The Kneebone Boy (13 page)

“I can’t believe you did that!” Lucia cried. “Did it bite you?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lucia. Don’t you
see
?”

“No.”

“This isn’t a real castle. Or a real dungeon. Or a real rat. It’s a toy. Spring-loaded, I think, and it’s triggered by the bed chains’ movement. It runs on a little track.”

So the Hardscrabbles spent the next twenty minutes jumping on their beds and making the rat run across the floor, behaving exactly the same way that generations of Kneebone children had behaved in the dungeon, until poor Chester looked like he would collapse from heart failure.

Thus, they all forgot about the strange thing that Max had noticed about Haddie. All but Max, of course, who lay awake in bed long after the others had gone to sleep, thinking deeply and importantly.

In which the Hardscrabbles worry about the title of this book and other things

The thing that’s been bothering me about this book so far is that we all seem very ordinary. A few times I tried to make us sound more dashing and heroic, but one of us (I won’t say who, but I bet you know) made me take those parts out because they weren’t factual. He said that we started off ordinary and
became
remarkable because of everything that happened, and people need to know the truth.

“The truth is a slippery fish,” I replied.

“You don’t even know what that means,” he said.

“You can bloody well stuff it,” I told him.

Things got ugly after that.

The other thing that’s been bothering me is that we haven’t yet mentioned The Kneebone Boy and he is the title of this book. That seems like a serious flaw. Still, it can’t be
helped because that’s the way things worked out, and anyway he’s coming in very soon. We’re not overly worried about
you
in particular, because we’re guessing that the castle folly and our missing mum is enough to keep you happy for a while. We are slightly worried about Mr. Dupuis, however, who might have some harsh things to say about sloppy plotting.

In which the Hardscrabbles find out some things about their mother, Max eats a Pixy Stix, and then makes Otto angry

It was hard to tell when it was morning. There was only the sliver of a window with the iron grill over it and it was way high up on the wall. If the day was overcast, as it was that morning, the dungeon was nearly as dark as it was in the middle of the night.

Chester was the first to get up. He stretched out his supple black body, then sat on top of Otto’s chest and cleaned himself thoroughly, paying special attention to his fifth leg.

The Hardscrabbles all did essentially the same thing, but it took them a lot longer. They stretched and groaned, their bodies cramped from the thin mattresses. They stared at one another dumbly for a while, silently putting together the events from yesterday.

“We ought to ring Mrs. Carnival,” Otto said. “In case
Dad rings her looking for us when he can’t get through to Angela.”

Max shook his head. “She’ll make us go back to Little Tunks.”

“We can just tell her that we’re all right.”

“You
know
she’ll ask questions,” Max droned.

“If she does, we’ll just hang up.”

It was the right and responsible thing to do, so they put it off until later.

Max wanted to explore the castle folly, but Lucia was anxious to look at the sea. She had felt the sea tugging at her since they’d first arrived. It gave her a sloshy feeling between her ears.

Much to their surprise, the dungeon door was unlocked. In fact, they discovered that it didn’t lock at all, it only made a sound like it was being bolted shut when you closed it. They all used the restroom until they were reasonably clean and since Haddie was nowhere to be found, they decided to go directly to the seaside.

Outside, the air was already warming and all around was the smell of the sea. A rolling carpet of fog concealed everything below their knees, so that often all they could see of Chester was the top of his question-mark tail. A combination of the sea smell and the fog gave Lucia the delicious sense of time collapsing. She imagined that she could hear the cannon fire of great ships of war, the splash of Viking oars, even the slow-motion footsteps of dinosaurs pressing through primordial forests.

Their walk toward the sea took them right past
Kneebone Castle. In the daylight, it was even uglier than it had appeared the night before. Its stones were an oily-looking brown, fat and lumpy and uneven, like enormously thick hamburger patties stacked on top of each other. Only the windows and crenellations were neatly hewn out of the stone. The drawbridge was up and the portcullis was down.

“What an awful-looking place,” Lucia said, gazing up at the towers. She was enchanted. “Do you think it’s open to the public?”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Max said.

“How do you know?” Lucia said, winching her brows at him.

“The curtain wall has been patched up recently,” Max said. “Look along the top.”

Sure enough there was a smooth rim of stone along the top of the wall that did not quite match the hamburger stone. It was paler and the lichen hadn’t mottled its surface.

“So?” Lucia said.

“And the crenellations on the castle’s towers are all crumbly.”

“And I repeat . . . so?”

“That means someone cared more about keeping people out than impressing people who might come in.” He paused. Then he added, “It’s just a guess, though. I may be completely wrong.”

He always said that when he knew he was 100 percent right.

Otto had been staring up at the castle, squinting. As they
walked he kept turning around to see something up in one of the towers.

“What?” Lucia said finally.

Otto stopped walking and took one long look up at the castle. “The tower on the right. Third window from the top.”

They looked. They squinted. Then they saw it. There was a figure in one of the windows. It was hard to see the person very clearly at that distance, and the fog that drifted in front of their faces periodically made it even harder, but it appeared that he or she was staring straight back at them.

Max waved. The person did not wave back. They just kept staring.

“What if she’s being held prisoner?” Lucia said hopefully.

“Then she probably would have waved back,” Max said. “And it might be a he.”

“Ha! Not likely,” Lucia said. “Didn’t you notice them?”

“Them what?” Max asked.

“Her . . . you know. She has breasts, Max! What do you think that is on her chest?”

“I think it’s a pair of crossed arms,” Max said.

It was. Most probably.

Otto laughed, a little pop of air that sounded like a pickle jar being opened.

So Lucia temporarily lost interest in the person at the tower window and quickened her pace toward the water.

