Bookweird (12 page)

 

Don't Mind Me. I'm Just the Reader.

T
he tickle of something inside his nostril finally woke him up. He sniffed and snorted without opening his eyes. It smelled musty, like the basement or a hamster cage. Had he sleepwalked to the basement perhaps? I've got to stop staying up all night, Norman thought. It was two o'clock when I put Dora's book down last night. I don't even remember getting out of bed this morning. That's how bad it's getting. Maybe if I just open my eyes slowly and don't yawn, no one will notice I fell asleep again.

He did open them slowly, keeping his head leaned against the wall. It became clear what had been tickling his nose: straw. He was lying in straw. He knew exactly what had happened. He wanted to pretend he didn't, but he knew exactly.

“Tell me I'm not in my pyjamas, tell me I'm not wearing pyjamas,” he muttered to himself. It might be acceptable among rodents, but real people, even fictional ones, thought it was weird if you went out in your pyjamas. He let out a sigh of relief. There was something to be said for falling asleep with your clothes on. He stood up cautiously, brushing the straw from his jeans and T-shirt. He was in a barn. He was pretty sure he knew which barn, too. Sun was streaming in through the only window in the stall, illuminating the loose bits of dust and straw floating in the air. It was morning,
sunrise, in Dora's stupid horse book.

He had to stand on tiptoes to see out the window. He could see the farmhouse from here. It was exactly as he imagined it, a big two-storey house of red brick. A white porch was wrapped around it, and a copper weather vane turned slowly and silently on the highest of its steeply pitched roofs. A neatly raked path led from the house to the barn, and the grass on either side was a uniform shade of bright emerald green. Everything in this book was flawless. No weeds grew on the gravel paths. Nothing seemed dirty. It was as if every piece of wood, every fence rail, every barn board had been freshly painted that morning. Norman had been to a real farm and knew they were never like this.

The smart thing would have been to walk up to the house, introduce himself somehow to Amelie and try to explain why he was here and how he could help. The trouble was he had no idea why he was here and what he could do to help. He had to think of a story for Amelie. He couldn't just say, “Don't mind me, I'm just the reader. I'm here to help.”

Instead, Norman told himself he just needed some time to think and do a little investigation. Maybe he could figure out what the gypsies had done with the horse. It was a little girls' book, after all—how hard would it be to solve the mystery?

The horse barn was just as perfect as the rest of the farm. The door hinges didn't even squeak when he pushed his stall door open. This is what little girls like Dora imagined farms should be like, clean and fresh, smelling more like wildflowers than horse manure. It was probably just as well. From what Norman remembered, the smell of horse manure wasn't all that pleasant.

All this clean, tidy perfection made the scene in the last stall all the more disgusting. The stench struck Norman between the eyes as he opened the stall door. It was dark and oppressive, a bit like vomit, a bit like incense in the church his grandmother sometimes took him to. It made his stomach churn and his head spin. He had to grab the railing to make sure he didn't faint. He'd seen a little too much killing for a kid his age, Norman thought.
When he'd caught his breath, he raised his head and took another look. It looked as grim as it smelled. The blood had dried now, staining the straw a sickly brown colour, like an old cola stain. It was everywhere. Georges Saint-Saens was right: there was no way the horse could have survived all that. But why? Why would anyone do that?

Norman had a couple of theories. Most likely it didn't have anything to do with this book at all. The missing page had disturbed the story, and things were happening that shouldn't happen, things that didn't belong in
Fortune's Foal
at all, just like they had in Undergrowth. If this was true, then it was Norman's fault. The missing page from
The Brothers of Lochwarren
had started a chain reaction. It had infected Dora's book and changed it too. But maybe this could be fixed. Despite his intervention, the stoat rebellion in Undergrowth seemed to be going pretty much as planned. By introducing Malcolm to his uncle, Norman might have actually made things better…maybe. So maybe he just had to do the same sort of thing here. He had to fix things. But how could he fix a murdered horse?

Obviously, he had to find out who killed the horse. He had to put
that
right at least. And he had to find this Amelie girl another horse. That would fix things, wouldn't it? He wished he'd asked Dora who might have done it, who Amelie's enemies were, who her father's enemies were. It was probably the gypsies, but maybe that was too obvious. Norman would have to talk to Amelie carefully, see what she knew. Together they'd figure it out. But he had to get to her alone first. He had to find a way to explain to her.

“It's those goddamned gypsies. Those filthy horse butchers better not let me catch them.”

Norman turned around, startled. He had heard lots of worse swearing in real life, but this was pretty harsh for one of Dora's horsey novels. It was one of the stablehands. He spat on the ground to punctuate his threat to the unseen, long-gone gypsies.

“Why would they do something like this, anyway?” Norman asked. Without waiting for an answer, he introduced himself. “I'm
Norman, Amelie's cousin,” he declared quickly, very much to his own surprise.

He might as well have said that he was Zorba from the planet Omega 3 for all the stablehand seemed to care. He just nodded, as if he already knew.

“Who knows what those savages do? Most likely they carved it up for those filthy sausages they try to sell out at the farmers' market.” He came closer and whispered knowingly, “Though some say it's all part of some satanic gypsy sacrifice.”

“Satanic gypsy sacrifice?” Norman didn't do a very good job of disguising his incredulity, but the stablehand didn't seem to notice.

“They say those gypsies do all sorts of mischief, devil worship and all that. Usually it's just chickens and pigs they steal. Must be something awful big to call for the murdering of a horse.”

