Bindings

by Carla Jablonski

  Maybe somewhere deeper in, he thought, crawling again. He arrived at a turn in the tunnel and found a flight of stairs. Here he could almost stand, so he took the steps in a low crouch. It twisted and turned so many times Tim had no idea if he was at the front or back of the house. It didn’t matter where he was, as long as Toothy didn’t find him.

  He came to a landing and leaned against the wall, trying to get his bearings. “Ooops!” He fell backward through a doorway and landed hard on his backside. “Ow,” he complained. He sat back up and crossed his legs. That wasn’t even a wall, he realized. It was just canvas painted to look like it was. Sneaky.

  There are all sorts of places for you to hide, Tim observed as he began crawling again. And all sorts of ways for someone to sneak up on you while you’re hiding.

  Tim found a room that looked promising. It was filled with nooks and crannies and junk like trunks and mounds of fabric. He might be able to hide in a trunk or cover himself with one of the drapes and pretend to be part of the furniture.

  Tim crossed quickly to the trunk. He was reaching to open it when the back of his neck prickled. Something was wrong. He glanced behind him and gulped. A row of sharp knives stuck out of the wall behind him, the razor-sharp tips pointing straight out. Tim was in the direct line of fire.

  He looked down at the trunk again. “I bet if I…” he murmured. On a hunch, he moved away from the trunk. He found a poker by the enormous fireplace. Gripping it, he lay on the floor as far away from the trunk as he could get and still reach it with the poker. He held the poker in two hands and lifted the trunk lid with it.

  Thwick! Thwick! Thwick!

  The knives flew across the room. Without Tim’s body to stop them, they flung themselves into the tapestry hanging on the opposite wall.

  The poker clattered to the floor. The trunk had been rigged. If Tim had opened it from the front, he’d be a pincushion right now. He could feel sweat bead up on his forehead. He had to be more careful—every single room could have a booby trap in it, a deadly one.

  He pushed himself up to sit, then sank back onto his heels. “All kinds of rooms and halls and ups and downs that look like places you’d be safe,” he muttered, “until you get inside them and you discover that they’re traps.”

  He felt exhausted. How could he possibly survive this game? What else lay out there waiting to impale him, suffocate him, or hold him prisoner until that man showed up? He took a deep breath and shook his head. “Don’t think about that,” he told himself. “Staying alive. That’s what you want to think about right now.”

  He stood and crossed to the knives embedded in the tapestry to their hilts. Did he dare touch them? Try to use one as a weapon? For all he knew they were coated with poison. Deciding to risk it, he wrapped his fingers around the carved black handle of the knife in front of him and tugged.

  The knife didn’t budge. He tried again. The same thing happened. It was as if the knife were now stuck in hardened cement.

  “Well, you’re no help,” he told the wall of knives. Keep playing the game, Tim reminded himself. If you concentrate on keeping yourself in one piece, everything else will take care of itself. At least, he thought, that’s how it works in fairy tales.

  Tim went back to trying to find a hiding place, or at least a way to keep himself one step ahead of his predatory host. He noticed that the flute playing had stopped. Tim wasn’t certain if that was because he was now out of hearing range or because the man had started hunting for him.

  Fairy tales. Bloody fairy tales. Tim hoisted himself up into a little recess in the wall. As he had expected, it led to another tunnel. This one was very dusty, as if it hadn’t been traveled in some time. That struck Tim as a good sign.

  Somehow the monsters never seem as real as the princes and princesses do, Tim thought. The ogres and the giants never seem to have a chance, really. Even the brave little tailors and clever orphan girls make mincemeat out of them. And live happily ever after. That’s how they end, the stories. Now that he was in a real-life fairy tale, complete with its own monster, he realized how unlikely those stories really were.

  Probably because they’re told by grown-ups. More lies.

  Tim spotted daylight at the end of the tunnel he was in. Could it actually be an exit? Since there weren’t footprints in the narrow passageway, and there were plenty of cobwebs, this could be a way out that the man had forgotten about. Tim picked up speed, banging his knees and bumping his head as he made his way to the end of the tunnel.

