Facing the Hunchback of Notre Dame (4 page)

Linus looked at his clock. It was now 10:30 p.m. and the party downstairs had finally wound down. Maybe a snack would be a good idea. After all, he had to frequently nourish that tall body of his. As he stepped out into the hallway, just at the top of the steps, he heard a rustle from the bathroom. More than a rustle, really. Perhaps one could describe it as the whisper of wood grating on wood.

He peered into the room just as a square of paneling near the toilet was pushed out of the way, and a head of gleaming brown hair emerged, followed by a long, muscular neck and broad shoulders swaddled in light blue pajamas. At that moment the head looked up to reveal a florid (red) face with large green-blue eyes that grew even larger at the sight of Linus.

Linus tilted his head.

“Oh!” the boy said. “Sorry.”

Warm voice, British accent … this must be Walter, the new student at The Kingscross School that Ophelia had mentioned earlier.

“No problem.”

“I found this secret passage. Where am I?” He crawled completely out of the opening now, his movements very graceful and athletic—almost like a big cat.

“Next door. Bookshop.” Linus eyed the boy’s arms, which were twice as big as his own. Those could come in handy for some heavy lifting in the future.

Walter stood up and dusted himself off before offering Linus his hand, “Well. So here I am. Walter Liddel.”

Linus quickly sized him up and had to admit that Walter could probably take him (beat him in a fight).

“Linus Easterday.”

“Pleasure.”

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

Wow. How big will he be when he fills out?
Linus thought. Out loud he said, “Same.”

“Good heavens, how tall do you think you’ll be when you stop growing?”

Linus shook his head with a shrug. “Want something to eat?”

Walter screwed up his face. “I can’t tell you how much. The food over there …” he tilted his head in the direction of the school and shuddered.

Linus could only imagine.

“And there’s never enough of it either. You know Clarice? She eats enough to feed two grown men!”

Linus tucked that away for future reference. If he ever took her out to dinner, it would have to be someplace offering a two-for-one special.

The boys wandered into the kitchen and began eating party leftovers. Walter knew what some of them were, what with his hailing from England. There were quail eggs and beef wellington. (Although why a dish from the 1800s was included in a medieval feast, I could not say. I suppose Augustus failed to hit all of the targets with that party.) There were also sausages, which both lads dipped right into the mustard jar. And to wash it all down, they drank soda (or pop, as some folks call it) — glasses and glasses of soda. In this case, they drank watermelon and green apple flavors. I don’t wish to know what’s in those sodas. It’s most likely radioactive.

Now what just happened here, as far as plotting goes, is that Linus received a compatriot, someone to rely on in a very different way than he can rely on his sister. Not that he loves her any less, but the two of them have so little in common. Plus, Linus feels more protective of his sibling than he does of some new guy from a different country
.

Walter also rounds out the group rather nicely, as neither twin is particularly physical in nature. Ophelia succumbs to nausea on spinning apparatuses and, due to an overdeveloped sense of competition, has avoided team sports because of the ugliness that comes out in her. Meanwhile, Linus despises heights; and while his fine motor skills are keen (I would bet all of my cleaning supplies that
the boy could paint the Last Supper on the head of a pin), he can barely walk down a set of steps without a bit of a stumble. That he didn’t tip a single tray of quail eggs onto a guest that night was nothing short of miraculous
.

So you can see how Walter, with his physical prowess, strength, and a certain indefinable charm, rounds out this trio quite well. When you find yourself in an adventure, try to bring along a person of charm — not to mention downright sparkling good looks and compelling personality — to serve as a decoy. He’ll get you into the places you need to go but would otherwise be shut out due to your lack of the gift of gab
.

I was busy those days or, rest assured, I would have volunteered myself
.

W
hile Linus was busy meeting Walter, Ophelia had retreated to the attic space with two books in hand. At any given time, Ophelia could be in the midst of reading several books. However, since she’d just finished
The Good Earth
, she was now involved in only two: her grandmother’s Bible, which she was reading for the third time, and
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
.

