The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (23 page)

As if reading my mind, Cobweb flung his remaining hand out in a flourish. A silk web sprang from it like a fisherman’s net in all directions and entangled the limbs of the Black Guard.

“That was all I had left,” Cobweb said, sinking to his knees in exhaustion or blood loss or maybe both. “Whatever you have planned, you had best make haste with it.”

If he thought I had a plan, he clearly didn’t know me. Still, I had to try to find a way to save us all.

“Alice,” I said, “I need you to bring us The Nameless Book.”

“You would fight the Black Guard with a greater madness?” Morgana asked.

“The Nameless Book isn’t really a book,” Alice said to me, frowning. “It’s just things stuck in another thing.”

“It looks like a book and we’re calling it a book,” I said. “That’s good enough for me.”

All around us, the Black Guard tore and slashed and bit at their web bindings. They were almost free now.

“The sooner the better,” I added.

A section of the wall suddenly burst into flame in the shape of a doorway. The books burned away in seconds, but the fire didn’t stop. I looked through the flames and saw the room with The Nameless Book on the other side.

“I don’t know how you do it, but thanks,” I said to Alice.

“It wasn’t hard,” she said. “It really wants to come to you.”

“Do what you can for Amelia,” I said to Morgana. “I’ll return when I’m able, but I don’t know when that will be.”

I turned to Amelia and smiled at her and she smiled back. We said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

Then I started toward The Nameless Book, only to have Morgana stop me with a hand on my arm.

“You will unleash chaos if you read the words of that book,” she said.

“Hopefully that chaos will be stuck in this place and won’t be able to find a way out to the world,” I said.

“And if you’re wrong?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Please,” I said. “One problem at a time.”

I turned back to The Nameless Book but Morgana didn’t take her hand away.

“There is another who will read it in your place,” she said.

“Thanks, but I won’t ask that of you,” I said. “And I won’t let you make Amelia do it either.”

“That is not who I meant,” she said and turned to Puck.

He sprang forward and Morgana slit the threads binding his mouth with her knife. The irons fell from his limbs at the same time.

“Here is your chance to redeem yourself, my pet,” she said. “Read from the book and unleash the greatest chaos the world has ever known.”

Puck cackled with delight and darted forward, past the Black Guard, who were freeing themselves of the last of the web now. He ran through the flames and grabbed The Nameless Book from its burning altar. He quickly flipped it open and started reading the words inscribed on the first page. I dare not repeat them here, for if I did this tale would end right now. Let me just say the world stopped for a second as a sound like the very heavens ripping open echoed throughout the library. The Black Guard even paused to look around and find the source of it.

But the source found them. A thing, a very indescribable thing, threw itself out of The Nameless Book and into our room. It was too large for the doorway, so it burst through the wall of books, and fiery texts flew everywhere. It fell upon Anubis, and his staff meant nothing to it. There was a spray of blood and flesh and black beetles and foul things I didn’t recognize at all. I felt some small sense of satisfaction.

The thing from The Nameless Book wasn’t the demon I’d bound into it all those centuries ago in Marlowe’s theatre. It was something far worse than that. Why it left Puck and the rest of us alone, I don’t know. Perhaps because we were the ones who had opened the book. Perhaps because it was saving us for last.

The other Black Guard turned their attention away from us and swarmed the creature, which I still can’t picture clearly in my memory. And suddenly there was a gap in the ring around us. I didn’t even have to yell at anyone to move. We ran into the room with The Nameless Book, through the flames to the hall on the other side. I knocked The Nameless Book from Puck’s hand before he could summon anything else from it. He stuck his tongue out at me in disappointment, but he ran along with the rest of us.

“From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody,” Marlowe cried from somewhere in the melee, “or be nothing worth!”

The dead continued to act out the play behind us, oblivious to the horror in their midst, or perhaps just uncaring. We left them behind as we fled through the Forgotten Library. We ran back the way we’d come in, but that turned into a dead end when we reached a section of the hall where the ceiling had collapsed. A wall of books lay in our path. We scrambled to pull them aside, but there were too many. An inhuman scream sounded somewhere behind us, and hundreds more books fell from the ceiling upon us.

