The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  “Yes. But going away was my only option. Especially once I found out about you, little giraffe. I—”

  It was as if somebody was turning the volume lower and lower. Everything went black.

  When I next opened my eyes I found myself back in bed. Alexis was bending over me, trying to feed me some lukewarm tea, while my grandmother paced up and down the room. Macbeth was dozing on the window seat.

  “I don’t understand it. Literary food never goes off! Either it is already rotten because the plot requires it, or it is fine. But nothing ever goes moldy inside a book,” said Lady Mairead. “Stories never go out of date.”

  “Perhaps somebody wanted her to get ill,” suggested Alexis.

  “But why? Amy has only just started jumping.” Lady Mairead pursed her lips. “Simply to go wandering off into Wonderland! I hope you realize, Amy, that it was completely against the rules, and I very much hope it will not happen again. You see what can happen. We must face facts, however.” She put her hands on her hips. “Nobody in the book world would have been capable of turning Alice in Wonderland so topsy-turvy as to end up with an inedible cake at the Mad Tea-Party.”

  “Hmm,” said Alexis. She gently lifted my head and held the cup to my lips. “We need to get some fluids into you.”

  I sipped at the tea and forced myself to swallow some of it. A trace of the bitter taste wormed its way back down my throat. Perhaps I should head for the bathroom just in case? I sat up. The room immediately started to spin.

  “Are you feeling sick again?” asked Alexis.

  I nodded, shook my head, swung my legs out of bed, and tottered a little way across the carpet. My knees were shaking. The nausea was starting to subside again now, though, and I went and flopped down onto the window seat next to Macbeth.

  Alexis hurried after me with the teacup. “Take one more sip. And these.” In her hand were several little tablets.

  “Later,” I said, looking out across the moor. I could see three figures moving toward us. A woman in an apron with an old-fashioned white cap on her head was pushing a man in a wheelchair across the uneven terrain. Both of them looked rather surly—probably because the chair’s wheels kept getting jammed despite the fact that there was a third person helping them lift it over the largest of the rocks and puddles. At first I thought it was Will, but then I recognized the gray habit and blond hair of the young bookbinder with the scar on his cheek. The weight of the wheelchair didn’t seem to trouble him in the slightest.

  “Oh no—Mel and Desmond are on their way with the Laird,” Lady Mairead said with a sigh, following my gaze. “I completely forgot to ask Mr. Stevens to prepare a snack.” She hurried out of the room.

  Alexis squeezed in between me and Macbeth on the window seat and waved the hand that held the tablets in little circles under my nose. “Take us, Amy,” she said in a squeaky voice. “We’ll make you better. We’re maaagic!”

  I smiled. “I’m supposed to eat something that can talk to me?”

  “Yes—we want to die!” squeaked Alexis. “Please, Amy! Eat us.”

  “Fine.” I picked the tiny white globules out of Alexis’s hand and put them in my mouth. “Happy now?”

  “Good,” said Alexis in her normal voice again. “I’d be even happier if you could make this tea disappear as well.”

  “No way.” Just the thought of it made the rubber ball rise into my throat again.

  The figures outside were still battling across the moor. The closer they got, the angrier the woman and the man in the wheelchair appeared. “What’s the Laird doing here? I thought the two families didn’t like each other.”

  “They don’t. But our two clans are the only ones in the world with the gift of book jumping, and we have to share this island, and the library. So they have to consult each other about certain things,” Alexis explained. “Once a month the heads of the families meet to discuss how to manage and finance the library, and anything else that needs arranging. Today your grandmother is probably going to have to explain why she sent you to lessons without having introduced you to everyone on the island first.”

  “Like my uncle, you mean?” I looked Alexis straight in the eye.

