She put her hands on her hips. “Give it to me. Now.”
“What?” I said again. “What’s going on? Is it my dad? Is he okay?” I swung my legs out of bed and started searching frantically for my slippers, but then I realized that if Dad had fainted again—if his life was in danger—it hardly mattered whether I had warm feet or not. I lurched toward the door, barefoot.
But Miss Whitfield barred my way. “This has nothing to do with your father. I want the chronicle, Emma. The chronicle!” Her voice shook, but her tone was adamant.
So it wasn’t about my dad, thank goodness. Relief flooded through me, immediately followed by confusion. What was Miss Whitfield doing here then? How did she know about the chronicle? I decided to play dumb for the time being. “What chronicle?” I asked innocently.
But Miss Whitfield wasn’t fooled. “Don’t lie to me, Emma,” she snapped. “I know you have it. You told me so this evening. Gina’s diary. That’s when I realized.”
I narrowed my eyes. I’d never seen Miss Whitfield like this before–shoulders quivering, lips pursed, and a look in her eyes that was enough to chill the blood. I’d never known her to be so rude, either. What had happened to the friendly old lady who just a few hours ago had been serving us tea in flowery china cups?
I gulped. “The chronicle,” I said. “What do you know about it?”
“Enough,” Miss Whitfield replied. “More than enough, I’m afraid to say. But I never realized it was … When Dr. Meier had that funny turn in the dining hall, and then the very next day a lion appeared in the woods—that was when I first suspected somebody might have gotten hold of it. But I had no idea it was you. After all, the creature almost attacked you and Charlotte and your young friend.” She sighed. “Be that as it may. I have been searching for this book for a very long time. It is dangerous, and I need you to give it to me before something dreadful happens.” She held out her hand.
But I didn’t move.
“So you know about it? About its powers?” I whispered, a thousand questions flashing through my mind. “How? What is it? Why is it so … special? What was it doing lying around in the west wing library?”
“That’s where you found it? Well, well, well.”
“Er—”
“That’s interesting. Very interesting.”
“Really? How come?”
Miss Whitfield looked me in the eye. “Legend has it that the book is cursed, Emma,” she said. “There was a paper mill on the banks of the Rhine…”
“Yes, I know the story. An evil fairy queen put a curse on the monks and their paper, and the seven books that were made from that paper had supernatural powers, which brought misfortune to their owners.”
“Exactly.”
“So you believe in the legend? You think it’s true?”
Miss Whitfield nodded.
The fact that she was barring my way to the door, and the angry glitter in her eyes, should have shocked and scared me. But instead I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that there was somebody else out there as crazy as me. Somebody who believed in the existence of a fairy queen. What was more, that that somebody was a grown woman—a teacher. And she’d always seemed so sensible and matter-of-fact.
“Okay,” I said. “What about the faun in the fairy tale? What do you think about that? Does he really exist? Could Frederick…”
Miss Whitfield sighed impatiently. She batted away my questions with a quick wave of her hand. “Give. Me. The. Book,” she ordered, taking a step toward me. “Then I’ll explain everything, I promise. Where have you hidden it? Is it here in your room?” She came even closer, close enough for me to see that she was trembling with suppressed agitation.
I took a faltering step backward. “W-well,” I stammered, but my eyes instinctively darted toward the bed and gave me away.
“Under your pillow?” Miss Whitfield exclaimed. “Emma! Everybody knows that’s the first place a thief would look!”
She marched past me before I could do anything to stop her, plucked the pillow off my bed, and dropped it carelessly on the floor. “Good,” she said. “I would have been surprised if you’d hidden it there. I knew you were clever enough to find a more creative hiding place.” She knelt down to look under the mattress, then opened the drawer of my bedside table and rummaged around inside it.
I made no move to stop her.
I was too busy looking at the empty space where my pillow had been.
Oh, crap.
Where was the book? I’d put it under my pillow that morning and I hadn’t touched it since. It couldn’t have fallen down the side of the bed or Miss Whitfield would have found it by now.
