Charlie Bone and the Invisible Boy

“I got bored,” said Olivia, “but I think Sander’s here for another reason.”

  Charlie noticed that the normally cheerful African boy looked extremely agitated. He kept darting wild, anxious glances around the room, and his gray parrot, Homer, fluttered from his head to his shoulder and back again every time he moved.

  “Where’s Tancred?” Charlie asked Lysander.

  “His dad made him stay in to study. I’ve done my work. I just had to come out.”

  “What’s the trouble?”

  Lysander shook his head. “My ancestors are angry,” he muttered. “I couldn’t sleep. All night I heard their drums in my head, their loud voices, their furious wailing.”

  All at once, Homer cried, “Catastrophe! Catastrophe!”

  “He knows when things are wrong,” said Lysander. “He feels their rage through me.”

  “Why don’t they tell you what’s upsetting them?” asked Olivia.

  Lysander frowned at her. “I have to find out myself,” he said.

  Lysander’s spirit ancestors were very powerful. They were more than ghosts. Charlie had seen their strong brown hands, their spears and shields. More than once, they had helped to save him. If they were angry, then it was for a very good reason.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Charlie suggested, hoping fresh air would clear Lysander’s head.

  “Good idea!” said Olivia, scooping up her rabbit.

  Charlie was about to go fetch Runner Bean when Mr. Onimous appeared with the dog. Runner Bean rushed up to Charlie, while cats and rabbits scattered in all directions.

  “Oh, he has missed you, Charlie,” said Mr. Onimous as the big dog leaped up and began licking Charlie’s face and hair.

  “And is the rat OK?” asked Charlie.

  “Right as rain,” said the little man. “Very popular with Mrs. Onimous. And the flames adore him.”

  “How unusual,” Olivia remarked. “I mean cats liking a rat.”

  “They’re unusual, miss,” said Mr. Onimous solemnly. “Off you go now. Charlie, give that dog a nice long run. My legs can’t keep up with him.”

  The three friends left the café and headed toward the park at the edge of the city. Olivia carried her rabbit in a basket, but Lysander’s parrot traveled on his shoulder, its head bobbing up and down in rhythm with its master’s stride.

  When they reached the park, Charlie let Runner Bean off the leash and he tore across the grass, barking joyfully. Homer the parrot left Lysander’s shoulder and flew over the big dog’s head, crying, “What a to-do. Dog ahoy!”

  “Ship ahoy, if you don’t mind,” called Olivia.

  “He’s confused,” said Lysander.

  “I’d say he’s gone off the deep end,” said Olivia, giggling.

  “It’s not a joke,” barked Lysander. “He gets muddled when he’s upset. Like me. I’m muddled.”

  “Sorr-e-e-e!” said Olivia.

  Charlie glanced at her. She might almost have been laughing at Lysander. It was all very well for her, Charlie thought. Olivia could be a good friend when she chose to be, but she didn’t really understand what it was like to be endowed, what a burden and a puzzle it could be.

  “Cool it,” he said.

  Olivia raised her eyebrows, but she seemed to understand the warning look in Charlie’s eyes.

  “I don’t think I’ll go to school tomorrow,” Lysander murmured.

  “Why?” asked Charlie.

  “Don’t really know, I think there’s trouble for me there.” Lysander’s voice had sunk so low they could hardly hear him.

  “But you’ve got to,” Charlie said desperately. “What about the carving? What about Ollie Sparks?”

  “Why do you care so much?” said Lysander, surprised by Charlie’s vehemence.

  “I just do,” said Charlie. “I can’t help it. I feel bad about Ollie because I haven’t tried to rescue him again. There’s been so much else going on. But think how awful it must be for him. Alone in those dark attics, not knowing if he’ll ever get out. We’ve got to rescue him soon, Sander. We’ve just got to. Please say you’ll come to school on Monday. Please!”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Lysander. He whistled to his parrot, and the gray bird wheeled around and flew back to perch on his shoulder.

  “See you,” said Lysander. He turned and strode away across the park.

  The parrot looked back at Charlie and Olivia and called, “Watch it!”

  As he made his way up the steep hill to his home, Lysander began to feel breathless. This had never happened before. He was a strong boy, tall for his age, a great runner and champion hurdler.

