“With pleasure,” replied Will, in the mechanical voice that told me he wasn’t Will at all anymore. He’d followed us up the stairs and was now crossing the circular floor of the tower roof. He was still clutching the knight’s dagger. He came toward us, faster now, more determined.
I jumped aside, but it was too late. He’d already grabbed hold of me, tugging roughly at my hair, pulling me away from the princess. Then I felt the blade at my throat, cool and sharp.
Will’s breath came in short gasps beside my ear. I wanted to look at him but I couldn’t turn my head, “Will,” I whispered. “Will, come back to me. It’s me, Amy. This is not a nightmare, it’s the princess’s curse.”
The pressure of the metal on my neck grew stronger.
“Will, don’t do this. I know you don’t want to do this.”
“No,” said Will. “But she’s forcing me. I…” The words sounded as if they came from very far away.
“You have to fight it, do you hear me? There must a way to break the curse. Desmond managed it, anyway.”
The blade broke my skin. I felt a single drop of blood well from the cut and run down my neck. “Desmond died at the end,” muttered Will through clenched teeth.
“But before that he killed the monster, Will. Somehow he must have managed to break the curse.”
“Before that? Desmond…” whispered Will, and suddenly he went very quiet. The pressure of the blade on my neck eased almost imperceptibly. “Amy … I think there’s only one way to end this,” he murmured quietly in my ear. “At the end, the knight has to…” He faltered.
“Will!” I cried.
“You have to go, Amy. Go! Take the ideas and—” He broke off. Had his mind lost its battle with the poison?
“And what?” I yelled. “What do you mean? How are we supposed to get out of here while you’re still under her control?”
This time he did not reply.
But the princess had appeared beside us and was plucking at Will’s sleeve. “Now,” she commanded. “Stab her in the heart.”
“With pleasure,” said the knight, throwing me to the ground. “I will put an end to this horror.” He was leaning over me now. The dagger flashed before me—the fire that surrounded us was reflected in its blade and I forgot everything, the tower, the princess, even the story we were in. All that was left was Will and me and the weapon between us.
“Will,” I whispered, looking into his eyes one last time. Eyes you could drown in.
Stormy-blue eyes.
Then, at last, he plunged the dagger home.
The blade pierced fabric and skin and bone and flesh. Too easily. Too fast. It pierced a beating heart. It severed muscles and arteries. It killed the heart.
It was over within seconds. Too quickly to take in.
Will slumped to the ground.
The knight closed his eyes.
It was done.
The curse was broken: the monster would die with him.
The breath left his body.
19
THE END
WILL FELL AND AS HE FELL the world slowed, stopped turning. I saw his knees give way beneath him, infinitely slowly, his body arc backward in slow motion, down and down to land softly on the roof where he’d been standing. As though an invisible current were carrying him gently to the bottom of an unknown ocean. As though it were rocking him to sleep and laying him to rest.
But at last the impact did come and the dull thud of his body hitting the stone roof ripped through the torpor the world had fallen into. It ripped through something inside me too.
“Will!” I heard myself shout, and “No!”
I lurched toward him.
His hands still gripped the jewel-encrusted hilt of the dagger sticking out of his chest. This image was so wrong. It was impossible that the rest of the dagger was buried inside a wound that …
Will’s eyelids fluttered as my trembling fingers touched his cheek. All of a sudden there was a lot of red. It was even reflected in his stormy-blue eyes.
“Amy,” Will whispered. “The … story … is over.”
“Will,” I said. “Will, Will.”
The patch of red spread further, widening into a pool on the floor, a sea of lost life. “Take the ideas and … get out of here. Take them back.” Will’s voice grew fainter.
“But—”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Amy.” He smiled feebly. “Now … you’re shining again … like a fairy fl—”
He exhaled. His lips had turned pale. The light in his stormy-blue eyes went out.
* * *
The knight died at the end of the story.
