The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  Lady Mairead, meanwhile, was chatting away again about the Secret Library. As I’d discovered on the way back to the classroom, Glenn had two colleagues at the library named Desmond and Clyde, whose job it was to maintain order among the chaos of the books. They, too, wore monk’s habits and had scars on their faces. Clyde cataloged the library’s holdings and Desmond was a bookbinder and only a few years older than me. Twenty at most, I reckoned.

  “Ah, those were the days. When I was young, I jumped into hundreds of stories.” Lady Mairead smiled to herself. “Our gift is very precious, Amy. Make the most of it while you can.”

  “Was it an accident?” I asked once I was able to speak again.

  Lady Mairead raised her eyebrows. “What?”

  “The librarians—Glenn’s eye and their injuries, I mean.”

  She looked down at her teacup. “Ah, yes. Yes, it was.” Macbeth raised his head and stared at me.

  My grandmother seemed to have no intention of revealing anything more, so out of politeness I took another bite of my biscuit. The volume of biscuit in my mouth seemed to increase the more I chewed, and I felt another choking fit coming on. I was such an idiot! My jaws worked overtime.

  As if sensing that I was in urgent need of a refill to wash down the biscuit crumbs, Mr. Stevens entered with a pot of freshly brewed tea. The cat settled back into Lady Mairead’s lap.

  As I’d made my way from the stone circle back to Lennox House, I’d been in a euphoric mood. I couldn’t wait to tell Alexis about the experience I’d had. My feet seemed to fly across the moor. As I arrived at the mansion I ran into Alexis in the entrance hall, muffled up in her coat and scarf. The words came tumbling out of me. “I was inside The Jungle Book. I spoke to Shere Khan—”

  “I’m going for a walk, Amy,” she’d interrupted, stemming my torrent of words. “Let’s talk about it later.” The next thing I knew she’d disappeared outside. I’d been waiting for her to return ever since.

  As Mr. Stevens poured the tea, I glanced at my watch. Alexis had been gone nearly three hours now. The island wasn’t that big. Perhaps she was doing more than one lap?

  “It’s not easy for your mother to come to terms with you jumping,” said Lady Mairead, noticing the glance.

  I shrugged. “She agreed to come here. And anyway, I don’t understand why she’s so against it. I think the whole thing is absolutely brilliant.” Again and again I thought back to my encounters with the tiger, the young man and the three old women, who I now supposed must have been witches. I’d been to a new world. A better world, one where dreams came true. And I was annoyed that I couldn’t tell my closest confidante about it. When Lady Mairead had tried to question me soon after I’d arrived back at the mansion, I’d simply shrugged. Despite my mum giving me the cold shoulder earlier, I still wanted her to be the first to hear about my experiences in the book world.

  My grandmother stirred a dash of milk into her tea. “I think that for many years Alexis was in denial about the fact that you might have the gift, too—until she almost came to believe her own self-deception. She is afraid of what might happen to you in the book world.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—her own experiences as a book jumper were not entirely positive,” said my grandmother quietly, as if she didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  “Really?” I leaned forward.

  “Do you know the novel Anna Karenina?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “I haven’t read it. But I know it’s about a woman who jumps in front of a train at the end.”

  Lady Mairead nodded. “Alexis chose the story as a practice book and—”

  At that moment, Alexis entered the conservatory and Lady Mairead fell silent.

  “I just wanted to let you know I’m back, and I’m going to go and have a lie-down. I think I’ve got a migraine coming on,” said Alexis. And off she went again.

  But I wasn’t going to let her get away so easily this time. I stuffed the remainder of the second biscuit into my pocket “for later” and hurried out into the hallway after Alexis.

  She was already one and a half flights of stairs ahead of me. When I caught up I found her leaning against a window with her forehead pressed to the glass, looking out across the moor.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked. My irritation at her disappearance suddenly evaporated, to be replaced by concern.

  Alexis jumped as if I’d caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be. “Oh, er—Amy,” she stammered. “Yes—I’ve just got a headache.”