“We need to find another way out,” Morgana said, and I was forced to agree with her. We ran back a bit to the nearest intersection. I thought about trying to summon the Witches again to show us the way out, but I had a feeling they wouldn’t answer my call this time. Or if they did, they’d bring the things from the Nameless Book to us and then toss what remained of our bodies and souls into their cauldron.

“Alice, any ideas?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she said. “My head is full of ideas. They buzz around there like bees in a hive. Sometimes they get so noisy I have to put my head somewhere else until they quiet down.”

“Left it is then,” I said, and we ran blindly down that hallway.

The Scholar was suddenly at my side, trying to take the book Polonius had given me from my pocket. I swatted his hands away, but not before he managed to slide a finger in between the pages. More words ran up his arm for a second, forming incomprehensible jumbles on his skin much like the words in the mist, and I finally saw what I had been missing all along. The final piece of the puzzle. I pushed the Scholar away—far away—and kept running. Now I just needed the time to put all the pieces together in the proper order.

I looked around at what remained of Morgana’s court and was relieved to find Amelia still among us. But it was a bittersweet sense of relief. There were only a handful of others left: Morgana, Puck and the woman with the donkey’s head, Mustardseed carrying the unconscious Cobweb, and, unfortunately, the Scholar. The Black Guard had taken their toll.

Something screamed behind us again, but closer this time. Something not of this world.

And then we came across the raven. It sat on a shelf of books that jutted from one wall, looking at us. I saw the name Poe on the spine of one of the books.

“What is that thing doing here?” Morgana asked.

“It’s being a pretty bird, of course,” Alice said, and she stopped running and waved at the raven.

“Ravens never forget an enemy,” I said, remembering the Raven Master’s words. “And they never forget a friend.” The raven croaked at me as if it were agreeing.

“Bah! It’s just a common scavenger!” the Scholar said. “A regular nuisance they are, always stealing pages from books to line their nests—”

“Shut up!” the rest of us shouted in unison and, finally, the Scholar shut up.

I nodded at the raven. “All right, old friend,” I said. “Show us the way out of here.”

I expected the bird to take flight, but instead it just pecked at the Poe book and croaked at us again.

“Perhaps it just wanted to witness your end,” Morgana said.

I ignored her and grabbed the Poe book from the shelf. I figured the raven was drawing attention to it for a purpose. As soon as I removed the book, the other books on the shelf collapsed, taking down part of the wall with them. Behind them was a door made of more ancient books, all folios like the kind I carried with me. The handle and hinges were made of shreds of paper. The raven took flight and circled over our heads.

“Do you think it’s safe to take such a door in a place like this?” the Scholar asked.

“Probably not,” I said and opened the door.

There was another hallway behind the door, but this one was made of pages instead of books. The words on them were handwritten rather than typed, and the paper yellowed and crumbling, so they must have been old pages indeed. We ran down this new hallway, the raven leading the way. I didn’t bother closing the door behind us. I knew it wouldn’t stop the thing on our trail.

We only ran for a minute or so before we reached the end of the hallway. It terminated in a curtain rather than another door. The curtain was made of more pages. We burst through it, and suddenly the pages flew everywhere, a whirlwind of them surrounding us. For a second, I thought our pursuer had caught up to us. Then the papers all fell to the floor and I saw where we were. The stage of a theatre. We looked out onto the empty seats of the audience, dimly visible thanks to the glow of the spotlights trained on the stage. I spun around to look behind us, but there was only a closed curtain at the midstage mark. The creature chasing us gave another cry, but it faded away into some distance we couldn’t see. Then there was only the sounds of our merry crew gasping for breath.

I stepped back to the curtain and looked through it. There was only empty stage on the other side. We had escaped. I looked down at the pages littering the floor and saw they were all blank now. Many of them were already crumbling away to little more than dust.