The truth gripped me, whether I wanted it or not.
Will was dead.
He couldn’t be dead.
Dead.
I heard the words in my head but I didn’t understand them.
Instead I cradled Will’s head in my lap and stroked his hair. What if Will had just fallen asleep? Yes, that was it—he was asleep. He was just having one of his nightmares and this time he’d taken me inside the nightmare with him. That had to be it. With my thumb I traced the curve of his eyebrow. With my index finger I twiddled the lock of hair behind his left ear. My vision blurred.
The princess was crying too. She crouched between the battlements and wept bitterly. “Who will protect me now?” she sobbed. “Who will fight for me now?” Out of the corner of my eye I saw her drop the rabbit to the ground and kick it. “Get away from me. I want my knight!”
I wiped my sleeve across my face. I stroked Will’s cheek one last time, then stood up. Something sticky welled from the rip inside of me, thick and hot and black as pitch. It filled my chest and throbbed at my temples. “He’s not your knight any longer,” I said.
“He is,” the princess howled. “He is—he has to protect me—he…” She took a step toward Will’s body, but I stepped forward to meet her. I would never abandon him to her. She had possessed Will for long enough.
I looked around, scanning the battlements and the burning horizon. Somewhere down there, by the foot of the tower—wasn’t that where we’d entered the story?
The princess glared at me. “Stand aside!”
“Forget it!” I hissed, and gave a start as something suddenly bumped against my foot.
The White Rabbit had rolled one of the glass spheres toward me. Inside it was the rose Will had cut from the thorns—the Little Prince’s flower. I must have dropped the idea in the chaos of the moment. I bent down to pick it up as the rabbit hopped a little farther away and nudged the cyclone, the monster, and Sleeping Beauty’s long sleep in my direction.
“We must hurry,” it muttered, rolling yet more ideas toward me.
I nodded.
“Stop that!” cried the princess, making a lunge for the glass spheres. But I was faster. I pulled off my sweater, gathered up the stolen ideas inside it, and knotted it so they couldn’t fall out. There was only one missing, and that was the rabbit himself. He now turned back into a shimmering idea too.
As I slipped the last idea inside my sweater the story began to fall apart. The princess cried out as the ground beneath her feet went up in flames. The tower crumbled and split in two, and she only just managed to leap across the gap to join Will and me. All that had remained of the surrounding hills was engulfed by the fiery inferno, and suddenly the air around us was filled with heavy black smoke that burned my lungs, stung my eyes, and made me cough. It was as if the fire had only now become truly hot. The heat gnawed at my skin and scorched my eyeballs.
The princess flung herself at me and tried to wrench the ideas out of my grasp. But she was a child. An angry, capricious, malevolent child, yes, but still far smaller and weaker than I was.
I pushed her off me, then turned back to Will and heaved his arm over my shoulder. I put one arm around his waist and held the ideas tight with the other.
The princess tumbled backward, almost falling into the flames. She was beside
herself with rage. She cried and yelled. She raged and stamped her dirty feet. Hatred glittered in her eyes. By the time she’d realized what I was planning I had already scrambled up onto the battlements. She ran at me, trying to cling onto me at the last second as she had done to one of my ancestors.
But it was too late. She missed the end of my ponytail by mere millimeters. But she missed it.
I’d already jumped from the tower roof. I plummeted down through the smoke and the flames and the darkness, plummeted toward the burning hilltop and passed straight through it. Back to Stormsay.
The princess was left behind, a prisoner in her own story.
* * *
We arrived at the stone circle, me, Will, and the glass spheres. I’d managed to save the ideas. The book world would go back (almost) to the way it had been before.
But Will and I would not. Because he still wasn’t moving, and the hole in his chest was still there.
I lay down beside him in the grass and closed my eyes. A river of tears had gathered behind them and now came spilling out from under my eyelids. Our shoulders touched. I felt for his hand and wove my fingers through his. Will’s skin still felt warm. Warm and alive and slightly slippery from all the blood. But it was already growing colder. His heart had stopped beating.
