The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  It began almost as soon as I’d slid the book over my face. Again I was greeted by the hot, humid jungle air; the letters exploded into plants before my eyes, and I heard Mowgli and the wolf cubs playing together. The roots of the giant tree creaked softly as I landed in them. This time, however, I immediately slipped off in the opposite direction from the voices.

  “You’re back,” observed Shere Khan, who was crouched in the thicket nearby.

  I nodded to him. Glenn had tasked me with trying to get an overview of Mowgli’s story. But any child capable of watching TV knew what happened in The Jungle Book, surely? I left the tiger behind me and went tramping off toward the edge of the jungle.

  The signpost was still there, as was the ravine where I’d come across the tearful young man with witch issues the day before. Today, however, I did a surprisingly good job of clambering over the boulders and rubble. So much so that I was almost disappointed when the path grew wider and straighter and eventually turned into a road. The steep walls of the ravine still towered into the sky on either side of me, but they grew farther and farther apart before eventually curving inward and meeting in the middle to form a kind of natural amphitheater. At the base of this amphitheater was a town.

  It wasn’t a big town. It consisted of only one street, in fact. But this one street was packed full of shops of all shapes and sizes, newsstands, cafés, and pubs. In the window of a chemist’s shop was a sign advertising a cure for weak verbs, and a fat woman with a hawker’s tray was shouting something about a miracle powder that could apparently be used to concoct a happy ending in a matter of minutes if you didn’t happen to have one handy. On a market stall I spotted a tub of self-service periods and commas (there was a special offer on—three quotation marks for the price of two). The shop next door had cloaks, swords, and wands on display. The sign above the door read: Hero Outfitters—from classical drama to science fiction epics. (We also cater to secondary characters).

  And everywhere you looked there were throngs of book characters, dressed in clothes from every era imaginable: a man in a toga surrounded by a gaggle of girls in dresses with enormous crinolines and ruffs, soldiers marching past them with laser guns, magicians in colorful hats, businesswomen in court shoes and trouser suits, and orcs with grotesque misshapen faces. Fairies with dragonfly wings buzzed in and out of the crowd. A goose with a tiny boy riding on its back pecked at the instant happy endings, and was shooed away loudly by the fat lady.

  Then I spotted a tomcat wearing a pair of riding boots and walking on its hind legs, and followed it through the crowd until it disappeared into a pub called the Inkpot. Not really fancying the “ink cocktail” being advertised on a board outside, I decided to keep walking. But just as the door to the pub was swinging shut, I caught a glimpse of a familiar face bent over a glass at the bar.

  I went in and sat down beside the young man, who cut just as wretched a figure as he had at our last meeting. “Are you still not feeling better?”

  He looked up, his eyes red from crying and glittering with tears. “Ah, Miss Amy. How nice to see you again.”

  “Nice to see you too. Have the old women been bothering you again?”

  “No, no,” he said, downing his half-full glass in a single swig. And if his glazed eyes were anything to go by, this glass was not his first. “I am merely full of sorrow,” he mumbled, flinging out his arm so wildly that the tabby cat on the bar stool next to him narrowly avoided a blow to the face. “About life, you understand? About the world, about love, about fate. Cruel fate! O, a thousand emotions rage within my breast!” His voice grew steadily louder.

  The cat got up and moved seats.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “I understand.” Unhelpful sentences like But you won’t find the answer at the bottom of a glass hovered on the tip of my tongue. I bit them back, however, and instead pushed away my stool and stood up. “I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know anyone apart from you. Would you be so kind as to … show me around?”

  The man gazed wistfully into his empty glass, then nodded and stood up. He swayed a little at first, but soon regained his balance. “I can refuse nothing to such a pretty young lady,” he declared, tucking his shirt back into his breeches and a few loose locks of hair back into the velvet ribbon that fastened his ponytail. Then he bowed, almost falling over forward in the process. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Werther.”

