The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  My stomach was rumbling. I hurriedly stuffed the red leather-bound copy of The Jungle Book into my bag and was about to walk past Will and down the hill, but something held me back. Perhaps it was the smile on his face. I’d only seen him looking serious and sad recently, and it was amazing how different he looked when the corners of his mouth quirked just a few millimeters upward. A dimple formed in his cheek. What was he dreaming about?

  Will’s tousled hair was sticking up all over the place. His eyelashes formed two dark half-moons on his pale skin and his cheekbones seemed to have grown even more angular over the past few days. Only his lips looked soft and relaxed and gave his face a friendly sort of—

  I must have bent over him, because my bag suddenly slipped off my shoulder and landed with a bump on Will’s chest.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Um, hi,” I said, snatching up my bag again. “Sorry, I dropped it.”

  Will blinked at me, too drowsy to understand what had jolted him out of the pleasant dream he’d been having. “What time is it?” he mumbled.

  “Five o’clock. I just got back, and my bag—”

  Will sat up. “Five o’clock? Man, I really could have done with a few more hours’ sleep last night.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, yawning. It was a wonder I’d been able to stay awake this long.

  All at once Will’s eyes narrowed to slits, and the last traces of his dream smile faded. “Lessons finished hours ago. What have you been doing in the book world all this time?”

  He gave me a piercing glance. I remembered I was supposed to be angry with him for not wanting me to jump anymore. I swallowed hard. “Nothing that would interest you. I know you prefer to just bury your head in the sand.”

  Will raised his eyebrows. “Is everything okay? Are you okay?” He seemed genuinely concerned.

  I bit my lip. “There’s … been … a few problems. But given that you’ve turned your back on the book world now, I’m sure you don’t ca—”

  “Problems with the Sherlock Holmes books?”

  “No idea. I’m not responsible for them. But it might be happening there too.” I pushed past him to get to the path. “The thief is pretty diligent, at any rate. Today he ruined two stories in one go.”

  He followed me. “Do you still think somebody’s stealing ideas on purpose?”

  “I don’t think it. I know it. We’ve seen it, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  “So you’ve changed your mind? You don’t think I’m being naïve and that the characters are just playing pranks on me? Or that I’m the one messing everything up?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been reading Alice in Wonderland. The whole story is basically kaput. It does look really bad—and not like an accident.”

  “No shit!”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you at first.”

  “It’s okay.”

  As we made our way slowly down the hill, I told him about the latest thefts and about Elizabeth Bennet’s carriage accident.

  “How exactly does somebody steal a cyclone?” asked Will the moment I’d finished.

  “No idea—I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. But,” I said, looking straight into his blue-gray eyes, “did you happen to see Betsy when she landed back here? Did she have a … a rose with her?”

  Will stopped dead. “You think Betsy’s the thief? Why would she do something like that?”

  I blew a stray lock of hair out of my face. “It was just a thought. Shere Khan reckons it might be somebody from Stormsay, and since I’m not sure what to make of Bet—”

  I fell silent.

  From somewhere overhead came a crunching, rumbling sound.

  Suddenly, several things happened at once: something very large and very heavy broke free of its moorings above our heads and came half rolling down the hill, half hurtling through the air toward us. Will grabbed me by the shoulders and flung himself against me with such force that we both fell to the ground. I landed roughly on my hip bone and jabbed myself in the ribs with my own elbow, and Will landed on top of me. And there, onto the very spot where I’d just been standing, one of the gigantic boulders that made up the stone circle came crashing down to earth.

  The stone slammed into the grass so hard we felt the ground shake. I clung to Will in terror, digging my fingers into his back, while he shielded my head with his arms. The tips of our noses touched. At last everything went quiet again.

  We looked at each other for a moment, and then Will rolled off me, stood up, and offered me his hand. I let him help me up.

  “What was that?” I asked once I’d got to my feet. My knees felt like jelly, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just the shock.

