The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  Goose bumps stole across the back of my neck.

  The second house was the one where the ferryman had disappeared in search of something alcoholic the night of our arrival. It was bigger and nicer than Brock’s. A chalkboard was propped up on a bench outside, announcing that stamps, lettuce, and toilet paper were currently on special offer. Frilly curtains hung in the windows. A little bell tinkled as we went in.

  Inside there was indeed a bar, with three stools standing in front of it. The walls were lined with shelves where spools of thread were stacked alongside boxes of tissues and tins of corn. An umbrella stand held several spades, a crutch, and two badminton rackets.

  “Is this a pub or a shop?” I asked.

  “Both,” said a man I hadn’t noticed amid all the clutter. He was sitting at a table in the corner stuffing his pipe. His hair was red. “I’m also the local post office. Welcome to Finley’s.”

  “Hello,” I said. The man looked familiar, somehow. “I’m Amy.”

  “I know,” said the man, pipe between his teeth. “News travels fast here. I’m your uncle.” He struck a match.

  “Oh. Er…” I didn’t know how to reply, and gnawed at my lower lip. Alexis had never told me she had a brother.

  Will was wandering around the room peering under tables and behind shelves. “Has anyone been in today?” he inquired.

  Finley raised his eyebrows, exactly the same way Alexis did. “No, why?”

  Will pulled a spade from the umbrella stand and weighed it in his hand as if considering whether to buy it or not. “Doesn’t matter,” he murmured.

  I still didn’t know how to react to the fact that this man was claiming to be my uncle. Why had Alexis never told me about him? On the other hand … she had kept pretty much everything about our family a secret. She’d always refused to tell me who my father was, most importantly. It shouldn’t really surprise me to learn that I had more relatives kicking about on the island. What I didn’t understand was why Alexis hadn’t told me all this in the first place.

  “How many people live here?” I began once Will and I were back outside in the sunshine. “Altogether on the whole island, I mean?” It looked as though I was going to have to find a few things out for myself.

  “Not many. There’s Lady Mairead and Mr. Stevens at Lennox House, Brock and Finley and a guy called Henk here in the village, and Betsy, her nanny Mel, and the Laird at Macalister Castle. And me, of course, and now you and your mum.”

  “You forgot Glenn, Clyde, and Desmond.”

  “They live in the library.”

  “Aha.” Fourteen people, then. That wasn’t just “not many”—it was hardly any. There were five times that many people in my apartment building alone, back in Germany. This island really was at the end of the earth, and it obviously did something strange to its inhabitants. Something that either kept them here irrevocably or drove them away completely, like Alexis. Something I didn’t fully understand yet. I eyed Will’s leather boots, his tattered trousers, and the ancient sweater he wore. With the best will in the world, I couldn’t picture him in a city like Bochum. “Have you ever been to the mainland?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Of course I have,” he said. “Many times.”

  “The monster’s poison works quickly.

  It causes spasms in the bowels of its victims, rendering them helpless,” explained the king’s counselor. “And most of the time, it kills them.”

  The princess shuddered.

  5

  IN SEARCH OF THE WHITE RABBIT

  IN CLASS THE NEXT MORNING, when I jumped back into The Jungle Book, Werther was there waiting for me. He was wearing a knee-length coat made of red silk and an old-fashioned hat. A vine had sunk its thorns into one of his silk stockings and laddered it. He was struggling to free himself from the plant’s grip when I landed.

  “Good day, Miss Amy. My sorrows are great indeed,” he greeted me.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve read your book.”

  “But today I suffer more cruelly than ever. My head feels as though it had been trodden under a horse’s hoof.” He grimaced. “I have the Inkpot to thank for that. Never again shall I set foot in that den of iniquity. I almost missed my own suicide last night,” he cried indignantly. “Can you imagine?”

  “Not really,” I admitted. “But are you sure you’re feeling up to showing me around today?”

  “Barely,” said Werther, finally wrenching himself free of the thorns. His stocking was in tatters, revealing a pale calf decorated with red scratches. “But I would willingly suffer a thousand sorrows for a young lady such as yourself.”