The raven circled the auditorium, croaking some more at us. Maybe that was its version of applause.

“Would someone care to explain what just happened?” Morgana said.

“All the world’s a stage,” I said and laughed.

I turned in a circle, making sure there were no threats anywhere else, and that’s when I recognized the theatre. We were back in Berlin, on the stage where it had all started. I nodded at the raven.

“Someday you’re going to have to show me your tricks,” I said.

The raven just made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a chuckle. It flew off into the shadows at the rear of the audience and disappeared.

“That’s it,” the Scholar said behind me. “I want to go back to the library.”

“Which library?” Alice asked.

“I don’t care,” the Scholar said. “Any library.”

“They’re not just places, you know,” Alice said. “They have feelings. How would you like it if some library said it didn’t care what kind of scholar it had in it?”

“I’ll be happy to take you back to the library,” I said, trying to cut off the conversation before it got out of hand. I checked the wings at each side of the stage. No nameless horrors, no Marlowe, no Black Guard. That was enough for me at the moment.

“What happened to the thing from the book?” Puck asked, looking around the theatre. He seemed disappointed that whatever had been following us through the Forgotten Library hadn’t made it out to our world.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s still back there with the Black Guard. It’s probably looking for us right now.”

“Do you think it’ll ever be able to escape?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I imagine it’s got all eternity to discover a way out.”

That thought seemed to cheer him and he grinned as he headed for one of the exits at the other end of the audience. The woman with the donkey’s head joined him and they held hands as they went.

“That was certainly a distracting little adventure,” Morgana said, narrowing her eyes as she looked at me. “But I can’t think of anything we did to rid ourselves of the ghost.”

“I think we’ve had the secret to getting rid of the ghost all along,” I said and held up the book Polonius had given me. “Haven’t we?” I said, turning to the Scholar.

He stared at the book and licked his lips, then grinned at me in what he no doubt assumed was a friendly fashion but instead looked more a death grimace.

“What is one book when you could have a library?” he said.

“What are you talking about?” Morgana asked. “There are no secrets in that book. All the pages are blank.”

“Blank to us, maybe,” I said. “But not to him. Am I right?” I asked the Scholar.

“Your illiteracy is not my fault,” the Scholar said.

“You knew from the moment you saw this book that it was the play that Shakespeare stole, didn’t you?” I said. “You just didn’t want to tell me because you wanted to find the Forgotten Library. You thought I’d have no need to go there if I knew I already had the play.”

“It is the greatest library ever known,” the Scholar said. “What scholar could resist that temptation?”

In case you were wondering, it was moments like this that made me reluctant to turn to the Scholar for help.

“We almost all died because of you,” I said.

“Me?” he protested. “You were the one who raised that hack Marlowe from the dead!”

“You might redeem yourself yet,” I said, ignoring the point he’d made. I went to hand him the book and he snatched it from me before I could even finish the motion.

“Blank pages,” Morgana said again. “Am I the only one seeing that?”

“Just because they’re blank doesn’t mean they’re empty,” I said. I nodded at the Scholar. He opened the book and ran his hand down a page. Words flowed up his arm and danced across his eyes. The same indecipherable words that floated out of the mouths of everyone dead and trapped in the play.

“Beautiful,” the Scholar whispered. “The language, it is full of grace. Poetry in a tongue that no longer exists.”

“What is it?” Morgana asked, staring at the Scholar.

“It’s the ghost play,” I said. “Or all that remains of it, anyway. The one that Will stole and called his own. The one that he brought to life with his ink, for it was the ghost of the play itself that was haunting your productions.”

“The father text to
Hamlet
,” the Scholar said, nodding. “The story that began it all.”

“Polonius must have given it to me in the hope I could use it to figure out what was causing the haunting,” I said. And so I had, for all the good that it had done the dead now trapped in the play.

“What use is the text to us?” Morgana asked, shaking her head in exasperation. “We should burn the thing and send it back to the Forgotten Library.”