  I moved a step closer to her. She did look pale, and there were dark circles under her eyes that I hadn’t noticed that morning, perhaps because they’d been hidden under a layer of makeup. Her arms hung down limply at her sides. Even her colorful knitted dress looked as though somebody had covered it with a gray veil. She wasn’t okay. Of course she wasn’t. How could I have forgotten that?

  It was only three days since Dominik had left her. Her world had fallen apart, just like mine had that Wednesday afternoon when Jolina had posted the photos online. And the fact that I’d spent a few hours in a dream didn’t change that.

  I put an arm around Alexis’s shoulders. “Let’s forget about all that,” I said. “That’s why we came here. Stormsay is going to help us forget.”

  Alexis said nothing.

  * * *

  I dreamed about the naked photos again that night. This time, however, they weren’t being sent from phone to phone but were printed on a poster on the wall of the Secret Library. Instead of Jolina and Paul and the rest of my class, it was Betsy, Will, and Glenn looking at the pictures. Will was snorting with laughter, while Betsy and Glenn argued.

  “She can’t really look like that. The photos must have been doctored,” said Glenn. “No normal human being looks like that.”

  “Rubbish. I took the photos myself in the locker room. She’s a Lennox, what do you expect?” retorted Betsy. “Just look at her sticky-out ribs. I told you, she’ll never be a book jumper. She’s nothing more than a dry twig.”

  Will’s laughter grew louder now, and even Glenn began to grin.

  “If you ask me we should just throw her on the compost heap,” added Betsy, pointing to a miniature rubbish pile that had suddenly sprung up in the corner of the classroom.

  “Yes,” said Glenn, ripping the poster off the wall. As he did so I realized that I wasn’t standing behind the other three, as I’d thought, but inside the pictures. I seemed to be trapped inside them.

  “We shall have to tell the Lady that Amy is not worth training,” Glenn continued. He tore the paper into tiny pieces, and me with it. First he ripped my face in half, then my body, my hands, my fingers. I screamed, but nobody could hear me. The poster disintegrated into smaller and smaller scraps; my arms and legs turned to confetti. My head was shredded. All that was left of me ended up on the stinking heap of muck.

  I was woken by my own scream.

  The sheets were drenched with sweat and clung to my body. Panting, I stared into the darkness of the canopy above my head. It wasn’t real. Nobody on the island except Alexis and me knew about the photos. My subconscious had been playing tricks on me again, and it had all been just a stupid nightmare. I’d had a lot of those recently.

  But it still took a while for my breathing to slow. I didn’t dare close my eyes. Who knew what crazy dream I would have next? Instead, I fumbled for my e-reader and switched it on. The screen lit up, bathing my face in its comforting glow.

  I scrolled through the library and came across a book I had out on loan from the public library back in Germany: Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens. I’d almost finished it, but now I went back to the beginning and skimmed through a few sentences about Oliver’s life in the workhouse without really taking them in. I knew now, after all, that reading wasn’t the only way to get inside a story. There was another way—a much more exciting way. What would it be like to jump into Oliver Twist’s story? To join him on all his adventures in Victorian London—the journey to
the big city, the time spent in the clutches of the band of thieves? I’d never been to London before.

  I laid the e-reader carefully over my face. This was no easy task, since there was no fold down the middle and only one page, which I had to balance on my nose and forehead. I pictured the scene from that afternoon, the way I’d jumped from the stone circle into the book world, the way the letters had slowly started to warp before my eyes. I remembered how the blackness of the words had expanded and contracted, how the sentences had swirled and merged. The memory was so vivid that the lines of text on the screen in front of me suddenly seemed to be moving too.

  At first the lines grew longer and longer, and then the letters began to trickle across the screen and melt into one another. The gray shades of the text gave way to brown. It was the brown of a table made of coarse wood.

  Suddenly I was sitting underneath this table, wedged in among a gaggle of thin boys’ legs in heavily patched trousers. I ran my fingertips across the dirty floorboards in disbelief. I could smell sweat and unwashed bodies.

