Inkspell (7 page)

Elinor stared at him all the time without any embarrassment and with as much hostility as she had shown in scrutinizing Dustfinger when he had sat at her kitchen table, feeding his marten bread and ham. She hadn’t let Farid bring the marten into the house with him. “And if he eats a single songbird in my garden he’d better watch out!” she said as the marten scurried away over the pale gravel. She had bolted the door after him, as if Gwin could open locked doors as easily as his master.

Farid played with a book of matches as he told his tale.

“Look at that!” Elinor whispered to Meggie. “Just like the matchstick-eater. Don’t you think he looks a lot like him?”

But Meggie did not reply. She didn’t want to miss a word of the story Farid had to tell. She wanted to hear everything about Dustfinger’s return, about the man with the hellhound who read aloud so well, about the snarling creature that could have been one of the big cats from the Wayless Wood – and about the words that Basta had shouted after Farid: “You can run, but I’ll get you yet, do you hear? You, the fire-eater, Silvertongue and his hoity-toity daughter – and the old man who wrote those accursed words! I’ll kill you all! One by one!”

While Farid told his story, Resa’s eyes kept straying to the grubby piece of paper he had put down on the kitchen table. She looked at it as if she were afraid of it, as if the words on that paper could draw her back again. Back to the Inkworld. When Farid repeated the threat Basta had shouted, she put her arms around Meggie and held her close. But Darius, who had been sitting next to Elinor in silence all this time, buried his face in his hands. Farid didn’t waste much time describing how he had gotten to Elinor’s house on his bare, bloody feet. In answer to Meggie’s questions, he just muttered something about getting a lift from a truck driver. He ended
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his account abruptly, as if he had suddenly run out of words, and when he fell silent it was very quiet in the big kitchen.

Farid had brought an invisible guest with him. Fear.

“Put more coffee on, Darius!” said Elinor as she looked gloomily at the table laid for supper. No one was taking any notice of it. “This could be iced tea, it’s so cold.”

Darius set to work at once, busy and eager, like a bespectacled squirrel, while Elinor gave Farid a glance as cold as if he were personally responsible for the bad news he had brought. Meggie still remembered just how alarming she had once found that look. “The woman with pebble eyes,”

she had secretly called Elinor. Sometimes the name still fitted.

“What a terrific story!” exclaimed Elinor as Resa went to give Darius a hand; Farid’s news had obviously made him so nervous that he couldn’t measure out the right amount of ground coffee.

He had just begun counting the spoonfuls he was tipping into the filter for the third time when Resa gently took the measuring spoon from his hand.

“So Basta’s back with a brand-new knife and a mouth full of peppermint leaves, I suspect. Bloody hell!” Elinor was apt to swear when she was anxious or annoyed. “As if it wasn’t bad enough waking up every third night drenched in sweat because I’ve seen his foxy face in my dreams ..

not to mention his knife. But let’s try to keep calm! Look at it like this: Basta knows where I live, but obviously it’s Mo and Meggie he’s after, not me, so this house ought really to be safe as –

well, safe as houses, for you. After all, he’s not likely to know you’ve moved in here, is he?” She looked at Resa and Meggie triumphantly, as if this were a conclusive argument.

But Meggie’s response made Elinor’s face darken again at once. “Farid knew,” she pointed out.

“So he did,” growled Elinor, her glance turning to Farid again. “You knew, too. How?”

Her voice was so sharp that Farid instinctively flinched. “An old woman told us,” he said in a wavering voice. “We went back to Capricorn’s village after the fairies Dustfinger took with him turned to ashes. He wanted to see if the same thing had happened to the others. The whole village was deserted, not a soul in sight, not even a stray dog. Only ashes, ashes everywhere. So we went to the next village and tried to find out just what had happened, and .. well, that was when we heard how a fat woman had been there, saying something about dead fairies, but at least, she said, luckily the human beings hadn’t died on her, too, and they were living with her now. . ”

Elinor lowered her gaze guiltily and collected a few crumbs from her plate with one finger.

