Bookweirder

by Paul Glennon

  “You can’t just disappear like that. You have to tell us where you’re going,” his father lectured, exasperated, as they trod back towards the main house. “We had the staff looking through the hedge maze for nearly an hour. You’re lucky that your mother remembered your thing for follies.”

  The lecture continued in the car on the way home. Norman hardly heard a word of it. Even his little sister, Dora, in the back seat next to him, was ignorable. He turned away from her smug face and leaned his head against the car window and watched the woods wind by. There could be talking animals in these woods, he thought. This could just as easily be Undergrowth. Out there beyond the hedgerows and the stone fences, who knew what was hiding? A ridge of gloomy clouds moved across the sky, casting dark shadows on the green hills, making the dark woods even darker. Who am I kidding? he asked himself. I’m just a stupid kid who imagines stupid things. It is hard to want something and know that what you want is impossible.

  The rented car rolled slowly onto the gravel driveway in front of the Shrubberies. Norman didn’t think of it as home yet. It was still like living in someone else’s house. It was somebody else’s house. It had been his grandparents’ house. Uncle Kit, his mom’s brother, lived there normally, but he was away. It was the first of many disappointments of the summer. Norman had been looking forward to meeting his uncle Kit. He sounded cool. When Norman was ten, Uncle Kit had sent him a wavy dagger called a kris. He’d had it for only a few minutes before his mom had confiscated it. She’d let him keep the blowgun that Uncle Kit had sent last year, but she’d taken away the darts.

  Norman’s mom didn’t have anything good to say about her brother. When Norman asked about him, she usually just rolled her eyes or sighed. The two had grown up here in this house. It was Kit’s now, but Norman’s mom still called it home.

  As soon as the car came to a stop Dora leapt out and scrambled across the gravel driveway to the thick-planked door of their temporary home. She waited impatiently for the door to be opened, then dashed upstairs to her room. She’d be going to her new friend Penny’s for the afternoon, Norman guessed. Back home, the prospect of having his sister out of the way would have cheered him up, but somehow today it bugged him.

  It annoyed Norman even more when he was forced to stay downstairs and help make lunch. Just because he had no one to hang out with shouldn’t mean that he got extra chores. Setting the table and slicing cheese for sandwiches might have been the equivalent to ten years’ hard labour.

  Dora clattered down the stairs in her new riding pants and borrowed riding boots. “Can we go right now, Mom?” she asked breathlessly.

  Meg shook her head, but not angrily. “Lunch first.”

  Dora plonked herself down at the dining table and waited to be served.

  “We’re heading into town this afternoon, Norman. Would you like to come?” his mother asked as she handed him a plate of sandwiches.

  Norman grabbed a sandwich for himself before placing the plate on the table, just a little beyond Dora’s reach. She grimaced at him but didn’t give him the satisfaction of complaining. She stood up to slide the plate back towards her and ignored him.

  “What are you doing in town?” Norman asked warily. There wasn’t much to choose from—another day hanging out doing nothing at the house or a trip into town with his mother. He knew by now that going into town was no great adventure.

  “I have some contracts to send back home,” his mother replied. “Then there are a few things we should pick up.”

  “Can we get a PSP?” Norman asked half-heartedly.

  His mother’s bemused smile was answer enough.

  “There’s nothing to do,” Norman complained. “Do you think we could get my computer couriered here?”

  His father, Edward, was putting the finishing touches on a pot of coffee. There was no coffee machine in the summer house, and the coffee had to be made by hand in a stove-top coffee maker. It seemed to be a lot of work to make a drink, but Norman had seen Edward Vilnius go without coffee and he wasn’t going to argue with the effort.

  “If we are doing that, Meg,” Edward asked, “can we also get our espresso machine sent over?”

  Meg Jespers-Vilnius rolled her eyes. “Are you all out of books again?” she asked Norman.

  “I’m rereading The Manacle of Munster,” he answered as he piled clotted cream and jam onto a scone.

  “Have you looked through the library here?”

  “There’s nothing good.”

