If Gwin could speak, thought Meggie, he’d do so in Dustfinger’s voice.
‘I prefer adventures in the sunlight,’ replied Elinor curtly. ‘Heavens, how I hate this darkness! Still, if we sit around here until dawn my books will be mildewed before Mortimer can do anything about them. Meggie, go round to the back of the car and fetch that bag. You know the one.’
Meggie nodded, and was just about to open the passenger door when a glaring light blinded her. Someone whose face she couldn’t make out was standing beside the driver’s door, shining a torch into the car. He tapped it commandingly against the pane.
Elinor jumped in such alarm she hit her knee on the steering wheel, but she quickly pulled herself together. Cursing, she rubbed her hurt leg and opened the window.
‘What’s the idea?’ she snapped at the stranger. ‘Do you have to frighten us to death? A person could easily get run over, skulking about in the dark like that.’
By way of answer the stranger pushed the barrel of a shotgun through the open window. ‘This is private property!’ he said. Meggie thought she recognised the rasping cat’s-tongue voice from Elinor’s library. ‘And a person can very easily get shot trespassing on private property at night.’
‘I can explain.’ Dustfinger leaned over Elinor’s shoulder.
‘Well, well, who have we here? If it isn’t Dustfinger!’ The man withdrew the barrel of his gun. ‘Do you have to turn up in the middle of the night?’
Elinor turned and cast Dustfinger a glance that was more than suspicious. ‘I’d no idea you were on such friendly terms with these people!’ she commented. ‘You called them devils!’
But Dustfinger was already out of the car. And Meggie didn’t like the familiar way the two men were talking. She remembered exactly what Dustfinger had said to her about Capricorn’s men. How could he talk to one of them like this? However hard Meggie strained her ears, she couldn’t make out what the pair were saying. She caught only one thing. Dustfinger called the stranger Basta.
‘I don’t like this!’ whispered Elinor. ‘Look at the pair of them. They’re talking to each other as if our matchstick-eating friend can come and go here as he likes!’
‘He probably knows they won’t hurt him because we’re bringing them the book!’ Meggie whispered back, never taking her eyes off the two men. The stranger had a couple of dogs with him. German shepherds. They were sniffing Dustfinger’s hands and nuzzling him in the ribs, wagging their tails.
‘See that?’ hissed Elinor. ‘Even those dogs treat him as an old friend. Suppose—’
But before she could say any more Basta opened the driver’s door. ‘Get out, both of you,’ he ordered.
Reluctantly, Elinor swung her legs out of the car. Meggie got out too and stood beside her. Her heart was thudding. She had never seen a man with a gun before. Well, on TV she had, but not in real life.
‘Look, I don’t like your tone!’ Elinor informed Basta. ‘We’ve had a strenuous drive, and we only came to this God-forsaken spot to bring your boss or whatever you call him something he’s been wanting for a long time. So let’s have a little more civility.’
Basta cast her such a scornful glance that Elinor drew in a sharp breath, and Meggie involuntarily squeezed her hand.
‘Where did you pick her up?’ enquired Basta, turning back to Dustfinger, who was standing there looking as unmoved as if none of this had anything at all to do with him.
‘She owns that house – you know the one I mean.’ Dustfinger had lowered his voice. but Meggie heard him all the same. ‘I didn’t want to bring her, but she insisted.’
‘I can imagine that.’ Basta scrutinised Elinor once again, then turned to Meggie. ‘So this is Silvertongue’s little daughter? Doesn’t look much like him.’
‘Where’s my father?’ asked Meggie. ‘How is he?’ These were the first words she had managed to utter. Her voice was hoarse, as if she hadn’t used it for a long time.
‘Oh, he’s fine,’ replied Basta, glancing at Dustfinger. ‘Although he’s saying so little at the moment that Leaden-tongue would be more like it.’
Meggie bit her lip. ‘We’ve come for him,’ she said. Now her voice was high and thin, although she was trying as hard as she could to sound grown-up. ‘We have the book, but we won’t give it to Capricorn unless he lets my father go.’
