Bookweird

by Paul Glennon

  “King Malcolm divided the two traditional gifts of the Mustelid Kings between his sons,” the haughty cleric declared. “To Cuilean he gave the Helm of Govan, symbol of the protector. To Duncan he gave the Chronicle of the Mustelid Kings, the one true record of our history.” He held up the book.

  “From Malcolm to his son Duncan and to his son Malcolm the throne passes,” he proclaimed.

  “Long live King Malcolm!” Cuilean’s voice rang out, calmly and warmly.

  “Long live King Malcolm!” the audience in the chapel shouted enthusiastically. It was echoed not only in the church but behind Norman, where a large crowd had assembled to witness the emergence of their new king.

  “Long live Cuilean the Protector!” the audience now cried. The bells above the church had begun a joyful peel. Norman’s legs felt weak beneath him.

  One glance toward the two princes convinced him that he’d done the right thing. Cuilean stood proudly and protectively at Malcolm’s shoulder. The young boy looked up for reassurance. The older man nodded encouragingly, and the new king again brightened and stood tall.

  It would all work out. The bookweird would make it okay. Whatever he had written last night was now the truth. Norman might have changed the story, but he had done it right. Malcolm would be a good king. His people clearly loved him, and his uncle would protect and guide him.

  Malcolm’s gleaming eye caught his own as he stared down the aisle of the chapel.

  “Long live King Malcolm,” Norman yelled, giving his friend the thumbs-up sign again. At least he thought he yelled. It came out quietly, as if the volume had been turned down. He still felt faint and his vision was blurring. By the time he realized what was really happening, it was too late to say or do anything more in Undergrowth.

  Grounded

  There was no scent of pancakes this time, or of bacon, or of banana milkshakes, for that matter. Norman just woke up. That didn’t make it any less confusing. Wherever he was, it was dark and very, very quiet. He rubbed his face and sat up. He’d been sleeping on something hard, and it had left an impression on his cheek that he did his best to rub off. Where was he, anyway?

  It looked liked he was back in his own time, or at least close. Carpet had been invented at least, he noticed, as he stood up and felt it with his sock feet. He peered down at his feet for a while, trying to remember why he wasn’t wearing shoes. It came to him eventually. One shoe was stuck in the mud of an ancient English battlefield. The other was now displayed on the trophy wall of the great hall of Castle Lochwarren.

  Norman hardly dared to hope that he was home again. It certainly wasn’t his own house he was in. He knew the sounds of his house—the hum of the furnace, the rattle of the old fridge—but there were none of these here. And yet this had to be modern times. There was carpet on the floor and the sound of the occasional car going past outside. He was in a large room, with no windows. The only light was the faint red glow of an illuminated exit sign. God, Norman hoped, let this not be Mom’s gross murder book again. He reassured himself that it didn’t smell like a police station.

  As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, the room became clearer. The tall shapes that filtered the light on either side of him were not cell walls. Those were books, not iron bars. It was beginning to dawn on him where he was.

  “Hello,” he whispered cautiously. He’d listened to the silence about as long as he could. There was no answer. He tried again, louder this time. Now he was sure that the library was empty, that it was long past closing time. Only a few cars had driven past since he’d woken up. During the day, the street outside the library was much busier than that.

  Keeping his hand on the shelf beside him as a guide, Norman slowly made his way out of the history section, where he’d fallen asleep. There was a phone by the desk. It should be that easy to get out of here.

  It could have been just the lack of light, but the library seemed more of a maze than he remembered. He hit a few dead ends at the end of the rows of shelves as he groped his way through the dark. When he finally emerged from the stacks at the library’s front desk, the first thing that confronted him was the illuminated face of the clock. It couldn’t possibly be that late, could it? The clock insisted it was 1:30 A.M., but he was reluctant to believe it. That would mean he was in some serious trouble.

  Norman stared at the telephone keypad and listened to the drone of the dial tone for several moments. He wondered if it might not be better to be back in a book being chased by a wolf or a crazed Viking. Darwin and Rorschach’s interrogation room didn’t even sound all that bad at the moment.

  When Norman finally worked up the courage to dial, it did not take long for someone to pick up. It hardly rang once. His dad must have been sitting by the phone.

  “Norman, is that you? Where are you? Are you all right?” he demanded.

  Norman must have said he was all right about fifty times before his mother picked up the other extension and asked some sensible questions.

  Norman’s parents arrived at the library about the same time as the police. Edward Vilnius had called Norman back on his cellphone and talked to him while he drove to the library. The police, he insisted, said it was okay to go out through the emergency door, but he was to wait until they were in the parking lot.

  The alarm going off made it pretty dramatic. The police didn’t have any way of turning it off. They’d already phoned the fire department and explained the situation. They weren’t sending a truck. The chief would drive over in his own car. That, at least, was a little less embarrassing than it might have been. Still, it was surprisingly difficult to explain.