Damn, damn, damn!
I snapped out of my reverie and threw myself to the floor. Panicked, I groped around under the mattress, grabbing the lamp from my bedside table and shining it into every nook and cranny.
“Emma!” barked Miss Whitfield at last, having given up on her own futile efforts to locate the chronicle. She stared at me for a moment. “Please tell me this doesn’t mean what I think it means. Where is the chronicle? Give it to me! GIVE IT TO ME! NOW!”
“What’s going on?” piped up Hannah sleepily from across the room. It was a wonder she hadn’t woken up before now, really, given that we’d just turned half the room upside down a few yards from her bed.
But Miss Whitfield took no notice of my roommate. She was still staring at me, unblinking. “Think, Emma. Where could it be? Who might have taken it?” she demanded.
“I—I don’t know,” I admitted. “I honestly don’t.”
“Miss Whitfield?” Hannah was up and out of bed in a flash. “What are you doing here? In the middle of the night?”
But Miss Whitfield clearly had no desire to explain herself again. She rounded on Hannah. “Did you take it?”
“N-no. Take what?”
“The book,” I said.
Hannah pressed her lips tightly together. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Miss Whitfield heaved a deep sigh. “Think, Emma! Think hard,” she insisted. “And as soon as you think of anything, come to me. We have to find that book.” Then she stood up. Her long skirt swished as she hurried to the door, and in the doorway she turned back for a moment. “It’s important. The chronicle has done terrible damage in the past. Anybody who comes into contact with it is putting themselves in grave danger.”
“Why, though?” I asked. But Miss Whitfield had already disappeared.
Hannah and I exchanged glances. “What was up with her?” said Hannah. “And what does she know about the book?”
I shrugged. “A lot, by the sounds of it. But that’s not even our biggest problem. The book’s gone.”
“WHAT?!” Hannah cried. “I thought you were just bluffing so she wouldn’t be able to take it away from us.”
I shook my head. “Somebody must have come into our room and stolen it.”
“Somebody other than a nutty old deportment teacher, you mean?” said Hannah. “But why? Anyway, I’ve been here all evening. If somebody did come in it must have been during the day—during lessons or at lunchtime…”
“Yes,” I said distractedly. I’d suddenly realized what it was I’d been missing all this time. The thing that had been right in front of my nose but that I’d never quite been able to grasp. Perhaps that was because I’d never really given very much thought to Miss Whitfield. She’d never seemed even remotely suspicious, and before now it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to associate her with the faun or the chronicle or any of the other weird things that had been going on at Stolzenburg.
But now, looking back, I remembered something: The night Hannah and I had gone to Miss Whitfield’s cottage to collect the furniture for the library, I’d caught a glimpse of one of her old family photo albums. Suddenly the black-and-white photographs came back to me in vivid detail.
In the background of one of the pictures, I’d spotted the entrance to the secret tunnel at the foot of the faun statue. I’d been s
o transfixed by the underground staircase that I’d hardly paid any attention to the woman in the foreground of the picture: a woman in a lace dress and gloves, holding a parasol, who had posed for the photographer by the ruins over a hundred years ago.
But if I had, I surely would have realized at the time that the woman in the photograph looked exactly like Miss Whitfield.
September 2017
This is obviously ridiculous. There’s no way this thing actually works. A magic book! Seriously?!
But hey, I’m gonna give it a try—just for a laugh. Obviously it won’t work because it’s completely impossible. But in the unlikeliest of unlikely events that this is not a complete joke and everything I’ve ever believed about the world we live in is false, I’ll give it a try. Just in case this isn’t a joke. Just in case it’s the explanation I’ve been looking for all this time.
I think someone should … go sleepwalking. Yeah, that would be funny. Emma Morgenroth is going to get out of bed tonight and roam the corridors of Stolzenburg in her sleep, having a weird dream she can’t wake up from. And she won’t be the only one. Let’s think, who could I get to keep her company?
