Bookweirder (10 page)

George just cried, “Get him!” and dove at the captive poacher. Had he thought about it, Norman would have stayed back. But he acted instinctively. This was the man who had captured and tortured his friend.

Norman hurled himself at the thug, but the big man just shrugged off his tackle. Norman heard an “umph” that might have come from him or George as they both tumbled to the ground. The poacher resumed his efforts with the rope.

George struggled to his hands and knees and launched another attack, grasping the man’s arm. Nelson barked and nipped at the big man’s heels. Their efforts barely slowed the struggling giant.

Norman thought for half a second about how dangerous this was, then he grabbed the villain’s other arm. The three struggled together for a few more moments in an uneven wrestling match.

The poacher was too strong and too mean for them. One vicious swing of his elbow caught George in the ribs. The boy hit the ground with a gasp. He lay there stunned for a moment, holding his chest.

A heavy boot caught Nelson in the hip. The dog yelped and skittered away sideways. Taking a position between his master and the poacher, the collie bared his teeth and let out a low growl, but kept his distance. Norman clung to the poacher’s back, making futile grasps at his arms. He felt himself rising as the poacher undid the last of the knots and staggered to his feet.

With one furious twist the poacher shook Norman from his back, flinging him violently to the ground. Norman winced and peered fearfully up at the bald criminal who loomed over him.

“Stupid brat,” he snarled. “You tryin’ to get yourself killed?” His accent reminded Norman of the noisy New York police station in
The Magpie
.

Suddenly the look in the poacher’s eyes changed. “Rams? That’s a Rams jersey,” he growled. He grabbed the shoulders of Norman’s sweatshirt and shook him. “Where’d you get this?” Norman stared back uncomprehendingly as the bald man’s anger swelled. “You tell me where you got that shirt, kid, or I’ll knock your teeth out.”

“My … my … my mom,” Norman answered, confused and scared by the question. What did his shirt have to do with anything?

The poacher’s eyes opened wide and stared manically.

The guy is crazy, on top of everything
, Norman thought.
He’s going to kill me because I’m wearing a Rams shirt.
Norman wasn’t even much of a football fan.

“You’re not from here,” the thug growled, bringing his face in close. The smell of his sour breath brought Norman back to the last time he’d been cornered by an angry enemy. It was wolves that time, but this was just as terrifying.

“You’re from the other place. The real place, the future, and you’re taking me back with you,” the poacher fumed.

Norman blinked and stared. What did he mean, the other place? A terrible thought began to occur to him.

The beam of a flashlight blinded Norman. “Put him down right now,” George commanded.

The thug turned and sneered, but now four new beams of light shone down from the path. A whistle sounded, followed by a shrill “Halt! Police!”

It wasn’t the police, it turned out. It was only Gordon and Pippa, each holding two flashlights, but in the dark and chaos of Kelmsworth Wood, the poacher was hardly to know this. He could deal with two crazy kids, their dog and their lame traps, but the prospect of four policemen weighing in was a little much. He dropped Norman unceremoniously to the ground.

Norman scrambled to the other side of the tree, lest the poacher change his mind. For a moment the bald man didn’t move, unwilling to leave even now. He stared at Norman for a long time, his eyes wide with anger and frustration. He looked more like a rabid animal than a man.

The whistle sounded again. The bald man gave Norman one last wild look and went crashing into the forest.

They knew better than to chase him. Norman and the Intrepids were relieved to have escaped without serious injury.

“Are you sure you’re all right, George?” Pippa asked for the third or thirteenth time, handing over the mugs of cocoa she’d prepared back at the lodge.

George furrowed his eyebrows but didn’t answer the question. Since they’d left the forest he’d been lost in thought, as if struggling with an impenetrable riddle.

“Strange,” he mused to himself as he sipped his cocoa. “That ought to have worked.” He was genuinely perplexed that he had not been able to capture a criminal more than twice his size. He was so used to his schemes working, the failure was unaccountable. “I can’t explain it. First London, and now this.”