  “Whoa!” he exclaimed. The tunnel opened out onto a narrow platform. If Tim had been moving any faster, he would have pitched right over the edge. It was a sheer drop of about thirty feet.

  Tim peered down below him and into a courtyard of rubble and bones. On the top of a pile of skeletons lay a young girl—obviously a recent victim. She was still dressed in a beautiful flowing gown and had a tiara on her head. She looked like she might have been a princess—or had been playing dress up. Her body was twisted and broken. Tim couldn’t tell if she had been killed by the horrible man or if she had plunged to her death from the very spot he was now in.

  Tim was filled with horror and deep sadness for the little girl. He began to choke up. Maybe she was clever and brave. Maybe she would have done all right, if she’d been in somebody’s bedtime story. But she wasn’t. And neither am I. So I need to hold myself together.

  This is going from bad to worse to even worse than that. Tim gritted his teeth. He was determined not to let this beastly man get the better of him. “I won’t give up!” he declared. His voice echoed around the courtyard. “I just won’t! I’ll beat you for me, and for that little girl, and for this Land—whether it’s Faerie or not!”

  Tim tried to calm himself, backed up, and began searching for another place to hide. Why would these tunnels be built so low? Tim wondered. Can Creepy Bloke even fit in here? I wonder if that guy does a lot of crawling around on his hands and knees. I guess he’s crazy enough for that. His mind was rambling to distract him from the horrible sight of the girl.

  Or maybe… Tim stopped crawling. He froze with one hand off the floor, one knee raised. Or maybe it’s because he doesn’t always go around standing up. Maybe he doesn’t always have two legs. He could be some sort of animal, when he’s at home.

  Tim placed his knee and his hand on the floor. Every muscle ached from his awkward journey through the twists and turns of this bizarre mansion. He was still being pursued and he still had no place to hide.

  A new thought occurred to Tim. Perhaps hiding wasn’t really the way to go. The other ones—the previous victims, he reasoned, it looks as if they all tried to hide and look where it got them.

  But he had to do something. He couldn’t just wait around to be turned into snack food. But what?

  Tim crawled out of an archway into another long hallway with a marble floor and several closed doors.

  He stood up and carefully tried the first door he came to. It was locked. Surprised, he tried the ornate door handle again. In all of his exploring he had yet to find a single door that had been locked. Until now.

  Now that’s interesting….

  Chapter Ten

  IF THIS DOOR WAS LOCKED, then it was pretty obvious that the master of the house did not want anyone to go into that room—which made it precisely the place Tim wanted to be.

  But how could he get in? Tim shoved his hands into his pockets as he thought about this. He felt the stone that Tamlin had given him. It hadn’t worked before and he didn’t think it would work now. Not in its present, dull state.

  The fingers of his other hand wrapped around something hard. He pulled it out of his pocket.

  Tim stared down at an old-fashioned key. His brow furrowed. He had completely forgotten that he had brought it with him.

  This key had nearly cost him his freedom—perhaps now it would save him.

  He hoped it would work. He didn’t think another world lay behind that door—just safety or information. He stepp
ed up to the door and slid the heavy key into the lock, hoping fervently that this plan would work. He heard a satisfying click, and the door swung open.

  Tim was in an enormous library. There were more books in this room than Tim had ever seen in a single place in his life. More than at school, more than at the bookshop. Even more than at the library three streets over from Molly’s place. He put the key back in his pocket and took a step deeper inside.

  The bookshelves rose from the floor to the ceiling, and there were rows and rows of them. Most of the books looked dusty and old, but there were some newer ones, too.

  Tim walked around the first bookcase, hoping to get a sense of the size of the room. Along the wall were more of those horrible display cases. This time, Tim forced himself to look. He knew his life depended on figuring out everything he could about how Toothy operated.