15
In my dream the faun and I walked in the shade of the woods. Side by side we wandered through the trees and the undergrowth, our steps cushioned by a carpet of pine needles. The air was mild and smelled of flowers and the faun played a tune for me on his flute, silvery notes that shimmered in the leaves and branches.
It was a sad tune, and the melody felt familiar—so familiar that I instinctively began to sing along: “And I wait between the lines, in the darkness of the night, I hear…”
I was still wondering where I’d heard or read the words to the song before, when I heard a steady pattering sound in the treetops, a sound that felt out of place on that summery morning. The soft forest floor turned cold under our feet, and wet, and slippery.
The flute fell silent.
Suddenly an icy wind began to blow, driving raindrops into my face. The faun, and my dream, slowly melted away.
And then I opened my eyes and gasped. All of a sudden I was wide awake.
Just inches from my toes was a sheer drop. I was balanced on a narrow wall, seven stories high, swaying dangerously in the wind. What the hell was going on? How had I ended up here?
I’d been safely tucked in bed, I knew that much. After Miss Whitfield had left our room (and I’d realized that, for reasons I couldn’t explain, she appeared in a photograph that was over a hundred years old) I’d tossed and turned for quite a while. But I had eventually managed to get to sleep—only to wake up teetering on the roof of the west wing tower. I wasn’t alone, either: Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving. A tall, dark-haired young man was walking along the battlements, perilously close to the edge, with his eyes tight shut. As I watched, Darcy de Winter placed one foot in front of the other, wobbled in the wind, and leaned out over the gaping void beneath us.
Shit!
Without thinking I launched myself at him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and hauled him back from the edge in the nick of time.
We fell backward off the slippery battlements and onto the roof of the tower. We landed so hard that the back of my head was dashed against the stone and I almost slipped back into unconsciousness, back into the dream I’d been having a moment ago. A fragment of song drifted through my mind: I hear wings, gossamer-fine …
But then I remembered where I was; I saw the misty early morning sky above me and felt the ice-cold raindrops on my cheeks. I heard Darcy groaning beside me.
“Aargh,” he moaned, rubbing his head. “Emma? Where are we? What happened?”
I shook my head. “No idea. I was asleep—I only just woke up.” I gulped, and added in a whisper: “Right on the edge of the roof.”
Darcy looked blankly at me for a moment. “So we’ve been sleepwalking?” he said at last. “Both of us? And we both just happened to end up in the same place?”
“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a coincidence,” I said darkly.
We sat up. Only now did I notice what Darcy was wearing—I was sure I’d seen that flowery fabric before, the night I’d run into Miss Whitfield in the woods. “That’s not yours, is it?” I said.
Darcy looked down at himself. The thin cotton was even thinner than I remembered, and it wasn’t concealing much. I could see Darcy’s boxer shorts through the nightdress. The fabric was stretched tight across his chest and shoulders, and the overall look was not much improved by the frilly hem.
“Of course not,” he snorted, plucking gingerly at the nightie. “I’m not really into dresses, believe it or not. On me, I mean.” He looked up. “Is this yours? Why am I—”
I felt myself blushing. “No,” I broke in hurriedly. “I think it’s Miss Whitfield’s.”
Darcy stopped plucking at the nightie. “Is this some kind of sick joke? Did I go back to her house or something while I was sleepwalking? Surely not!” He frowned.
“I think my subconscious mind must have wanted me to check on my dad,” I said, pointing to my dad’s corduroy shirt, which I was currently wearing like a dress. “Simultaneous sleepwalking,” I added slowly. “We’re lucky we didn’t both fall to our deaths.” A shiver ran down my spine.
Darcy blinked. “I can’t think how we…” But then he broke off: suddenly, mixed in with the drizzle, lots of small, hard, pink objects had started raining down onto our heads and shoulders. They bounced off us and went skittering across the roof of the tower. Darcy brushed one off his arm. “Are they … mice?”
