“So now you’re sorting through her things?” I spotted a stack of French vocabulary flash cards by his left knee.
“I thought it might help me understand.”
“And? Is it helping?”
He tilted his head, and suddenly he didn’t look sullen and sneering anymore, just exhausted. Only now did I notice his tousled hair. It was almost as if he’d tried to tear it out in handfuls. The rings under his eyes looked dark blue against his pale skin, and his cheeks were haggard; he probably wasn’t eating enough, closeted away up here all the time. It was as if I was suddenly getting a glimpse of the real Darcy. As if he’d not only invited me into his room, but also allowed me to look past his mask of reserve and pride.
“I’ve been reading through her old exercise books and lesson schedules and I’ve found out a few things,” he said, “but what I really need is a diary or something—I could have sworn she told me she kept a diary. But wherever it is, I can’t find it. I’ve been through all of her stuff, and I’ve even searched the classrooms and her old bedroom—sorry about that, by the way—but I haven’t found anyth—”
“Sorry about what?” I stepped over a pile of dolls and sat down on the floor beside him.
Darcy shrugged. “I thought she might have kept it in a secret hiding place under the bed, or under a loose floorboard or something. It’s possible.”
I let out a long breath. “Are you telling me it was you who trashed the library? You’ve been lying about it this whole time?”
“No, of course not!” Darcy shook his head vehemently. “I’m not talking about the library, I’m talking about Gina’s old bedroom. Which is now occupied by other students. You and Hannah, to be precise.
“You searched our room? Without asking us?”
“Yes—as I said, I’m sorry. But I had to know, I couldn’t wait. I hadn’t been here very long and I didn’t really know you. Otherwise I might have asked you if I could search your room, instead of climbing in through the window in the dead of night. Or at least I would have realized that no one patrols the school corridors at night anymore, so I could have just walked up the stairs instead of nearly breaking my neck scaling the castle walls.”
“Oh—you might have asked me. How very considerate of you,” I scoffed. Perhaps behind his mask Darcy was still a stuck-up, arrogant …
He sighed, and suddenly two pieces of the puzzle slotted together in my mind.
“That was the night of the First Lesson, wasn’t it?” I remembered how I’d woken up shivering, and found the window ajar and the chronicle lying open on my bedside table.
Darcy nodded. “I didn’t find any secret hiding places in the room, but one of your books did catch my eye—I just opened it quickly to see what it was, but then you suddenly woke up. I managed to hide behind the curtain just in time. Obviously, I never would have read your diary without permission.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. So Darcy had still been in the room when I’d sneaked off to the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. That was why the window had been open again when I got back. He’d waited for me to leave and climbed out the window, empty-handed. Gina hadn’t hidden her diary anywhere in her bedroom. Although perhaps she’d …
Oh.
My.
God.
I went cold. Goose bumps crept up the back of my neck, and for a moment I forgot to breathe.
How could I have been so stupid this whole time?
So blind!
So dense!
“Emma?” Darcy returned the plastic unicorn to its herd, then put out a hand and gently touched my shoulder. “What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed. “Why have you gone so pale? Don’t you feel well?”
“I…,” I croaked. “W-wait here, okay?” I leaped to my feet. “I’ll be right back. Stay where you are!”
I dashed out of the room and ran all the way to the east wing, taking the stairs to my bedroom two at a time. When I got there I lurched over to the dresser, yanked the sock drawer open, grabbed the chronicle, and set off back to the library at a run. I fumbled with the book as I went, trying to open it to the page I was looking for, and halfway to the library I almost collided with Hannah as she emerged from the conservatory. “Has something happened?” she called after me, but I was in too much of a hurry to answer. “Later!” I panted as I veered around the next corner.
When I got back, Darcy was pacing up and down the room (which was no mean feat, given the amount of clutter on the floor), but the moment he saw me in the doorway he stopped and came toward me. “Please tell me what’s going on,” he said.