  It was the drums that took away his breath. That’s what it was. Their angry beats echoed in his head like distant thunder, making him shudder.

  “Trouble!” called Homer from his master’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, trouble,” Lysander agreed.

  He had just climbed the steepest part of the hill road, a long curving ascent that ended in a welcome stretch of even ground. Here he stopped and looked out across the city. The cathedral, with its great domed roof, dwarfed all the other buildings in the city. Only the shadowy mansion to the north was anywhere near as tall.

  “Bloor’s,” Lysander muttered.

  Beyond the gray roof of the academy, and just at the edge of the woods that covered the castle ruin, there issued a thin plume of smoke.

  When he saw it, Lysander’s eyes began to smart, his skin burned, his throat felt raw. Tearing at his collar, he ran the last few meters home. He reached a pair of tall iron gates and, pulling one open, he tore up the path to an imposing white house, set behind lawns as green and smooth as billiard tables.

  Mrs. Jessamine Sage was watching a quiz show on TV when her son went pounding up to his room. Mrs. Sage knew her son’s trouble immediately. She could hear the drums accompanying his footsteps. It was from her that Lysander had inherited his power. At certain times, she too heard the drums speak and the ancestors clamoring for attention.

  Mrs. Sage eased herself up from her comfortable chair. She was a well-rounded woman of considerable strength, but she’d been feeling heavy and listless of late. She didn’t need drums to tell her that another baby was on its way. There were other very obvious signs.

  The beautiful and stately woman climbed the stairs to the first floor. Behind the two doors on either side of her son’s room, her daughters, aged ten and fourteen, were playing loud, unmelodic music: guitars and voices. It was all squeaky shouting and rap, rap, rap. Not a drumbeat between them.

  “Hortense! Alexandra! Reduce!” barked Mrs. Sage in such a commanding tone that both girls immediately obeyed.

  When Mrs. Sage opened her son’s door she was met by another barrage of sound, this one so tumultuous it almost knocked her back onto the landing.

  “Lysander! Calm!” called Mrs. Sage across the room. She never used two words, or even five for that matter, where one would do.

  Lysander was lying on his bed with his eyes shut tight and his hands over his ears. Even so, he heard his mother’s powerful voice. He opened his eyes.

  “Think of a tree,” sang Mrs. Sage.

  “Roots, leaves, branches.

  “Holding, lifting …

  “Sky …

  “Think of the King.”

  Lysander removed his hands from his ears.

  “There,” said his mother, lowering herself onto the bed. “Better?”

  It worked every time. As soon as Lysander thought of a tree, as soon as he saw, in his mind’s eye, the mysterious painting in the King’s room, he felt calmer. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The drumbeats were still there, in his head, but now quiet enough for him to think.

  “Tell,” said his mother.

  “Trouble!” cried Homer from his perch by the window.

  “She didn’t ask you,” said Lysander with a rueful grin. “There is trouble, though,” he told his mother. “I don’t know what. But it’s at Bloor’s. I saw smoke and I felt my skin burn. The ancestors are angry
, Mom.”

  “They always have a reason,” said Mrs. Sage.

  “I don’t want to go to school on Monday. I don’t want to face whatever it is. I never felt like this before.”

  “You must face it.” Mrs. Sage patted her son’s hand. “You must go to school.”

  “That’s what Charlie Bone said.”

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes. You know, the kid with rough hair. His uncle had a party last semester, remember? He’s smaller than most of us, but he pushes his way into trouble and somehow we find ourselves following; Tancred, me, and Gabriel. He’s doing it again, trying to rescue a boy from invisibility.”

  “Invisibility?” Mrs. Sage frowned.

  “I’m making a carving,” Lysander went on. “It’s really good, Mom. The best I’ve ever done. I thought the ancestors would be able to bring the boy back. But the drums say no, I’ve done the wrong thing.”

  Mrs. Sage stood up. “Not you, Lysander. Someone else has done wrong. Go to school and put it right.” She swept out of her son’s room, her long, flowered skirt whispering around her ankles like the sea.

  “What a picnic!” shrieked Homer.

  “For you, maybe,” said Mrs. Sage, closing the door.