  The title of a book we’d read last year in school flashed through my mind, the letters bright and vivid: The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Lots of things suddenly started to make sense. So the guy was drinking because he was unhappy in love—so unhappy, in fact, that at the end of the book he committed suicide. And those weird witches had been tormenting him by prophesying that there was still hope for his doomed love. Poor man!

  “Er—pleased to meet you,” I said, putting out my hand. Werther did not shake it but planted a boozy kiss on it instead. I forced a smile. “Very busy in here, isn’t it?”

  Werther nodded. More and more characters were crowding into the pub; most had gathered at a table in the corner where they put their heads together and whispered.

  “How much gold is missing?” asked a man whose head was covered with scales instead of hair.

  “They’d been slaughtered, just like that,” said the tiny boy on the goose’s back to a woman with a fish’s tail, who reached for a jug of water every few seconds and poured some over her face. “The whole stable was full of blood—away from the plot, thank goodness.”

  “And have you heard about Alice?” murmured a man with grayish skin and a briefcase under his arm.

  Werther drew me outside. There he took a few deep breaths, as even more people streamed past us into the pub. “There is something afoot. The rumor mill has been turning for hours now. Something seems to have gone awry in our world.”

  “In Oliver Twist?” My heart beat faster. “Has the story been messed up?”

  “What? No.” Werther rubbed his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Apparently, gold has been stolen from The Arabian Nights. And Alice is rumored to have missed the White Rabbit this morning, and to have been unable to find her way to Wonderland. I know no more than that—I have spent the past few hours…”

  “Drinking?” Werther was swaying dangerously, and I linked arms with him to stop him from falling over.

  “Thinking,” he corrected me. “At any rate, people are up in arms—nothing like this has ever happened here before. Alice has never once missed the rabbit, you understand. Such a thing is simply unthinkable. She must be reproaching herself very severely.”

  “Does that mean … could some tiny little change have set off a chain reaction?” If all stories were connected somehow, could introducing a harmless packet of chewing gum into Oliver Twist’s workhouse have led to repercussions like this?

  “It looks more as though somebody has been intentionally interfering with parts of the affected stories,” said Werther, his face suddenly turning pale. He leaned weakly against a market stall and closed his eyes.

  “I’ll get you a drink of water,” I offered.

  But Werther shook his head. He pulled out an embroidered handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth and nose. “No, thank you,” he said. “But … perhaps tomorrow I could…” He wheezed. “… show you around? If you would be so good as to excus—”

  He vomited into a crate of fresh exclamation marks. Feeling rather nauseated, I decided to head home.

  * * *

  That afternoon the sun was shining over Stormsay for a change, reminding us it was July. Alexis made the most of the good weather by going for another walk, and I felt the urge to be outdoors too. After combing the pages of Oliver Twist for a while looking for changes in the story (I found none—Oliver must simply have asked for a second helping of gruel the day after I’d seen him), I gathered together my art materials. There was a lot I hadn’t been able to bring with me; my acrylic paints had been left at home to make room for more books, as
had my paintbrushes, easel, and canvases, which wouldn’t have fitted in my suitcase anyway. But I had packed a sketchbook and a few pencils. Tucking them under my arm, I headed off across the moor and up the hill to Shakespeare’s Seat. The cliffs looked just as steep as they had on our arrival. From up here, in fact, they felt even higher and more treacherous.

  I sat down on a rock and began to sketch the vegetation at the edge of the cliff and the ocean beyond. The waves were dove-gray and ebbed lazily against the foundations of the island with an ancient soughing sound. The wind had died down over the past few days too. It was still blowing my hair all over the place, but at least I actually felt warm in my sweater now. There was a smell of salt and freedom; the sunlight danced across my fingers. With quick strokes I sketched the movement of the waves and the pattern of the few clouds reflected on their surface. I wished I hadn’t left my paints in Germany now. This was the most beautiful view I’d ever seen.

