‘Do you really have any idea how you might be able to read Dustfinger back into his story? Or were you making it up?’
‘Nonsense. I’m useless at telling lies, as you know.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Meggie couldn’t help smiling. ‘Well, what’s your idea?’
‘I’ll tell you when I know if it works.’
Mo was still leafing through Elinor’s book. Frowning, he read a page, turned it over and read another.
‘Please, Mo!’ Meggie moved closer to him. ‘Just one poem. A tiny little poem. Please. For me.’
He sighed. ‘Just one?’
Meggie nodded.
Outside the noise of the cars had died down. The world was as quiet as if it had spun itself into a cocoon, like a moth preparing itself to slip out in the morning, young again and good as new.
‘Please, Mo, read to me!’ said Meggie.
So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained-glass pictures, tickling the skin. Even when Meggie nodded off she could still hear them, although Mo had closed the book long ago. Words that explained the world to her, its dark side and its light side, words that built a wall to keep out bad dreams. And not a single bad dream came over the wall for the rest of that night.
Next morning, a bird flew down and perched on Meggie’s bed, a bird as orange as the light of last night’s moon. She tried to catch it, but it flew away to the window where the blue sky was waiting for it. It collided with the invisible glass again and again, bumping its tiny head, until Mo opened the window and let it out.
‘Well, do you still wish you could do it?’ asked Mo when Meggie had watched the bird fly away until it merged with the blue of the sky.
‘It was beautiful!’ she said.
‘Yes, but will it like this world?’ asked Mo. ‘And what’s gone to replace it in the world it came from?’
Meggie stayed by the window as Mo went downstairs to pay their bill. She remembered the last poem that Mo had read before she fell asleep. She picked up the book from her bedside table, hesitated for a moment – and opened it.
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Meggie whispered the words aloud as she read them, but no moon-bird flew down from the lamp. And she must be just imagining the smell of peppermint.
24
Fenoglio
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Mark Twain,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Dustfinger and Farid were waiting for them in the car park when they left the hotel. Over the nearby hills, a warm wind was slowly driving rain-clouds towards the sea. Everything seemed grey today, even the houses with their bright colour-washed walls and the flowering shrubs in the streets. Mo took the coastal road, which Elinor had said was built by the Romans, and followed it further west.
All through the drive the sea lay to their left, its water stretching to the horizon, sometimes hidden by houses, sometimes by trees, but this morning it didn’t look half as inviting as it had on the day when Meggie had come down from the mountains with Elinor and Dustfinger. The grey of the sky cast a dull reflection on the blue waves, and the sea-spray foamed like dirty dishwater. Several times, Meggie found her gaze wandering to the hills on her right. Capricorn’s village was hidden somewhere among them. Once she even thought she saw its pale church tower in a dark fold of the hills, and her heart beat faster, although she knew that it couldn’t possibly be Capricorn’s church. Her feet remembered all too well how long that endless journey down the mountainside had been.
Mo was driving faster than usual, much faster. He could obviously hardly wait to reach their destination. After a good hour they turned off the coast road and followed a narrow, winding lane through a valley grey with buildings. Glasshouses covered the hills here, their panes painted white for protection against the sun that was now hidden behind clouds. Only when the road went uphill did the country on both sides turn green again. The buildings gave way to natural meadowland, and stunted olive trees lined the road, which forked unexpectedly a couple of times. Mo had to keep consulting the map he had bought, but finally the right name appeared on a sign.
They drove into a small village, little more than a square, a few dozen houses, and a church that looked very much like Capricorn’s. When Meggie got out of the car she saw the sea far below. The waves were so rough on this overcast day that, even from this distance, she could see the breakers. Mo had parked in the village square beside the memorial for the dead of two world wars. The list of names was long for such a small place. Meggie thought there were almost as many names as the village had houses.
‘You can leave the car unlocked. I’ll keep an eye on it,’ said Dustfinger, as Mo was about to lock up. He threw his rucksack over his shoulder, put the sleepy Gwin on his chain, and sat on the steps in front of the war memorial. Farid sat down beside him without a word. Meggie looked uneasily at them both as she followed Mo.