Her eyes now flicked back and forth from the book of Esther to the current conditions of Quasimodo. And while her grandmother had underlined a verse about loving your enemies, Ophelia felt more like throttling someone! Anyone in that Parisian mob would do.

Oh, that poor hunchback! Ophelia loved the downtrodden, the oppressed, and the underdog (a person not accepted by the “in” crowd or, as in a contest, the one most likely to lose; also, the least likely to be picked for anyone’s team on the playground. Yet, who’d want to be picked by those horrible, insensitive, unfair, and stupid people anyway?). Quasimodo—his name meaning “part man” or “semi-human” — wanted what we all do: to love and to be loved in return. Unfortunately, when you live in a cathedral and most of your conversations are with the same one or two people, the chance of that happening is severely diminished.

In addition, if your spine is curled at the top like a shepherd’s crook, while bristly patches of red hair sprout from your oversized head, a giant wart covers one of your eyes, and some unknown manner of growth protrudes from your forehead … well, then
you should probably cast aside any notion of finding that special someone to take you out to a cozy candlelit dinner at your favorite French restaurant. And being deaf, due to your job as a bell ringer in the cathedral’s tower, affords no great help to the matter. But at least you can speak. You still have that going for you, at any rate (although what you might have to say, having lived in a cathedral your entire life, I cannot begin to guess). Such were the circumstances of Quasimodo.

Now, loving other people wasn’t hard for Quasimodo. It was the receiving love part that never seemed to work in his favor. He loved his caretaker, Deacon Frollo, the priest who found him on the steps of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, took him in, raised him, taught him, and provided a place of sanctuary. And in some ways, Frollo loved him too. But it was a harsh love, a demanding kind of affection through which Quasimodo realized that most of life’s offerings come at a price. We all have to realize that someday—and the sooner the better, I say. Why, consider some of those English professors I mentioned earlier, who take for granted all of my support and encouragement. They shall be sorry one day when I can take it no more.

But most importantly, at least for our story, Quasimodo loved the graceful Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy girl with long, dark, lustrous, curly hair and tiny feet. She danced in the cathedral square and performed tricks with her little goat, Djali (pronounced “Jolly”). Crowds gathered around her, mesmerized by her beauty and the magnetism of her personality. In other words, she knew how to put on a good show. But how could a girl like Esmeralda ever come to love a man like Quasimodo, even though he had the strength of ten men?

Impossible.

But permit me to tell you something: There are many kinds of love in the world, so if we don’t find ourselves possessing one variety, plenty more exist in which to invest.

You might think Quasimodo would have a difficult time finding any kind of love, what with the wart and all. But consider this, if someone cannot look beyond a giant wart, bristly hair, a hunched back, and spindly legs (or a large nose, eyes that protrude a bit too
far, crooked teeth, or an addicted parent), then perhaps the love that person offers to the world is not true love at all.

That evening in the attic, Ophelia wondered if she would have treated Quasimodo any differently on that January day when he wandered out of Notre-Dame. Through no fault of his own, Quasimodo was unanimously elected as Pope of Fools on Epiphany, or the Feast of Fools, which was a holiday in Paris during the Middle Ages when her citizens, particularly the students, felt a little more license (in this case, freedom) to unveil, shall we say, all of their personality.

Ophelia, despite her preoccupation with whatever book she is reading, owned a soft heart. After the anger subsided, she felt sorrow for Quasimodo as she lay there on the blue sofa. At the insistence of Frollo, his master and father figure who was also in love (to the point of obsession) with the Gypsy girl Esmeralda, Quasimodo tried to kidnap her. Unfortunately, luck was not on his side — left, right, front, or back — and he was arrested and thrown into jail. Meanwhile, Frollo escaped into the night with a swirl of his black cape. Obviously, he enjoyed a good deal more luck than his charge did.

And luck may not have been in play so much as Frollo’s obsession with alchemy and magic. Could that have given him the confidence he needed to escape? It certainly didn’t make him love Quasimodo more.

