The Book Jumper

by Mechthild Gläser

  There was a rustling noise outside the bedroom door.

  Werther fell silent and put a finger to his lips. We listened. There was complete silence. But now Gregor Samsa opened his beetle eyes. For a while he gazed at his domed belly and his delicate little legs. Then he tried to turn onto his side, but kept rolling onto his rounded beetle back again. Eventually he looked at the alarm clock beside his bed, which showed a quarter to seven, and gave a start—perhaps because he had just spotted me and Werther standing across the room from him. His antennae swiveled toward us in surprise.

  “Gregor,” called a woman’s voice from outside the door. “It’s a quarter to seven. Don’t you need to be going?”

  “Yes, Mother, yes, thank you—I’m getting up now,” replied Gregor Samsa in a harsh beetle voice, trying and failing to get out of bed. He just couldn’t quite manage to tip himself onto his belly.

  The room had two other doors: Gregor’s father could now be heard outside one of them, and his sister, Grete, at the other. Both wanted to know why Gregor had not gone to work yet, and whether he was unwell.

  The little beetle legs paddled helplessly and ever more frantically through the air. There were knocks on all three of the bedroom doors. “Should we help him up?” I asked Werther.

  Werther shook his head firmly. “No—we must not interfere with the plot,” he said quietly, looking out of the window again. He seemed to think the thief was going to come marching down the street any second now. In fact, however, the thief must have come flicking through the pages of the story just as dexterously as we had, for a moment later there was a cry from outside the door where Gregor’s mother was standing.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Who are you?” shrieked Gregor’s mother.

  “What’s going on?” demanded Gregor’s father.

  “Has something happened?” called Grete.

  “Pull down that ridiculous hood and show yourself!” ordered Gregor’s mother. “Ow, you’re hurting me!”

  “What’s the matter?” called Gregor’s father.

  “He pushed me out of the way!”

  “Who?”

  “The stranger!”

  Werther and I held our breath as Gregor Samsa continued to rock laboriously to and fro on his back, trying to tip himself over the edge of the bed, and eventually landed with a dull thud on the carpet.

  “Perhaps it’s the chief clerk!” called Grete.

  “I think I would recognize the chief clerk if he were standing right in front of me.”

  “I thought he had his hood up.”

  “And?” We heard Gregor’s mother gasp. “That is my son’s bedroom. Kindly stop tampering with the lock!”

  And now, from our vantage point inside the room, we could see the key being pushed very slowly out of the lock by somebody outside the door. It fell to the floor and landed on a strip of paper that hadn’t been there a moment before. The thief pulled the piece of paper with the key on it out from under the door. Then we heard the lock click. The door handle turned. The door opened, just a crack at first, then wider and wider, to reveal a black cloak.

  Werther pounced on the hooded figure the moment it set foot inside the room.

  At last! I had to help him, of course. I leaped forward too. This was the moment we’d been waiting for for so long. The thief had fallen into our trap! All we had to do now was grab hold of whoever it was and rip that stupid hood off their face. But what would we find underneath it? Did I really want to know the truth? By now I had begun to have grave misgivings about the thief’s identity: I hesitated midleap and for a fraction of a second I forgot to think about what my feet were doing. I tripped over Gregor, who was lying on the floor with his legs waving in the air, then collided with Werther and sent him flying too.

  We had lost the element of surprise.

  Before we could get back up the thief had turned on his heel, shoved Gregor’s mother aside once more, and flicked through the pages and away. It all happened so quickly that we didn’t even see which way he went.

  “Crap!” I panted once I’d found my feet again. Werther, mopping the sweat from his brow with his embroidered handkerchief, merely shrugged. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said, cocking his chin at Gregor’s head where the idea of the beetle body still shimmered. The thief had not succeeded in stealing it. We’d stopped him. Werther and I grinned at each other. We hadn’t managed to catch the scumbag, but at least we’d saved Metamorphosis. Hadn’t we?