  In the undergrowth nearby, Shere Khan rolled his eyes.

  “Um—cool,” I said. “So, I was thinking: I saw the Margin yesterday, so I’d prefer to visit Alice in Wonderland today to see if everything’s back to normal there. Shall we?”

  “Your wish is my command.” He gave me his arm and I took it. But it proved almost impossible to make our way through the dense jungle arm in arm, and I soon attempted to extricate myself. Werther’s grip on my arm, however, was unshakable. In true gentlemanly style he insisted on escorting me across the rough terrain, and so we stumbled on clumsily over roots and undergrowth and squeezed along narrow tracks side by side, treading on each other’s toes, until at last we reached the edge of the story. At the crossroads with the signpost we turned left.

  We hadn’t gone far before the sandy road turned into a garden path made of flagstones that led across a meadow. On either side were beds of brightly colored flowers; the air had the scent of a summer’s afternoon. From somewhere ahead of us came the quiet murmur of water. Werther and I passed through an archway covered with climbing roses, and then the path ended as suddenly as it had begun. Now the garden was split in half by a stream, and on the banks of the stream sat two girls in pinafores. One was reading a book and seemed not to notice our arrival. The other was wearing several daisy chains in her hair, and burst into tears when she saw us.

  “I’ve missed him again,” she sobbed, and the cat in her lap mewed piteously. “The White Rabbit simply doesn’t come anymore. Or if he does, it’s when I’m not looking.”

  “But—but—my dear Miss Alice,” said Werther, fishing out his handkerchief. The little girl blew her nose.

  “Could the rabbit be ill, maybe? Have you been to look for him?” I asked.

  Alice shook her head, dislodging the daisy chains. “I can’t. I have to stay here until he comes. Otherwise the whole story will get into a muddle.” Tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto the cat’s back. “What if I never find my way back to Wonderland?”

  “Then you can read my book with me,” said the other girl.

  Alice made a face. “That book’s far too dull,” she said. “It hasn’t even any pictures in it. We’d rather carry on making daisy chains, wouldn’t we, Dinah?” She tickled the cat behind the ears, then bent to pick some more daisies.

  I turned to Werther. “We have to find the White Rabbit,” I said. “Perhaps that’ll help us find out what’s going wrong?”

  He gave me his arm again. “Indeed,” he said. “We had better skip forward a few pages.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Well—as a Reader, you must know that. Or do you only ever read one page of a book at home?” said Werther.

  “No.”

  “You see.” He marched straight into a flowerbed and tugged at a daisy.

  The world folded up around us; the sky tilted sideways. Where the horizon had been, the garden—stream and all—was now suspended in midair, and the water was flowing upward. I craned my neck to see where it was going, but Werther pulled me forward with a jerk. We tumbled through the wall of meadow as if it were mist, and found ourselves in a cave whose walls were lined with a tangled web of tree roots punctuated by kitchen cupboards and shelves. Though it wasn’t so much a cave, really, as an enormous hole. Beneath us was a yawning chasm, and we were falling into it feetfirst. I only vaguely recalled the stor
y because it was a while since I’d read the book. But I did remember that at the beginning Alice had spent quite a long time falling down a rabbit hole. Despite the fact that there was no ground beneath my feet for miles, I felt a surge of excitement. I still couldn’t believe I was actually inside a novel. My gift was so new and surprising that I still hadn’t considered all the possibilities that came with it. It looked like I was about to enter the real Wonderland!

  I blinked, and when I opened my eyes I found the cave had turned into a long corridor full of doors. At the end of the corridor I saw something white scurrying away from us.

  “There he is, over there!” I called, pointing to a tiny door half hidden by a curtain. “He hopped through there.” Unfortunately, the door in question only came up to my ankles. “We have to go after him. Can you skip forward?”

  Werther waggled his head from side to side. “Yes—but we must be sure not to miss him. And we must alter our size for the next part of the story.” He massaged his temples—his head must still be pounding.

  “Oh yes,” I said, “of course.” I remembered that on her journey through Wonderland Alice was forever eating and drinking things that made her grow and shrink.