They were. Pink sugar mice, the sweets I’d loved so much as a child that one Christmas, when I’d been given a bagful of them, I built them their own house out of shoe boxes. (It had been an architectural masterpiece of cardboard, pipe cleaners, and real Gouda, and I had christened it “The Palace of a Thousand Cheeses.” My dad had had to throw it away after a week because it had gone moldy and started stinking to high heaven.)
I gathered up a few of the mice and bit off one of their tails. Sugar, no doubt about it. As I chewed, I tipped my head back and peered up at the sky, trying to locate the source of this weird meteorological phenomenon. But I saw no sign of any plane, helicopter, or even hot-air balloon that might have been dispensing the mice. They seemed to be raining down on us from the clouds themselves.
I must have well and truly lost it this time.
“Er…,” said Darcy. He’d gone as white as a sheet, and was staring dazedly down at his flowery nightdress and the pile of mice accumulating around him. They were still tumbling from the sky thick and fast.
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a few deep breaths. There must have been a logical explanation for what was going on; in fact, I’d had an inkling of what it might be ever since I’d woken up on the edge of the turret roof. “Darcy,” I said quietly, folding one of the sugar mice into his hands, “the chronicle has been stolen. Yesterday when I got back to my room, it was gone. And I think whoever took it is messing with us.”
“You mean…”
I nodded. “I know you don’t believe in magic. But just look at what’s happening. It’s not normal. It’s impossible. That’s why I’m sure that whoever has the book is playing games with us.”
Darcy stood up, a little unsteadily, and leaned out over the battlements. I did the same, and together we looked down into the courtyard, where the gravel was now blanketed in a layer of pink sugar. The downpour of mice was growing heavier now, and had even spread to the parkland beyond the castle gates.
Again I described the book’s powers to Darcy. I also told him about Miss Whitfield coming into my room. While I was speaking, he gripped the stone parapet so hard that his knuckles went white and his fingernails turned slightly blue. But when I’d finished, he nodded, very slowly, without taking his eyes off the mice that were still raining down into the courtyard below. “It’s completely insane. It’s nuts. I don’t believe in magic,” he said quietly. “But I do believe you about that book. I don�
��t really have a choice. This is too much, it’s too … I keep thinking I’m still dreaming, or I’ve got a fever and I’m hallucinating or something.…”
“I know. But unfortunately, we are very much awake.”
“And not exactly dressed for it.” He glanced at my bare legs. Although my dad was a lot taller than me, his shirt wasn’t quite long enough to pass for a dress.
“True,” I said, tugging down on the hem.
Darcy dragged his eyes back to my face. Now he, too, bit into a mouse, and then he cleared his throat. “So whoever it was that stole the book—they created this sugar rain, put us in these stupid clothes, and sent us up here onto the roof?” he mused.
I nodded.
“That’s terrible,” he said quietly. “We could so easily have fallen. We could have died. It’s terrifying that a stranger has the power to manipulate us like that.” The muscles in his jaw stood out as he clenched his teeth.
“I know,” I said. “I know.” We were still being pummeled by the deluge of sugar mice. I was trembling with cold, and with anger at the thief who had almost killed us. “Let’s go inside and figure out what we’re going to do. We have to get the chronicle back, and fast.”
Darcy nodded grimly. “Whatever it takes,” he said.
* * *
An hour later, Hannah, Charlotte, Toby, Darcy, and I assembled in the west wing library for an emergency meeting, fully dressed now and ready for anything. Technically Hannah, Charlotte, and I had lessons to go to. But although we knew we’d get into trouble for skipping class, this just couldn’t wait. We had to do something, and there was no time to lose.
We’d let Toby in on the secret of the book and its magical powers, but he didn’t seem to be as worried about it as the rest of us. He was more amused than shocked by the sugary downpour, and by the idea that we were actually dealing with real magic. Perhaps that was because the lower school students were currently having a riotous sugar-mouse fight in the courtyard, while the police, summoned by my dad to investigate the mysterious pink mass, confirmed that they were not treating the mice as terror-related.
The Forgotten Book Page 21