Somewhere deep inside me there had been a last vestige of hope. Because it had happened in the book world and Will, after all, was a real person. I’d had this absurd idea that death wasn’t real in books, that Will would be okay again once he was back in the outside world.
That idea had been a fairy story.
Will was dead.
Even in the real world, he was dead.
I wanted to cry until the river of tears had run dry and the only warmth left in Will’s skin was the warmth flowing from my body to his. But instead I blinked and my eyes fell upon something lying on the ground close by: Will’s copy of Peter Pan. His favorite story.
Without stopping to think I reached for the book, opened it somewhere in the middle and slid it over my face. A moment later the words sucked me in and Will along with me, his hand in mine.
We landed on a brig with a rotting wooden hull. It was the Jolly Roger, the scourge of the seas, the ship of the infamous Captain Hook.
The pirates, when they found us lying there on the dirty planks, realized at once that something was wrong. The plot came to a temporary halt. The pirates shed their fierce expressions and forgot for a while to be evil and bloodthirsty. Hook himself emerged from his cabin and bent over Will. He touched the wound with his hook, then took off his large plumed hat and bowed his head. He said nothing, but placed his one good hand on my shoulder. Together we stood there in silence.
Somehow, though, the news of our arrival spread quickly throughout the island. Soon characters came running from every corner of Neverland, for everybody here had known and loved Will. The Indians tiptoed onto the deck, the lost boys clambered over the railing, and the mermaids began to circle the ship. Even the ticking crocodile, the one who had eaten Hook’s hand and swallowed a clock, made an appearance. It dragged its scaly body toward us and rang the bell of the clock in its stomach. But Will did not wake up, not even when the Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael, floated down from the sky along with Peter Pan himself.
Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, dropped to his knees at Will’s side. “What happened to him? Was he looking the wrong way?” he asked. The words sounded brusque and a little arrogant, as was his way. But he was crying as he spoke.
Later all I could remember was that I’d tried to tell them what had happened. But my account was disjointed and full of holes because I couldn’t tear my gaze away from Will’s staring blue eyes.
Perhaps that was why I didn’t notice that another character had come darting toward us—not until she landed on the end of Will’s nose and pressed her ear to his lips. The fairy Tinker Bell was about the size of my hand. She listened at Will’s lower lip and left traces of fairy dust on his skin. Her light flickered and her voice was like the tinkling of a bell when at last she straightened up and told us what we all already knew. “He’s dead,” she said.
We nodded. Wendy sobbed. The crocodile ticked mournfully.
But Tinker Bell hadn’t finished: “He’s dead. But a trace of his soul is still inside him. Not enough for him to live, but…” She came buzzing over to me and whispered something in my ear.
A tingling sensation flooded through me. I didn’t even have to think about her offer—I nodded, straightaway.
Tinker Bell flew straight as a die toward the wound. She flew right inside Will’s chest, passing through skin and bone and flesh and muscle. Everything she touched glittered with fairy dust, which came together to form a glimmering golden cloud. And this cloud grew and spread until it encompassed Will’s whole body. The fairy dust trickled through his hair, covered his face, settled in every fold of his sweater, and washed the blood away.
Tinker Bell finally came to rest on my head. She laughed her bell-like laugh and as the cloud dispersed, it happened—the thing I had no longer dared to hope for, the most incredible thing in the world, the thing that was possible only in the book world: Will sat up.
He had changed. His arms and legs were less gangling, his facial features were perfectly symmetrical, his hair was glossier, and in his stormy-blue eyes were shimmering gold specks of fairy dust. He was wearing the same clothes as the lost boys, clothes made out of leaves and bearskins. He had become one of them.
Will was a book character.
But he was alive.
