Bookweirdest (17 page)

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. Getting Kit to sit still and focus to write a short story about his childhood wasn’t easy. They needed to clear everything off his desk, not just the papers and the plates, but also the computer—especially the computer. The computer seemed to distract Kit. He started out looking things up on the Internet but soon was sidetracked. Let’s say he wanted a good synonym for “house,” for example; in no time, he got distracted and started listing words that started with “house”—housefly, housewife, household, houseboat.

“Did you ever notice that if you stare at a word long enough, it starts to look foreign?” he said. “Does the word ‘house’ look right to you?”

Norman tried closing down all the extra windows on his screen and found that he had Minesweeper open on the desktop. Evidently not all his furious clicking was typing. Eventually he and Malcolm convinced Kit to get rid of the computer and work with a pad of paper and a pencil.

“But if I need a synonym for ‘house’ again?”

“Just call it a house. If that’s what you called it when you were a kid, that’s what you should call it in the story.”

Kit grumbled but slowly got on with it.

“It would be much faster if I typed it,” he protested after a few sentences.

“That’s not how A.S. Sarmin does it,” Norman assured him. “He writes it out by hand and gets his secretary to type it up.” He wondered if his mother would be proud of just how good a liar he was becoming for her. “I’ll type it up for you later. Mom’s always asking me to do that, but I never do.”

“But you’ll do it for me? You’ll be my secretary?” Kit asked eagerly, pleased both to have won a victory over his sister and to have someone to boss around.

Norman and Malcolm had to be vigilant, and it wasn’t fun, coaxing a true story out of Kit, making sure it didn’t drift into fantasy. One of them had to be in the room at all times to make sure he didn’t start doodling, or ripping up his work and starting again. They took turns watching him while the other fetched a regular supply of cookies, candies and other treats. It was obvious now why there was no good food in the house. He seemed to live on junk himself.

Kit constantly questioned what he wrote. Norman and Malcolm had to reassure him that it was good, and bring him gently back on track when he started to veer off. “Isn’t this boring?” he’d ask. “Maybe I should put the dolphins back in, or just the spy car?” They had to convince him that the true story was just as interesting, if not more so.

Norman wasn’t lying. He actually
was
interested in Kit’s story. Kit had been a mystery for so long that it was fascinating to get a glimpse into his and Meg’s childhood. They even got Dora in on the act. Whenever Norman’s assurances that this was how A.S. Sarmin did something or Malcolm’s exaggerated enthusiasm seemed to wear thin, Kit turned to Dora for an opinion. Maybe he thought she was still under his spell. Maybe he didn’t have Norman’s insight into how good a fibber she really was.

In the end, it was a sad little story about Kit as a boy, or at least how he saw himself as a boy. When they read it, both Norman and Malcolm felt a little sorry for him, although nothing particularly bad happened to make them feel that way. He lived in a nice house and had a nice family. The dad worked a lot overseas. The mother did charity work, and the boy’s older sister either bossed him around or wanted nothing to do with him. The kid had a wild imagination and was always seeing crazy conspiracies and outrageous crimes going on around him. He’d tell wild stories to anyone who would listen, but nobody really did listen. The parents pretended to, but they were obviously just humouring him. The sister rolled her eyes on good days, mocked him on bad. It was strange to see his mother through Kit’s eyes, or through the eyes of Kit as a boy. Not that there was much difference between the man and the boy. Norman wasn’t grown up himself, but he could tell that Kit really wasn’t either. As a boy, Kit had admired and hated his big sister in turns. He wanted to be like her, but he wanted to be better than her, and even though the story was told from his point of view, you could tell when he was lying about beating her at cards or getting better grades or winning the race across the wooden footbridge.

In fact, most of the story seemed to take place in the boy’s head alone. It started like this:

Norman wondered what his mother would think when she read Kit’s story. It definitely wouldn’t do anything to mend the argument between the two.

“It’s good,” he told Kit when he’d finished reading it. He was telling the truth, but he would have said it regardless.

“You think so, Norms?” his uncle asked, sticking out his chest and looking enormously proud.

“Very authentic,” Norman assured him. “Don’t you think so, Mal?”

Malcolm was half asleep on the windowsill by this point, but roused by the question, he summoned an enthusiastic agreement. “Oh, yes! Very much so.”

Kit rubbed a hand across his scruffy chin and nodded. “Yes, I think you’re right. I can feel my voice loosening up already. Voice, voice, voice,” he repeated in different notes and intonations, as if warming up to go on stage or testing a microphone. “Yes, definitely. It’s coming in nicely.”

Behind his back on the windowsill, Malcolm yawned a toothy stoat yawn and rolled his eyes.

As promised, Norman typed up the story for his uncle. Malcolm sat on his shoulder and watched, fascinated, as the letters blinked onto the screen.

“Is this the bookweird?” he marvelled. “This personal scriptorium of yours? Did you conjure it with the bookweird or did Kit?”

Norman stopped typing long enough to answer him, or at least try to. “It’s a machine, like a loom or a musical instrument. It’s not magic. A human made it.” The computer was just the latest in a series of modern machines that the medieval king should never really have seen. “It’s like the train we took from George’s house,
and you have to forget about it. Some things belong in your story. Some things belong in mine.”

Malcolm nodded sagely. “And you and I? Where do we belong? Back in our own books?”

“Yes,” Norman concluded after a pause. “We belong in our own books.” It saddened him to admit it, but it was true.