  “I’m still so hungry,” came a voice from somewhere above my head.

  “Course you are—we all are. Who could ever be full after three spoonfuls of gruel?” declared another.

  “If it goes on like this, I shan’t be able to guarantee anything—I may end up eating one of you tonight in your sleep,” said a third. “That’s it—I’m going to ask for a second helping.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “No. But one of us must, else we’ll waste away and die.”

  “Yes.”

  “Before we all croak.”

  “We’d best draw lots.”

  There was no longer any doubt in my mind: this must be Oliver Twist’s workhouse! I crawled through the forest of legs until I found a spot where I could wriggle up onto one of the long benches. By now the boys were busy drawing matchsticks, and didn’t notice me. I was shocked to see how gaunt their faces were. They looked almost ageless—not like children, at any rate. The skin was stretched tight over their cheekbones, and most had greasy hair that hung raggedly down over their foreheads and into their eyes. They all had empty bowls.

  This row of tables was not the only one in the room: there were three other rows full of scrawny children. And not a single one of them was eating, even though a grubby man stood in the corner stirring an even grubbier pot from which I could clearly see steam rising.

  “Oliver Twist,” murmured the boys around me. “Oliver must ask.”

  A small, watchful-eyed boy gulped nervously. His fingers were almost as thin as the broken match they held.

  “Go on, Oliver!” prompted a buck-toothed boy not much older than him. “We’ll starve to death on the spot if you don’t.”

  But the little boy hesitated. There was fear in his eyes. Trembling, he rose slowly from the bench.

  I looked over at the grubby pot and the man standing behind it. His fierce expression would have put me off too. Why didn’t he just give the boy a bit more of the sticky grayish gruel he was slopping round and round in the pot? It would probably only end up having to be turned into dust-biscuits tomorrow anyway (Lady Mairead’s favorite).

  Oliver swung his leg over the bench, then shrank back as the cook glanced in our direction. Fortunately, he didn’t see me.

  “Wait,” I said—I’d had an idea. “If you’re that hungry, I might … I might be able to help.”

  Thirty heads turned to look at me. Oliver Twist gazed at me hopefully.

  “She’s a Reader,” somebody whispered.

  “A Reader,” came the echo from farther down the table. “From the outside world.”

  “What does that matter? As long as she’s got some grub for us!”

  “Just a second,” I murmured. “Wait here, okay?” I dived back under the table and crawled back to the spot I’d arrived at. The next moment I found myself back in my four-poster bed on Stormsay. The thought that I’d just jumped from my bedroom into a book exploded in my head like a firework. I’d done it—I’d gone to visit Oliver Twist in the middle of the night! I—

  No: I’d have plenty of time to celebrate later. Right now I had to help the half-starved boys in the workhouse. On my bedside table I found the plate of biscuits Lady Mairead had sent up that evening. (She was evidently very keen to get rid of them. Well, that wouldn’t be a problem now!) I dropped the biscuits into my pajama pockets, then quickly fished a packet of chewing gum out of my backpack. A moment later the e-reader was balanced on my face once more.

  I jumped back under the table and tugged at one of the boys’ trouser legs.

  Oliver Twist ducked his head under the table.

  “Here,” I said, pressing the biscuits and the chewing gum into his hand. “That’s all I can rustle up for the moment. These are biscuits and this is chewing gum. You can munch on them till you get something else to eat. But don’t swallow the chewing gum. I hope it helps a bit.”

  “Thank you,” he mumbled.

  Above my head, boys quickly set to sharing the food out equally between them.

  I heard somebody say: “But tomorrow Oliver will have to ask, if they keep giving us such tiny portions.”

  And then I found myself back in my bed in the twenty-first century.

  “I choose you,” said the princess. “Kneel.”

  The knight did as he was bid.

  “Do you swear that you will hunt and kill the monster and that you will not rest until I, your princess, am safe once more? Do you swear it upon your life?”