  I felt like I was sitting at the end of the earth. There was no wireless or cellular signal here—it didn’t matter who posted what on social media. Jolina was far away. All that mattered was the sweep of smoky blue sky overhead, stretching away to the horizon and caressing the sea. I’d never felt so much space around me before—space to breathe, space to think. Space for the heather that dangled curiously over the edge of the cliff to peer down into the depths.

  I was busy sketching the tiny blossoms when a shadow fell across the paper.

  “Pretty,” said a voice behind me.

  I clung to my pencil and the magic of the moment for a second longer, then let out my breath and turned around. “Hi.”

  Before me stood Will. He pointed to the sketchbook on my lap. “I didn’t know you liked drawing.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Well that’s hardly surprising, is it? You don’t know anything about me.” It came out more brusquely than I’d intended.

  “Well,” said Will, “I do know your name. And I know you must be a talented jumper because you got to the edge of a novel on your first ever visit to the book world.”

  “Hmm.” I bent over my drawing again. “Still not a massive amount, all things considered.”

  “True.”

  The wind caught my hair as I reached for a softer pencil to shade in the waves.

  Will stood beside me a little longer and studied my drawing, watching me shade in the sky. After a while he cleared his throat. “But it looks like you want it to stay that way. I get it.” He leaned closer to me. “I’ll get out of here and leave you in peace, then, shall I?”

  I didn’t answer. He was right—up to now I’d only spoken to Betsy and Will when absolutely necessary, and in lessons I usually tried to avoid meeting their eyes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to make new friends. I was just more cautious now. Hypercautious.

  And anyway, it wasn’t like my new classmates had exactly been falling over themselves to make me feel welcome. Will in particular gave the impression most of the time that his thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

  He obviously interpreted my silence as an answer to his question, and turned to leave. His feet were stuffed into battered leather boots and his shaggy hair flew out behind him. Only now did I remember where I’d seen hair flapping in the wind like that before.

  “You were up here the night before last, weren’t you?” I said just as he reached the path that led back across the moor.

  Will stopped. “Yes,” he said.

  “What were you doing outside in that storm? And what was that massive dog you had with you?”

  He came back and sat down beside me on the rock. “I was looking for someone. A … a friend. It’s his dog.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “Unfortunately not.” He put his head in his hands. “I’ve turned the whole island upside down. But he’s disappeared.”

  “Has he gone away?”

  “You could say that.”

  We looked out over the sea. “Aren’t you going to carry on?” asked Will.

  My sketch was nearly finished, but I laid down the sketchbook and pencils on the grass and snuck a sideways glance at Will. His nose had a very small bump in it, as if it had once been broken, and his face was a little too angular to be perfect. But in his blue-gray eyes was a clarity like that of the sky over Stormsay. They were stormy-sky eyes.

  “Did you manage to find anything out? About why your book has suddenly got thinner?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, dropping his voice to a whisper. “It’s because Sherlock Holmes isn’t there anymore.”

  “Oh,” I gasped. “Might he be in a different book? There’s a whole series of Sherlock Holmes novels, isn’t there?”

  Will sighed. “Yes, and none of the other Sherlocks have seen him.”

  “I heard today that some gold has been stolen, and there’s been some kind of misunderstanding in Alice in Wonderland.”

  “He’s my best friend,” said Will, who didn’t seem to have heard me. “He has been since I was five years old. He always used to think up riddles and cases for me, and I helped him outside of the plot. He practically brought me up.”

  “And now you’re looking for him on Stormsay?” I was confused by this sudden overlap between the literary world and the real one. “What would he be doing here in the outside world?”

  Will tipped his head back and closed his eyes in the sunlight. His eyelashes cast shadows on his skin, like dark moons. But he wasn’t as relaxed as he made out. I could see that his lips were pressed tightly together. He’d dug his fingers into a tuft of grass.

  “You brought him here, didn’t you?”

  “We’re not allowed to do that.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “It’s not allowed, Amy. As Glenn explained at great length this morning.”