Norman shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He had an idea why neither scheme had worked.

“Just a run of bad luck,” Gordon opined cheerfully. “We’ll have him out in the next over.” He sat back and licked the cocoa moustache from his upper lip.

Norman wasn’t so sure. George was used to coming up against a different kind of villain. The world of the Intrepids didn’t include opponents who were too smart or too tough for George. That wasn’t how it worked. But Mr. Todd didn’t play by these rules because Mr. Todd was Fuchs. Fuchs wasn’t from the world of the Intrepids. Fuchs didn’t care that their mouse distraction was supposed to work. The poacher didn’t care either, and Norman had a terrible suspicion that the reason was the same. Neither of them belonged in the pages of the Intrepids.

“You ought to give me your jumper,” Pippa said, obviously trying to change the subject. “I’ll have it mended. George, you’ll lend him one of yours, won’t you?”

George mumbled a distracted agreement.

When Norman pulled his sweatshirt over his head, he noticed how badly it was ripped. The violence of the poacher’s grip came back to him and made him shiver.

“By the way, Norman, what’s Rams?” Gordon asked blithely. “What’s that all about, then? Is it your school PE kit?”

It took a while for Gordon to explain that PE was what Norman knew as Phys. Ed., and in the end it was easiest for Norman to agree that yes, it was his gym uniform.

Gordon grinned, content with his perspicacity, and drained his
mug. “So what do you think of our poacher, then, now you’ve heard him? Is old Dodgeworth right? Is he from New York?”

Norman nodded, and lifted his cup to his lips to avoid saying more. He had been to New York only once, and he had not enjoyed it. When the bookweird had started to go wrong before, he’d been transported into
The Magpie
, a crime novel that his mother had been reading. The detectives in
The Magpie
, Rorschach and Darwin, had been on the trail of a killer when Norman had turned up at the alleyway crime scene. He’d spent two hours in a dingy interrogation room before Fuchs had saved him.

Norman had no idea how the bookweird worked, how you got from one book to another. It had all started for him when he’d accidentally eaten a page of
The Brothers of Lochwarren
and fallen into the world of Undergrowth. Fuchs had called this his
ingresso
. Eating book pages had side effects. It was contagious. It caused things to move from book to book.

When Norman escaped Undergrowth something else escaped with him. The wolves that hunted him in Undergrowth pursued him into Dora’s horse book,
Fortune’s Foal
, killing a horse and nearly wrecking the book completely. It was as if his
ingresso
created doorways between books. When he fell into that New York alleyway in
The Magpie
, he accidentally brought a horse with him. He’d never thought of what might have been displaced from
The Magpie
when he escaped … until now.

“What is it, Norman?” Pippa asked. Norman had looked up suddenly from his cup as the idea hit him.

His mind immediately leapt to the worst of all possibilities—the killer. A killer who could elude the wily Rorschach and Darwin for more than four hundred pages could easily wreak havoc in the world of the Intrepids.

He bit his lip and pretended to sip his cocoa again. He would have to tell Todd. As Fuchs, he had intervened before to get Norman out of a book. He’d been there in the interrogation room with Rorschach and Darwin, and had given him the page to eat himself out of
The Magpie
. Fuchs knew how dangerous that world was. If
he knew the killer was loose here with the Intrepids, he’d do something to stop it. Wouldn’t he?

“When are you going back to London?” Norman asked George.

“Not until we’ve got this sorted out here,” George replied. “It’s obvious that this poacher is something to be reckoned with.”

“Couldn’t Fu—I mean, Todd help?” Norman asked.

“Mr. Todd doesn’t seem to be able to help anybody,” Pippa replied a little bitterly. “He’s been working on Lord Kelmsworth’s appeal for ages now, and we haven’t seen any progress at all. I think George ought to talk to his MP.”