“Here.” I held out the book. On the way back I’d opened it to one of the pages written by my predecessor—the person who’d been using the chronicle four years ago.
Darcy’s eyes widened as he took it from me. He ran his fingertips gently over the paper. “Gina!” he stammered. “This is her writing, this…” He tore his eyes away from the page and looked at me with fierce intensity. His dark caramel-brown eyes blazed. “You,” he breathed. “You had her diary?”
“Yes,” I said. “No.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not really a diary—it’s actually a kind of chronicle,” I explained. “About the school and the castle. Lots of people have written in it—I have, too. And … well, so has Gina, but I didn’t realize that until just now. I think before she disappeared she must have been using it as a diary. But the thing is, it’s … it’s not a normal book. This book is special. It’s…” I took a deep breath. “It’s different from other books.”
I’d been about to say magic, but the word had gotten lost on its way to my lips. I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. And perhaps that was for the best. Did I really want Darcy to know the whole truth? I did feel I could trust him now, in spite of everything. But it probably wasn’t a bad idea to be cautious.
Darcy hefted the chronicle in his hands. “It looks old,” he remarked, turning the pages very gently. “And valuable.” He didn’t understand, of course. For him, the most important thing about the book was the fact that it was Gina’s diary. It was no more and no less than the vital clue he’d been searching for all these weeks. The vital clue I’d written that he should find! At least I’d gotten something right.
Darcy hurriedly swept aside some of the books and boxes, making enough space on the window seat for us to sit comfortably side by side. “I think we should go through everything Gina wrote, line by line. This is going to help us find her, I’m sure of it.” He grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward him. I’d never seen him like this before—so excited, so animated, with that hopeful tremor in his voice. Was this what he’d been like before Gina had gone missing? I found myself smiling.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
We sat down on the window seat with the book between us and started reading.
I was already familiar with a few of Gina’s entries. The one about the First Lesson four years ago, for example. And the one about the blueprints for the new sports hall. I’d also read some of the passionate poems she’d written (although as a rule I was not a fan of dramatic declarations of love). But there was much, much more to discover. Gina had been extremely prolific. I found several entries I’d never noticed before—as if there were hidden pages in the chronicle that gradually revealed themselves over time.
We spent the next few hours poring over Gina’s entries. But they were so confusing—sometimes even unsettling—that our initial euphoria at having found a new clue soon turned to unease. Clearly, Gina had not been very happy. Many of her entries spoke of homesickness, self-doubt, and how upset she was that her brother had no time for her anymore. She wrote that keeping a diary wasn’t helping, but was only causing more problems. Had Gina been one of the few chroniclers who’d realized how the book worked, and had gotten themselves helplessly embroiled in problems of their own making? It certainly looked like it. Because Gina, just as I’d suspected, had been looking for the faun.
We read a
bout how she’d come across the old legends, how she’d started searching the castle, how she’d discovered and explored the secret tunnels. It all felt eerily familiar. Gina, too, had been impatient to meet the faun, and had spent hours lingering by the statue in the woods wondering where he could be hiding.
And then, one day, she’d found him.
Suddenly the tone of her entries changed. They sounded happier and more animated. Gina kept mentioning a new friend—a “creature.” She wrote that she wanted to save him, that she would do whatever it took to help him. There was no doubt about it: Gina had found the faun. If her entries were to be believed, he might still be here in the castle even now!
I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed these lines before; perhaps it was because I’d always found Gina’s entries so dull that I’d tended to skip right past them. And Darcy seemed to be having trouble with these new revelations, too. “I don’t get it,” he said at last, after we’d read about twenty or thirty entries. “Gina wasn’t some kind of fantasist. What made her suddenly start believing in fairy tales? Particularly some weird faun creature living here in the castle? It’s ridiculous! Kids’ stuff!”