He had turned back and resumed typing when Malcolm added, “It doesn’t feel that way.”

“No,” he agreed. “No, it doesn’t.”

Malcolm curled up on the desk and snoozed in the heat of the computer exhaust while Norman finished his typing. When he was done, he printed off two copies. One he kept for Kit, and the other he slipped into what he’d come to think of as his magic knapsack. Then he woke Malcolm for dinner.

The only thing that Norman knew how to make was grilled cheese, so he made grilled cheese. Malcolm and Dora ate with glee. Kit nibbled away, distracted by reading his own story.

For dessert, they ate bowls of raspberries and blackberries that Malcolm and Dora had collected.

“I don’t think I’ll ever eat ice cream again,” Dora declared. Her lips and one cheek were stained purple from the berries.

“Where is my real sister and what have you done with her?” Norman asked.

Malcolm, who didn’t get the joke, looked from side to side, wondering what he was missing. “But isn’t Dora your sister?”

Brother and sister both nearly spit out a mouthful of berries laughing at that.

“I like your new friend,” Dora said when she’d finished giggling.

Malcolm licked the berry juice from his paws. “The feeling is mutual, Lady Dora,” he assured her.

When dinner was done and the dishes cleared, Norman excused himself for a nap. Dora’s eyes boggled at the suggestion. Neither of them had willingly taken a nap in years. She opened her mouth to say something but stopped when she saw her brother shake his head.

“Maybe if you ask nicely, Uncle Kit will read you his new story.”

Dora rolled her eyes. “Why would—”

Norman stared at her and tried to get her to read his mind.

Kit didn’t seem to notice the silent communication between brother and sister. “You want to hear it?” he asked. “No problem. I’d be happy to read it to you.” He flapped the papers ostentatiously and cleared his throat.

Norman mouthed a silent thank-you to his trapped sister as he and Malcolm escaped to his room.

Though Malcolm had snoozed off and on all day, he was ready for another forty winks, as he called it. Norman wasn’t very good at napping. It felt strange trying to go to sleep in the middle of the day, but they had agreed this was the next step. Everything seemed to happen while they were asleep.

“The bookweird is like a watched pot,” Malcolm suggested. He peered into the knapsack. “It’s getting crowded in there. I might have to eat some of these loaves to make room.”

It took Norman ages to drop off. The moment they stopped doing things, his mind started to fill with worries. In the desert somewhere, the library of San Savino was still burning. Back in Willowbraid, Cuilean was lying in a sickbed. In Paris, his mother was fending off Prussian officers or Egyptian diplomats armed with bombs or guns or jars of spiders. To add to all that, he now had Dora to worry about too. Would she survive a few more days with Kit?

N
orman was woken up in the middle of the night by a tickling in his ears. It was only Malcolm whispering to him that it was time get up, but it startled him into a shout. “Shhh, Strong Arm.” Malcolm put a tiny paw over his mouth to shut him up. “You’ll wake the whole house.”

But the fine hairs of Malcolm’s palm on his lips only tickled him more, sending him into a giggling fit.

Malcolm stood there with his hands on his hips in mock disapproval. “Whenever you’re ready.”

It was still nighttime, but as Norman’s eyes adjusted, the moonlight was enough to illuminate the room and his friend standing on the headboard. They were still in the Shrubberies—so far so good. Norman had purposely not eaten any paper before going to sleep, but that was no guarantee of staying in one place. Sometimes the bookweird just picked you up and put you where it wanted to.

Norman pulled himself together. “Has anything happened?”

“I dunno,” the stoat replied. “Nothing changed in here, but it’s the library that matters, I suppose.”

“Did you hear anything?” Norman asked.

Malcolm shook his head. “Nothing but the strange bird sounds
you have here in England. Does it make a sound, the bookweird, when it happens?”

“I’m not sure,” Norman replied. “But you’d expect something, wouldn’t you? If the world was going to change in the night, shouldn’t it make some sound—a whoosh or something?”

Malcolm shrugged. “You’re the expert. So what now?”

“I guess now”—Norman swung his feet over the side of the bed—“we check if there’s a way out of here.”

Malcolm needed no further invitation to action. “I was hoping you would say that.” He sprang from the headboard to the open window. “I’ll see you in five. And, Strong Arm?” He paused dramatically on the sill. “Try to make less sound than a badger at a jam tasting, will you?” With that, he disappeared outside.

Norman waited a moment before rising to his feet and tiptoeing to his bedroom door. An ear on the door confirmed that everyone was asleep, but the creak of the floorboards still made him cringe as he crept out and down the hall. At the library door he paused and listened for movement. If Malcolm was inside, he was too stealthy for Norman’s human ears. The scratch and click of the key turning in the lock was the first indication he had that Malcolm was inside. Norman gave the door a gentle push. Malcolm clung to the handle and rode it as it swung open.

“Your library, sir,” he declared, hanging on to the handle with one hand and gesturing to the shelves with the other.

“Thank goodness,” Norman said. “I almost didn’t believe it would work.” He dropped to his knees to check the bottom shelf behind the encyclopaedias. Sure enough, the Intrepids series was all there. He opened
Intrepids at Sea
and leafed through it, sighing with relief. It was real—real words in real sentences. They could at least get to Kelmsworth. If they needed allies, they knew they could count on George Kelmsworth and the Cook twins.