I fell into his arms, sobbing his name—and other things—into the crook of his neck. I cried the river of tears now after all, as Will held me tightly. “I love you too,” he said. “I love you too, Amy.”
Then he kissed me.
A long, familiar kiss.
Will was himself again. My Will.
The mermaids broke into song, Peter crowed like a cockerel, and the pirates lit the cannons and fired several shots for sheer joy.
Will and I, meanwhile, were learning how to fly.
* * *
That afternoon we wandered through Neverland together, bathed in the lagoon, danced in the Indian village, and soared starward.
Will belonged here now, in the book world, in this story. He was happy. He’d loved this book since childhood. But it still felt so strange, so final. Tinker Bell had brought Will back to life, but the magic only worked inside Peter Pan. He would have to stay here forever. He would always be seventeen. He would never see Stormsay again. But he was breathing. He kissed me. I lost myself in his stormy-blue eyes. And he began, along with Peter and the other boys, to fight Hook.
This was the price. We were happy to pay it.
For a few hours I was able to stop myself thinking about what would happen next. I tried to forget that other stories—and the outside world—still existed. But after a while somebody came flicking through the pages of Peter Pan toward us—somebody who, like me, did not belong there.
Werther.
He was riding an enormous monster that looked like a scaly sausage, and looking for me. News of what had happened had spread throughout the book world and he’d come to help me do what I had to do—the thing I’d been doggedly refusing to think about until now.
He found me in the hut on the beach that Peter had lent us to stay in. We were in the middle of dinner when Werther burst in, laddering one of his silk stockings on the door frame in the process.
I leaped to my feet. “Werther!”
“Miss Amy,” he greeted me and made as if to kiss my hand, but I just launched myself at him and hugged him tightly. “Oh,” he stammered, “I … I heard what had happened. Are … are you well?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very well.”
Will had stood up, too, and shook Werther’s hand. They looked at each other. Werther saw what Will had become, and cleared his throat. “Welcome to the book world,” he said politely, before turning back to me. “Is it true that you w
ere able to recover the ideas?”
I nodded. “They’re up by the portal in the outside world.”
He looked at me. “Then it is time we returned them to their stories. Come, Miss Amy.” He gave me his arm.
I gazed back at him mutely. Then I turned to Will. “See you later,” I said, and planted a kiss in the corner of his mouth.
I accompanied Werther outside the hut to where Charybdis, the scaly sausage, was grazing peacefully. She yelped for joy when she spotted Werther’s ruffled shirt.
“It has become apparent that she thinks I am her mother,” he explained sheepishly, lifting me onto the monster’s back behind him.
A moment later we were speeding through the story. Werther dropped me off by the pirate ship and I jumped back to the real world to fetch the ideas. Then, together, we restored them to their rightful places: the talking rabbit to Alice in Wonderland, the long sleep to Sleeping Beauty, the Elf-King to The Elf-King, the cyclone to The Wizard of Oz, the flower to The Little Prince, the summer to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the transformation to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the evil to Wuthering Heights, and the two sea monsters to The Odyssey. Only the picture from The Picture of Dorian Gray was irretrievably lost, the princess having destroyed it at the stone circle. Luckily the witches from Macbeth offered to paint a sort of mock-up of the original picture. Their picture was little more than a sketch, and it sometimes seemed as though there was black magic at work in it. But after a while even this story began to work pretty well, so much so that readers didn’t even notice the real picture was missing. In the end, almost everything was back to the way it was supposed to be. Except that Will had disappeared from the outside world forever.
The adult book jumpers especially missed him very much. In the weeks that followed, the Laird and Lady Mairead talked a great deal about Will and less and less about their ancient feud. Will’s parents grieved for their son, but consoled themselves with the thought that he would live forever in the story he loved most in the world. And as for me—I traveled back and forth between the real world, which had become so much more important to me over the past few weeks, and my second home, the world of stories. Almost every day I went to visit Will in Neverland.
The Book Jumper Page 27