“Well,” I said, smoothing out the pages, “like I said, this book is different from other books. It … it sometimes makes you believe in things you’d never have thought possible under normal circumstances.”
Darcy looked at me blankly.
I shrugged. “What would you say if I told you that … that for quite a while now I’ve been wondering the same thing myself?” I asked. “Whether the faun exists, I mean.” My voice shook a little as I said it.
Darcy’s nostrils flared. “I’d offer to take you to the doctor.”
“I thought so. You and my dad have something in common there, you know…,” I tittered nervously.
“Er—Emma, are you okay?”
“Of course.”
“You believe in the faun, too?”
I looked down at the chronicle without speaking.
“Come on, Emma, you can’t be serious. I mean … why?”
Then my eyes fell on Gina’s next entry, and I noticed that it was dated several months later than the previous one. “Well, you know what a naïve little kid I am,” I muttered distractedly. Gina’s tone had suddenly changed again; even her handwriting looked different somehow. Wilder. More rushed. Something must have happened between this entry and the last. Something important.
Darcy sighed. “I shouldn’t have insulted you like that, and I’m s—”
“When exactly did Gina go missing? December 2013?” I broke in.
“Yes, December fourteenth.” He took the book out of my hand. For a while he read in silence, and as he read, his breathing grew shallower. Then he passed the chronicle back to me.
Gina’s entries for December made for horrifying reading. Something had clearly upset her very much. She kept saying she felt stupid and betrayed, and in some places the paper was rippled and the ink smudged with tears. Her poems became darker, bleaker. Gina seemed to have tried several times to speak to Darcy about something, but either she hadn’t been able to find him or he’d given her the brush-off. And then she mentioned another name: Frederick.
Frederick?
It’s time, she’d written in her last ever entry. He’s waiting for me by the river.
Oh God.
I looked up. “She was going to meet Frederick by the Rhine,” I whispered. “The night she disappeared.”
Darcy had turned even paler. He pressed his lips together so tightly that all the color went out of them, and his shoulders shook with rage. “I knew it,” he shouted. “I always knew it! That bastard!”
Without warning he drew back his arm and punched a pile of books and boxes, hard. Too hard. They swayed for a fraction of a second and then toppled over toward him. I flinched, but Darcy didn’t even bat an eyelid—he managed to catch the boxes in midair and stand them upright again. My heart was in my mouth: I’d had a vision of Darcy lying on the floor buried under a pile of Gina’s schoolbooks, not breathing. The thought made my blood run cold, and I blinked hard in an attempt to rid myself of the horrible image.
“Frederick…,” I said. “Why was she going to meet him? What does he have to do with all this? Do you think they’d been planning to run away together and something … went wrong?”
Darcy took a deep breath. “What she wrote about the river—it fits with something I found out recently,” he said. “It turns out the rowing club lost one of their boats that December. It wasn’t discovered until a few days after Gina went missing, so nobody ever knew whether it had been stolen that night or washed away in a storm three nights later.”
“So they stole a boat to escape in together,” I mused. “But only Gina disappeared. Frederick’s still here. Why would that be?”
“Perhaps Gina didn’t leave of her own accord,” said Darcy flatly. “Perhaps Frederick made her disappear.” His skin had taken on a grayish tone, and his fists were clenched.
What Darcy was saying made terrifying sense. Perhaps that was why Frederick had been so keen to find out how much Darcy knew. “But why would Frederick…? Gina hadn’t done anything to him.”
“No,” said Darcy. “I don’t know. And I should have listened to her.” He’d picked up the chronicle and was leafing through Gina’s final entries again. “She needed me, and I didn’t even realize it. She wanted to tell me something. I … I probably could have stopped it.” He looked at me, his eyes dark with the despair that had gripped him ever since his sister’s disappearance. Now it threatened to eat even deeper into his soul.
“You don’t know that. It might not have changed anything,” I said in an attempt to console him. But he wasn’t listening.
