Bookweirdest (18 page)

“But how?” Malcolm asked. He leapt down to see the book his friend had left open on the floor.

Like most things bookweirdish, Norman could only guess how it worked. “I think it’s because Kit really isn’t in control of this
world, even though he made it. It’s just made up of scraps of books and other stories he’s stolen. When he wrote the story yesterday, he couldn’t help making it true. I guess that’s why my mom wanted him to write about his childhood, because that would mean writing about the real Shrubberies, and the real Shrubberies has a library.”

“So it’s not a dead end anymore?” Malcolm asked, glancing again at
Intrepids at Sea
. “We can get into any of these books here?”

Norman nodded. “And from there, hopefully, to San Savino.”

“Your uncle said there was a copy of
The Secret in the Library
in the British Library. You think we could get there from Kelmsworth?” He held up
Intrepids at Sea
hopefully. “If anyone can get us into the British Library, it would be Georgie and the Gingers.”

“It could work. They might even have a copy of their own—Kelmsworth had a pretty big library—but I was hoping …”

Malcolm read his thoughts. “You were hoping that Kit’s story would bring
The Secret in the Library
back.”

Norman’s eyes roamed the room until they lit upon the rolltop desk in the corner. The desk was new, or new to Norman, but this was the library as it had appeared during Kit’s childhood. Likely the desk had been there when Meg and Kit were children.

“Do you think it’s still there, like in Kit’s story?” the stoat asked.

Norman tried the top left-hand drawer, but it was locked.

“Malcolm?” The desk might look impregnable to a human, but Malcolm had a stoat’s eye view of it.

“Lift the rolltop for me,” he urged.

Norman did as he was told and rolled up the top of the desk. The stoat needed only a couple of inches of gap to duck in among the old papers and notebooks. In a blink, he had all the small interior drawers out and had emptied their contents. Old coins, pins, stamps and paper clips were strewn across the desktop. In a flash, he dove into one of the drawer openings—just stuck his head in and disappeared inside. It looked impossibly small for him, but Norman knew that most of the stoat’s apparent size was fur and he could squeeze into very tiny holes. A scratching noise now ran though the innards of the desk, as Malcolm descended through
whatever gaps he found in the joinery. It was impossible to know where he was from the scratching, but it was obvious that something was in there somewhere. If they ever had to haunt anyone (and it wouldn’t be the first time!), the stoat-in-the-desk trick was a good one.

All at once, the shuffling stopped, and there was a click and then silence. Norman waited anxiously, not sure what the silence meant. Was Malcolm stuck? Was he going to have to saw the desk apart to rescue his friend? But three tiny knocks from inside the top left-hand drawer stopped this line of thinking. When Norman pulled on the drawer this time, it slid open easily to reveal Malcolm standing in the bottom. The stoat blinked and shook his head, sending up a cloud of dust and woodchips that made him cough and splutter.

“This—
cough, chuff
—what you’re looking for?” Malcolm managed to ask, pointing to the book under his feet. He punctuated his question with a tiny comical sneeze.

It was indeed what they were looking for. The navy blue cloth cover and the silver-embossed lettering were both newer than when Norman had seen them last, but it was recognizably the same book
—The Secret in the Library
. Malcolm stepped aside so that Norman could lift it out. He opened it to the first page, and stoat and human boy read the inscription out loud: “To my little adventurer. May it be good company on your travels.”

The inscription was in pale blue ink, the script elegant and old-fashioned, a little blurry around the edges, the mark of a fountain pen. There was no signature.

“Was this there when we last saw it?” Malcolm could not recall reading any inscription.

“Not that I remember, but we may have missed it. Or maybe it’s new. This was the inscription in Kit’s story, so maybe it used to be there. He could have conjured it as he remembered it, or maybe the paper was cut out by the time we got the book. I never looked that closely.”

“So what now?” Malcolm asked eagerly. “We find a nice page for you to enter and you have a little midnight snack?”

“I suppose,” Norman said hesitantly.

Together they leafed through the pages of
The Secret in the Library
. The first time they’d stumbled across it, the book had grabbed them right away. There hadn’t been time to read beyond the first two chapters, but boy and stoat both agreed that they knew how the novel was supposed to end.
The Secret in the Library
didn’t have two plot lines for nothing. One plot was about Jerome, who was delivered to San Savino on horseback by a dying knight. The other was about Johan Vilnius, the leader of the Livonian Knights, and his escape from the dungeons of the evil Black John of Nantes. It didn’t take a genius to see that the boy had to be the Crusader’s long-lost son. At some point, they would be reunited to defeat Black John together. Norman and Malcolm would have to read more of the novel to find out how, but there was no time for that now. They just knew that they had to get into the book before John of Nantes’s threatening first visit, before Norman was captured, and before Nantes launched his attack on San Savino. And this time, Norman had to do a better job of hiding.

For an hour, they sat on the carpet in the library and pored over the book together, arguing about where to ingress.

“Let’s let the book decide,” Norman suggested, putting the book down and yawning. The excitement of sneaking into the library had worn off and he was exhausted.

“Do they talk to you now, then?” Malcolm asked, not completely sarcastically.

