he thought he might as well take a look outside the barn to see if he could see anything peculiar.

  Around the back of the barn, something very peculiar did in fact appear. Most of the farm was covered with almost perfect lawn—the sort you see
on professional baseball fields and in front of houses in expensive subdivisions. The horses around this farm must trot around in slippers, Norman thought, because they never seemed to tear up the turf with their hooves. Here at the back of the barn, though, was a patch of torn-up ground. A muddy trail led from a locked side door across a meadow toward a line of trees. Norman followed it slowly away from the barn, looking all the while for that telltale cigarette butt or the perfect shoe print. He tried not to get too excited. Surely the local sheriff had already followed this trail and extracted whatever clues there were to be had. It was that obvious. It was exactly the sort of trail that evil horse-murdering forces from outside the book would make when they snuck into a horse barn. The trail led to a wide clump of dense bush and trees, beyond which Norman could see nothing.

  Norman had reached the edge of the field when he heard voices behind him. He turned to see a group of people following the same trail from the barn, too far away yet for him to recognize any of them. Norman returned his attention to the muddy trail. After the trees the field gave way to a sharp incline. About six feet below was a wide, fast-moving river. A boat was tied up to a tree by the banks. Not a small boat, either, but a long, narrow wooden boat—a barge, that was what they called them, a gaudily painted orange and green river barge.

  The voices behind him were clearer now. He could just make out what they were saying.

  “Are you sure he said he was my cousin—not a friend, someone from summer camp?” It was a girl’s voice: Amelie. This was not good. This was not good at all. What on earth could he tell them? Norman turned around slowly to watch the little group of people coming toward him. He could make out Amelie, her father and the rumour-mongering stablehand from the barn. Norman raised his hand in a friendly greeting. Maybe if he just caught Amelie’s eye and looked honest, she would go along with his story. Maybe there was a code word he could use to tip her off—something about her mother’s accident, maybe.