  “What if he comes back?” I asked.

  “I do not think he will try again here. Everybody is forewarned now, after all.” He turned to Gregor’s family, who had all come bursting into the bedroom and were staring down at the giant beetle. “You must look after him and keep a very close eye on him from now on.”

  The family nodded. They were all visibly shocked.

  “And we have to think about what we’re going to do next,” I said. My frustration at having come so close to catching the thief had melted away, giving way to a euphoric thirst for action, which temporarily eclipsed my fears about what might be hidden under that hood. The main thing was that we’d finally managed to stop the thief. We’d been able to save at least one story, and that felt pretty damn good.

  Half an hour later, Werther and I had cut across to the neighboring Russian authors and were sitting in the stylish compartment of a nineteenth-century train carriage on the Moscow–St. Petersburg line. A snowstorm raged outside the window and somewhere in the next carriage sat the unhappy Anna Karenina with whom Alexis had once been such good friends.

  We, however, were enjoying the cozy warmth and soft seats of our compartment. A gas lamp bathed the upholstery and plush carpets in a warm light and Werther, who had never ridden a train before in his life, marveled at the rattle of the wheels and the far-off glimmer of the steam engine when it came into view at a bend in the track, twinkling amid the thickly falling snowflakes. For the first ten minutes of our journey he stayed glued to the window and peered out at the passing countryside, which was only dimly visible in the darkness. I left him to it and thought again about what I had found under the sofa in Will’s cottage.

  “So, if we were to find the core ingredients of the stories,” I began at last, “would we be able to … er … put them back? Would that make the stories start working again?”

  “I dare say it would,” murmured Werther, without taking his eyes off the window. He whooped like a little kid when the steam engine let out a whistle.

  I said nothing for a while. Perhaps I could return the ideas to their stories without anyone noticing. But that wouldn’t be enough on its own, if the thief just kept stealing more. “How can we find out where he’s going to strike next?”

  Werther tore his gaze away from the scenery at last and put his head to one side. He hesitated for a moment, then reached into an inner pocket of his waistcoat, took out the long letter he’d received that morning, and unfolded it. “Well—it so happens that my friend Wilhelm and I have been debating that very question for some time now, and we have come to the conclusion that there must be a specific purpose behind the thefts,” he explained.

  I sat up straighter. “What purpose?”

  “Well.” Werther drummed his fingertips together. “I would naturally have spoken to you of this sooner, Miss Amy,” he said, “were it not for the fact that our alliance has acquired a new member of late.…” His eyes slid sideways. Was it just my imagination or did he sound ever so slightly hurt? “I was not sure, you see, whether I ought to take the risk, which is why I have preferred to remain silent until now.”

  I opened my mouth to set Werther straight. I wanted to tell him he was being stupid, that of course we could trust Will. But the words wouldn’t come.

  Werther looked me straight in the eye and handed me a piece of paper. It was a list, written in his own squiggly handwriting:

  “What about the treasures from The Arabian Nights and Dracula?” I asked. “And Elizabeth Bennet’s carriage accident?”
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  But Werther waved these suggestions aside. “No ideas were stolen in those instances.”

  “Hmm.” I read through his list again. “And what do the three question marks at the end stand for?”

  “They are part of our theory.” Werther leaned forward and clasped my hands in his. The gesture seemed a little uncalled for but I was too excited, too eager to find out what he knew about the thief, to give it much thought. His pale face was very close to mine now. So close that I could make out every single one of his long eyelashes. “We are afraid that a person stealing such powerful core ingredients as these can only have one thing in mind,” he whispered. “We are afraid that this person plans to use them to create a new story.” A shudder ran through him as he spoke.

  “A … new story?” I stammered.

  “Over the past few days my trusty Wilhelm has immersed himself thoroughly in the annals of our world, and has discovered that it is indeed possible. But only if one succeeds in bringing ten of the most powerful ideas in the history of literature under one’s control.”

