The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  “You still like being here?”

  “No. But I have come to terms with what’s happened.” He stared down at his coffee. “And I am thankful for having had the chance to meet Alexis. She is the love of my life. You’re very like her, by the way.”

  I snorted. “As if.”

  “Yes, really.” He looked at me. The corners of his mouth twitched once or twice before he spoke again. As if he was wondering whether to say what he was thinking. “In the book world, I never would have had the chance to be a father,” he murmured at last. “I honestly can’t believe I have a wonderful daughter like you.”

  I looked down, but felt something swell in my chest. However strange the circumstances, it felt good to have a father.

  The jazz musician went around with a hat, and Desmond dropped in a few coins as he came past our table.

  “Some characters in the book world have children, though,” I said, thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters.

  “Of course,” said Desmond, “if the story dictates it.”

  “And your story didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “You were a knight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you happy?”

  He sighed. “Yes and no. I managed to defeat the monster, but … the way it happened was…” He closed his eyes for a moment. “In the story, the knight had to die at the end and it was … it was not a good death,” he explained haltingly.

  My cup clinked as I set it down a little too violently in its saucer. “Did you get killed?” I whispered.

  Desmond didn’t answer. Instead he drained the last of his coffee, sprang to his feet, and beckoned to Alexis, who was crossing the road toward us with two large shopping bags. She was a bit out of breath when she arrived, but she beamed and flopped down on the chair between us.

  “Do you remember?” she asked Desmond, nodding in the direction of the busker, who appeared to have a rather limited repertoire and was playing the same song over again.

  Desmond nodded. “How could I forget?”

  When he finally came face-to-face with the monster, he did not realize it at first.

  What he saw made no sense.

  Or did it?

  A pearl of recognition formed in his mind.

  He was afraid.

  Then he reached for his weapon.

  12

  A MIDWINTER NIGHT’S DREAM

  IN THE NIGHTS THAT FOLLOWED Will and I kept watch at the stone circle again several times but nobody—not even the child—materialized. This gave us plenty of time to talk. We discussed our favorite books in whispers, and the more time went on, the more often our hands touched—as if by accident. Or was I just imagining things?

  But then, a few days later, the thief struck again. In broad daylight this time. Werther and I heard the news in the Margin one day during one of my jumping lessons. We’d just been in Heroes Direct talking to Hercules (who was being fitted for a new pair of sandals) about how things were going in the Classical dramas, and he’d assured us that everything was fine: there was still no shortage of tragic demises, so all was as it should be. As we stepped out into the street, however, a large, translucent thing came whooshing through the air toward us. We managed to jump aside just in time, narrowly avoiding being flattened by the creature as it went hurtling past us in the direction of the Inkpot. It was as tall as a house, and its lower body consisted not of legs but of a weird plume of smoke. At the end of this plume of smoke hung a dented oil lamp which clattered along the ground behind it.

  “The thief!” thundered the genie in an Arabian accent. “He has robbed the Sultan! Gold and jewels from his treasure chamber! An outrage!”

  My heart beat faster.

  “Excuse me—to which Sultan are you referring?” asked Werther. But the genie had already gone sailing past us. Luckily, I knew which story he came from. “‘Aladdin,’” I said tersely to Werther, tugging at his arm. At last, we had a clue! We had to get to The Arabian Nights, ASAP!

  Unfortunately, however, Werther wouldn’t budge, no matter how much I tugged at the sleeve of his frilled shirt. Instead he stood with his back pressed against the window of Heroes Direct and closed his eyes. All the color drained from his face. “Not again,” he breathed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, still trying to drag him along the road. “Come on, we have to hurry—we might still catch the thief.”

  Werther didn’t move an inch. He was trembling now. “Something wicked this way comes,” he croaked.

  “Pardon?” I exclaimed. “What do you mean, something wicked?”