  His mother smirked. It was true, though. Norman had looked. The novels were all pretty lame.

  “Is Dora going with you?” he asked. It could be the deciding factor between car boredom and house boredom.

  “She’s going to Penny’s for the afternoon.”

  Just as Norman had predicted. Dora had made a friend on the first afternoon they’d been here—a friend with a stable of ponies, too. Dora was in heaven. She and Penny rode almost every day. Norman didn’t want to admit it, but he sometimes wished his little sister were around more. He might have been able to convince her to go exploring or play some games. That’s how bored he was.

  “Penny says that I was born to ride Dandy,” Dora bragged. “He’s very naughty with other girls, but he’s brilliant with me.” Recently Dora had begun to use these British words and phrases that she’d picked up from her friend Penny. Everything was now “brilliant” and “super.” If Norman had been paying attention, he would have taken time to make fun of Dora’s fake British accent, but he was busy with his own thoughts.

  “Dad, is there a particular reason that animals can’t talk?” He was thinking about the rabbits he’d imagined seeing back in the folly, and in a sideways way about Undergrowth.

  Edward Vilnius nearly spat out a mouthful of coffee, but he managed to stifle the laugh. “Is this a commentary on your sister or the horse?”

  “Uh!” Dora cried shrilly, exaggeratedly offended. Her father winked at her.

  Norman pressed on. “I mean, is there a physical reason they can’t talk—like their mouths can’t make the sounds?”

  “Almost all animals communicate in some sort of language,” Norman’s mother pointed out. “Whales have huge repertoires of songs, for example.”

  “No,” Norman elaborated, “I mean, could they speak a human language, like English?”

  “Well, parrots can be taught to mimic human language. Is that what you mean?” his father asked.

  “I guess so.” Norman didn’t know why he’d bothered asking. It wasn’t like he could explain it.

  “Is there a particular animal you are thinking of? Are you thinking of having a conversation with this horse, Dandy, to ask him what the trick is to getting along with your sister?” his mother asked.

  “What about a rabbit?”

  “That’s an interesting one—talking rabbits,” his father mused, putting his coffee down and pulling up a chair. “Lots of talking rabbits in literature, you know—Alice in Wonderland, Watership Down, those horrible Beatrix Potter books. I wonder what that’s all about.” Edward pondered this for a while. “Might be worth a paper on the subject: “Talking Rabbits in English Literature.” You think the department would like that, Meg?”

  Meg Jespers-Vilnius had made a career out of motivational speaking, but even she couldn’t quite sound convincing when she replied, “I think that’s a brilliant topic for a paper. You’ll be the star of the English Department.”

  Edward Vilnius smiled like a man who was used to being mocked.

  “Right, are you coming, Norman?” Meg asked.

  Norman contorted his face as if this was a difficult question. “Can I use your laptop when you’re gone?”

  “Yes,” she agreed patiently, “just be careful with it.”

  Norman, in the Library, with a Book

  That was something, then … but it wasn’t like having his own computer. There was no Internet, and his mother’s laptop had none of his games. He was stuck playing Minesweeper and Hearts. It killed a
few hours, though. He played in “the library,” the room where his mother worked. His father had “the study.” The Shrubberies wasn’t like their house back home. It had dozens of small rooms, each with its own specific name and purpose. There was a real dining room rather than just a space off the kitchen, and there was something called a “morning room,” as well as a “drawing room.” Like most British things it all sounded a little ridiculous. When they had arrived at the house at the beginning of the summer, Norman and Dora had seized on the room names as if they were playing Clue, and now the game had extended to any British word they thought was funny—“Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the clotted cream!” or “Miss Scarlet in the lift with a lorry!”

