Endymion Spring (38 page)

"If you want the book so badly," he lashed out, "why don't you come over here and take it?"
 
His heart felt like a bomb ticking down inside him.
 
At any moment, it might explode.

"Yes, I suppose I could," said Diana without enthusiasm.
 
He noticed her long white gloves and panicked, realizing that she had been careful not to leave any fingerprints behind.
 
He could imagine her sliding her hands around his neck and throttling him.

Sensing the direction of his gaze, she slowly removed one of the gloves.
 
She peeled back the smooth white material and pulled it from her fingers.
 
Blake gasped.
 
All of the fingernails on her left hand were black.

"It's like Professor
Jolyon
," he blurted out.

"Oh, this?" she said calmly, assessing her bruised nails.
 
"Yes, I was snubbed by the book too.
 
Just like
Jolyon
."

"Do you mean you're in on this together?" he asked, his mind working furiously.
 
A recollection of a dark-haired Diana flirting with the youthful
Jolyon
in the
Libris
Society photograph flashed in his memory.

Diana was appalled by his insinuation.
 
"Heavens, no.
 
Jolyon
and I haven't agreed on anything since the foundation of the
Libris
Society.
 
However, we are
both
interested in the
Last Book
and would love to get our hands on it... for different reasons.

She watched his face register surprise.
 
"
Jolyon
isn't such an angel either," she said coldly.
 
"Disappointing, isn't it?"

"I don't understand."

She reached for a piece of powdered confectionery in a crystal bowl on her desk.
 
Turkish delight.
 
She bit into it with relish.

"I'm disappointed in you, Blake.
 
Are you really so dim?"

He nodded; it was safer to keep her talking.

"Oh, very well," she muttered, brushing a smattering of icing sugar from her lips.
 
"
Jolyon
broke the clasp on the blank book a long time ago, soon after the
Libris
Society was formed.
 
He was convinced he could find the
Last Book
without any help from the rest of us.
 
Of course, he was mistaken.
 
He tried to steal the book from George
Psalmanazar
, who had found the book originally, but the clasp broke off and stabbed him in the thumb, branding him a traitor."

Blake inhaled deeply.
 
His mind was spinning.
 
No wonder the professor had seemed so agitated when he'd first mentioned
Endymion
Spring
at the college dinner.
 
No wonder he'd been unwilling to confess his involvement in the past...

Diana glanced at her blackened fingernails.
 
"Of course, I rather fancied him more after that," she said dryly, clearly enjoying pulling off the scabs of Blake's delusion, "but he became so incredibly penitent afterwards.
 
It was tiresome.
 
He vowed never to go near the book again."

Her voice was filled with scorn.
 
"He became boring."

"And what did you do?" asked Blake, eyeing her fearfully.
 
"What turned your fingernails black?"

The smile died instantly on her face.
 
"After the book rejected
Jolyon
, I had to connive my way closer to that ugly wretch, George."
 
She spat out the name with distaste.
 
"I could tell he was going to hide the blank book and I needed to lay my hands on it before the key to the
Last Book
eluded my grasp forever.
 
It was my only chance — or so I thought."

Her eyes gleamed and her fingers clawed the air.
 
"It was almost in my hands," she said, reliving the experience, "but then that wretch saw what I was doing and slammed the book shut on my fingers.
 
The clasp stung me!
 
It was sheer agony!
 
Yet I managed to hold on to one section of the book and ripped that from the volume."

"The section
Psalmanazar
gave me," Blake whispered to himself.

Diana was rubbing the tips of her charred fingers.
 
"I didn't know his strength," she remarked.
 
"He wrestled even that away from me, unwilling to let a single part of the book escape, saying that even the tiniest scrap of paper held the strongest magical
power, that
the
Last Book
would never work without all the pieces."

"But why go to so much trouble?" asked Blake.
 
"It's only a book.
 
Surely, it can't be that powerful."

All the while she
talked,
he was inching closer to the desk and the temptingly sharp paperknife.

Diana snarled at him.
 
"Foolish boy!
 
You have no idea what the book contains!
 
It is the key to everything you've ever desired.
 
All the power and riches in the world!"
 
Her face contorted, as if possessed by greed.
 
"The book demands an innocent to unleash its words, but only a person with true ambition can fully know their worth.
 
Johann
Fust
knew as much... as did Horatio Middleton, Jeremiah Wood,
Lucius
St. Boniface de la Croix and all the others who have searched for the book for years."

As she said this, a ray of sunlight broke through the clouds and transformed the surrounding spires and domes to a shimmer of burnished gold, but its warmth stopped short at the window.
 
Blake had turned ice-cold.
 
He recognized those names.
 
They had been staring at him from the walls of St. Jerome's College ever since he arrived in Oxford.
 
They were the ancient scholars in the portraits, all clutching their sacred, unidentified leather books, feeding on him with their eyes.

As if in answer, Diana withdrew a think black book from her pocket and waved it in the air.
 
He saw a shadowy
F
 
stamped
into its unsightly cover and realized with a start that it was the
Faustbuch
he had found in the secondhand bookshop.

"That book..." he said, confused.

"Yes, you really were most considerate, finding this for me," she said with a devious smile.
 