“No, let’s just put it down and see where it opens.” He hadn’t really meant it when he’d first said it, but it was starting to sound like a good idea. Why not let the book decide?

Malcolm rubbed his eyes and shook his head in disbelief. “And if it opens to John of Nantes running someone through with a sword?”

“Then I guess we’ll know not to trust the book to decide.”

Malcolm shrugged. It was worth a try. Norman closed the book solemnly and then placed it spine first down on the carpet. It flopped open to a page about a third of the way in. The boys read it eagerly.

“This won’t work. It’s after Nantes visited the castle, after he captured you. You’re already tied up in the tent outside. The attack will start any minute.”

“Let’s try again.”

Norman closed the book and once again placed it down on the carpet spine first. Once again they watched it flop open.

“Same page!” Malcolm cried when he saw where it had opened. “Try again.”

They performed the test again and again. Each time, the book opened to the same page. Boy and stoat exchanged significant looks.

“When this book decides something, it doesn’t change its mind,” Malcolm concluded.

Norman nodded and gulped. “I guess this is it, then.” His hand hovered over the page. To be honest, he felt a little uncomfortable about eating a page from this book. If it was as rare as Kit claimed—if all the other copies were locked away somewhere—they might be destroying the last available copy. Norman was afraid of losing his ingress, but more than that, he felt guilty removing a book from the world. And it was his mother’s favourite, after all.

He got a firm grip on the page and prepared to give it one good tug to get it over with, like yanking a tooth or pulling off a bandage. He even closed his eyes. But still, he couldn’t do it. Closing the book again, he considered his options.

“Let’s try this,” he said, opening the book to the first page again. “We’ll copy it out, but we’ll use the book’s own paper. That’s as close as I dare come to eating a real page.”

The closest thing to a blank page was the fly-leaf on the inside of the front cover. The inscription was on one side, but the other was entirely blank.

“Let me,” Malcolm offered, whipping out his sword. Norman nodded for him to proceed, and the stoat king went to work. He made quick work of it, running the blade along the edge of the paper, closer to the stitched seam than Norman would have been able to. The cut was clean and straight. The book appeared undamaged. If you didn’t know that the page was supposed to be there, you would never know it was missing.

“Well done,” Norman told him, and he set about copying the page they’d selected, or rather the page that had selected them. “I wish Esme was here,” he said when he was about halfway through. “Her handwriting is so much better.”

“And smaller,” Malcolm agreed. “Your chicken scratch is an insult to chickens.”

Norman ate the page right there, still sitting on the rug in the library. There was no point waiting.

“What’ll we do with the book, then?” Malcolm asked as he watched Norman laboriously chew and swallow the page. “Should we put it back?”

Now that they’d finally found it, Norman didn’t like the idea of letting it go. “There’s still some room in the knapsack.”

“You’re turning into a right paper hoarder, aren’t you? I have to be careful now in here. I’m liable to die of a paper cut.” But Malcolm made some room for
The Secret in the Library
among the granola bars, rabbit baking and various loose sheets of paper.

Back in Norman’s room, they both waited for sleep to come to them. They’d thought that if they woke up and did the book-eating business in the night, they’d save a day waiting for the bookweird, but the whole plan depended on them being able to fall asleep again before dawn. Only minutes ago in the library, they had both been yawning and rubbing their eyes. Now, knowing where they were going and what they might find there, sleep didn’t come so easily.

The sound of Malcolm fidgeting in the knapsack told Norman that he wasn’t the only one struggling to get back to sleep. “Funny,” he said. “Jerome is lying awake and worrying right now too.”

“I never could sleep the night before a battle,” Malcolm replied, his voice muffled by the canvas of the bag.

“If we’re lucky, we won’t have to fight.”

“Aye, and we’ve been famously lucky so far,” the stoat replied. There was a long silence before he said anything else. “Besides, I’m spoiling for a fight myself.”

That was the last thing either of them said, but it was still a long while before they managed to return to sleep.

T
he scent gave it away—the smell of old wood, books and dust, and beneath that, the dry smell of the desert. They had done it. The room they had woken up in was completely without light, but there was no doubt that it was San Savino. That scent of Jerome’s desert hideaway was unmistakable.

A rustling of paper and canvas was all that gave Malcolm away. Even this close, Norman could not see him, unless perhaps that was the glint of moonlight reflecting off the blade of his sword. Norman felt the stoat before he heard him again, just a gentle tug on his arm that told him Malcolm was climbing up to his shoulder, then the swish of his tail on his neck.

“We’re not alone,” Malcolm whispered in his ear. “Wait here while I circle round.”

Norman remained as still and silent as possible while the stoat reconnoitred the room. Malcolm’s hearing and night vision were much better than his. Already the stoat was proving his usefulness. Norman would never have known there was someone else in the library with them. But who was it? Was it Brother Godwyn, finishing up for the night? Surely Godwyn would carry a candle, unless he had come here to sleep, guarding Jerome’s hiding place. Norman fervently wanted to believe this. He did not want to
believe that there was another intruder in the castle, one of John of Nantes’s spies or assassins skulking around in the dark, perhaps. Where was Malcolm? He certainly was taking his time.