  She blushed. “Oh, little giraffe. How was I to know I’d end up bringing you back to this godforsaken island one day? I didn’t think you’d ever meet them anyway, so what did it matter if you didn’t know about them? And quite frankly there are some people you’re better off not knowing. Like the Laird. He thinks he can control everything and everyone on this island.” She snorted. “The Macalisters have always thought their family was better than ours. They claim they were already living on Stormsay long before the Lennoxes, and that our family is just descended from a branch of theirs. But they’ve got no proof.”

  “Well—their castle does look a bit older than this house.…”

  “That’s because the Macalisters torched our castle hundreds of years ago.”

  “Oh.”

  Alexis nodded. “Crazy family. Most of them are, and always have been, idiots. The whole argument about the library and whose gift is more powerful is idiotic,” she said. Then she suddenly started waving and put on a fake, sugary-sweet smile. “The worst thing is the annual banquet in August, where everyone has to pretend to like one another.”

  The Laird had reached the grounds by this time and was looking up at our window. He wrinkled his nose as he caught sight of us.

  * * *

  I spent most of the weekend reading—reading in the traditional sense, that is, without jumping into the book world. I was itching to jump, but I felt much too weak to go clambering through jungles or chasing after white rabbits or even to spend the day at a magical boarding school. Though the prospect was hard to resist, I was in no fit state for adventures right now.

  Despite having to fight off dizzy spells and jelly legs, I was relieved to find that the bitter taste in my mouth soon abated. On Saturday I was able to eat a bowl of chicken soup and on Sunday afternoon I even ventured out of doors.

  The sunlight was the perfect color for a love story, and danced across the backs of a handful of sheep grazing on the edge of the parkland attached to Lennox House. One of the animals was munching an unsymmetrical hole in one of the geometrically trimmed hedges, while the others sampled some flowers. Mr. Stevens would not be happy. Only yesterday I’d looked out of the window and seen him slip across the grass with a little pair of scissors to trim the edges of the lawn. Alexis said he couldn’t sleep at night unless the grounds were up to his “very British” gardening standards.

  I left the sheep to their munching and walked across the moor a little way, the light now dancing on my shoulders, too. I took the path that led down to the beach, and the air immediately grew colder. The wind tugged at my ponytail and my scarf. I wandered out across the broken seashells and, hoping to drive away the last remnants of the bitter taste, drank in a deep breath of the salty air that was filtering into every pore in my body.

  Some distance away I caught sight of Will. He was playing with a gigantic dog (the Hound of the Baskervilles?), throwing a tennis ball into the sea for it to fetch. The dog bounded eagerly after it.

  With my feet safely clad in a pair of my grandmother’s dark green wellies, I too waded out to sea, letting the surf slosh around my ankles as I made my way toward the wreckage of the submarine fleet. The metal was old, the paint blistered. From afar the pieces looked sharp and jagged, but the passage of time had long since blunted their fangs. I leaned against one of the heavy bits of wreckage, ready-warmed for me by the sun. Now I had a good view of Will and the dog, who were still playing fetch and didn’t seem to have noticed me.

  The dog retrieved the ball and dropped it at Will’s feet. Then it shook its shaggy coat and showered him with water before jumping up and down in front of him wagging its tail. Will laughed and threw the ball again. The dog sped off in pursuit.

  Only now did Will look in my direction. I raised a hand to wave at him, then let it drop again becaus
e I’d just spotted something out of the corner of my eye that I hadn’t noticed until now. I turned to face the open ocean. The waves rolled inexorably toward me and broke on the remnants of the warships. And on the surface of the waves, I saw something floating. Something large, snagged on the metal husks.

  It was a human being.

  “Will!” I yelled, and then again, “Will! Come here! Quick!”

  The man was floating facedown. A clump of seaweed was stuck to the back of his head, and his leather shoes bumped gently against the wreckage.

  “Hey, Amy!” called Will from the shore. He was still laughing. “Are you feeling better?”

  I stared at the seaweed. It formed a nest in the man’s dark, wet hair. It had worked its way in and taken root. And it didn’t seem to want to leave. A lone strand wound cautiously down toward the shirt collar around the man’s neck, wanting perhaps to glimpse this strange island it had washed up on.

