His heart beat even faster, as if to choke him. The silence behind the door sounded terribly familiar. Just such a silence had met his ears once before, when he had called Resa’s name again and again. He had waited ten years for an answer.
Not again, please God, not again. Not Meggie.
It seemed as if he heard the book whispering on the other side of the door: Fenoglio’s accursed story. He thought he heard the pages rustling, greedy as pale teeth.
‘Mortimer?’ Elinor was standing behind him. ‘The eggs are getting cold. Where are you and Meggie? Oh heavens!’ She looked at his face with concern and reached for his hand. ‘What’s the matter with you? You’re pale as death.’
‘Do you have a spare key for Meggie’s door, Elinor?’
She understood at once. Just like Mo, she guessed what had happened behind that locked door, presumably last night when they were all asleep. She pressed his hand. Then she turned without a word and hurried downstairs. But Mo just stood there leaning against the locked door, heard Elinor call Darius and begin to search for the key, cursing, and he stared at the books standing side by side on her shelves all down the long corridor. Resa came running upstairs, pale-faced. Her hands fluttered like frightened birds as she asked him what had happened. What was he to say?
‘Can’t you imagine? Haven’t you told her about the place often enough?’ He tried the handle again, as if that could change anything. Meggie had covered the whole door with quotations. They looked to him now like magic spells written on the white paint in a childish hand. Take me to another world! Go on! I know you can do it. My father has shown me how. Odd that your heart didn’t simply stop when it hurt so much. But his heart hadn’t stopped ten years ago either, when the words on the page swallowed Resa up.
Elinor pushed him aside. She was holding the key in her trembling fingers, and she impatiently put it in the lock. Crossly, she called Meggie’s name, as if she too hadn’t guessed long ago that nothing but silence waited behind that door: the same silence as on the night that had taught Mo to fear his own voice.
He was the last to enter the empty room, and he did so hesitantly. There was a letter on Meggie’s pillow. Dearest Mo … he didn’t read on, he didn’t want to see the words that would only pierce him to the heart. As Resa picked up the letter he looked round the room – his eyes searching for another sheet of paper, the one the boy had brought with him – but it was nowhere to be found. Well, of course not, you fool, he told himself. She’s taken it with her; after all, she must have been holding it while she read.
Only years later would he discover from Meggie that the original sheet of paper with Orpheus’s writing on it had been there in her room all the time, hidden between the pages of a book – where else? Her geography book. Suppose he had found it? Would he have been able to follow Meggie? No, probably not. The story had another path in store for him, a darker and more difficult path.
‘Perhaps she’s only gone off with the boy! Girls of her age do that kind of thing. Not that I know much about it, but …’ Elinor’s voice reached him as if from very far away. In answer, Resa handed her the letter that had been waiting on the pillow.
Gone. Meggie was gone.
He had no daughter any more.
Would she come back, like her mother? Fished out of the sea of words again by some other voice? If so, when? In ten years’ time, like Resa? She’d be grown up by then. Would he even recognize her? Everything was blurred before his eyes: Meggie’s school things on the desk in front of the window, her clothes, carefully hanging over the back of the chair as if she really meant to come back, her soft toys beside the bed, their furry faces kissed threadbare, although it was a long time since Meggie had needed them to help her get to sleep. Resa began crying without a sound, one hand pressed to her mute mouth. Mo wanted to comfort her, but how could he with such despair in his own heart?
He turned, pushed aside Darius, who was standing there in the open doorway with a sad, owl-like gaze, and went to his study, where those damned notebooks were still stacked among his own papers. He swept them off the desk one by one, as if he could silence the words that way – all the accursed words that had bewitched his child, luring her away like the Pied Piper in the story, to a place where he had already been unable to follow Resa. Mo felt as if he were dreaming the same nightmare all over again, but this time he didn’t even have a book whose pages he could have searched for Meggie.
Later, he couldn’t say how he had got through the rest of that day without going mad. All he remembered was wandering for hours through Elinor’s garden, as if he might find Meggie somewhere there among the old trees where she liked to sit and read. When darkness fell and he set out to look for Resa, he found her in Meggie’s room. She was sitting on the empty bed, staring at three tiny creatures circling just below the ceiling, as if they were looking for the door they had come through. Meggie had left the window open, but they didn’t fly out, perhaps because the strange, black night frightened them.
‘Fire-elves,’ said Resa’s hands when he sat down beside her. ‘If they settle on your skin you must shake them off, or they’ll burn you.’