“Damn it,” she muttered. “Yes. Perhaps I did say rather too much in that shop when I phoned you from there. I was in such a state after seeing the empty village! How could I guess those gossips would tell Dustfinger about me? Dustfinger, of all people! Since when do old women talk to someone like him?”

Or to someone like Basta, thought Meggie.

But Farid just shrugged his shoulders, rose to his feet, which were now covered with bandages, and began limping up and down Elinor’s kitchen. “Dustfinger thought you’d all be here in any case,” he said. “We even passed this way once because he wanted to see if she was all right.”

He jerked his head Resa’s way. Elinor snorted scornfully. “Oh, did he, indeed? How good of him.”

She had never liked Dustfinger, and the fact that he had stolen the book from Mo before disappearing had done little to lessen her dislike. Resa, however, smiled at Farid’s words, though she tried to hide her smile from Elinor. Meggie still clearly remembered the morning when Darius had brought her mother the strange little bundle he’d found outside the front door – a candle, a few pencils, and a box of matches, all tied up with stems of blue speedwell. Meggie had known at once who the bundle came from. And so did Resa.

“Well,” said Elinor, drumming on her plate with the handle of her knife, “I’m delighted to hear that the matchstick-eater’s back where he belongs. The very idea of him slinking around my house by night! It’s just a pity he didn’t take Basta, too.”

Basta! When Elinor said his name Resa suddenly rose from her chair, went out into the corridor, and came back with the telephone. She held it out to Meggie with a look of entreaty in her eyes and began gesticulating so excitedly with her other hand that even Meggie had difficulty in reading the signs she traced in the air. But finally she understood.

Resa wanted her to call Mo. Of course.

It seemed forever before he came to the phone. He’d probably been working. When Mo was away he always worked late into the night, so that he could get home sooner.

“Meggie?” He sounded surprised. Perhaps he thought she was calling because of their quarrel, but who’d be interested in that stupid argument now?

It was some time before he could make anything of the words she was hastily stammering out.

“Slowly, Meggie!” he kept saying. “Take it slowly.” But that was easier said than done when your heart was in your mouth, and Basta might be waiting at Elinor’s garden gate this very minute ..

Meggie didn’t even dare to think this idea through to its logical conclusion.

Mo, on the other hand, remained strangely calm – almost as if he had expected the past to catch up with them again. “Stories never really end, Meggie,” he had once told her, “even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.” “Has Elinor switched on the burglar alarm?” he asked now. “Yes.”

“Has she told the police?”

“No. She says they wouldn’t believe her, anyway.”

“She ought to call them, all the same. And give them a description of Basta. You can describe him between you, right?” What a question! Meggie had tried to forget Basta’s face, but it would live on in her memory for the rest of her life, as clear as a photograph.

“Listen, Meggie.” Perhaps Mo wasn’t quite as calm as he pretended. His voice didn’t sound the same as usual. “I’ll drive back tonight. Tell Elinor and your mother. I’ll be with you by tomorrow morning at the latest. Bolt everything and keep the windows closed, understand?”

Meggie nodded, forgetting that Mo couldn’t see her over the phone. “Meggie?”

“Yes, I understand.” She tried to sound calm and brave, even if she didn’t feel that way. She was scared, badly scared. “See you tomorrow, Meggie!”

She could tell from his voice that he was going to set out right away. And suddenly, seeing the moonlit road in her mind’s eye, the long road back, a new and terrible thought came into her
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mind. .

“What about you?” she exclaimed. “Mo! Suppose Basta’s lying in wait for you somewhere?” But her father had already hung up. Elinor decided to put Farid where Dustfinger had once slept: in the attic room, where crates of books were stacked high around the narrow bedstead. Anyone who slept there would surely dream of being struck dead by printed paper. Meggie was told to show Farid the way, and when she wished him good night he just nodded abstractedly.

He looked very lost sitting on the narrow bed – almost as lost as on the day when Mo had read him into Capricorn’s church, a thin, nameless boy with a turban over his black hair.