  Nobody seemed to want to believe that he’d just fallen asleep in the library. Not his parents, not the police. The fire chief, at least, didn’t care. He just wanted to get the alarm off and get back to bed, which sounded like a pretty good idea to Norman himself. Instead, though, he had to answer a dozen questions from his parents and the police—or rather, the same question over and over. Everyone wanted to know if he had really fallen asleep in the library or if he had tried to run away. The police officer wasn’t at all like Rorschach or Darwin. She reminded him more of his grade 2 teacher, Ms. Morin. She always made a big deal out of little things, too. When he finally convinced them all that he really had just fallen asleep in the library, it was after 2 A.M.

  If his parents were angry, they did a good job of hiding it. His mom sat in the back with him while his dad drove. She kept stroking his hair back from his forehead while she told him how worried they had been.

  “I haven’t seen your father look that worried since the day you were born.”

  Norman’s dad looked back at them in the rear-view mirror. There was a deep frown on his face.

  “Honestly, Edward,” his mom said, talking to his dad’s face reflected in the rear-view mirror, “your forehead was creased exactly like that.”

  His parents didn’t mention the missing page from the poem, even when they arrived home. Norman wasn’t complaining. If he could avoid talking about it, he would. Maybe he would never have to talk about it. Maybe they didn’t know that the old poem had been changed at all, never mind that it was his fault. It would be a terrible secret to keep. Worrying about it tainted his relief at being home even as he fell back asleep, exhausted.

  He was still thinking about the damage to The Battle of Maldon when he awoke. He was more than a little surprised that he was in his own bed in his own room in his own life. Once you’ve woken up inside a book a few times, it’s hard to go on through your life with the same expectation of normalness.

  The clock told him it was 9:30, but he was sure it was a school day. Hadn’t he left on a school day? His mother was working at the kitchen table when he finally dragged himself down there. There was no reprimand. She just looked up, smiled and said, “Good morning, sweetheart,” as he lurched into the room. Norman poured himself a bowl of cereal and waited. Perhaps he ate with an elbow on the table and slurped to hasten the scolding, but really Norman
was too exhausted to be this calculating.

  “Isn’t today a school day?” he asked finally, cautiously.

  His mother smiled the same indulgent smile she’d given him when he’d first come down. “We thought you could use a little extra rest.”

  Boy, if she only knew, Norman thought. He gulped another spoonful of cereal before another thought came to him.

  “Is Dad at the university today?” Norman’s mom tended to be more lenient than his father. When his mom went easy on him, there was always the chance that this would only make his dad come down harder on him.

  “Your dad’s here too. He’s working in the den.” She got up from the table to steam the milk for coffee. “Why don’t you take this up to him? He’ll appreciate that.”

  Norman studied her face. She didn’t look like she was sending him off for his punishment, but his mother could hide her intentions better than most. She was hard to read sometimes.

  On the stairs, on his way to his father’s office, Norman decided that honesty was the best policy, or at least as much honesty as would be believable, which, now he thought about it, wasn’t really much. This might be a case where he’d have to lie in order to be honest. This conundrum made him hesitate as he knocked on the door of his father’s den.

  “Is that coffee I smell?” his father asked cheerfully. “I certainly hope so. I feel the last one wearing off.” It was the old familiar joke, but Norman would not let himself be lulled into a false sense of security. He kept his guard up and placed the coffee carefully on the desk.

  “Ah, cappuccino, just what the doctor ordered. Your mother is a lifesaver.” This was really weird. Maybe it would be better to just leave his father alone with his coffee. Norman backed away toward the door.

  “Listen, Spiny…” That stopped Norman in his tracks. Dad never called him Spiny when he was angry. Norman was a bundle of nerves. He could feel his lip quivering and bit it to make it stop. His dad had every right to be furious. It was all his fault after all. When he’d eaten that first page out of his book, he’d broken some ancient law of books. He’d caused a chain reaction of destruction that had culminated in his father’s work being destroyed. Now history was all messed up and his dad would get fired, and he’d have to learn to speak Viking. He was probably already speaking Viking and just didn’t know it.

  “Spiny—”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry about your poem. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know how it happened…I just, accidentally one night. I ate…I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

  His father got up from his chair and approached him with his arms open. “Spiny?”

  “There’s a librarian, though. He’s also a fox. He knows how to fix it. He won’t tell me, but maybe if you…”

  His father had wrapped one arm around him and pulled him close. With his free hand he wiped Norman’s cheek. “Hey, relax. There’s nothing to be sorry about. Fox librarians, eh? That’s what happens when you have a sleepover in a library. Listen, I owe you an apology.”

  Norman was sniffling now. When had he come down with a cold? It was probably from running around outside in hills of Lochwarren without shoes.

  “Yesterday when I was looking for the page I’d lost, I was frantic. I let my anger at myself get out of control and I blamed other people for something that was entirely my fault.”

  “But, Dad, it is kind of my fault. Even though it doesn’t seem like it. It’s something called bookweird.”

  His father chuckled. “Bookweird? That’s a good word for it. It’s funny how you can lose your head over a book. I found my missing page, Spiny. It was here all along.” He pointed to a large leather-bound book. “It was here, in between the pages of this dictionary. I was up late—not as late as you, perhaps—but like you, I lost track of things.”