  I felt goose bumps on the back of my neck, too, now. “So there are only three to go. Metamorphosis would have been number eight.”

  Werther nodded, but I still didn’t fully understand. “But why … I mean, if somebody wants to create a new story, why don’t they just write one? Why do they have to go helping themselves to things out of other books?”

  Werther came even closer. I could feel his breath on my lips—it smelt of peppermint and violets. “Powerful ideas like these do not grow on trees,” he whispered. “They are extremely difficult to invent. And not everybody is capable of creating something new. We book characters, for example—”

  Something slammed into the windowpane from the outside. Something far too blue to be a snowflake.

  We jumped. At last I backed away from Werther’s violet-breath and freed my hands from his grasp. I stood up and opened the compartment window to find a tiny fairy clinging to the window frame, flapping about in the wind. She tumbled inside the carriage accompanied by a blast of ice-cold night air and a flurry of snow, and landed on the seat beside me. Her wings were frozen stiff, and she squeaked out her message with such urgency that she tripped over her tongue in her agitation. She had to repeat herself three times before we realized that we had celebrated too soon: while we’d been chugging through the Russian winter, the thief had been carrying out another raid. He’d infiltrated The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and made off with no less than Mr. Hyde himself.

  Damn it! I bit my lip. Why had we let him get away? How were we supposed to protect the book world when the moment we thwarted him in one book, the thief simply turned his attentions to another?

  As Werther took out his quill, crossed out the question mark next to Number 8 on his list and replaced it with the title of the book, my mind began to whirl again. So fast that I felt sick. If Werther and Wilhelm were right, somebody was dismantling the great works of world literature in order to build a new story. But who would want to do that? Betsy? Lady Mairead? I swallowed hard and thought, very quietly: Will?

  The princess was young and fair.

  She had hair down to her heels and she dressed every day in the finest of gowns. When she laughed, all the kingdom was entranced.

  She was the fairest child in all the land.

  15

  THE FORGOTTEN GIRL

  THE RINGING OF THE ALARM CLOCK on my phone chased away my troubled dreams. My brain felt as though it had been transformed overnight into a wet sponge which was now sliding this way and that inside my head. I groaned as I swung my legs out of bed and blinked in the dull morning light. But at least I could think clearly enough now to know what I had to do. And that the sooner I did it the better.

  It was early, not even properly light yet. My book-jumping lesson in the Secret Library awaited me. I staggered into the bathroom for a shower, then picked a few clothes up off the floor at random and slipped them on. I brushed my teeth with one hand and tied my hair back in a messy bun with the other. Having neglected to look in the mirror, I didn’t realize until I was halfway downstairs that I was wearing the hideous sweater Alexis had bought me in Lerwick. I didn’t care.

  On the ground floor I grabbed a slice of bread from the breakfast table as I passed, and headed straight out of the front door. The gravel was wet with dew and crunched under my feet. Cool, damp air filled my lungs. I left the grounds of Lennox House, but I didn’t take the path to the Secret Library. No—I hurried out onto the moor. Suddenly I was overcome by such a sense of urgency that I started running. Something—some indefinable feeling—told me there was no time to waste.

  I was out of breath by the time I reached Will’s cottage. I went in without knocking and made a beeline for the sofa.

  Will, who was halfway through putting on a pair of jeans, was so taken aback that he got his foot stuck in one of the legs and fell against the stove. “Amy!” he stammered. “H … hello. Has something happened?”

  Without even looking at him, I threw myself to the floor. I searched the hiding place under the sofa, feeling around with both hands, peering into every corner, brushing aside the cobwebs. Nothing. I gasped.

  “Er—Amy?” Will crouched down beside me. “Is everything okay?”

  I leaped to my feet and backed away from him. “Where are they?” If I was going to repair the stories like Werther had said, I would need the core ingredients. But I was too late. I could have kicked myself. “Where are they?” I hissed again.