"The
Faustbuch
holds the key to the entire history of
Endymion
Spring
.
 
Not only how the
Last Book
came to Oxford, but also how to see inside it, to decipher its riddles and make use of its power.
 
Of course, it's rather ruined now — it's been handed down for centuries, ever since the anonymous author first penned it — but it really has come in useful..."

Blake shivered.
 
His eyes returned to the desk and the paperknife, which disappeared into Diana's fingers.
 
She was regarding him steadily.

"Did you really think you could outsmart me?" she said.
 
"You're just a boy.
 
Now hand over the book."

Knees quivering, Blake crabbed sideways to the window.

Diana followed him, balancing the tip of the paperknife against her fingers.
 
His skin pricked with fright, but she merely placed the knife and the
Faustbuch
on top of one of the cabinets, out of reach.

"Tell me," she said.
 
"Have the pages come alive?
 
Have the words emerged from hiding?"

He stiffened as she drew up beside him and prized his chin in her hands.
 
Her fingers were long and cold, like icicles, except they didn't melt.

Snakelike, she peered into his eyes.
 
Blake glanced away.

From far below came the sound of crowds milling in the street.
 
A dog barked somewhere.
 
The noise caught his ear and he checked the window.
 
The glint of an iron fire escape leading up the side of the tower flashed in the corner of his eye.
 
Perhaps, after all, there was a way out
...
He wanted to run, but felt trapped by the cold hands on his face, the fierce glare of her eyes.

"Show me the book!" roared Diana, and flung him ferociously towards the center of the room.
 
He collided heavily with the desk and slid to the floor.
 
A throbbing pain cleaved his chest and a strange iron tang filled his mouth.
 
Blood.

Defenseless, he watched as she stooped over him and casually plucked the bag from his shoulders, throwing it on the table.

Like a beast ripping into prey, she tore open the main compartment and cast Duck's coat aside.
 
Then she found what she was looking for:
 
the unspectacular brown leather book at the bottom of the bag.
 
Endymion
Spring
.
 
She dipped in her hands to retrieve it and whisked them away, as though stung.

"It bit me!" she howled with rage.

Blake gazed at her, his vision blurry, barely comprehending what was going on.

She drew on her long white glove and tried again to withdraw the book.
 
Succeeding this time, she laid it carefully on the table.

She stared at the cover closely —
Endymion
Spring
's
name was still inscribed on the leather in rounded letters — and the began to turn the pages with the tips of her gloves, impatient to garner their knowledge.

"But that's not right!" she hollered, lifting her face from the book.
 
"Why you deceptive little beast, what have you done?"

She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him sharply to his feet.
 
Dazzling lights popped and fizzed before his eyes.
 
She slammed her fist on the table.

Speechless with surprise, Blake forced himself to focus on the page in front of him.
 
Apart from the black section in the middle of the book, the remaining pages had reverted to their natural, unsullied white.
 
There were no words to be seen.

"I don't understand," he began.
 
"They were—"

"Well, they're gone now!" screamed Diana.

He blinked again.
 
As his eyes adjusted to the glowing whiteness of the paper, he realized that the words had not disappeared, but were recoiling into the book like snails into their shells.
 
They were still there, but only for those with eyes to see them.

The deception, he feared, would not last long.
 
Already he could see a faint shadow of ink leaching through the paper, as though all of the books and the marvelous secrets they contained would soon reappear.

Thinking quickly, he said, "It's not yet complete.
 
I tried to tell you.
 
Something's wrong."
 
He hoped that the statement would deter her.

"Yes, but what?"

Presuming he had outwitted her, he added more confidently, "There's still a section of the book missing.
 
It won't work without that."

He turned to the black page and showed her the torn corner.
 
"See?"

Diana hissed with fury, but then a smile slowly returned to her lips.
 
"Ah yes, how very foolish of me," she said.
 
Her mouth curled into a sneer.
 
"I can fix that."

Unclasping the butterfly pin from her cloak, she carefully plucked the paper wings from its body and lined them up with the book.
 
They were a perfect fit.
 
The delicate black paper fluttered with life.

"But...
"
Blake stammered.

She smiled at him victoriously.
 
"I didn't say George was successful, did I?
 
I managed to steal just one corner of one page, which I kept as a little reminder of what I most desired:
 
the
Last Book
!
"

Blake stared at her, appalled.
 
Paying no attention, she pressed the blackened wing of paper onto the page in front of her and he watched helplessly as it began to reattach itself to the book with an invisible seam.
 
Like a dark snowflake, the
ashlike
paper melted into the volume and the pages inside started to spin.
 
The book shone with a fierce white light.

"Yes, imagine my surprise when this little slip of paper alerted me the other day to the fact that someone had rediscovered
Endymion
Spring
," she said.
 
"It seemed too good to be true.
 
All I had to do was look for someone sufficiently... idealistic... to draw
Endymion
Spring
out of hiding.
 
I was quite pleased to make your acquaintance and then to see you slipping out, oh, so surreptitiously, you thought, from the college dinner."

"So you were the person behind me?" gasped Blake as the book continued to stir with jubilant, ecstatic, powerful life.
 
He could see the ink beginning to grow darker, taking on a more permanent form, as the words were released from their hibernation.
 
"You followed me to the library that night?"