  Will pointed up to the brow of the hill where one of the stone gateways was now, unmistakably, missing its horizontal stone lintel. How many hundreds of years had those things up there been standing? I massaged my rib cage. “Something like that doesn’t just fall apart by itself, does it?” I muttered.

  Will rubbed his face and eyes, then squinted back up at the now broken archway. “No,” he said at last. “Especially not at the precise moment you’re standing underneath it, I would’ve thought.”

  It was very difficult to recognize the monster, for it was cunning and disguised itself well.

  Unless you looked closely, you might almost have taken it for a human being.

  Almost.

  10

  VISITORS TO LENNOX HOUSE

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS Shere Khan, Werther, and I trawled the book world for clues as to the identity of the thief. After the incident in the stone circle, Will finally believed my theory that there was somebody with evil intentions causing havoc in the book world, and he asked for regular updates on our progress. But he still wasn’t willing to jump again himself, no matter how much I urged him. And unfortunately, none of the fictional characters we questioned had seen the thief’s face or indeed anything other than that damn hooded cloak. We were still groping in the dark. More ideas were stolen, but we didn’t manage to catch so much as a glimpse of the hooded figure. Whoever it was seemed to have learned from the chase through The Little Prince and Pride and Prejudice and had now adopted a more circumspect and, above all, slower approach.

  By this time I was almost certain Betsy had something to do with the thefts. I’d been watching her closely during lessons and I’d seen how nervously she’d glanced at us one break time when the subject of Dracula’s stolen gold had come up. At the first mention of the vampire (who was still incandescent with rage), Betsy had been so startled that she’d accidentally poked herself in the eye—and a sloppily mascaraed eye at that—with the rubber on the end of her pencil. To me that was a clear indication of her guilt. But Will assured me time and again that Betsy saw the protection of the book world as her sole purpose in life and that he really couldn’t imagine her ever doing anything to harm literature.

  So, as July gave way to August, we still didn’t have any new information. And one day a great commotion broke out at Lennox House. It turned out that the anniversary of the clans’ truce was just around the corner and that this year it fell to our family to organize the celebrations.

  All of a sudden I noticed that Mr. Stevens was never to be found without a mop or some other cleaning utensil in his hand, and that the house sparkled and shone more brightly with every passing day. One afternoon I saw him perched on a ladder, his smart suit twinned with yellow rubber gloves, polishing each individual curlicue of the chandelier in the entrance hall. And Alexis squealed like a stuck pig when she staggered into the bathroom early one morning to find Mr. Stevens in our bathtub, whistling merrily as he descaled the showerhead. As if the guests were ever going to set foot in our little attic bathroom! But Mr. Stevens, who seemed to harbor a secret passion for cleaning, scrubbed and polished everything in his path, and my grandmother left him to it. She was really very glad, she said, that our butler showed such enthusiasm for such disagreeable tasks. The fami
ly had had to forgo the luxury of employing a cleaner years ago.

  Lady Mairead herself, meanwhile, wrote endless shopping lists and mused aloud about table decorations and menus and the intolerable tastes of the intolerable Laird, and generally became increasingly grouchy. One evening she inquired crossly of Alexis whether we’d brought any suitable clothes with us: we were barely presentable, apparently, in our usual attire. The next day we found ourselves drowning in a sea of fabric as we battled with the puffed sleeves of the cocktail dresses Mr. Stevens had bought for us on Mainland.

  As I stood in front of the mirror on the evening of the party, my mood plunged as low as my grandmother’s. My dress was bottle green like the stag on our family’s coat of arms, with a puffy tulle skirt that ended just above the knee. It looked like an excessively generous tutu. But what the dress lacked in skimpiness at the bottom, it made up for at the top. True, I didn’t miss the enormous puffy sleeves which Alexis (thank goodness) had unpicked for me, but the neckline could have done with being somewhat less low-cut, and the narrow straps drew unflattering attention to my bony shoulders. Alexis was wearing an identical dress in wine red, and it made her look like a princess. Lady Mairead, at any rate, was delighted with her daughter when we stepped into the banqueting hall on the ground floor around seven o’clock. But she seemed to resent the fact that I had slung on one of my baggiest cardigans over the top of my dress. Only a narrow strip of tulle could be seen poking out at the bottom.