  Of all the rooms, the library was Norman’s favourite. After a few frustrating games of Minesweeper, he closed the laptop and surveyed the bookshelves one more time. How could it not have a single book worth reading? Three of the room’s four walls were covered in books. It was just like a real library, with huge floor-to-ceiling shelves and a little ladder that slid on wheels across the face. Everything about it promised adventure and excitement. A long, carved wooden tube leaned in one corner. Norman’s dad said it was called a didgeridoo, but Norman thought he might be making that up. In the middle of one shelf was a brass statue of some crazy six-armed dancing goddess. There were statues and strange carvings in every nook and cranny, but his favourite thing in the room was a painting of a fox hunt. There were dozens of hunters riding around in the woods, falling off their horses into ponds and hedges. The dogs all looked lost or bored. Back at the stables a fox was stealing sausages from a picnic hamper. It wasn’t just a library full of books. It was like a library out of a book. There has to be, Norman thought, at least one decent book in here.

  The ladder was tempting, but he’d found out weeks ago that the higher shelves held the most boring books—old science books, histories, whole shelves of Latin and Greek. Norman lay on his side on the carpet and surveyed the lowest shelf. It made sense that kids’ books would be down there, didn’t it? He ran his finger across the spines of an Encyclopaedia Britannica. He had resorted to this before, and it was a decent last resort. This encyclopaedia was ancient and full of articles on places and people that no longer existed—Finnveden and Pengwern, Wallachia and Tamburlaine. Beside the encyclopaedia was something called The Illustrated History of the Imperial Wars, which contained pictures and stories of wars in places called Boer and Crimea. Norman often imagined that the encyclopaedia and the history were partially made up. The next shelf had a series of books called the Harvard Classics, which was about as boring as it sounded. Norman pulled a volume out and leafed through it. Sophocles—boring; Plutarch—boration; Seneca—boremungus.

  He was about to slide the volume back when he noticed through the gap left in the series that there was another row of books behind. He removed more Harvard Classics to get access. It revealed a row of thin hardcovers, their red dust covers torn and faded. He reached in to remove two—Terror of the Intrepid Trio and The Clue of the Coughing Dragon: An Intrepid Trio Mystery.

  “Hmmm,” Norman muttered. He was afraid of getting his hopes up, but he stripped the Harvard Classics shelf bare, and sure enough there was a whole shelf of them. Intrepid into the Night, The Intrepid Three at Sea, The Scourge of Malbranche: An Intrepid Trio Mystery. Okay, this was worth trying.

  Norman wasn’t so finicky as to need to read a series in order. He knew that it didn’t really matter. He just grabbed the title that jumped out at him and descended to the kitchen to finish off the scones. He couldn’t have explained why he picked Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies. He didn’t reflect on it. All he cared about was reading something that he hadn’t read before.

  Edward Vilnius was in the kitchen when he arrived. Norman’s father had had the same idea about the scones and was making coffee again to go with them.

  “Hullo, Spiny, how goes it?” Edward asked. Since they had been in England, Edward had taken to using a rather comical British accent around the house. Unlike Dora, he knew he was doing it and thought he was rather funny. Norman wondered whether he used it with the other professors at the university, and whether they thought he was crazy or just insulting.

  “Found a book,” Norman managed through a mouthful of scone.

  “Huzzah!” Edward cheered ironically, raising his scone in a toast. It was his new favourite word, apparently a British way of saying “Yay.”

  “Huzzah,” Norman repeated, but less enthusiastically. “You ever heard of this?” He held up Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies for his father to see.

  “Nope,” he said. “It’s probably one of your mother’s old books.”

  Norman opened the front cover to see if she’d written her name in it. There was a name, but it was not his mother’s. Written very exaggeratedly, in cobalt blue ink, as if somebody was trying out a new pen or just very proud of his handwriting, was the following inscription:

  Property of Christopher T. Jespers

  “Ah, your mysterious uncle,” Edward intoned.

  “Why don’t we ever see Uncle Kit?” Norman asked. “I thought he’d be here.”

  “Off travelling the world, I expect. Your mother probably wouldn’t have agreed to stay here at the Shrubberies if your uncle weren’t away.”

  Norman had no idea what Uncle Kit did for a job. He imagined him as some sort of international explorer, crossing a desert on camelback or hacking his way through some jungle to uncover a hidden Aztec temple.