So the officials of Paris pushed Quasimodo into the stocks the next day.

Just in case you may not be familiar with them, stocks are a wooden device that was used to trap a person by the hands and neck — feet, too, if he were unlucky enough — while the public was invited, even encouraged, to ridicule the prisoner. But the real ones weren’t created for taking souvenir pictures at a party in some college town. These bit the wrists and squeezed the neck with their wooden jaws if you were large enough, and Quasimodo was most definitely large enough. How far down the Pope of Fools had fallen — paraded around the city one day, displayed as a criminal with rotten produce and street garbage hurled at his face the next
.

Ophelia’s heart broke again for the character. If she’d been
there, she would have gotten him out of those stocks — or at the very least brought him some water.

Oh, that poor young man!

Before she lifted the book back into her field of vision, something else made its way there. Two things, actually: a three-inch high carving atop a book on the worktable under the window. She set her book on the floor, just inside the painted circle, and got up to take a closer look. She picked up the figurine and studied it. A little dove rested on the stump of a tree, looking as if it were about to take flight.

The book beneath it proved most interesting. It was called
, It’s All Reality: Traveling Through “Imaginary” Realms in Five Easy Steps
. Ophelia opened the volume, hardly old, its glossy cover sporting the picture of a man, thumbs up, amid characters Ophelia recognized right away. The Ghost of Christmas Present with a candelabra wreath atop his giant head, Miss Havisham in her moth-eaten bridal gown, Hamlet (if the doublet and the wild look in the man’s eyes was any clue), Natty Bumppo, and Hester Prynne (she was easy to recognize what with wearing that glowing scarlet A on her dress).

This looks like a photograph
, Ophelia thought, realizing she was quite possibly holding the strangest book she’d ever seen. She positively knew it hadn’t been there when she’d reclined on the sofa an hour earlier. Had she dozed off and not realized it? Who dropped it off? Linus? Had he found it in the bookshop? Surely she would have heard him come into the attic.

She shivered.
I don’t like this
.

Wary, Ophelia brought the book back to the couch and opened it on her lap. She felt tired. Maybe she should start on it in the morning. The attic was beginning to make her skin crawl (or “creep her out,” as she so eloquently described). She checked her watch — 11:10 p.m. Ophelia loved elevens, and 11:11 was her favorite time of the day and night, so she watched the display on her watch until it switched.

At 11:11 on the dot, the room began vibrating, the tubes and beakers clinked against each other, the fringe on the couch pillows jiggled side by side. Even the milk in her glass broadcast itself from
center to edge in concentric circles (one inside the other like rings inside a tree). Ophelia held on to the arm of the sofa and raised her feet up off the floor.

An earthquake? In Kingscross?

Her eyes became the size of large gumballs as she looked down and watched the circle on the floor begin to glow, blue at first, then green, then yellow, orange, red, pink, and on into violet. Suddenly, white sparks (imagine sparklers) shot up from the floor as if someone had placed nozzles all around the circle. They hissed and popped and made the William Tell Overture jump into Ophelia’s brain. She wanted to run, but she felt as if an unseen hand pressed her to the couch cushion.

And all was still.

Smoke, faint and smelling more like baby powder than flame, fogged the room. And then with a swirling snap, it all disintegrated.

Ophelia rubbed her eyes and looked inside the painted circle on the floor.

What?

She rubbed her eyes again. I must be seeing things!

A large figure sat hunched over in the middle of the circle. He raised his head, took one look at Ophelia with his good eye and then scanned the room around him. He inhaled a shaky breath and fainted, falling forward with a thud.

G
enerally speaking, Ophelia is no dolt. She knew right away who was passed out inside the circle. Who else could be cursed with a wart so big that it covered one eye? After all, we have surgeons for that sort of thing nowadays.

“Quasimodo!” She dropped to her knees beside the huddled mass that, not to sound cruel, smelled like a dumpster in August.