  “I get cold easily,” I muttered.

  Lady Mairead, who was wearing a wine-red-and-green checked shawl over her shiny black dress, did not reply. Perhaps it was not my outfit but the imminent arrival of our guests that had made her expression turn sour, I thought.

  And at that moment: “Reed Macalister, Laird of Stormsay,” announced Mr. Stevens from the other end of the hall.

  Lady Mairead sighed as the Laird, dressed from head to toe in tartan, rolled into the hall in his wheelchair. He was followed by Betsy and Will. Will was wearing a jacket that matched his dark hair beautifully. And a kilt. I’d always found the idea of men in skirts faintly ridiculous. But seeing Will in his dark-green-and-grayish-blue-checked kilt, which sat so perfectly on his hips and showed off his well-muscled calves in their traditional knee-high socks, I promptly changed my mind. Will looked so different without his scuffed boots and old sweater! He seemed even taller than usual and the check pattern on his kilt was the same color as his eyes. Stormy-blue eyes.

  I gulped.

  Even though Will and I had seen each other pretty much every day for weeks now and were getting on really well together, a strange feeling constricted my throat. An old fear I’d almost forgotten over the past few weeks, but which was now threatening to suffocate me. The fear of being laughed at, being mocked. Why did he have to look so perfect all of a sudden?

  On Will’s arm, looking no less perfect, was Betsy. She floated across the parquet floor in an ice-blue dress with a cowl neck and a train. As they came closer I did up the top buttons on my cardigan just to be on the safe side, and took half a step behind Alexis. I was trying to make myself invisible, but somehow I managed to do just the opposite. As I stepped backward I collided with a chest-high marble pillar on top of which Mr. Stevens had placed a vase full of roses from the grounds. The vase began to wobble and, though I lunged to catch it as it fell, shattered with a loud crash on the floor. Water and roses sprayed in all directions. Every head in the room turned to look at me.

  The old Laird let out a dry laugh. Betsy tittered.

  My face turned scarlet, and Alexis hurried off to fetch something to mop up the mess. I crouched down and started gathering up flowers and shards of broken glass, dunking my skirt in the spilled water in the process.

  “Please do sit down,” urged Lady Mairead, hoping to distract everybody. She moved to the head of the banqueting table, which Mr. Stevens had set with crystal glasses, weighty silver cutlery, and the good porcelain emblazoned with the family crest. The guests followed her.

  The Great Hall of Lennox House, just like its magnificent entrance hall, had a vaulted ceiling covered in paintings and with chandeliers fashioned from golden letters. It was about the size of a sports hall and must originally have been used for hosting lavish balls. For the handful of clan members left on Stormsay, however, it was far too big. The table looked lost in the middle of the enormous hall. In fact, with a few extra folding chairs we’d have been able to fit everybody here into our tiny kitchen back home in Bochum.

  “The families feel the need to show off their wealth,” Alexis whispered to me a few minutes later as Mr. Stevens wheeled in a hog roast on a trolley.

  It was a strange assortment of people. On my grandmother’s right sat the Laird in his wheelchair, wearing an old-fashioned suit with a waistcoat and a scarf around his neck instead of a tie. His head was bald and shone with a grayish tinge; his eyebrows met in the middle and lowered like a black beam over his eyes. He stared down at his plate, lips pursed.

  To Lady Mairead’s left was my uncle Finley, languidly unfolding his napkin. (I’d given up on trying to get to know him by this time: I’d been to visit him twice in his shop and both times he’d managed to evade every single one of my questions about our family. Instead he’d talked about the weather and tried to palm me off with some tinned sweet corn that was on special offer.)

  Opposite us sat Betsy and Will, and at the foot of the table Glenn, Clyde, and Desmond in their usual gray robes. It was customary for the clans to invite the book characters who had survived the great fire to the anniversary feast.