Basta turned to Dustfinger again. ‘Something about her does remind me of her father after all. See her lips tighten? And that look! Oh yes, anyone can see they’re related.’ His voice sounded as if he were joking, but there was nothing funny about his face when he looked at Meggie again. It was thin, sharply angular, with close-set eyes. He narrowed them slightly as if he could see better that way. Basta was not a tall man, and his shoulders were almost as narrow as a boy’s, but Meggie held her breath when he took a step towards her. She was afraid of him. She had never been so afraid of anyone before, and it wasn’t because of the shotgun in his hand. He had an aura of fury about him, of something keen and biting—
‘Meggie, get the bag out of the boot.’ As Basta was about to grab Meggie, Elinor pushed herself between them. ‘There’s nothing dangerous in it,’ she said crossly. ‘Just what we came here to hand over.’
By way of answer, Basta pulled the dogs aside, pulling so harshly on their leashes that they yelped out loud.
‘Meggie, listen to me!’ whispered Elinor, as they left the car and followed Basta down a steep pathway leading to the lighted windows. ‘Don’t hand over the book until they let us see your father, understand?’
Meggie nodded, clutching the plastic bag firmly to her chest. How stupid did Elinor think she was? On the other hand, how was she going to hang on to the book if Basta decided to take it away from her? She preferred not to follow this line of thinking through to its conclusion.
It was a hot, sultry night. The sky above the black hills was sprinkled with stars. The path down which Basta was leading them was stony, and so dark that Meggie could hardly see her own feet, but whenever she stumbled there was a hand to catch her. The hand belonged either to Elinor, walking beside her, or to Dustfinger, who was following as silently as if he were her shadow. Gwin was still in his rucksack, and Basta’s dogs kept raising their noses and sniffing, as if they had picked up the sharp scent of the marten.
Slowly, they came closer to the lighted windows. Meggie saw old houses of grey, rough-hewn stone, with a pale church tower rising above the rooftops. Many of the houses looked empty as they passed, going down alleys so narrow that Meggie felt they could close in on her. Some of the houses had no roofs, others were little more than a couple of walls partly fallen in. It was dark in Capricorn’s village. Only a few lamps were on in the streets, hanging from masonry arches above the alleyways. At last they reached a small square. The church with the tower they had seen from a distance stood on one side of the square, and not far away, divided from it by a narrow passage, there was a large, two-storey house which did not look at all derelict. This square was better lit than the rest of the village, with four lanterns casting menacing shadows on the paving stones. Basta led them straight to the big house, where more light showed behind three windows on the upper floor. Was Mo in there? Meggie listened to herself as if she could find the answer there, but all her heart would tell her was a tale of fear. Fear and grief.
14
A Mission Accomplished
‘The reason there’s no use looking,’ said Mr Beaver, ‘is that we know already where he’s gone!’ Everyone stared in amazement.
‘Don’t you understand?’ said Mr Beaver. ‘He’s gone to her, to the White Witch. He has betrayed us all.’
C.S. Lewis,
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Hundreds of times since Dustfinger had first told her about him, Meggie had tried to picture Capricorn’s face. She’d thought about it on the way to Elinor’s house when Mo was sitting beside her in the van, and in the huge bed there, and finally on the drive here. Hundreds of times? No, she had tried to imagine it thousands of times, drawing on her ideas of all the villains she had ever read about in books: Captain Hook, crooked-nosed and thin; Long John Silver, a false smile always on his lips; Injun Joe, who had haunted so many of her bad dreams with his knife and his greasy black hair … But Capricorn looked quite different. Meggie soon gave up counting the doors they passed before Basta finally stopped outside one. But she did count the black-clad men. Four of them were standing in the corridors, looking bored. Each man had a shotgun propped against the whitewashed wall beside him. Dustfinger had been right: in their close-fitting black suits they really did look like rooks. Only Basta wore a snow-white shirt, just as Dustfinger had said, with a red flower in the buttonhole of his jacket, a red flower like a warning.
Capricorn’s dressing gown was red too. He was seated in an armchair when Basta entered the room with the three new arrivals, and a woman was kneeling in front of him cutting his toenails. The chair seemed too small for him. Capricorn was a tall man, and gaunt, as if the skin had been stretched too tight over his bones. His skin was pale as parchment, his hair cut short and bristly. Meggie couldn’t have said if it was grey or very fair.
He raised his head when Basta opened the door. His eyes were almost as pale as the rest of him, as if the colour had drained out of them, but bright as silver coins. The woman at his feet glanced up when they came in, then bent over to resume her work.
‘Excuse me, but the visitors we were expecting have arrived,’ said Basta. ‘I thought you might want to speak to them at once.’