  The knight looked up at the princess’s face, her dainty nose, the arch of her eyebrows, her rosy cheeks.

  Her beauty was flawless. He would be happy, he thought, to look upon this face and nothing else until the day he died.

  It was like looking into the eyes of an angel.

  No harm must ever come to this angel.

  “I swear it upon my life,” he said.

  4

  BETWEEN THE LINES

  THE NEXT MORNING’S LESSON began disappointingly. I’d hoped to be able to jump straight back into The Jungle Book. Instead, Glenn gave us a two-hour lecture about the book world. He talked about our duty as book jumpers to protect literature—a duty that was both an honor and a burden. He told us it was possible, in an emergency—although strictly forbidden otherwise—to bring characters back with us to the outside world (in order to rescue them in a crisis, for example) and to let them find their own way back into their stories afterward. He also explained in detail how all books bordered on other books in certain places, and that there were paths between stories that would take you from one to another and, if you were lucky, to the so-called Margin. This was a place outside the lines where lots of book characters liked to hang out when they weren’t currently appearing in their own plots. His explanations were interspersed with anecdotes about some great-great-uncles of ours who had made various stupid mistakes. And he gave us an emphatic warning about the consequences of altering a story—such alterations, he said, would immediately appear in every printed copy of that story. In every printed copy?

  Betsy and Will must have heard all of this a thousand times already. As Will stared dully at the cover of The Hound of the Baskervilles (was it just my imagination or had the book got thinner overnight?), Betsy seemed to feel the need to emphasize every word Glenn said. She spent the whole time nodding and saying things like “Exactly,” and “Yes, that’s right,” and “You probably won’t be able to manage that for a while yet, Amy.” Her lips were so shiny with lip gloss this morning it looked like she’d eaten a tin of sardines in oil for breakfast.

  “Lady Mairead, for example, jumped into Macbeth once when she was younger and—” Glenn broke off. “Yes, Amy, what is it?”

  I put my hand down. “Is it bad—” I began. “I mean—um—would it do any harm if somebody were to jump from somewhere other than Porta Litterae?”

  Glenn furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

  “Well—yesterday you said we cou
ld only jump into books from the stone circle. Why is that? Would it be bad if somebody was, say, reading in bed, and then…” I’d had a guilty conscience ever since I’d woken up that morning, and it had been bothering me more and more as Glenn’s speech had gone on. I’d simply jumped into Oliver Twist without a second thought, and as if that wasn’t bad enough I’d interfered with the storyline by giving the boys dust-biscuits and chewing gum. The longer I’d listened to Glenn the more it had dawned on me that I didn’t really know anything about the book world and that it might not be such a great idea to go tinkering about with it however the fancy took me. “If something like that happened—would it be a problem?”

  Betsy rolled her eyes and quietly sighed. “Oh, Amy.” She looked almost as cruel as she had in my dream.

  Glenn, however, shook his head. “No,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a problem. It just wouldn’t be possible. Your gift only works within the stone circle.”

  “Really?” I looked over at Will and Betsy. “Have you ever tried to jump from anywhere else?”

  “I’ve got better things to do with my time than make an idiot of myself,” said Betsy. “Now if you’ll excuse me.” She pulled out a makeup bag and sailed from the room, while Will looked at me properly for the first time that day. He was still as pale as if he’d seen a ghost, and his hair was just as unkempt as yesterday. He looked hard at me.

  “Of course,” he said at last, and smiled, a little bit more with the right-hand side of his mouth than the left. “I often tried when I was a kid. But it never worked.”

  “Hmm,” I said. Had I only imagined my excursion into Oliver Twist? Had the whole thing been just another dream?

  Glenn’s lecture continued for another hour and a half before he finally led us up to the top of the hill. One after the other we jumped into our practice books: Will (whose task was to try to find out why his book really did only have a few pages left), Betsy (who was going to negotiate with the ice-cream-parlor dwarf and had touched up her eyeliner especially for the purpose), and me—who knew nothing about anything and was bursting with curiosity.