Fire-elves. Mo remembered reading about them in the book. Something always came back in return. There seemed to be just that one book in the whole world.
‘Why three of them?’ he asked. ‘One for Meggie, one for the boy …’
‘I think the marten went too,’ said Resa’s hands.
Mo almost laughed out loud. Poor Dustfinger, he obviously couldn’t shake off his bad luck – but Mo could feel no sympathy for him. Not this time. Without Dustfinger the words on the sheet of paper would never have been written, and he would still have a daughter.
‘Do you think at least she’ll like it there?’ he asked, laying his head in Resa’s lap. ‘After all, you liked it, didn’t you? Or, at any rate, you told her so.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said her hands. ‘So very sorry.’
But he held her fingers tight. ‘What are you talking about?’ he said softly. ‘I was the one who brought the damned book into the house, remember?’ And then they were both silent. In silence, they watched the poor, lost elves. At some point they did fly through the window, and into the strange night. As their tiny red bodies disappeared into the blackness like sparks going out, Mo wondered whether Meggie was wandering through an equally black night at this moment. The thought pursued him into his dark dreams.
12
Uninvited Guests
‘You people with hearts,’ he said once, ‘have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful.’
L. Frank Baum,
The Wizard of Oz
On the day when Meggie disappeared silence moved back into Elinor’s house, but not the silence of the old days when only her books lived there with her. The silence that now filled the rooms and corridors tasted of sorrow. Resa wept a great deal, and Mortimer said nothing, as if paper and ink had swallowed up not just his daughter, but all the words in the world with her. He spent a lot of time in his workshop, ate little, hardly slept – and on the third day Darius, looking very anxious, went to Elinor and told her that Silvertongue was packing up all his tools.
When Elinor entered his workshop, out of breath because Darius had been tugging her along behind him so fast, Mortimer was throwing the stamps he used for gold leaf into a crate, pell-mell – tools that he normally handled as carefully as if they were made of glass.
‘What the devil are you doing?’ enquired Elinor.
‘What does it look like?’ he replied, and began clearing away his sewing frame. ‘I’m going to find another profession. I never want to touch a book again, curse them all. Other people can listen to the stories they tell and mend the clothes they wear. I want nothing more to do with them.’
When Elinor went to fetch Resa to help her, Resa just shook her head.
‘Well, I can understand why those two are useless just now,’ commented Elinor, as she and Dariu
s sat at breakfast by themselves yet again. ‘How could Meggie do a thing like that to them? What was her idea – did she want to break her poor parents’ hearts? Or prove once and for all that books are dangerous?’
Darius had no answer but silence. He had been the same all these last few sad days.
‘For heaven’s sake, all of you silent as the grave!’ Elinor snapped at him. ‘We must do something to get the silly creature back. Anything. Good God, it can’t be as difficult as all that! After all, there are no fewer than two Silvertongues under this roof!’
Darius looked at her in alarm and choked on his tea. He had left his gift unused for so long that no doubt it seemed like a dream to him – and he didn’t want to be reminded of it.
‘All right, all right, you don’t have to read aloud,’ Elinor assured him impatiently. Good God, that owlish gaze of horror! She could have shaken him. ‘Mortimer can do it! But what should he read? Think, Darius! If we want to fetch her back, should it be something about the Inkworld or about our own world? Oh, I’m all confused. Perhaps we can write something like: Once upon a time there was a grumpy middle-aged woman called Elinor who loved nothing but her books, until one day her niece moved in with her, along with the niece’s husband and daughter. Elinor liked that, but one day the daughter set off on a very, very stupid journey, and Elinor swore that she would give all her books away if only the child would come home. She packed them up in big crates, and as she was putting the last book in, Meggie walked through the doorway … Heavens above, don’t stare at me in that sympathetic way!’ she snapped at Darius. ‘I’m trying to do something, at least! And you yourself keep saying: Mortimer is a master, it takes him only a couple of sentences!’
Darius adjusted his glasses. ‘Yes, only a couple of sentences,’ he said, in his gentle, uncertain voice. ‘But they must be sentences describing a whole world, Elinor. The words must make music. They must be so closely interwoven that the voice doesn’t fall through.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Elinor said brusquely – although she knew he was right. Mortimer had once tried to explain it to her in almost the same way: the mystery of why not every story would come to life. But she didn’t want to hear about that, not now. Damn you, Elinor, she thought bitterly, damn you three times over for all those evenings you spent with the silly child imagining what it would be like to live in that other world, among fairies, brownies and glass men. There had been many such evenings, very many, and Mortimer had often put his head round the door and asked, sarcastically, if they couldn’t discuss something other than Wayless Woods and blue-skinned fairies just for once.