  The first case held a large beast, some sort of cross between a lion and an eagle. The display card hanging beside it read GRIFFIN. SPECIMEN NUMBER 21. Tim walked a little farther along the wall and came to a pedestal with an animal that also seemed to be part lion. Only this one had the head of a woman. He recognized it from ancient civilization in history class. It was a sphinx. He remembered learning that the giant sphinx that still stood in Egypt was a large version of thousands of little statues of these creatures that were found all over Egypt.

  Maybe they had so many statues of them because they once were real, Tim thought. And they’re all gone now, maybe thanks to this guy’s extermination plan. What had he called it? Oh yeah. “‘Simplifying the world,’” Tim murmured.

  He came to a low platform. There was nothing on it. “That’s weird.” He glanced at the label on the wall and his heart did a flip-flop. FAIR FOLK, it said.

  So far, Tim hadn’t seen anything set up to display humans. “Well, duh,” Tim scoffed at himself. “You don’t display your meals.”

  Tim peered down a row of bookshelves and realized there was a large open space in the center of the library that he hadn’t seen before. Curious, he moved to where he could see more clearly.

  “Oh no,” he gasped.

  An extraordinary creature stood on a pedestal in the center of the room.

  “You’re so beautiful,” Tim whispered. “And he got you, too.”

  A unicorn stood before him, silent and motionless, surrounded by the phalanx of bookshelves. Tim knew it was no longer alive, but he had to move closer. He wanted to touch it, pet it, stroke its white mane. He didn’t care if that was silly. The unicorn was so magnificent it simply drew Tim toward it.

  As he moved toward the unicorn, he realized he had stepped onto a crumpled piece of paper. Bending down, he saw that it was a page that had been torn from a book.

  He gazed down at the piece of paper in his hands. On it was printed an illustration of a unicorn with a description of it underneath. The writing looked old-fashioned, and there were Latin words scattered throughout the paragraph.

  Then he noticed that a book was pulled partway out from the bottom bookshelf, its binding sticking out a few inches. “Terra Incognita,” Tim read. He sat down cross-legged on the floor, picked up the book, and flipped it open.

  “What the—?” Page after page had been torn from the book. He glanced at the unicorn page. It had obviously been torn from this very book. But why? Why would anyone rip out all the pages of a book? And then why would he put it back on the shelf?

  Not all the pages have been torn out, Tim realized. “Ugh. That dude sure is ugly.” He stared down at the picture on the only remaining page in the volume.

  “Manticore,” Tim read. Hm. Never heard of one of those. The creature was another one of those mixed-up half-this, half-that beasts. But it wasn’t elegant and mysterious like the sphinx. The manticore was just gross. And mean-looking. It had a lion’s body, except its tail looked like a scorpion’s. It also had the face of a man, but what a face! Its eyes looked crazed, and it had a mouth with rows of teeth.

  Tim particularly noted the part that explained it had an appetite for humans.

  “Harrum.” Tim heard behind him.

  He started, and dropped the book. Sheesh. Does the guy have allergies or something? Or is that throat clearing a nervous tick? He picked the book back up, closed it, and lay it across his knees. He chose not to get up, trying to act like he didn’t care that the guy had just snuck up on him.

  “How did you get in here?” the man demanded.

  “I have my ways,” Tim retorted. “I’m not just a dumb kid, you know.” He lay the crinkled unicorn page on the book and smoothed the paper.

  “I see that you’ve already begun your studies,” the man commented.

  “I’m looking at this book, that’s all.” He lifted up the book for the man to see. “Why do you even bother to pretend it’s a book at all when you’ve torn out all the pages? That’s stupid.”

  “I do not pretend that this is a book, insolent child,” the man snapped. “This is a book.”

  Tim glanced over his shoulder up at the man. The man fussed with his long hair as if he were collecting himself. “I have, in the interests of scholarship,” he said, much more calmly, “removed from the volume certain entries that I determined to be extraneous, as they dealt with creatures whose existence my researches have disproved.”

  Now Tim couldn’t contain his anger. He leaped to his feet, letting the book thud to the floor. He waved the unicorn page at the creep. “Like the unicorn, you mean? You’re lying. It’s a lot realer than that ugly thing in your stupid book. The only page you left in it.”