  Norman paused before asking a question he’d never before dared to. “Why don’t they talk anymore? What happened?”

  Edward Vilnius paused for a moment and considered the question. “I don’t know, really. Probably started as a little thing and snowballed. It doesn’t sound like they ever got along.” He took a last bite of his scone and wiped the crumbs from the goatee he had decided to grow this summer. “Better be nice to your sister,” he warned, rising from the table. “She might decide never to see you when she grows up.”

  Norman opened his mouth but left the obvious reply unspoken. He loaded a plate with scones and carried them and the book up to the small room that served as his bedroom and lay down on the bed, propping himself up on his elbows to read.

  Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies

  Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies didn’t exactly grab Norman right away—it was slow to start and full of old-fashioned British slang, but after a while he started to get into it. The Intrepid Three were three kids. George Kelmsworth was tall, dark-haired, with something called an “aristocratic nose.” He was only fifteen, but somehow he lived alone in a hunting lodge at the edge of Kelmsworth estate. The estate’s main house, Kelmsworth Hall, was George’s family home, but it had been commandeered and was going to be turned into a First World War army hospital. The other two Intrepids were Pippa Cook, a red-headed girl George’s age, and her younger brother, Gordon. Their mother worked for the new administrator, Mr. Hepplewaithe, making arrangements to convert the hall into a hospital, but that did not stop the Cooks from befriending George.

  The three kids seemed to be able go wherever they liked and do whatever they wanted. Their parents hardly appeared in the book at all. Pippa and Gordon’s father was with the army in France. George’s own father, Lord Kelmsworth, was being held in prison for a crime he did not commit. Lord Kelmsworth had worked for the Admiralty before the Great War and was being held responsible for the disappearance of some important papers. As far as Norman could tell, George had been trying to prove his father’s innocence since the beginning of the series. Since there were at least twenty books, it didn’t look as though Lord Kelmsworth was coming home any time soon.

  At the opening of Intrepid Amongst the Gypsies the Cook children snuck out after dark to meet George at the ancient stone lodge. Cloaked with moss, the lodge blended into the dark woods behind it, but the thick leaded glass of its windows flickered orange from the light of the wood fire that burned inside. George strode back and forth in front of th
e great stone hearth, waving his hands as he’d seen his father do when practising a speech. Pippa sat quietly, her brow furrowed. She had a serious look to her in her school uniform with her hair tied back in a tidy braid. Gordon fidgeted in his seat. He was shorter than his sister with more obvious freckles and excitable features beneath a head of unruly ginger hair.

  The Intrepids were faced with two problems. Two nights ago there had been a break-in at the hall. One of the back doors had been forced and the larder raided. The intruder had taken a ham, a wheel of cheese and several carving knives. The burglary had stalled their latest plan to exonerate George’s father.

  The Intrepids had planned to take the train to London to search the offices of the Kelmsworth family lawyers. George was certain that the family solicitor had something to do with the plot against his father. Pippa wasn’t convinced but was too loyal to disagree very loudly. Young Gordon believed everything his idol told him and was ready for an adventure at any time.

  The three of them had concocted an elaborate plan to distract the lawyers by releasing some sort of animal in the office. Once they had driven the lawyers out, the Intrepids would ransack the files for proof that the lawyer was working against them. George had wanted to use a snake, preferably an Armenian mountain viper or a king cobra, to execute this plan. Gordon was all for getting a trained monkey. But Pippa prevailed, and they decided that mice would be just as distracting and easier to get hold of.

  The break-in had put this scheme on hold. George had led them on several expeditions around the grounds. The previous night they had come across a Gypsy encampment at the edge of the estate—just a few tents in the clearing on the other side of the ravine, dim triangular shapes lit by the yellow light of two lanterns in the trees. When they’d returned the next day in daylight, the camp was gone, but George was now convinced that the Gypsies were behind the break-in.

  George paced before the fire, watched anxiously by the Cook children. “Now that Hepplewaithe has dismissed most of the servants, the hall is poorly guarded.”