  Norman nodded. “But the battle at Maldon. The English lost, and it’s all my fault.”

  “Your fault, eh?” His father laughed. “Now you’re getting delusions of grandeur, Spiny. That must have been some crazy dream you had in the library last night. Stress can make you dream strange things. I’m really sorry, Norman. I shouldn’t have blamed you for the missing page.”

  “But the English lost,” Norman repeated. His father clearly didn’t understand.

  “Of course, they lost. Brythnoth let the Vikings across the causeway, and as soon as things got rough his allies ran off.”

  “But was it always that way?” Norman asked.

  Another chuckle from of his father. “Yes, it was always that way. It’s the whole point of the poem. It’s what makes it interesting. Is Brythnoth a sucker, or is he another example of this crazy English idea of fair play?”

  “But don’t the Vikings go on and conquer England? Didn’t you tell me that this was an important point in the war against the Vikings?”

  “It was, but not because they won—because they kept fighting. English history is full of stories like this, fighting on in the face of sure defeat.”

  Norman didn’t really know what to say to this. He wasn’t sure he believed it.

  Norman’s father smiled again and tried to cajole one out of Norman. “Your mother figured you could use a day off school. I think she’s right. You couldn’t have slept all that well in the library.”

  Still deep in thought, Norman shook his head slowly.

  “Listen,” his father said. “I have a book on this you might like. It’s about the first great English king, Alfred the Great. Do you want to read it?” Norman’s father ran a finger across the spines of the books on his bookshelf until they came to rest on a slim green clothbound volume. Norman jumped back involuntarily when his father held it out toward him.

  His dad chuckled. “You haven’t developed bibliophobia, have you? Fear of books? It’s very serious. The treatment is quite painful.”

  Norman couldn’t stop a small grin from wrinkling out from his mouth. “I just think that I should give my brain a rest for a day or so.”

  “You’re probably right. That’s another possible diagnosis: you could have bibliotoxosis, book poisoning. I’d suggest a day of bike rides. I could pull my bike out after lunch, if you like.”

  “Maybe until then I’ll just play on my computer.”

  His father took a sip of his coffee and nodded in mock solemnity. “Yes. For now, that’s probably the safest course of action.”

  Norman did finally return to book reading later that week. He borrowed his dad’s book on Alfred the Great and got through it without incident. And The Scythian Scimitar finally came in at the library on the weekend. Mrs. Balani handed it over and took his library card with a sly smile.

  “You know this is a day pass? It’s not good for overnight stays. Right?”

  Norman had no answer to that. Mrs. Balani would hardly be the last person to tease him about his night in the library.

  He read The Scythian Scimitar carefully at first, worried that this was just the sort of book to draw him in—all ancient intrigues, customs and magic. But he couldn’t hold off very long. On his second night with it, he found himself reading by his desk lamp, which was bent and pointed in a tight cone of light toward his pillow. It had just been revealed that the sword, long protected in a crystal case in the Scythian vaults, was a fake, just when they needed its powers the most. The city was sure to fall to the evil monk Savanorola now. Norman knew it all along. The monk had tricked a young groom in the Scythian stables into hiding the true scimitar. If only he were there, Norman could explain it all to the groom and save the city. He was just about to rip off the corner of the page when he stopped himself. That was close, he thought to himself. He put the book down for the night.

  He finished The Scythian Scimitar the next day, in the daylight. The next few books were a little easier. He was slowly curing himself of his habit of eating paper. After a while, not eating parts of books became as natural and unconscious as eating them had once been. For a very long time after that, the strangest thing that happened to Norman was a dream in which
he was failing a cycling safety test given by a bunch of pencil drawings. That seemed to be the end of bookweird for him.

  By the time summer holidays rolled around, Norman was pretty sure he had dreamed it all—the Vikings, the gypsies, even his friend Malcolm. He might not have forgotten so easily if he hadn’t lost the map that Duncan had given him. When it went missing, he just assumed that it was one more thing that he had imagined. It wasn’t as if he could, as he usually did when he lost something, ask his mother if she’d seen his authentic stoat heirloom map of Undergrowth. Had he asked, though, he might have received an unexpected answer. It would have been interesting to hear her explain why, when she found the map on Norman’s floor that day, she peered at it curiously for some time before folding it up and putting it in her pocket.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m grateful for Lara Hinchberger’s sympathetic editing, which made Bookweird a much better book. I must thank Denise Bukowski for introducing the book to the world and Amy Black for making sure it emerged in the best possible shape. Bookweird would not exist without the early encouragement of the Stickman and his sister, the book’s earliest readers, editors, and critics. One of them also knows a secret or two about Fortune’s Foal.

  About the Author

  Paul Glennon is the author of an adult book, which was a finalist for the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction and was selected as one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 Best Books of the Year. Bookweird is his first book for young readers. He lives in Ottawa.

  Copyright © 2008 Paul Glennon

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.