  On Monday morning, the reason for Lysander’s terrible foreboding soon became clear.

  After their history test, Charlie and Fidelio, emerging into the garden, saw a group of their friends clustered around the remains of a fire. Weedon was always burning garbage on the grounds, so this wasn’t too unusual — it was the attitude of the group that alerted Charlie. Lysander was standing in stony disbelief, while Tancred’s stiff yellow hair sparked with electricity.

  Olivia, standing next to Lysander, caught Charlie’s eye and gestured wildly. Charlie and Fidelio rushed over to them.

  Amid a pile of scorched twigs and burned paper, two blue eyes stared out at them. The eyes were all that remained of Lysander’s beautiful carving.

  “How could they?” whispered Emma.

  Lysander was shuddering. He held his arms stiffly at his sides and his hands were clenched. He seemed unable to speak.

  Charlie noticed a group of seniors watching them. Asa Pike had a satisfied smile on his face, while Zelda Dobinski’s long features were twisted in a horrible smirk. Manfred, however, was staring straight at Lysander, as if he was outraged at the African boy’s clever attempt to rescue Ollie.

  “No one else knew….” Lysander muttered. “Who would …?”

  “Obviously, someone in art,” said Olivia.

  Silence fell over the little group and then, almost as one, they looked over to the walls of the ruin, where Belle and Dorcas were standing watching them.

  “But why?” said Lysander.

  “Because your carving was too good,” said Olivia grimly. “And because someone doesn’t want us to rescue Ollie Sparks.”

  “Don’t give up, Sander,” said Charlie.

  “You don’t know what it’s like for him,” said Tancred. “He can feel the injury, can’t you, Sander? It’s like he put a bit of his own heart into that piece of wood. Do you know what that’s like, Charlie?”

  “No,” said Charlie in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s that?” said Fidelio, rubbing his head. “I can hear drums.”

  “What do you expect?” said Tancred, almost angrily. “Come on, Sander, let’s get out of here.” He grabbed his friend’s arm and steered him away from the fire. Lysander seemed hardly aware of his surroundings. He allowed Tancred to lead him back toward the school, but not before Charlie too heard the faint throb of a drum, almost like a heartbeat, following Lysander across the grass.

  “I didn’t ask him to do it,” Charlie murmured, gazing at the accusing blue eyes. “He wanted to. It was his idea.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Fidelio said cheerfully. “Sander will get over it. We’ll just have to think of something else.”

  “It’s so awful,” murmured Emma. “I feel like I’m looking at a real boy, or what was a real boy.”

  “Let’s get away from here,” said Olivia, glancing at Belle and Dorcas. “We don’t want them to enjoy our misery for too long, do we?”

  As they turned away from the fire, Gabriel came leaping up to them. “I’ve had a really weird piano lesson,” he panted. “It went on for ages and …” He stopped in mid-sentence. “Oh, no,” he said, staring at the blue eyes. “Is that …?”

  “Lysander’s carving,” said Charlie. “And we’ve got a good idea who did it.”

  In an effort to cheer them up, Olivia announced that she’d brought a Frisbee to school. “Let’s have a game,” she suggested.

  While they tossed the red Frisbee from one to the other, Gabriel told them about his strange piano lesson.

  Mr. Pilgrim, the piano teacher, was an odd person at the best of times. A tall, dark, morose man, he was seldom seen outside the music room at the top of the west tower. He hardly ever spoke, and it was so difficult to get any advice from him that he had lost most of his students. During Gabriel’s extended piano lesson, however, Mr. Pilgrim had said quite a lot — for him.

  “So come on, tell us what he said.” Olivia leaped for the Frisbee, losing a yellow shoe mid-leap.

  “It was weird,” said Gabriel. “He said, ‘I don’t know how he got up here, but I couldn’t help him.’ So I said, ‘Who, Mr. Pilgrim?’ And he said, ‘It’s all too much, he can’t take it in — lights, traffic, plastic things. He doesn’t like them; they confuse him. He’ll do away with them, and who can blame him …?’ and then Mr. P looked very hard at me, and said, ‘I can’t see how he’ll do it, though, can you?’