  Werther handed me a little glass bottle filled with what looked like cough syrup. The label read “Drink me.”

  “Well then—cheers!” I said, and gulped down some of the liquid, which didn’t actually taste that bad. It was a bit like Black Forest cake … But before I’d had time to think, my legs contracted like elastic bands, my arms shortened, and my hands grew so tiny that I could no longer hold the bottle. I was shrinking. Just as I was about to be crushed to death by the bottle, Werther picked it up again and drank from it himself.

  “I hope it will help with my indisposition, too,” he muttered. His voice went booming through the cave. He was a giant.

  By this time I was the size of a grasshopper. The toes of Werther’s shoes towered above me like two hills and I retreated a little way to make sure he didn’t accidentally trample on me. Fortunately, however, he now began to shrink, too.

  A few moments later, Werther pulled at the handle of the tiny door and the cave turned upside down. This time he skipped both forward and backward: first we found ourselves surrounded by a gaggle of animals swimming in a lake, then suddenly inside a house, then out in the open again. Somewhere in between the pages floated the Cheshire Cat’s mouth, grinning—the rest of its body was invisible. But the White Rabbit was nowhere to be seen.

  We stopped at last in front of a mushroom, on top of which lay a fat blue caterpillar. The caterpillar had a kind of hookah pipe clasped in its numerous little arms. Smoke rings coiled into the air above its head. I had to stand on tiptoe to see over the top of the mushroom. The caterpillar stared at us for a while. Its face creased as it took a drag on the mouthpiece of the pipe.

  “Um—excuse me? Has the White Rabbit been by here recently?” I asked.

  The caterpillar blew a smoke ring over the top of our heads. “Who are you?” it asked in a raspy voice. “Where is Alice?”

  “Ah! My sincerest apologies!” Werther bowed. “My name is Werther and this is young Miss Amy. We are delighted to make your acquaintance.”

  “Alice can’t come because she missed the White Rabbit again. We’re trying to find out why,” I explained. The way the caterpillar was staring at down us from on high was starting to annoy me. “So—have you seen him?”

  The caterpillar crawled down off its mushroom. As it slid past us through the grass we were engulfed by the smell of tobacco. “Yes—he came by here earlier. But he seemed to be in a great hurry.”

  “Which way did he go?”

  “I believe he was on his way to tea with the Hatter and the March Hare,” the caterpillar replied before vanishing into the undergrowth.

  Werther sighed and put his head in his hands. “I should be glad to rest a moment,” he said. “The hooves are pounding against my poor brow from the inside out now.”

  I laid a hand on his arm. “I know—but if we’re ever going catch up with the White Rabbit, we’ve got to keep going. We’ve got to find the Hatter.”

  Werther nodded sorrowfully. “In that case, we should eat some of this mushroom to return ourselves to our proper size.” He reached up and broke two chunks off the top of the mushroom. No sooner had we bitten into them than we started growing—just large enough to comfortably drink tea with a rabbit.

  Again, Werther skipped forward and backward through the pages of Alice in Wonderland. Colors, landscapes, and characters whizzed past us in quick succession. I saw the eyes of the grinning cat, and at one point we hurtled past a queen in a heart-patterned dress screeching, “Where is Alice? Off with her head!”

  We arrived at last at a little house in the woods. In front of the house was a long table, set for tea. And at the table, all crowded together at one end, sat a hare, a dormouse, and a little man with buckteeth. He wore a top hat with a price tag attached.

  The Hatter and the March Hare were drinking their tea with the dormouse wedged in between them, so deeply asleep that it had no idea it was being used as an armrest.

  “Tell me: what do a raven and a writing desk have in common?” asked the Hatter, the instant he spotted us.

  “Um … they both begin with an r sound?” I guessed.

  The Hatter wrinkled his nose. “Hmm,” he said. “That could be it. What do you think, March Hare?”

  “I think my watch has stopped again. Even though I put the best butter in it. It really was the very best butter,” said the March Hare. “And why are you two sitting down, may I ask? We didn’t invite you to sit down. This is outrageous!”