‘Remember, you promised not to mention me!’ Dustfinger called after them.
‘Yes, all right!’ replied Mo.
Farid was playing with matches again. Meggie caught him at it when she looked round once more. By now he could extinguish the burning matches with his mouth quite well, but all the same Dustfinger took the box of matches away from him, and Farid looked sadly at his empty hands.
Meggie had met many people who loved books, sold them, collected them, printed them or, like her father, prevented them from falling apart, but she had never before met anyone who wrote the words that filled all a book’s pages. She didn’t even know the names of the authors of some of her favourite stories, let alone what they looked like. She had seen only the characters who emerged from the words to meet her, never the writer who had made them up. It was just as Mo had said: in general one thought of writers as dead or very, very old. But the man who opened the door to them, after Mo had rung the bell twice, was neither. That is, he was certainly quite old, at least in Meggie’s eyes: in his mid-sixties or even older. His face was wrinkled like a turtle’s, but his hair was black, without a trace of grey (she was to find out later that he dyed it), and he didn’t look at all fragile. On the contrary: he planted himself so impressively in the doorway that Meggie was instantly tongue-tied. Luckily Mo was not.
‘Signor Fenoglio?’ he asked.
‘Yes?’ The face looked less forthcoming than ever. There was disapproval in every line of it. But Mo seemed undaunted.
‘I’m Mortimer Folchart,’ he introduced himself, ‘and this is my daughter Meggie. I’m here about one of your books.’
A boy appeared at the door beside Fenoglio, a little boy of about five, and a small girl joined them on the other side of the doorway. She stared curiously, first at Mo, then at Meggie. ‘Pippo’s picked the chocolate chips out of the cake,’ Meggie heard her whisper as she looked anxiously up at Mo. When his eyes twinkled at her she disappeared behind Fenoglio’s back, giggling. But Fenoglio himself still looked anything but friendly.
‘All the chocolate chips?’ he growled. ‘Very well, I’m coming. You go and tell Pippo he’s in serious trouble.’ The little girl nodded and ran away, obviously happy to be the bearer of bad news. The small boy clung to Fenoglio’s leg.
‘A very particular book,’ Mo went on. ‘Inkheart. You wrote it quite a long time ago, and unfortunately I can’t buy a copy anywhere now.’ With the man’s icy stare still re
sting on her father, Meggie could only marvel that the words didn’t freeze on Mo’s lips.
‘Oh yes. So?’ Fenoglio crossed his arms. The girl appeared on his left again. ‘Pippo’s hiding,’ she said.
‘That won’t do him any good,’ said Fenoglio. ‘I can always find him.’ The little girl scurried off again. Meggie heard her in the house, calling to the chocolate thief. Fenoglio, however, turned back to Mo. ‘So what do you want? If you’re planning to ask me clever questions of some kind about the book, forget it. I don’t have time for that sort of thing. Anyway, as you said yourself, I wrote it ages ago.’
‘No, there’s only one question I was going to ask. I’d like to know if you still have any copies, and if so may I buy one from you?’
The old man’s expression was no longer quite so forbidding as he inspected Mo. ‘How extraordinary. You must be really keen on the book,’ he murmured. ‘I’m flattered. Although,’ he added, and his face darkened again, ‘I hope you’re not one of those idiots who collect rare books just because they’re rare, are you?’
Mo couldn’t help smiling. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to read it, that’s all. I just want to read it.’
Fenoglio braced an arm against the door frame and looked at the house opposite as if he feared it might collapse at any moment. The street where he lived was so narrow that Mo could have touched both sides at once if he stretched his arms out. Many of the houses were built of coarse blocks of sandy grey stone, like the houses in Capricorn’s village, but here there were flowers in window boxes and pots of plants on the steps, and many of the shutters looked as if they had been freshly painted. There was a pram outside one house, a moped leaning against the wall of another, and voices floated into the street from open windows. Capricorn’s village probably looked like this once, thought Meggie.