  Then I, too, noticed the flapping sound that filled the air. It was the flap of ragged hooded cloaks. A dark, restless sound, the kind that signals an impending thunderstorm. A moment later, the three old women I’d found tormenting Werther on my first ever visit to the book world came swooping down out of the sky. I knew by now that they were the witches from Macbeth. They whirled through the street, shrieking, leaving the stench of decay in their wake. “Alas!” they wailed. “Alas, it doth snow in A Midsummer Night’s Dream!”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I cried.

  The witches turned to look at me.

  “Sisters, ’tis the impudent Reader!” said the first witch, jabbing a long fingernail in my direction.

  “And young Werther!” leered the second. Her warty nose quivered with pleasure at the sight of her favorite victim.

  “Hail to thee, young Werther!” screeched the third, grinning. “Thou shalt wed her by and by!”

  Werther slumped to the ground and hid his head in his hands. “Begone,” he muttered, almost inaudibly.

  “Thou shalt find happiness with A—” the first witch began, but I cut her off.

  “What’s happened? Is there a problem in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?” I called.

  The unnatural fluttering of the witches’ cloaks fell silent.

  “’Twas the base thief,” explained the third witch, and her shoulders drooped. The grin faded from her face. “Nothing is sacred to him; not even the works of the great Shakespeare! Now he hath stolen summer itself!”

  “Alas!” wailed the other two witches. “Alas, it doth snow in A Midsummer Night’s Dream!”

  “But I thought Betsy had only just stolen from the Sultan in ‘Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,’” I murmured. “How can that be? She can’t have been in two places at once, can she?”

  “Alas! Then this is like to be the blackest magic,” screeched the witches, rolling their eyes in fear. “Blacker even than our own.”

  “Black magic?” I raised my eyebrows. I believed in many things by this point, but magic certainly wasn’t one of them. “Well, I don’t know … what do you think?” I said, turning to Werther.

  But Werther didn’t answer, because he’d fainted.

  This seemed to cheer the witches enormously. Leering, they dangled their witchy hair into his face and scraped their fingernails down the windowpane beside his ear before flying away.

  Even after I’d shaken Werther awake, dragged him inside the Inkpot, and pepped him up with a glass of cola, I still couldn’t make any sense of it all. At first I’d wondered whether Betsy might have gone on a kind of thieving spree, stealing from several stories in quick succession. But both the genie and the witches, when they’d arrived at the pub, had repeatedly assured everyone at the bar that they’d come straight there after the robberies to raise the alarm. And all the book characters present agreed that nobody could flick through literature that fast. Not from The Arabian Nights to Shakespeare, at any rate.

  By the time I finally jumped back to the outside world, I still didn’t know who was behind the thefts or how to stop them, but I was very conscious of the fact that I was going to need more help in the book world. Help that was less prone to fainting fits than Werther.

  Will was sitting in the grass beside one of the boulders in the stone circle, reading (in the traditional sense) Peter Pan. He was so absorbed in the story that
he didn’t even look up until I was standing right in front of him.

  “I’m back,” I announced superfluously, nodding at the book of fairy tales lying on a mat under one of the archways. “I take it Betsy’s still inside her book.”

  Will nodded absentmindedly. His mind, it seemed, was still whirring with thoughts of Neverland.

  “Good,” I murmured, pacing up and down the stone circle. It was eleven o’clock; we still had an hour till Glenn came to fetch us back to the library for a lesson on literary history. Now that clues had started appearing again as to the identity of the thief—who might be wreaking havoc in the book world even now—it was obvious what we had to do!

  Without stopping to think I marched back over to Will, grabbed him by the elbow, and pulled him to his feet. “Come on,” I said brusquely.

  He blinked. “What? Where?”

  “It’s snowing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I said. “The thief has struck twice already today.” I opened up The Jungle Book and tried to maneuver Will toward one of the gateways.

  But he stayed rooted to the spot. “What?”

  “What do you think? We have to try, and we have to go now.”

  Will folded his arms. “I’m not jumping again, Amy,” he said quietly.

  “But you have to. I need your help.” I lay down under the portal.