  Mr. Stevens served up enough dishes to feed a small army: glistening joints of roast meat, bowls of mashed potatoes and steamed carrots, croquettes, salmon in cream sauce, beans with bacon, various soups and salads, skewers of grilled vegetables, rice with spicy sauce, tofu cutlets … There was so much that I seriously started to wonder when and how he’d managed to prepare it all.

  We watched in near silence as the table filled up. Despite the posh clothes and the mountains of food, most of the guests were in a distinctly unfestive mood. Wasn’t it a bit ridiculous, after all, for two families who’d hated each other for generations to insist on a gathering like this?

  At last, once all the dishes had been served up and there was not so much as an egg cup’s worth of space left on the pristine tablecloth, Lady Mairead cleared her throat. “Welcome, dear guests,” she began, forcing a smile. “Welcome to the celebration of the two-hundred-and-ninety-third anniversary of our truce! Let us raise our glasses to the end of our feud and to eternal friendship between the honorable clans of Lennox and Macalister. May both families always strive as one to protect the things we hold dear: the island of Stormsay and the world of literature that has been entrusted to our care!”

  “Hear, hear,” growled the Laird.

  Everyone raised their crystal glasses and drank.

  “And now all that remains is for me to wish you bon appétit,” said Lady Mairead.

  The food was delicious. Unlike Betsy, who nibbled daintily on a few microscopic morsels, I chomped my way through as many dishes as I possibly could in quick succession. But the mood didn’t lighten much as the evening went on. The Laird and the Lady made a little stilted small talk; Desmond sprayed half the table with sauce after accidentally sticking his elbow in his bowl because he couldn’t take his eyes off Alexis; Betsy eyed me and my still-damp garments with disdain; and Glenn and Clyde discussed the fact that some unknown person had apparently been helping themselves to Finley’s food stocks. The evening finally hit rock bottom when we were eating dessert. It all started with a perfectly innocuous question from Will as he turned to Alexis over a vat of tiramisu. “So, have you settled in well?” he asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had descended on the room between the main course and the cheeseboard.

  Alexis nodded. Her eyes darted almost imperceptibly to Desmond. “Yes, thank you. We feel almost at home.”

  “Probably because this is your
home,” said Lady Mairead, spooning lemon cream into a little glass bowl.

  “Mmm,” said Alexis, and I thought that was the end of it, but after a moment she put down her spoon and added, with a look of determination, “For another two weeks, at least.”

  Desmond knocked over his glass.

  “I beg your pardon?” exclaimed Lady Mairead.

  “Well—you know we’re just visiting. Amy’s summer holidays are nearly over and we have to go back to Germany soon.”

  I shot a sideways glance at Alexis. She looked almost relieved about what she’d just said. Did she really want to leave the island? Leave Desmond? “But…” I stammered. The longer we’d spent here, the more difficult it had become to imagine ever having to leave, and I’d assumed Alexis felt the same way. But it seemed I’d been wrong.

  “That was always the plan.” Alexis lowered her eyelids. “You have to go back to school.”

  “She can do that here,” said my grandmother. “The book world needs her.”

  The Laird snorted. “The book world would be a great deal safer without her.” He crumpled the corner of the tablecloth in his hands. “Betsy tells me they’re saying in the Margin that Amy goes roaming around the book world as if it were a playground! They even say she’s been keeping young Werther from his story, and—”

  “Amy knows she has to stay inside The Jungle Book,” said Glenn.

  I sank lower in my chair.

  “But she doesn’t stay there.” Betsy jabbed a finger in my direction. “Everything’s a joke to her! She goes around wreaking havoc in stories and she doesn’t even care—just look what she’s done to Alice in Wonderland!”

  I tried to protest, but the words wouldn’t come.

  “No, no—the characters are just playing the fool again,” said Glenn. But Betsy was adamant.

  “In the book world they’re saying Amy jumps wherever she likes. And whenever she likes,” she cried.

  The whole table fell silent.

  “What is the meaning of this?” asked Lady Mairead.