An old woman passing by looked suspiciously at the strangers. Fenoglio nodded to her, murmured a brief greeting, and waited until she had vanished behind a green-painted front door. ‘Inkheart,’ he said. ‘That really is a long time ago. And it’s odd that you should be asking about that one, of all my books.’
The girl came back. She tugged Fenoglio’s sleeve and whispered something in his ear. Fenoglio’s turtle face twisted in a smile. Meggie liked him better that way. ‘Oh, that’s where he always hides, Paula,’ he told the little girl softly. ‘Perhaps you should advise him to try a better hiding-place.’
Paula ran off for the fourth time, but not before gazing curiously at Meggie first.
‘Well, you’d better come in,’ said Fenoglio. Without another word he showed Mo and Meggie into the house, went down a dark, narrow passage ahead of them, limping because the little boy was still clinging to his leg like a monkey, and pushed open the door to the kitchen, where the ruins of a cake stood on the table. Its brown icing was as full of holes as the binding of a book when bookworms have been gnawing at it for years.
‘Pippo?’ Fenoglio bellowed so loud that even Meggie jumped, although she didn’t feel guilty of any naughtiness. ‘I know you can hear me. And I warn you I shall tie a knot in your nose for every hole in this cake. Understand?’
Meggie heard a giggle. It seemed to come from the cupboard next to the fridge. Fenoglio broke a piece off the cake with the holes still in it. ‘Paula,’ he said, ‘give this girl a slice if she doesn’t mind the missing chocolate.’ Paula emerged from under the table and looked enquiringly at Meggie.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Meggie, whereupon Paula took a huge knife, cut an enormous piece of cake, and put it on the table in front of her.
‘Pippo, let’s have one of the rose-patterned plates,’ said Fenoglio, and a hand stuck out of the cupboard holding a plate in its chocolate-brown fingers. Meggie was quick to take the plate before it dropped, and put the piece of cake on it.
‘What about you?’ Fenoglio asked Mo.
‘I’d prefer the book,’ said Mo. He was looking rather pale.
Fenoglio removed the little boy from his leg and sat down. ‘Go and find another tree to climb, Rico,’ he said. Then he looked thoughtfully at Mo. ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a single copy left. They were stolen, all of them. I lent them to an exhibition of old children’s books in Genoa: a lavishly illustrated special edition, a copy with a signed dedication by the illustrator, and the two copies that belonged to my own children with all their scribbled comments – I always asked them to mark the bits they liked best – and finally my own personal copy. Every last one of them was stolen two days after the exhibition opened.’
Mo ran a hand over his face as if he could wipe the disappointment off it. ‘Stolen,’ he said. ‘Of course.’
‘Of course?’ Fenoglio narrowed his eyes and looked at Mo with great curiosity. ‘You’ll have to explain. In fact I’m not letting you out of my house until I find out why you’re interested in this of all my books. In fact, I might set the children on you – and you wouldn’t like that!’
Mo tried for a smile, without much success. ‘My copy was stolen as well,’ he said at last. ‘And that was a very special edition too.’
‘Extraordinary.’ Fenoglio raised his eyebrows, which were like hairy caterpillars creeping above his eyes. ‘Come on, let’s hear your story.’ All the hostility had vanished from his face. Curiosity, pure curiosity, had won out. In Fenoglio’s eyes Meggie saw the same insatiable hunger for a good story that overcame her at the sight of any new and exciting book.
‘There’s not much to tell,’ said Mo. Meggie heard in his voice that he didn’t intend to tell the old man the truth. ‘I restore books. That’s how I make my living. I found yours in a second-hand bookshop some years ago, and I was going to give it a new binding and then sell it, but I liked it so much I kept it instead. And now it’s been stolen and I’ve been trying in vain to buy another copy. A friend who knows a great deal about rare books and how to get hold of them finally suggested I might try the author himself. She was the person who found me your address. So I came here.’
Fenoglio wiped a few cake crumbs off the table. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘but that’s not the whole story.’
‘What do you mean?’
The old man scrutinised Mo’s face until he turned his head away and looked out of the narrow kitchen window. ‘I mean I can smell a good story miles away, so don’t try keeping one from me. Out with it! And then you can have a piece of this magnificently perforated cake.’