Well, at least Meggie knows all she needs to know about that world, thought Elinor, wiping the tears from her eyes. She realizes she must be careful of the Adderhead and his men-at-arms, and she mustn’t go too far into the forest or she’ll probably be eaten, torn to pieces or trodden underfoot. And she’d be well advised not to look up when she passes a gallows. She knows she must bow when a prince rides by, and that she can still wear her hair loose because she’s only a girl … damn it, here came the tears again! Elinor was mopping the corners of her eyes with the hem of her blouse when someone rang the front door bell.
Many years later, she was still angry with herself for the stupidity that didn’t warn her to look through the spy-hole in the door before opening it. Of course she had thought it was Resa or Mortimer outside. Of course. Stupid Elinor. Stupid, stupid Elinor. She had realized her mistake only when she opened the door, and there stood the stranger in front of her.
He was not very tall and rather too well-fed, with pale skin and equally pale fair hair. The eyes behind his rimless glasses looked slightly surprised, almost innocent like a child’s. He opened his mouth to speak as Elinor put her head round the door, but she cut him short.
‘What are you doing here?’ she barked. ‘This is private property. Didn’t you see the notice down by the road?’
He had come in a car; the impudent fool had simply brought it up her drive! Elinor saw it, a dusty, dark blue vehicle, standing beside her own station wagon. She thought she saw a huge dog on the passenger seat. That was the last straw!
‘Yes, of course I did!’ The stranger’s smile was so innocent that it suited his childish face. ‘Why, no one could miss seeing the notice, and I really do apologize, Signora Loredan, for my sudden and unannounced arrival.’
Heavens above – it took Elinor’s breath away. The moon-faced man’s voice was almost as beautiful as Mortimer’s, deep and velvety like a cushion. Coming from that round face with its childlike eyes, it was so incongruous that you felt almost as if the stranger had swallowed its real owner and taken over his voice.
‘Never mind the apologies!’ said Elinor abruptly, once she had got over her surprise. ‘Just get out.’ And so saying, she was about to close the door again, but the stranger only smiled (a smile that no longer looked quite so innocent) and jammed his shoe between the door and the frame. A dusty brown shoe.
‘Do forgive me, Signora Loredan,’ he said softly, ‘but I’ve come about a book. A truly unique book. I have heard, of course, that you have a remarkable library, but I can assure you that you don’t yet have this book in your collection.’
With an almost reverent expression on his face, he put a hand under his pale, creased linen jacket. Elinor recognized the book at once. Of course. It was the only book that made her heart beat faster not because it was a particularly fine edition, or because she longed to read it. No. At the sight of that book Elinor’s heart beat faster for only one reason: because she feared it like a ferocious animal.
‘Where did you get that from?’ She answered her question herself, but unfortunately a little too late. Suddenly, very suddenly, the memory of the boy’s story came back to her. ‘Orpheus!’ she whispered – and she wanted to shout, loud enough for Mortimer to hear her in his workshop, but before a sound could come out of her mouth someone slipped out of the cover of the rhododendron bushes by the front door, quick as a lizard, and put his hand over her mouth.
‘Well, my lady bookworm,’ a man’s voice purred in her ear. Elinor had so often heard that voice in her dreams, and every time she found herself fighting for breath at the sound of it! Even in broad daylight the effect was just as bad. Basta pushed her roughly back into the house. Of course, he had a knife in his hand; Elinor could as easily imagine Basta without a nose as without a knife. Orpheus turned and waved to the strange car. A man built like a wardrobe got out, strolled around the car at a leisurely pace, and opened the back door. An old woman stuck her legs out and reached for his arm.
Mortola. The Magpie.
Another regular visitor to Elinor’s nightmares.
The old woman’s legs were thickly bandaged under her dark stockings, and she leaned on a stick as she walked towards Elinor’s house on the wardrobe-man’s arm. She hobbled into the hall with a grimly determined expression, as if she were taking possession of the whole house, and the look she gave Elinor was so openly hostile that its recipient felt weak at the knees, hard as she tried to hide her fear. A thousand dreadful memories came back to her – memories of a cage stinking of raw meat, a square lit by the beams of glaring car headlights, and fear, dreadful fear …
Basta closed the door of the house behind Mortola. He hadn’t changed: the same thin face, the same way of narrowing his eyes, and there was an amulet dangling around his neck to ward off the bad luck that Basta thought lurked under every ladder, behind every bush.