  He sighed. “Not like this, though. I don’t want to do any more damage. Holmes—”

  “Enough about Holmes. Come on,” I said, patting the mat beside me. “Please. It’s for the book world, after all.”

  “I’m not jumping again,” Will repeated. “I’ve made my decision.”

  “You can’t stop jumping, Will. We have to stop Betsy. We have to.” How could he not understand that? A knot of anger tightened in my stomach.

  “But I still don’t think Betsy—”

  “Fricking hell!” I shouted. “Then it’s somebody else, Will! Whoever the thief is and for whatever reason he or she is stealing ideas, it’s destroying literature! Doesn’t the book world mean anything to you? All the stories we love? What if Peter Pan is next?”

  Will’s jaw tightened. He gripped his favorite book so hard his knuckles went white.

  “You can’t just stand by and watch, Will. That’s not what Holmes would have wanted, is it?” I looked him straight in the eye.

  He was silent.

  Three seagulls were circling overhead. Their screeches were not unlike those of the witches, only quieter and less piercing. As if the three old women were calling to us for help, from far away. Will tipped his head back and looked at the flying gulls without really seeing them. His eyes were fixed on a point somewhere beyond the clouds. I could see him searching his soul, wrestling with himself. The roar of the waves that drifted up to us from the shoreline sounded like the storm of thoughts inside his head. Then, after what felt like an eternity, Will took a very deep breath and sighed.

  “No,” he said at last, his voice firm. “You’re right. Holmes would have wanted us to catch the thief. Holmes never lets a criminal get away.” He sighed. “But I’ll only jump until we’ve caught him. After that…”

  I nodded and moved over a little to make space for Will beside me. For a moment the sky looked higher and wider than it ever had before, as we lay there shoulder to shoulder. Then I slid The Jungle Book over our faces.

  We found Werther exactly where I’d left him: at the bar of the Inkpot. In front of him were several empty cola bottles, and he was rocking restlessly back and forth on his bar stool. Possibly because there was now more caffeine and sugar running through his veins than actual blood. How had he managed to drink so much in the short time I’d been away?

  “Helloo-oo, Miss Amy!” he greeted me chirpily. His eyes lit up. But when he saw Will standing beside me his smile stiffened a little.

  “Will Macalister,” said Will, holding out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” said Werther, clearing his throat. “Yes, indeed, very pleased.”

  “I’ve decided to go and look for clues in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I explained.

  Werther nodded. “I shall accompany you, of course. As long as our route does not take us through Macbeth. That play does not seem to agree with me, as you know.” He tried to sound nonchalant, but his fear of the witches was written all over his face.

  “Good—let’s go, then, shall we?” asked Will. “I know a shortcut, by the way. We won’t even have to go near a certain witches’ cave.”

  Werther studied Will with a mixture of relief and disappointment. “I take it the young gentleman is to accompany us?” he inquired.

  I nodded. “He’s a book jumper, like me. He’ll be helping us from now on.”

  “Aha,” said Werther, straightening the ribbon in his hair. “Well then.”

  Will led us out of the pub, straight down the Margin and then, with the precision of a sleepwalker, through an astounding number of Shakespeare plays. At first I marveled at Will’s purposefulness, but it shouldn’t really have surprised me. Will was a much more experienced book jumper than I was—he had years of training behind him. Of course he knew his way around the book world. And now that he’d decided to jump again—now that he’d realized he had no choice, if we were to save the book world—he was showing the same fierce determination as when he’d refused to set foot in it ever again.

  So Werther and I followed Will through Italian city-states and British fields until we came to a mountain range, at the foot of which lay a Mediterranean-looking city. The sun was setting on the horizon, bloodred, bathing olive groves and ancient temples in a warm glow. Unfortunately, nothing else about the place was warm. It was snowing, in fact. The roofs of the houses and towers looked as though they had been coated with white icing, and frost glittered on the ancient marble columns.

  “Is this Athens?” asked Werther, pulling his velvet waistcoat more tightly around him.