That night, before she went to sleep, Elinor checked the burglar alarm several times to make sure it really was switched on. As for Darius, he went to find the rifle that Elinor sometimes fired into the air if she saw a cat prowling under one of the birds’ nests in her garden. Wearing the orange bathrobe that Elinor had given him last Christmas – it was much too big for him – he settled down in the armchair in the entrance hall, the rifle on his lap, staring at the front door with a determined expression. But when Elinor came to check the alarm for the second time he was already fast asleep.

It was a long time before Meggie could sleep. She looked at the shelves where her notebooks used to stand, stroked the empty wood, and finally kneeled down by the red-painted box that Mo had made long ago for her favourite books. She hadn’t opened it for months. There wasn’t room in it for a single extra book, and by now it was too heavy for her to take it when she went away.

So Elinor had given her the bookcase to hold more of the books she loved. It stood beside Meggie’s bed, and it had glass doors, and carvings that twined over the dark wood, making it look as if it hadn’t forgotten that it was once alive. And the shelves behind the glass doors were well filled, for by now Resa and Elinor, as well as Mo, gave Meggie books, and even Darius brought her a new one now and then. But her old friends, the books Meggie had already owned before they had moved in with Elinor, still lived in the box, and when she opened the heavy lid it was almost as if half-forgotten voices met her ears and familiar faces were looking at her. How well worn they all were. . “Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said when, on Meggie’s last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. “As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells .. and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . both strange and familiar.”

Slightly younger, yes. Meggie picked up one of the books lying on top and leafed through it.

She had read it at least a dozen times. Ah, here was the scene she had liked best when she was eight, and there was the one she had marked with a red pencil when she was ten because she thought it was so beautiful. She ran her finger down the wobbly line. There’d been no Resa in her life then, no Elinor, no Darius, only Mo .. no longing to see blue fairies, no memories of a scarred face, a marten with little horns, and a boy who always went barefoot, no memory of Basta and his knife. A different Meggie had read that book, very different .. and there she would stay between its pages, preserved as a memento.

With a sigh, Meggie closed the book again and put it back with the others. She could hear her mother pacing up and down next door. Did she, like Meggie, keep thinking of the threat that Basta had shouted after Farid?
I ought to go to her
, thought Meggie.
Perhaps our fear won’t be
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so bad if we’re together.
But just as she was getting up Resa’s footsteps died away, and it was quiet in the room next door, quiet as sleep. Maybe sleep wasn’t a bad idea. Mo certainly wouldn’t arrive any sooner just because she was awake and waiting for him. . Oh, if only she could at least have called him, but he was always forgetting to’ switch his cell phone on.

Meggie closed the lid of her book box softly, as if the sound might wake Resa again, and blew out the candles that she lit every evening although Elinor was always telling her not to. As she was taking her T-shirt off over her head, she heard a knock at her door, a very quiet knock. She opened the door, expecting to see her mother outside because she couldn’t sleep after all, but it was Farid. He went scarlet in the face when he saw that she was wearing only her underclothes.

He stammered an apology and before Meggie could say anything limped away again on his lavishly bandaged feet. She almost forgot to put the T-shirt back on before going after him.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered anxiously as she beckoned him back into her room. “Did you hear anything downstairs?”

But Farid shook his head. He was holding the piece of paper in his hand: Dustfinger’s return ticket, as Elinor had tartly described it. Hesitantly, he followed Meggie into her room, and looked around it like someone who doesn’t feel comfortable in enclosed spaces. Ever since he had disappeared with Dustfinger, leaving no trace behind, he had probably spent most of his days and nights in the open air.

“I’m sorry,” Farid stammered, staring at his toes. Two of Resa’s bandages were already peeling off. “I know it’s late, but –” And for the first time he looked Meggie in the eye, turning red again as he did so. “But Orpheus says he didn’t read it all,” he went on, his voice hesitating. “He just left out the words that would have taken me into the book, too. He did it on purpose, but I have to warn Dustfinger, so .. ”