  “What is it?” shouted Will, splashing through the water toward me.

  The jacket was checked, with corduroy patches at the elbows. The legs were encased in tweed trousers. I looked at the seaweed again.

  Will was beside me now. He gasped. “Shit!”

  “Shit,” I echoed quietly. My mind only gradually understood what I was seeing, as if I was afraid even to think what I knew to be true: a man was floating there, and he was dead.

  Will grabbed the body by the shoulders and dragged it onto the beach. As he did so, a pipe fell out of the inside pocket of the jacket and landed in the water. I fished it out and followed Will ashore, where he was rolling the dead man onto his back. The seaweed loosened its grip and slid off. I gripped the pipe.

  The man’s face was bloated and pale, his eyes sightless. Under the jacket he was wearing a waistcoat, and under that a shirt. Both looked threadbare and a little old-fashioned. Both were stained with a red blot that had spread from a hole in the man’s chest.

  Will sank to his knees beside the body, burying his hands deep in the seashell shards that littered the beach. He closed his eyes. “Sherlock,” he said tonelessly. “It’s Sherlock.”

  The knight bowed down before the princess.

  “You can rely upon me,” he vowed.

  “I will put an end to the beast. It will be a bloody end. A long, painful end.

  An end worse than a thousand deaths.

  And I will laugh and think of you, Princess.”

  6

  THE GREAT FIRE

  THE WORLD AROUND WILL FADED AWAY into the mist. The mist crawled out of the sea in thick swathes, lay heavy on his chest, blotted out everything else. Everything but the inert face of his oldest friend. A single word hummed in Will’s head: dead.

  Dead, thought Will. Dead. Dead. Sherlock was dead.

  Suddenly he was five years old again, standing in a room of the house on Baker Street. Through the open window came the clatter of horses’ hooves and the sound of loud cursing—somebody, obviously in a great hurry, was shouting something about having to get to the other side of London by the end of the day. On the massive desk in the middle of the room were piles of cards and notepads, some dirty crockery, and some bizarre measuring instruments with lots of cogs. A pipe and a scattering of brown crumbs lay on the Oriental rug. An acrid smell emanated from a test tube on the mantelpiece.

  It was the first time Will had ever been here, and he could only just see over the edge of the desk. He didn’t know whose house this was or how he had ended up here. It must have something to do with his gift—the one the Laird had told him about. A gift that Will didn’t understand. A gift that could send him to strange places …

  He liked the big magnifying glass. The lens—a circle of glass with both faces ground into a funny curved shape—glinted in the sunlight as he lifted it off the desk. It was heavier than he’d expected. Rainbow-colored streaks danced across the walls as he turned it this way and that. Will sat down cross-legged on the crumb-strewn carpet. The magnifying glass caught the light and transformed it into brightly colored flecks that darted around the room. Or were they little fairies?

  All of a sudden, a pair of checked trouser legs appeared beside him.

  “That’s my magnifying glass, young man,” said a voice from somewhere above the trouser legs.

  “I was just having a look at it. Look what I can do!” Will sent the fairy flecks whirling across the ceiling. He looked up.

  Above the trouser legs was a jacket, and above that was a head with a long, crooked nose and bright blue eyes. “Aha! This looks to me like a scientific discovery,” said the owner of the head, and laughed.

  Will blinked. The Holmes in front of him wasn’t laughing.

  He would never laugh again.

  Will heard himself speaking as if from far away. “We have to get help,” said his voice. He saw himself stand up and turn to face Amy. “We need help,” he said again as the dog curled up beside Holmes and buried its nose in the crook of his neck.

  Amy replied, but he didn’t hear what she said.

  They ran across the moor.

  Later Will could hardly remember how they’d made it to the Secret Library, how Glenn, Desmond, and Clyde had come rushing over, how he’d explained what had happened, how they’d all raced back to the beach, how Desmond and Glenn had helped him carry Holmes up to the stone circle, and how Will had taken the detective back into his book so that the other characters could bury him. The dog had disappeared back into the story along with his dead master.