  But Werther and I stayed seated. “I beg you, sirs—there is enough room here for all of us,” said Werther, visibly cheered by the winged armchair he had flopped down in. The March Hare snorted.

  “Both begin with an r sound…” murmured the Hatter. “That’s good! That may well be the answer! Will you take some tea?”

  Before we could reply he’d poured us both a cup of tea and deposited a slice of cream cake on each of our plates. “Dig in,” he urged.

  “Thanks,” I said. The cake looked delicious. But it would have to wait. “We’re looking for the White Rabbit. Have you seen him?”

  Hare and Hatter exchanged a glance.

  “He is not well,” said the March Hare.

  “He is much changed,” said the Hatter.

  “So he was here? Where did he go?”

  “Nowhere.” The Hatter opened the teapot and pulled out a dripping wet rabbit that must once upon a time have been white. Brown rivulets of tea trickled down its legs. It looked around fearfully at the occupants of the table.

  I raised my eyebrows. “That’s the White Rabbit? He looks … pretty ordinary.” The rabbit wrinkled its nose, affronted.

  “We’ve tried butter too, but we simply cannot put him to rights,” declared the March Hare. “He has lost the ability to talk. And his watch and waistcoat have disappeared. So he keeps crawling inside our old teapot to hide.”

  “Strange,” murmured Werther. “It is almost as though his idea had disappeared.”

  “His idea?” I asked.

  “The author’s idea that this story should feature a talking rabbit with a pocket watch and a waistcoat, which leads Alice into Wonderland,” he explained. “Could somebody have … no, it cannot be.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Well—it seems almost as though somebody had stolen the idea.”

  “Is that even possible? Who would do something like that? And why, more to the point?” I didn’t understand how you would even go about erasing an idea from a book.

  Werther shrugged.

  “Who knows?” The Hatter stuffed the rabbit back inside the teapot and seemed instantly to forget that it existed. “But both begin with an r sound! Isn’t that wonderful? Come, eat your cake, drink your tea!”

  Unfortunately the cake didn’t taste nearly as good as it looked. A bitter tas
te filled my mouth the moment I bit into it. It rolled across my palate and down my throat. I coughed and took a sip of tea to take the taste away. But it didn’t help.

  * * *

  The bitter taste persisted long after I had jumped back to Stormsay. At lunch I could hardly eat a thing, and gulped down glass after glass of water instead. My grandmother kept shooting inquiring glances at me, but I ignored her. A big row about how I’d wandered into a story I wasn’t supposed to be in was the last thing I needed right now. At last I slipped into my four-poster bed and lay staring at the fabric overhead. I took the smallest breaths I could manage. The taste of the cake had formed a lump in my throat, and it was now sliding up and down my gullet like a slimy rubber ball. At the same time a knot was forming in my stomach, tightening into a ball of iron and gurgling loudly. I panted, drew my knees into my chest, shut my eyes for a moment, and then leaped out of bed and lurched to the bathroom.

  I was only just in time.

  Three hours later, Alexis found me lying on the bath mat. She brought me a pillow and a blanket. The walls were spinning: it felt as though the sink and the toilet were dancing around me, laughing at me. Alexis crouched down beside me and mopped my forehead with a washcloth.

  “I don’t feel well,” I whispered. My lips were chapped. “There was something wrong with the cake in Wonderland.”

  “You were in Alice in Wonderland?”

  “Yes.” I wanted to tell her about Werther and our search for the White Rabbit, but I was too weak.

  “I went there, too, when I was younger,” said Alexis. She stroked my hair. “I played croquet with Alice and the Queen of Hearts. It was wonderful.”

  “I thought…” I wheezed. The lump in my throat was threatening to surface again. “… I thought you hated the literary world.”

  “Not at all,” said Alexis. “I loved it. I loved it far too much, unfortunately.”

  Her words sounded muffled, as if I was hearing them through a wall of cotton wool. “Really?” I whispered as the bathroom began to spin even faster and dark clouds crept across the edges of my vision.