  Will raised his eyebrows. He stared at me uncomprehendingly. “Where are what?”

  “The ideas,” I whispered. “They were here yesterday, Will, I saw them. So where are they?” With every word, the wave of fear inside me rose higher and higher. It felt like it was about to come crashing down and wash me away.

  I didn’t even want Will to reply. I didn’t want to hear him admit it. I just wanted to find the ideas and take them back to their stories.

  Will frowned. “Ideas? What ideas? What do you mean?”

  “The stolen ideas,” I said flatly. “The ideas that have disappeared from the book world. They were under your sofa.”

  “Under my sofa?” He knelt down and peered underneath it.

  Meanwhile the wave of fear rose higher still, creeping up through my chest and pushing painfully at my throat. Then it broke with a roar that swept away everything in me. My vision blurred. All of a sudden the cottage around us seemed to grow even tinier, the dirty walls closing in on me along with a truth that hurt too much to acknowledge. The next moment I went stumbling out of the cottage.

  I slumped down outside the door and hid my face in my hands. I was destined not to have any real friends in this world. It was better to trust nobody. Would I never learn that lesson?

  Then I felt an arm around my shoulders. Will had sat down beside me—I recognized his familiar smell. I wanted to shake him off and run away, but I didn’t have the strength.

  “So you found the stolen ideas in my cottage yesterday and you didn’t tell me?” murmured Will. “Did you think I’d hidden them there?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Will sighed. “It wasn’t me, Amy. It wasn’t me, okay? Please believe me—I had no idea they were there.”

  I looked up. “Really? But … then how did they … And where…?”

  Will thought for a moment, then said: “I think I know who’s taken them.” He looked me straight in the eye and I could see no hint of a lie in his face as he went on: “When I woke up from one of my nightmares last night, the little girl was lying on the rug by the sofa. I thought she was asleep, so I didn’t disturb her. But now I reckon it was her that took the ideas. Remember when we found her messing with my chest of books the other day? She probably left the ideas behind when she ran away from us—and came back for them last night.”

  I blinked. What Will was saying made sense! It made wonderful sense! And it struck dead all the pain and fear and horrible thoughts inside me with one b
low.

  I fell into Will’s arms and pulled him toward me so hard that I bit his lip when I kissed him. But he didn’t complain. We fell backward onto the muddy path. I kissed him and he kissed me back. He loosened the bun in my hair and buried his hands in it, and all the thoughts flew out of my head.

  But it wasn’t long before they returned. “So the little girl has something to do with the thefts,” I mused once we’d got our breath back.

  Will nodded. He looked even more disheveled than usual and his lips were red. “We have to find out more about her, and fast.”

  Half an hour later we were marching side by side across the island.

  Stormsay wasn’t very big and I’d thought I knew every corner of it already, but I realized now that I’d been quite wrong. Will led me down to the beach and from there northward along the coast. Macalister Castle soon loomed up ahead of us, and I gaped at it. I’d never seen the castle from this angle before. Its formidable turrets looked even higher from here than they did from inland. They scraped the sky like the fingers of an ugly giant. The black stone from which Will’s ancestors had built the fortress was porous and shot through with cracks, sprouting clumps of weeds. Facing onto the beach was a wrought-iron gate, beyond which a passageway led deep into the bowels of the castle’s foundations. Will explained that this was the tunnel to the old dungeons which the Macalisters had once used for starving prisoners to death—preferably members of the Lennox clan.

  But the castle was not the northernmost point of Stormsay, as I’d previously thought. Beyond it were several rugged headlands, like fingers feeling their way out into the slate-gray sea. They were too narrow to build on, and over time the water had carved countless caves and gullies out of them so that they now resembled miniature mountain ranges. All the island’s paths petered out when they reached these headlands, and the beach narrowed and eventually disappeared altogether. The only things that lived out here were a colony of puffins, who were currently eyeing us with suspicion.