Capricorn leaned back in his chair and cast a brief glance at Dustfinger. Then his expressionless eyes moved to Meggie. She was clutching the plastic bag containing the book to her chest, her arms firmly wrapped around it. Capricorn stared at the bag as if he knew what was in it. He made a sign to the woman at his feet. Reluctantly, she straightened up, smoothed down her black dress, and glared at Elinor and Meggie. She looked like an old magpie, with her grey hair scraped back and a pointed nose that didn’t seem to fit her small, wrinkled face. Nodding to Capricorn, she left the room.
It was a large room, only sparsely furnished: a long table with eight chairs, a cupboard and a heavy sideboard. There were no lamps in the room, only candles, dozens of them in heavy silver candlesticks. It seemed to Meggie that they filled the room with shadows rather than light.
‘Where is it?’ asked Capricorn. When he scraped back his chair Meggie flinched involuntarily. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve only brought the girl this time.’ His voice was more impressive than his face. It was dark and heavy, and the moment she heard him speak Meggie hated it.
‘She’s got it with her. In that bag,’ replied Dustfinger before Meggie could say so herself. His eyes wandered restlessly from candle to candle as he spoke, as if only their dancing flames interested him. ‘Her father really didn’t know he had the wrong book. This woman who says she’s a friend of his,’ added Dustfinger, pointing to Elinor, ‘changed the books round without telling him. She’s a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books – looks as if she likes them better than human company.’ The words came spilling out of Dustfinger’s mouth as if he wanted to be rid of them. ‘I didn’t like her from the first, but you know our friend Silvertongue. He always thinks the best of everyone. He’d trust the Devil himself if Old Nick gave him a friendly smile.’
Meggie looked at Elinor. She was standing there as if tongue-tied. Anyone could see she had a guilty conscience.
Capricorn merely nodded at Dustfinger’s explanations. He tightened the belt of his dressing gown, clasped his hands behind his back, and came slowly over to Meggie. She did her best not to flinch, to look firmly and undaunted into those colourless eyes, but fear constricted her throat. What a coward she was after all! She tried to think of some hero out of one of her books, someone whose skin she could slip into, to make her feel stronger, bigger, braver. Why could she remember nothing but stories of frightened people when Capricorn looked at her? She usually found it so easy to escape somewhere else, to get right inside the minds of people and animals who existed only on paper, so why not now? Because she was afraid. ‘Because fear kills everything,’ Mo had once told her. ‘Your mind, your heart, your imagination.’
Mo … where was he? Meggie bit her lip to stop herself shaking, but she knew the fear showed in her eyes, and she knew that Capricorn saw it. She wished she had a heart of ice and a clever smile, not the trembling lips of a child whose father had been stolen away.
Now Capricorn was very close to her. He scrutinised her. No one had ever looked at her like that. She felt like a fly stuck to a flypaper just waiting to die.
‘How old is she?’ Capricorn looked at Dustfinger as if he didn’t trust Meggie to know the answer herself.
‘Twelve!’ she said in a loud voice. It wasn’t easy to speak with her lips quivering so hard. ‘I’m twelve. And I want to know where my father is.’
Capricorn acted as if he hadn’t heard the last sentence. ‘Twelve?’ he repeated in the dark voice that weighed so heavily on Meggie’s ears, ‘Three or four more years and she’ll be a pretty little thing, useful to have around the place. We’ll have to feed her up a bit, though.’ He felt her arm with his long fingers. He wore gold rings on them, three on each hand. Meggie tried to pull away, but Capricorn was gripping her tightly as his pale eyes examined her. Just as he might have looked at a fish. A poor little fish wriggling on a hook.
‘Let the girl go!’ For the first time Meggie was glad Elinor’s voice could sound so sharp. And Capricorn actually did let go of her arm.
Elinor stepped up behind Meggie and put her hands protectively on her shoulders. ‘I don’t know what’s going on here,’ she snapped at Capricorn. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you and all these men with guns are doing in this God-forsaken village, and I don’t want to know either. I’m here to see that this girl gets her father back. We’ll leave you the book you’re so keen to have – although that’s enough to give me heart-ache, but you’ll get it as soon as Meggie’s father is safe in my car. And if for any reason he wants to stay here we’d like to hear it from his own lips.’
Capricorn turned his back to her without a word. ‘Why did you bring this woman?’ he asked Dustfinger. ‘Bring the girl and the book, I said. Why would I want the woman?’
Meggie looked at Dustfinger.