George scowled but did not disagree. “It’s more vital than ever that we stay here. That poacher is a villain of the first water. It’s obvious that your pet stoat is in serious danger.”

Norman didn’t need to be told. If the poacher was the Magpie, then killing a small forest animal would be the least of his crimes.

“What we need to do is rescue your stoat,” George declared, putting his mug down emphatically. “We’ll get him out of harm’s way and prove that old baldy is a thief. Then we can get the constabulary involved.”

The Cooks nodded their red heads solemnly in agreement, and Norman wasn’t about to argue. He’d have liked nothing better than to rescue Malcolm and get out of there. He wished that he shared the Intrepids’ confidence. He smiled weakly and agreed—yes, of course—doing everything he could to pretend that this was a wise plan certain to succeed.

When the Cooks had returned to the main house and George had retired to his room, Norman tossed and fretted on the couch. Things were bad. In fact, they couldn’t be much worse. It was almost a year since Norman had woken up in the public library after his last trip inside the pages of a book. He had thought that it was all over, that he had stopped falling into books and that their characters had stopped falling out of them and into the pages of other books. If the poacher was a character from
The Magpie
, he had been in the Intrepids books for months. And if he was the Magpie himself, then
there was no telling what damage he’d already done. A murderer from one book was likely to remain a murderer in another.

Norman tapped his foot rhythmically on the floor beside the sofa. He couldn’t sleep like this. He hadn’t been this afraid since the last time. It wasn’t just Malcolm he was worried about anymore. He was afraid for his own life. It was enough to make him fantasize about going home now, getting out of this book right away. He didn’t do it—couldn’t really do it—but he wanted to. Even the thought of abandoning Malcolm made him feel guilty.

Since he wasn’t sleeping anyway, Norman rose and tiptoed quietly to the desk where George had sat all evening. Methodically and quietly he tore a page from the notebook where George had scribbled his observations. Tonight was not the time to learn how to use a fountain pen. He ferreted through the drawers until he found a suitable pencil. Then he sat down and began to write a story.

“That summer, Norman and his parents and sister moved to the house of his mother’s family in England,” he began. “The house belonged to Norman’s uncle Kit, his mother’s brother. Uncle Kit was away and let them stay at the house while he was gone.”

Feeling the need to be as specific as possible, Norman wrote the full address, the postal code and the date of their arrival. He did not stop writing until he had described the house and his family completely. He did his best to remember details of the house—the crack in the sand-coloured masonry above the back kitchen door; the one wall that was covered with glossy, dark green ivy; the five matching and one mismatched chairs in the dining room; the way that the big oak door of his bedroom caught on the jamb and honked to the entire house that he was leaving his room.

He described his family: Dora as kindly as he could with her nine years of accumulated experience annoying him; his distracted professor father, obsessed with coffee and books; his unnaturally cheerful mother, whose habit and job of motivational coaching was infuriating and yet made him strangely proud. It comforted Norman to write these things. He had to think about his reality in
order to describe it. He was not used to thinking about his family. He was used to living with them.

It must have taken him more than an hour to fill the page. He made it as vivid and as accurate as he could. Once he was done, he read it over to himself to make sure that it felt right. His eyes grew hot and itchy as he read the description. He wasn’t at all sure that
ingresso
still worked, but there was not much more he could do. He folded the paper in four and tucked it in his back pocket and lay down on the couch again. Perhaps the evening’s exertions had just caught up to him, but he finally felt tired enough to sleep. It was easier to sleep, too, with the thought that he had an escape plan in his back pocket.

T
hey crept towards the poacher’s encampment, through the thickest part of Kelmsworth Wood, where slim new alder filled the ground between the gnarled old beech trees. They took the long way around so they could approach from upwind. Norman had been pretty sure that the poacher wasn’t about to smell their approach, but George had insisted on carrying out this raid like “Red Indians.” He’d also insisted on saying “Red Indians,” no matter how many times Norman had tried to correct him with “Native Americans.”