Norman nodded vaguely, as if agreeing. His eye was caught by a mark on the outside of the stall door. It was new and deep. Five deep gashes had been gouged into the greying wood, exposing the fresh yellow wood beneath.

“What are these?” he asked.

“Gypsy signs, probably,” the stablehand said, as if he was an expert on all these things. They didn't look like any kind of sign to Norman. They looked like claw marks, as if some huge cat had been stretching and sharpening its claws on the door.

“Last year the Greenlys over on the other side of the river found a gypsy ritual site near their farm,” the farmhand continued. “A bunch of burned animals laid out on a big slab of rock—squirrels, rabbits, skunks even. And they'd made one of their secret gypsy signs on the grass with the ashes.”

Norman made a grossed-out kind of face. Not that he really believed any of this, but it seemed to be the reaction that was expected of him. He didn't really know anything about gypsies. His only reference was a novel study his class had done on
The Painted Wagon,
and that had been mostly about prejudice and racism. Maybe there was more than one kind of gypsy.

“If the gypsy signs are secret, then how would you recognize them in the ashes?” Norman asked distractedly. It was hard to keep his eyes off the horrible scene in the horse stall. He couldn't stop his mind from speculating about those long scratches on the door.

“Well, none of us normal folks would do that,” the stablehand answered, as if it was obvious, “so they must have been gypsy signs.”

Norman turned to see if maybe he was joking, but the stablehand stared back, nodding and rocking slightly on his pitchfork, like someone delivering the cold, hard facts.

“I guess you're right.” It seemed easier just to agree.

Maybe Norman hadn't been completely believable. The stable-hand raised his chin as if to say “so long” and continued down the long aisle of the horse barn. Norman said, “See ya,” quietly, as he strode away.

The stablehand's story didn't really make sense. Norman didn't believe it, but it was another creepy thought to consider. Devil worshipping and animal sacrifices would be a pretty bad thing to appear in a book for eight-year-old girls, and Norman didn't like the idea that he might be responsible for their introduction. There seemed little more to discover in the horse stall. The book had described it accurately. It was an ugly and disgusting scene, but there weren't any obvious clues. Even the scratches could be nothing—somebody accidentally scraping the door with a farm tool. If this had been one of the detective books that Norman had been into last summer, he would have spotted some clue in the straw, a foreign cigarette butt or a button or some broken piece of jewellery that the police had missed. No such luck. It wasn't that kind of book. Even so, he thought he might as well take a look outside the barn to see if he could see anything peculiar.

Around the back of the barn, something very peculiar did in fact appear. Most of the farm was covered with almost perfect lawn—the sort you see on professional baseball fields and in front of houses in expensive subdivisions. The horses around this farm must trot around in slippers, Norman thought, because they never seemed to tear up the turf with their hooves. Here at the back of
the barn, though, was a patch of torn-up ground. A muddy trail led from a locked side door across a meadow toward a line of trees. Norman followed it slowly away from the barn, looking all the while for that telltale cigarette butt or the perfect shoe print. He tried not to get too excited. Surely the local sheriff had already followed this trail and extracted whatever clues there were to be had. It was that obvious. It was exactly the sort of trail that evil horse-murdering forces from outside the book would make when they snuck into a horse barn. The trail led to a wide clump of dense bush and trees, beyond which Norman could see nothing.

Norman had reached the edge of the field when he heard voices behind him. He turned to see a group of people following the same trail from the barn, too far away yet for him to recognize any of them. Norman returned his attention to the muddy trail. After the trees the field gave way to a sharp incline. About six feet below was a wide, fast-moving river. A boat was tied up to a tree by the banks. Not a small boat, either, but a long, narrow wooden boat—a barge, that was what they called them, a gaudily painted orange and green river barge.

The voices behind him were clearer now. He could just make out what they were saying.

“Are you sure he said he was my cousin—not a friend, someone from summer camp?” It was a girl's voice: Amelie. This was not good. This was not good at all. What on earth could he tell them? Norman turned around slowly to watch the little group of people coming toward him. He could make out Amelie, her father and the rumour-mongering stablehand from the barn. Norman raised his hand in a friendly greeting. Maybe if he just caught Amelie's eye and looked honest, she would go along with his story. Maybe there was a code word he could use to tip her off—something about her mother's accident, maybe.

A sound below on the river drew Norman's attention. There were people down there, too. Keeping one eye on the group approaching across the field, he edged closer to the river. Steadying himself against a low branch, he peered over the bank, but the branch
was springy rather than solid, bending under his weight and casting him forward. The sandy bank subsided beneath his feet and he began to slide slowly down the steep slope. Norman crouched, nearly sitting down on the loose ground to keep his balance as he slid. He grasped at the scrub to slow his descent, but his impression was that the voice more than any action on his part stopped his movement.

“Stop, boy. Don't move.” It was a thick foreign voice. A short, swarthy man stood on the riverbank, a small girl at his side. The girl's eyes were big and brown as they stared at Norman, stared as if he were a magical creature or something fearsome and mythical. Did she know? Did she somehow guess what he was? He could hardly ask the question, because the man beside her had his shotgun pointed at Norman's head.

“Get down on the ground. Put your hands over your ears,” he ordered gruffly. Norman just stared, dumbfounded. His assailant seemed to look right through him, as if Norman was too insignificant to look directly in the eye. Without looking away, the man whispered urgently to the girl at his side, “Leni, get back on the boat.” Though his voice was firm and insistent, neither Norman nor the girl obeyed. Norman began to edge closer to him and the girl just stood rooted on the spot, staring.