‘Where are the others?’ Mortola demanded, while the wardrobe-man looked around him with a foolish expression. The sight of all those books seemed to fill him with boundless astonishment. He was probably wondering what on earth anyone would do with so many.
‘The others? I don’t know who you’re talking about.’ Elinor thought her voice sounded remarkably steady for a woman half dead with terror.
Mortola’s small, round chin jutted aggressively. ‘You know perfectly well. I’m talking about Silvertongue and his wi
tch of a daughter, and that maidservant, the one he calls his wife. Shall I get Basta to set fire to a few of your books, or will you call the three of them for us of your own accord?’
Basta? Basta’s afraid of fire, Elinor wanted to reply, but she refrained. It wasn’t difficult to hold a lighted match to a book. Even Basta, who feared fire so much, would probably be capable of that small action, and the wardrobe-man didn’t look bright enough to be afraid of anything. I just have to keep stalling, thought Elinor. After all, they don’t know about the workshop in the garden, or about Darius either.
‘Elinor?’ she heard Darius call at that very moment. Before she could reply, Basta’s hand was over her mouth again. She heard Darius come down the corridor with his usual rapid tread. ‘Elinor?’ he called again. Then the footsteps stopped as abruptly as his voice.
‘Surprise, surprise!’ purred Basta. ‘Aren’t you glad to see us, Stumbletongue? A couple of old friends come to pay you a visit!’ Basta’s left hand was bandaged, Elinor noticed when he took his fingers away from her mouth, and she remembered the hissing creature that Farid said had slipped through the words in Dustfinger’s place. What a pity it didn’t eat rather more of our knife-happy friend, she thought.
‘Basta!’ Darius’s voice was little more than a whisper.
‘That’s right, Basta! I’d have been here much sooner, believe you me, but they put me in jail for a while on account of something that happened years ago. No sooner was Capricorn gone than all the people who’d been too scared to open their mouths suddenly felt very brave. Well, never mind. You could say they did me a favour, because who do you think they put in my cell one fine day? I never could get him to tell me his real name, so let’s call him by the name he’s given himself: Orpheus!’ He slapped the man so hard on the back that he stumbled forward. ‘Yes, our good friend Orpheus!’ Basta put an arm around his shoulders. ‘The Devil did me a real favour when he made Orpheus, of all people, my cellmate – or perhaps our story is so keen to have us back that it sent him? Well, one way or another, we had a good time, didn’t we?’
Orpheus did not look at him. He straightened his jacket in embarrassment, and inspected Elinor’s bookshelves.
‘Hey, just look at him!’ Basta dug his elbow roughly into Orpheus’s ribs. ‘You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve told him there’s nothing to be ashamed of in going to jail, particularly when your prisons here are so much more comfortable than our dungeons at home. Come on, tell them how I found out about your invaluable gifts. How I caught you one night reading yourself that stupid dog out of the book! Reading himself a dog! Lord knows, I could think of better ideas.’
Basta laughed nastily, and Orpheus straightened his tie with nervous fingers. ‘Cerberus is still in the car,’ he told Mortola. ‘He doesn’t like it there at all. We ought to bring him in!’
The wardrobe-man turned to the door. He obviously had a soft spot for animals, but Mortola stopped him with an impatient gesture.
‘The dog stays where it is. I can’t stand that creature!’ Frowning, she looked around Elinor’s hall. ‘Well, I expected your house to be bigger than this,’ she said, with assumed disappointment. ‘I thought you were rich.’
‘So she is!’ Basta flung his arm so roughly round Orpheus’s neck that his glasses slipped down his nose. ‘But she spends all her money on books. What would she pay us for the book we took from Dustfinger, do you think?’ He pinched Orpheus’s round cheeks. ‘Yes, our friend here made good juicy bait for the fire-eater. He may look like a bullfrog, but even Silvertongue can’t make the words obey him so well, let alone Darius. Ask Dustfinger – Orpheus sent him home as if nothing could be easier! Not that the fire-eater will—’
‘Hold your tongue, Basta!’ Mortola interrupted him abruptly. ‘You’ve always liked the sound of your own voice. Well?’ She impatiently tapped her stick on the marble tiles that were Elinor’s pride and joy. ‘Where are they? Where are the others? I shan’t ask again!’