Paula clambered up on to Fenoglio’s lap, nestled her head under his chin, and looked at Mo as expectantly as the old man himself.
But Mo shook his head. ‘No, I think I’d better say no more. You wouldn’t believe a word of it anyway.’
‘Oh, I’d believe all manner of things!’ Fenoglio assured Mo, cutting him a slice of cake. ‘I’d believe any story at all just so long as it’s well told.’
The cupboard door opened a crack, and Meggie saw a boy’s head emerge. ‘What about my punishment?’ he asked. Judging by the fingers, which were sticky with chocolate, this must be Pippo.
‘Later,’ said Fenoglio. ‘I have something else to do now.’
Disappointed, Pippo came out of the cupboard. ‘You said you were going to tie knots in my nose.’
‘Double knots, seaman’s knots, butterfly knots, any knots you fancy, but I have to hear this story first. So go and fool about with something else until I have time for you.’
Pippo stuck his lower lip out sulkily and disappeared into the corridor. Rico, the little boy, ran after him.
Mo remained silent, pushing cake crumbs off the worn table-top, drawing invisible patterns on the wood with his forefinger. ‘There’s someone in this story, and I’ve promised not to tell you about him,’ he said at last.
‘Keeping a bad promise makes it no better,’ said Fenoglio. ‘Or at least so a favourite book of mine says.’
‘I don’t know if it was a bad promise.’ Mo sighed, and looked up at the ceiling as if the answer might be found there. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell y
ou. But Dustfinger will murder me if he finds out.’
‘Dustfinger? I once called a character that. Oh yes, of course, the poor trickster in Inkheart. I killed him off in the last chapter but one. A very touching scene. I cried while I was writing it.’
Meggie almost choked on the piece of cake she had just put in her mouth, but Fenoglio went on calmly. ‘I haven’t killed off many of my characters, but sometimes it just happens. Death scenes aren’t easy to write – they can too easily get sentimental – but I thought I did pretty well with Dustfinger’s death.’
Horrified, Meggie looked at Mo. ‘He dies? Did – did you know that?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ve read the whole story, Meggie.’
‘But why didn’t you tell him?’
‘He didn’t want to know.’
Fenoglio was following this exchange with a puzzled look on his face – and with great curiosity.
‘Who kills him?’ asked Meggie. ‘Basta?’
‘Ah, Basta!’ Fenoglio smiled. Each of his separate wrinkles expressed self-satisfaction. ‘One of the best villains I ever thought up. A rabid dog, but not half as bad as my other dark hero, Capricorn. Basta would let his heart be torn out for Capricorn, but his master is a stranger to such loyalty. He feels nothing, nothing at all, he doesn’t even enjoy his own cruelty. Yes, I really did think up some pretty dark characters for Inkheart, and then there’s the Shadow, Capricorn’s hound, as I always called him to myself. Though of course that’s far too friendly a name for such a monster.’
‘The Shadow?’ Meggie’s voice was hardly more than a whisper. ‘Does he kill Dustfinger?’
‘No, no. I’m sorry, I’d quite forgotten your question. Once I begin talking about my characters it’s hard to stop me. No, one of Capricorn’s men kills Dustfinger. It was a very successful scene. Dustfinger has some kind of tame marten. Capricorn’s man wants to kill it because he enjoys killing small animals, so Dustfinger tries to save his furry friend and dies in the attempt.’
Meggie said nothing. Poor Dustfinger, she thought. Poor, poor Dustfinger. She couldn’t think of anything else. ‘Which of Capricorn’s men does it?’ she asked. ‘Flatnose? Or Cockerell?’
Fenoglio looked at her in surprise. ‘Well, fancy that. You know all their names? I usually forget them soon after I’ve made them up.’
‘It’s neither of them, Meggie,’ said Mo. ‘The murderer’s name isn’t even mentioned in the book. A whole pack of Capricorn’s men is hunting Gwin, and one of them draws a knife and uses it. A man who’s probably still waiting for Dustfinger.’