  “Yes,” said Will. “This is it.” He flicked us through the pages, through the snowflakes that fell thicker and faster every minute, to one of the gates in the city wall. At that moment a pair of lovers slipped out into the night and ran off into a nearby wood. They were both far too scantily clad for the wintry conditions.

  “What—um—what’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream about?” I asked.

  Will shrugged. “It’s about love and fairy magic,” he said. “Lysander and Hermia are in love but they can’t be together because Hermia’s dad wants her to marry Demetrius. So she runs away from Athens with Lysander. Then there’s a character called Helena, who’s in love with Demetrius and wants him for herself. She tells Demetrius about Hermia and Lysander’s plan to run away together, and Demetrius goes after them. And then Helena follows Demetrius, and they all end up in the woods. The fairies cast spells on them and make both the men temporarily fall in love with Helena, so they suddenly forget about Hermia. Oh yeah, and there’s a weaver whose head gets turned into a donkey’s head. The whole thing is pretty confusing,” he explained as another young man came running out of the city and into the woods, followed by a young woman.

  “Hermia is promised to another? It is about unrequited love?” stammered Werther.

  “It’s about fairies?” I asked.

  Will nodded. “But the story usually takes place on a warm summer’s night. So someone must have stolen the idea of it being summer.” He folded his arms for a moment and pondered. I half expected him to pull a magnifying glass out of his pocket. Or at least a pipe to chew on. But he didn’t, of course. He just pointed to the edge of the wood and murmured, “Let’s see if there were any witnesses. Perhaps someone will be able to identify the thief, or at least give us something to go on.”

  We left the city behind and trudged off after the four lovesick characters. This was no easy task, however, since we were now ankle-deep in snow. We made slow progress. My sneakers were soon soaked through and my toes were numb with cold. Will lent me his sweater again, while Werther’s teeth chattered so loudly that the
whole of the forest must have heard them.

  There was no sign of the lovers. Instead, the trees began to thin out and eventually gave way to a clearing full of dancing fairies with butterfly wings sprouting from their backs, dressed in clothes made of flower petals. It would probably have looked quite magical if the delicate little creatures hadn’t been shivering so violently. They weren’t so much dancing, in fact, as hopping about rubbing one another’s wings to warm them up. Their bare feet had turned completely blue, and they were crying ice crystals instead of tears. Icicles of snot hung from their noses. “Our poor Queen!” they cried. “If we could but light a fire for her!”

  At the center of the clearing hung a sort of hammock lined with moss, and in it lay a fairy wearing a dress of shimmering cobwebs and a crown of pinecones. Her long golden hair was draped over her shoulders like a cloak. She too was shivering. Beside her perched a fairy with an impish face, twirling a flower between his fingers.

  “Titania,” Will greeted the fairy queen.

  Titania’s eyes fluttered open reluctantly. “Who are you?” she breathed.

  “My name is Werther,” said Werther with a bow.

  “Amy and I are Readers. We’re looking for the thief who has stolen the summer from you. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary today?”

  The fairy queen rose from her bed of moss and floated over to us. Frozen dewdrops glittered on her eyelashes. Her eyes were far too large and far too blue to be human. “No,” she said, her voice as clear as a bell. “No. All was as it should be. Peaseblossom and Mustardseed did dress my hair, when all of a sudden it turned cold. Terribly cold. Then at last the frozen water fell from the heavens and now we can no longer sleep for shivering, and the story cannot go on.” She floated very close to Will, circled around him, and brushed his cheek with her delicate fairy fingers. “So thou art a Reader?” she murmured.

  I cleared my throat. “Why can’t the story go on?”

  The fairy queen shot a glance at me. “My husband, Oberon, must anoint my eyelids with the juice of this flower, fetched here by Puck,” she explained, pointing to the fairy with the impish face. “The flower’s liquor must enchant me so that when I wake, I fall in love with the ass-headed weaver who will be here anon. But if I do not fall asleep, the magic cannot work.”