“If only I’d been there for her,” he murmured, bowing his head so that his forehead rested against the window pane. Suddenly I thought I understood: Darcy was not particularly forgiving of other people’s mistakes, but he judged his own just as harshly. Forgiving himself was something he found very difficult to do. And now that he knew Gina had been in desperate need of his help … I laid a hesitant hand on Darcy’s shoulder. I half expected him to shake it off, but he didn’t move, so I left it there. What kind of a game was Frederick playing with us? What had happened between him and Gina?
“Should we go to the police? Show them Gina’s entries in the chronicle, tell them they should question Frederick again?” I asked at last.
Darcy shook his head. “Not till we have proof. Not till we’ve figured out exactly what happened and what those bloody fairy tales have got to do with it.”
“And how are we going to do that?”
Darcy turned to face me. The determination in his face made me drop my hand from his shoulder.
“We’ll think of something,” he said. “Are you … Do you still want to help me?”
I nodded and picked up the chronicle. “It’s my diary, too, so I’d like to take it with me if that’s okay.”
“Of course.”
I turned to go, but then a thought occurred to me. “What—er—what was going on back then, that meant you didn’t have time for Gina?” I asked. “What was keeping you so busy?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing important. I was a stupid kid—I was only sixt … er, sorry … I mean, I was an idiot back then. But fortunately I’ve got a bit more sense these days.”
“How come?”
But Darcy clearly had no intention of going into details. “Didn’t you say you’d found a secret entrance to the west wing library?” he asked, edging past a heap of dolls, an iPod, and some childhood photo albums till he reached the bathroom door, then he beckoned to me to follow.
A moment later, we entered the library. I led Darcy over to one of the bookcases at the far end of the room, the one that had only a few books left on its shelves. I pulled them out one by one until I found the fake book that operated a hidden mechanism when you tilted it, unlocking the door. “I came through from the other side last time,” I expla
ined as the bookcase swung open to reveal the spiral staircase beyond. “You can get to the lord of Stolzenburg’s laboratory from here. Do you remember the footprints we found in the dust? There’s another secret door in the wall just there.”
“I see.” Darcy pushed past me into the darkness and for a brief moment, as he drew level with the bookcase, my heart started pounding again and I was overwhelmed by a sudden, irrational fear that something was about to happen to him. This time, though, I understood why. My subconscious must have been trying to tell me this for weeks, but it was only now that I remembered. I remembered what I’d written in my first ever entry in the chronicle.
I pressed the worn cloth binding to my chest. Back then, of course, I hadn’t known about the book’s powers; I hadn’t realized that whatever I wrote would eventually come true. I’d only written what I’d written because I’d been furious with Darcy for throwing us out of our beautiful library. But that didn’t change the fact that I’d put him in terrible danger. I’d written that I hoped he would choke on the books he’d stolen from us.
I knew by now that it sometimes took quite a while for the book’s magic to take effect. But it always did, sooner or later. It was just impossible to predict when and how it would happen.
Had I foretold Darcy’s…?
I didn’t even dare think it. But I felt my own words hanging over us, dark and heavy, ready to come crashing down on Darcy at any moment. Probably when I was least expecting it.
Shit. I bit my lip and tasted blood.
Then I followed Darcy into the secret tunnel.
December 2013
I still can’t believe it!
Why?
Why?
WHY?
How could he do something like this? Is that how he sees me? As a joke? As a stupid little girl?
Is that all I am? That’s how I feel at the moment. Stupid. And alone.
Where the hell is Darcy?
13
When Hannah and I came down to breakfast the next morning, it was immediately obvious that there was something going on. The dining hall was full of little groups of students whispering to one another, and the table where Helena usually sat was surrounded by a whole crowd of people, although Princess von Stein herself was nowhere to be seen. The teachers also seemed less relaxed than usual. To judge by the looks on their faces, something pretty serious had happened.
The Forgotten Book Page 18