  “You wound me, boy,” the man said. “Voicing this claptrap, you dash my expectations.” He waved toward the display cases along the wall. “Oh, the creatures I’ve subtracted from my bestiaries may have served a purpose once,” he said loftily. He pointed at the unicorn on the pedestal behind Timothy. “The unicorn, for example, that you seem to have fixated on. Certainly, the unicorn was a staple of the ballads with which troubadours entertained many a milkmaid. A pretty concept, that is all.” He stepped up so closely to Tim the boy could smell the man’s foul breath. “But it is nothing,” the man hissed.

  Tim backed up a few steps from the stench. “Don’t tell me you don’t believe in magic,” Tim scoffed.

  “I believe in food,” the man declared. “And I believe in myself.” He crossed his arms over his chest, his eyes narrowing. “But we will discuss this later.”

  Tim thought the man sounded peeved. Fine. It’s not like we were going to be friends, and it isn’t as if getting the guy mad puts me in any greater danger. He knew he had been in danger since the moment he landed in the bone-filled courtyard.

  “I sought you out with conversation in mind,” the man fretted. “But I find myself no longer in the mood to chitchat. You’ve put me out of sorts, you see. So I am going away for the briefest moment possible, my dumpling. And I am going to change into something a bit more comfortable.”

  A nasty smile spread across the man’s face. With all those teeth, the expression was grotesque.

  Tim’s heart thudded. That smile. Those teeth!

  “When I return, we shall finish our game, once and for all.” The man turned to go.

  It has to be—! Tim flipped open the book again and ripped out the last remaining page. The manticore!

  “Wait,” Tim called, holding the torn page behind his back. “I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean to insult you.” The man slowly turned around. “Didn’t you?” He sounded skeptical.

  Since this creepo kept referring to Tim as an “eager student,” Tim figured he should go all wide-eyed and humble.

  “I just meant that I didn’t understand what you said about the unicorn.” He jerked his head toward the unicorn on the pedestal. “I mean, it looks sort of real. Sort of three-dimensional even if it is a bit tatty.” He gazed down at the floor and made a small circle with his toes. “I’ve never been very bright. I know.”

  The man took a step closer. “Do tell.”

  Tim played u
p the pathetic act big-time. “I failed biology twice.” He hadn’t really, but biology was a subject that had seemed to come up a lot lately. “But please, sir—if you’d try to explain about the unicorn. In little words so I can understand. I’m sure you’re a better teacher than my old one back home ever was, or could ever hope to be.”

  The man clapped his hands together with delight. “Enough, my cherub. Say no more.” He chucked Tim under the chin. Tim forced himself not to cringe. “No doubt your education has been deficient, if not defective. But you must not reproach yourself on that score. You have never had a teacher deserving of the name until this moment. Come, my cupcake. And I’ll explain the unicorn.”

  The man put his arm around Tim and walked him to the pedestal where the unicorn stood, motionless and unseeing.

  “It is remarkable, I must say, that this is the specimen that captured your imagination,” the man declared, “since it was, in a sense, the unicorn who made me what I am today.”

  “Really.” Tim tried not to gag from the man’s foul smell, not to mention those multiple teeth.

  “Indeed, my poppet. Had I never encountered the beast, I might never have discovered my purpose or my power.”

  Tim could tell he was in for a long story, sort of like when he visited Auntie Blodwyn in Brighton and his uncles all felt compelled to talk of their war years. On and on for hours. Well, as long as the guy kept talking, Tim would stay alive. And have the chance to come up with a plan.

  “I had simple appetites in the old days,” the man said. “One can consume no end of flesh, you see, and still be racked by hunger.” He said this as if he were confiding some great secret to Tim. Words of wisdom, as it were. “One’s soul is ever so much more difficult to fill than one’s belly. I was a tragic figure in those days. Unfulfilled, ravenous for I knew not what. Until this shabby creature wandered into my life.”