The girl and the book. The words kept repeating inside her head, like an echo. The girl and the book, I said. Meggie tried to look Dustfinger in the eye, but he avoided her gaze as if it would burn him. It hurt to feel so stupid. So terribly, terribly stupid.
Dustfinger perched on the edge of the table and pinched out one of the candles, gently and slowly as if waiting for the pain, the sharp little stab of the candle flame. ‘I’ve told Basta already: our dear friend Elinor couldn’t be persuaded to stay behind,’ he said. ‘She didn’t want to let the girl go with me alone, and she was very reluctant to give up the book.’
‘And wasn’t I right?’ Elinor’s voice rose to such a pitch that Meggie jumped. ‘Listen to him, Meggie, listen to that fork-tongued matchstick-eater! I ought to have called the police when he turned up again. He came back for the book; that was the only reason.’
And for me, thought Meggie. The girl and the book.
Dustfinger pretended to be preoccupied with pulling a loose thread from his coat-sleeve. But his hands, usually so skilful, were shaking.
‘And as for you!’ said Elinor, jabbing Capricorn in the chest with her forefinger. Basta took a step forward, but Capricorn waved him away. ‘I’ve had a lot of experience with books. I myself have had a number of books stolen from me, and I can’t claim that all the books on my shelves got there exactly as they should have done – perhaps you know the saying that all book collectors are vultures and hunters? But you really seem to be the craziest of us all. I’m surprised I’ve never heard of you before. Where’s your collection?’ She looked enquiringly round the big room. ‘I don’t see a single book.’
Capricorn put his hands in his dressing-gown pockets and signed to Basta. Before Meggie knew what was happening, Basta had snatched the plastic bag from her hands. He opened it, peered inside suspiciously as if he thought it could contain a snake or something else that might bite, then reached in and brought out the book.
Capricorn took it from him. Meggie couldn’t see on his face any of the tenderness with which Elinor and Mo looked at books. No, there was nothing but dislike on Capricorn’s face – dislike and relief. That was all.
‘These two know nothing?’ Capricorn opened the book, leafed through it, then closed it again. It was the right book. Meggie could tell from his face. It was exactly the book he had been looking for.
‘No, they know nothing. Even the girl doesn’t know.’ Dustfinger was looking out of the window very intently, as if there were more to be seen there than the pitch dark. ‘Her father hasn’t told her, so why should I?’
Capricorn nodded. ‘Take these two round behind the house,’ he told Basta, who was still standing there holding the empty bag.
‘What do you mean?’ Elinor began, but Basta was already hauling her and Meggie away.
‘It means we’re going to shut you two pretty birds in one of our cages overnight,’ said Basta, prodding them roughly in the back with his shotgun.
‘Where’s my father?’ shouted Meggie. Her own voice was shrill in her ears. ‘You’ve got the book now! What more do you want of him?’
Capricorn strolled over to the candle that Dustfinger had pinched out, passed his forefinger over the wick and looked at the soot on his fingertip. ‘What do I want of your father?’ he said, without turning to look at Meggie. ‘I want to keep him here, what else? You don’t seem to know about his extraordinary talent. Up to now he’s been unwilling to use it in my service, hard as Basta has tried to persuade him. But now Dustfinger has brought you here he’ll do anything I want. I’m confident of that.’
Meggie tried to push Basta’s hands away when he reached for her, but he took her by the back of the head like a chicken whose neck he was going to wring. Elinor tried coming to her aid, but he casually pointed the shotgun at her chest and forced Meggie over to the door.
When Meggie turned round again she saw Dustfinger still leaning against the big table. He was watching her, but this time he wasn’t smiling. Forgive me, his eyes seemed to say. I had to do it. I can explain everything! But Meggie didn’t want to know, and she certainly wasn’t about to forgive him. ‘I hope you drop dead!’ she screamed as Basta hauled her out of the room. ‘I hope you burn to death! I hope you suffocate in your own smoke!’
Basta laughed as he closed the door. ‘Just listen to this little wildcat!’ he said. ‘I think I’ll have to watch my step with you around!’
15
Good Luck and Bad Luck
It was the middle of the night, and Bingo couldn’t sleep. The ground was hard, but he was used to that … His blanket was dirty and smelled disgusting, but he was used to that too. A tune kept going through his head, and he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It was the Wendels’ victory song.
Michael de Larrabeiti,
The Borribles Go for Broke
The cages, as Basta had called them, kept ready by Capricorn for