Soon they came to the edge of the cliff, which dropped down at an alarmingly steep angle to a shingle beach far below. The beach was now receiving a fine thrashing from
the white-tipped waves, and the whole view—the sky, as slickery as blue rain boots, the rippling water, the milk white triangle of a taut sail on a distant boat—was all too gaspingly perfect. They stared at it for a while (during which Lucia thought up the blue rain boot description) until they became bored. So they looked for a way down.

There wasn’t one. The castle was perched on the very edge of a precipice, as castles often are, to keep off the foreign invaders. Installing a set of stairs from the cliff to the beach would naturally be counterproductive. What they did find, or rather what Otto found, was a perilously jagged path that more or less led down to the beach. It required some creative thinking to figure out how they were supposed to get from one ledge to the next when the two might be a good distance apart, but they did it, and suffered only minor abrasions and a tiny amount of blood loss.

Lucia and Max chucked their shoes and socks and chased the waves. Then they let the waves chase them as they ran backwards on the narrow strip of sand. It made them laugh like infants.

Otto, however, sat close to the edge of the cliff face and examined the smooth stones that covered most of the beach. Chester stayed with him, though Lucia could have sworn Chester was watching the waves with the most wistful expression.

“Come on!” Lucia called to Otto. “The water feels gorgeous on your ankles!”

But Otto refused until Lucia finally relented and left Max to chase the waves by himself. She ran over to Otto,
still laughing, and collapsed on the ground beside him. She smiled at him but he didn’t notice. He was absently examining a white-streaked stone that he held in his palm. He was so solemn. So
sad.
Was he always like that and she had never noticed? It bothered her, especially because she had just felt the wonderful blood rush that comes from being silly and barefoot.

“When I grow up,” she said, because it was their special game, and she wanted him to stop looking at the stupid stone, “I’ll buy a lighthouse by the sea, for us to live in. At night we’ll watch for ships that are about to crash into the cliffs and we’ll shine the lights and save them. During the day we can throw things down at people on the beach.”

Otto balanced the stone on his knee and said nothing, just stared at it.

“What’s wrong with you?” She grabbed the stupid stone out of his hand and threw it as far as she could. Then she felt bad.

Otto stared after the lost stone, then looked at Lucia. There was something he wanted to tell her, something important. She kept very still, her eyes on his eyes, waiting. Then he turned away from her. He picked up another stone, one with black speckles, and began to examine it.

That was when Lucia first began to suspect that Otto was keeping a secret. A big fat one.

They had spent several hours by the water, and had even discovered a cave, in which they looked for evidence of an old pirate hideout but all they found were some empty
Coke cans and a vintage car magazine. By noonish, though, they were getting hungry and headed back to the castle folly. On the way back they looked for the person in the tower at Kneebone Castle but there was no one at the window now. The castle was so still and silent that they stood there for a few minutes, looking up at it.

Have you ever stared at someone while they were sleeping, and then realized that they were not asleep at all but were lying there with their eyes opened in slits, staring right back at you? It gives you a very squirrelly feeling. It was the same thing with Kneebone Castle. The Hardscrabbles suddenly all got the feeling that it was watching them through its arrow slits. Otto was first to start backing away from the place, then Lucia and Max did as well, and they hurried back over the meadow to the castle folly as fast as they could without actually running.

“Ho! Prisoners!” a voice called down from somewhere above them as they approached the folly’s moat. They looked along the walkway on top of the curtain wall, but they didn’t see a single thing.

The person whistled. It was a very loud and impressive whistle and it directed their attention to a pair of feet in flip-flops resting on the railing of the tall wooden tower that Lucia had climbed yesterday. The feet suddenly disappeared and Haddie’s face took its place as well as half her body. She leaned out farther than any sensible person should have. A pair of binoculars hung around her neck and on her head was a black baseball cap turned wrong side round.

“I was beginning to think you’d escaped!” Haddie called down.

“No, we were just messing about on the beach,” Max called back.

Max is amazingly literal for a ten-year-old.

There was a pause. Then, “Assuredly you lie! Your pant cuffs aren’t damp!” She began reeling in the bicycle from across the moat.

“We rolled them up,” Max called back.

“No back talk, thou spleeny canker blossom! You shall all be punished severely! Meet me in the Great Hall. It’s the second room on the right up the first passage.” Then she hopped on the bicycle and flew across the moat and into her bedroom window.

The severe punishment was a repulsive concoction of peanut butter and marshmallow cream in a sandwich, set out on a slabby wooden table with benches beside it.

“Try it, you’ll hate it,” Haddie said.

They did, and they did. But they ate the sandwiches anyway, because they were all starving. Max said he liked it, but he was also staring at Haddie in the most ridiculous way so I doubt he was tasting his sandwich at all.

The Great Hall was about the size of a smallish living room, with coffered wood ceilings that were carved with scenes of knights on horseback fighting dragons and knights on horseback fighting each other and occasionally a knight lying dead on the ground with a sword sticking out of his suit of armour. The walls were full of mouldy mounted deer heads, and above a huge grandfather clock
was a collection of engraved archery bows. Hanging all around the edges of the room were banners decorated with educational information, like the periodic chart of the elements and place value mathematical charts, and a plant classification chart with mosses, ferns, and angiosperms. The Hardscrabbles imagined that the parents of the Dusty Old Children (that is what the Hardscrabbles began to call the Kneebone children, who did seem like long-gone relics) must have thought they were being very crafty, and I’m sure the Dusty Old Children resented it thoroughly. Even now, the room had a dreary, deserted feel to it—the sort of room that you peer into on the way to somewhere else.