  “I said …” Gabriel caught the Frisbee and yelped with pain. “Ouch! That was a hard one, Charlie!”

  “Come on, come on,” cried Olivia. “So what did you say?”

  “I just said, ‘No, sir.’ I mean, what else could I say?”

  “You could have said, ‘Do what?’” said Fidelio.

  A nasty thought suddenly occurred to Charlie. He stood stock-still with the Frisbee clutched in both hands.

  “Come on! Come on! Throw it, Charlie!” called the others.

  “Hold on,” said Charlie. “Did Mr. P describe this mysterious visitor?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I couldn’t get a name out of him either. He just said, ‘He can, you know. He’s quite exceptional. Look what he did to the music!’ So I looked, and do you know, all the notes on one of the music sheets had turned to gold. It was Beethoven’s Sonata Number Twenty-seven, as a matter of fact. And then I noticed that the bats in the corner — Mr. Pilgrim’s always had bats in his room, but he doesn’t mind, nor do I, they’re just like flying gerbils really….”

  “So what had happened to the bats?” asked Fidelio impatiently.

  “They were gold, too,” said Gabriel.

  “Oh.” Charlie felt queasy.

  Emma looked at him. “What is it, Charlie?”

  “Er, nothing,” Charlie mumbled.

  “So were the spiders,” Gabriel went on blithely, “and their webs. They looked really pretty, like Christmas decorations.”

  Charlie was glad to hear the hunting horn. He was beginning to wonder when the next nasty surprise would hit him. For once, all he wanted to do was to bury himself in a complicated math test.

  “I’ve got a feeling you know who it is,” said Fidelio, racing Charlie across the grass. “Mr. P’s visitor, I mean.”

  “Shhhh!” hissed Charlie.

  “Tell us, Charlie, go on!” cried Olivia.

  They piled into the hall, where Charlie was grateful for the rule of silence. He walked off to the math room with Fidelio in tow, while the girls went to their coatrooms and Gabriel dragged himself up the stairs to a dreaded theory test.

  Charlie might have longed to bury himself in fractions, but he found he couldn’t. His thoughts kept returning to Mr. Pilgrim’s mysterious visitor. Who else would turn spiders into gold? Who else would be confused by lights and traffic
? At the end of the test, Charlie knew he’d done badly. He wished he’d put the wand to work on mathematics instead of French.

  There was more bad news waiting for him in the cafeteria. One of the lunch ladies was in quite a state, having only that morning witnessed a large bull charging out of the butcher’s, where before there had only been two large sides of beef hanging at the back.

  “Beef one minute, bull the next,” Mrs. Gill kept muttering as she handed out plates of shepherd’s pie. “What’s happening to the world?”

  “What indeed, Mrs. Gill?” said Fidelio, with his usual charming smile.

  “I don’t think you believed her, did you?” whispered Charlie as they made their way to a table.

  “Well, did you?” said Fidelio. “Poor old thing, she’s a real fruitcake!”

  “Actually, I did believe her,” said Charlie.

  At that moment, Gabriel joined them, saying, “Have you heard what Mrs. Gill’s been …?”

  “Yes, we have,” said Fidelio. “And Charlie believes her, because he knows why or who or what … Well, why, Charlie?”

  “You know that painting?” Charlie said. “The one I brought to school last semester?”

  Fidelio and Gabriel, with forks halfway to their mouths, stared at Charlie.

  “You mean the one with the sorcerer?” asked Gabriel in a squeaky whisper.

  Charlie looked around the cafeteria. No one was paying them any attention, and the noise of scraping knives and forks and chattering voices was so loud, not a soul beyond their table could have heard him. All the same, Charlie lowered his voice as he told his two friends about his visit to Skarpo, and the escaped mouse.

  “You mean, you think he got out, too?” said Fidelio.

  “Must have,” said Charlie. “At first I thought it was impossible, because he was still in the painting. But my uncle says that’s only his image, not his essence. I’d convinced myself that Skarpo couldn’t get out because I desperately didn’t want to believe it.”

  “You mean the golden bats and the bull and stuff are him …?” said Fidelio.

  “Must be,” said Charlie. “And I’ve got a horrible feeling he’s only just begun. It could get worse.”