  “I gave chewing gum and biscuits to Oliver Twist.”

  He blinked. “Really?” The beginnings of a smile crept onto his face. He scrutinized me for a moment, as if wondering whether I could be trusted. “Amy Lennox,” he murmured. “Our families don’t like each other very much, did you know that?”

  I remembered Betsy’s remarks. “I had noticed.”

  He grinned at me, and a dimple appeared in his right cheek. “Well—I was going to go and have another look for my friend in the village and on the beach. Perhaps Holmes is testing me and I just need to find the vital clue. Or else he’s drinking himself into a stupor at the pub. Do you want to come with me?”

  I nodded. I’d had enough of drunken book characters for one day, but I had nothing against a walk. Especially in such charming company.

  The beach extended along the east coast of the island all the way to the Macalisters’ castle. This beach was no white-sanded bathers’ paradise out of a glossy travel magazine. It was covered in pebbles and fragments of seashells and other broken things; in the shallows, huge rusty bits of metal coated in flaking green paint jutted up out of the water. Will told me they were the remnants of a submarine fleet that had been torpedoed during the Second World War. The crew had all been killed and for days bits of the wreckage had washed up on the shore of Stormsay and sunk deep into the silt.

  Holmes was nowhere to be seen.

  I amused myself by letting the waves lick at the soles of my sneakers. Will poked about with a stick in clumps of seaweed and a washed-up plastic bag. But still there was no trace of the great detective and the closer we got to Macalister Castle, the slower Will advanced. Ahead of us, meanwhile, the castle’s turrets loomed higher and higher into the sky. Will eventually came to a standstill a few yards from an imposing quarried stone gatepost.

  “Nice pad,” I said, looking up at the Macalister coat of arms over the gateway. It showed a dragon against a green background, blowing books from its nostrils instead of flames.

  Will hurled the stick into the sea with surprising force. It sailed through the air and landed a long way out. “Bit uncomfortable if you ask me.”

  “But perfect for playing the lady of the manor.”r />
  Will grinned. “You mean like Betsy does all the time?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that—she spends most of her time putting makeup on, doesn’t she?”

  “Also true.” He laughed, but immediately afterward grew serious again. “I’ve searched this dump multiple times already. I think we should try the village next.”

  “Okay,” I said, tilting my head. “You don’t like your home very much, do you?”

  Will didn’t answer.

  A quarter of an hour later we came to the little hamlet Alexis and I had passed through the evening we’d arrived. The village that could scarcely be called a village. Now, by daylight, I could see that almost all the cottages were standing empty. They looked derelict; most of the windowpanes were broken. Wooden beams jutted like ribs from the crooked roofs, and some of the doors were nailed shut. Only two of the houses looked even remotely habitable.

  One was small and shabby, with a patch of weeds out front enclosed by a rotting picket fence. The clay and straw walls of the cottage looked as though they might have been whitewashed once upon a time, but now they were just covered in muddy handprints. Here and there a creeper sprouted from the plaster, causing it to crumble. On the broken steps leading up to the front door sat a boy, his lips moving soundlessly. Or was he a man? He was burly and broad-shouldered and dressed in blue dungarees. His face was covered with an uneven layer of fuzzy hair. But his gaze was that of a child, and it was glued to a sandbank on the shoreline that was covered with gray bodies.

  “Hello, Brock,” Will greeted him as we passed.

  The man-child didn’t respond. He carried on mouthing words, his brow furrowed in concentration. Then he cried suddenly, “Seventeen!”

  I jumped. “Pardon?”

  But he was still staring at the sandbank. His mouth opened and shut as if he were talking to somebody only he could see.

  Will nudged me onward. “He’s counting seals,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s his hobby.”

  “Counting seals?”

  “Twenty years ago, when Brock was little, he got washed up on the beach here. We think he must have hit his head somehow.” Will tapped his forehead. “He must’ve been floating around at sea in his life preserver for ages, all alone.”