  At last, Will found himself sitting on the threadbare old sofa in his cottage wondering whether it had all really happened. Whether Holmes was really dead. Night had fallen by now and the cracked windowpanes were dark. A fire crackled in the stove in the corner.

  “I am a detective,” said Holmes.

  “What’s a dective?” asked Will, making the fairy flecks slide up and down the checked trouser legs.

  “I solve criminal cases. Most are difficult puzzles, and I have to do rather a lot of thinking in order to solve them.”

  “Do you solve the puzzles with this?” Will held up the magnifying glass.

  “Sometimes. You can help me, if you like. At the moment I am engaged in the search for a very large dog.”

  “I like dogs.”

  “Tea?”

  Will turned his head. Amy was holding a steaming mug out toward him. A few strands of hair had escaped from her ponytail and hung down into her face, giving her a disheveled look. Will had never seen anyone who was so pretty without even trying.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the tea. The warmth of the mug felt good. It brought him back to the here and now.

  Amy poured herself a mugful, too, and sat down on the sofa beside him.

  “Do you live here?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Well—yes, actually.”

  Amy nodded. “Interesting wallpaper, by the way.” She cocked her head at the red letters above the stove. “What does that mean—I have awoken?”

  “What? Oh.” Will shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “I … don’t know, I—” He broke off.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be nosy,” said Amy. She pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapped her slim arms around them, and rested her chin on them. She looked at him intently with her large, bright eyes. “It must be awful to lose such a good friend.”

  Will felt himself nod jerkily.

  “Should I … go?” asked Amy.

  “No,” he said quickly, banishing the last of the fairy flecks from his thoughts. “I … thanks for making the tea.”

  “No problem.”

  They sipped at their tea.

  “Do you think it was an accident? D’you think he fell off the cliff during the storm?” asked Amy.

  “Did you see the hole in his chest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Looked more like something else, don’t you think?” He turned cold at the thought.

  “So somebody … killed him?” she whispered. “But he was a book character! Who would do s
omething like that? Why would anyone do something like that?”

  Will shrugged. “Perhaps because he found out something he shouldn’t have?”

  “But what?”

  He pointed to the writing daubed on the wall. “He was looking at this just before he disappeared.”

  “Oh,” said Amy.

  Will took a big gulp of his tea, which was far too hot. It scalded his throat, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything. He’d known Sherlock nearly his whole life. The master detective had been more to him than just a character in a book. He’d been his friend, his confidant, and his adviser. Will, for his part, had been responsible for Sherlock; it had been his job to protect Sherlock’s story. And now the great detective was gone. Will had failed—failed miserably. He hurled his mug to the floor as hard as he could, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. Tea splattered across the room. “I should have been more careful! I should never have brought him to the outside world!”

  “It might have been an accident,” murmured Amy, without even batting an eyelid at the sight of the broken mug. “And anyway, you weren’t to know something like that would happen, were you? This whole book-jumping thing has never seemed all that dangerous to me. Exciting yes, but not dangerous.”

  “It isn’t dangerous,” said Will. “Books are a wonderful thing. But what happened to Sherlock never should have happened, and it was all my fault. I brought him here.” He kicked out at the rickety coffee table, which collapsed with a crash.

  Amy laid a hand on Will’s arm, but he couldn’t bear to be touched. He didn’t deserve consolation. Instead he reached down over the far end of the sofa and fished a well-thumbed copy of Peter Pan out of his chest of books. The book’s spine was cracked, its pages yellowed. He tossed it to Amy. “The first book I ever jumped into,” he explained.

  That was where it had all started. The whole chain of events that had led to his best friend washing up dead on the coast of Stormsay, thought Will bitterly. Perhaps he should burn it. Yes—he should throw it in the stove right now!