Inkheart (2 page)

"He's just standing there!" whispered Meggie, leading Mo into her room.

"Has he got a hairy face? If so he could be a werewolf."

"Oh, stop it!" Meggie looked at him sternly, although his jokes made her feel less scared. Already, she hardly believed anymore in the figure standing in the rain — until she knelt down again at the window. "There! Do you see him?" she whispered.

Mo looked out through the raindrops running down the pane and said nothing.

"Didn't you promise burglars would never break into our house because there's nothing here to steal?" whispered Meggie.

"He's not a burglar," replied Mo, but as he stepped back from the window his face was so grave that Meggie's heart thudded faster than ever. "Go back to bed, Meggie," he said. "This visitor has come to see me."

He left the room before Meggie could ask what kind of visitor, for goodness sake, turned up in the middle of the night? She followed him anxiously. As she crept down the corridor she heard her father taking the chain off the front door, and when she reached the hall she saw him standing in the open doorway. The night came in, dark and damp, and the rushing of the rain sounded loud and threatening.

"Dustfinger!" called Mo into the darkness. "Is that you?"

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Dustfinger? What kind of a name was that? Meggie couldn't remember ever hearing it before, yet it sounded familiar, like a distant memory that wouldn't take shape properly.

At first, all seemed still outside except for the rain falling, murmuring as if the night had found its voice. But then footsteps approached the house, and the man emerged from the darkness of the yard, his long coat so wet with rain that it clung to his legs. For a split second, as the stranger stepped into the light spilling out of the house, Meggie thought she saw a small furry head over his shoulder, snuffling as it looked out of his backpack and then quickly disappearing back into it.

Dustfinger wiped his wet face with his sleeve and offered Mo his hand.

"How are you, Silvertongue?" he asked. "It's been a long time."

Hesitantly, Mo took the outstretched hand. "A very long time," he said, looking past his visitor as if he expected to see another figure emerge from the night. "Come in, you'll catch your death.

Meggie says you've been standing out there for some time."

"Meggie? Ah yes, of course." Dustfinger let Mo lead him into the house. He scrutinized Meggie so thoroughly she felt quite embarrassed and didn't know where to look. In the end she just stared back.

"She's grown."

"You remember her?"

"Of course."

Meggie noticed that Mo double-locked the door.

"How old is she now?" Dustfinger smiled at her. It was
a
strange smile. Meggie couldn't decide whether it was mocking, supercilious, or just awkward. She didn't smile back.

"Twelve," said Mo.

"Twelve? My word!" Dustfinger pushed his dripping hair back from his forehead. It reached almost to his shoulders. Meggie wondered what color it was when it was dry. The stubble around his narrow-lipped mouth was gingery, like the fur of the stray cat Meggie sometimes fed with a saucer of milk outside the door. Ginger hair sprouted on his cheeks, too, sparse as a boy's first beard but not long enough to hide three long, pale scars. They made Dustfinger's face look as if it had been smashed and stuck back together again.

"Twelve," he repeated. "Of course. She was . . . let's see, she was three then, wasn't she?"

Mo nodded. "Come on, I'll find you some dry clothes." Impatiently, as if he were suddenly in a hurry to hide the man from Meggie, he led his visitor across the hall. "And, Meggie," he said over his shoulder, "you go back to sleep." Then, without another word, he closed his workshop door.

Meggie stood there rubbing her cold feet together. Go back to sleep. Sometimes, when they'd stayed up late yet again, Mo would toss her down on her bed like a bag of walnuts. Sometimes he chased her around the house after supper until she escaped into her room, breathless with
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laughter. And sometimes he was so tired he lay down on the sofa and she made him a cup of coffee before she went to bed. But he had never
ever
sent her off to her room so brusquely.

A foreboding, clammy and fearful, came into her heart as if, along with the visitor whose name was so strange yet somehow familiar, some menace had slipped into her life. And she wished —

so hard it frightened her — that she had never gone to get Mo and Dustfinger had stayed outside until the rain washed him away.

When the door of the workshop opened again she jumped.

"Still there, I see," said Mo. "Go to bed, Meggie. Please." He had that little frown over his nose that appeared only when something was really worrying him, and he seemed to look straight through her as if his thoughts were somewhere else entirely. The foreboding in Meggie's heart grew, spreading black wings.

"Send him away, Mo!" she said as he gently propelled her toward her room. "Please! Send him away. I don't like him."

Mo leaned in her open doorway. "He'll be gone when you get up in the morning. Word of honor."

"Word of honor — no crossed fingers?" Meggie looked him straight in the eye. She could always tell when Mo was lying, however hard he tried to hide it from her.

"No crossed fingers," he said, holding both hands out to show her.

Then he closed her door, even though he knew she didn't like that. Meggie put her ear to it, listening. She could hear the clink of china. So the man with the sandy beard was getting a nice cup of tea to warm him up. I hope he catches pneumonia, thought Meggie . . . though he needn't necessarily die of it. Meggie heard the kettle whistling in the kitchen and Mo carrying a tray of clattering crockery back to the workshop. When that door closed she forced herself to wait a few more seconds, just to be on the safe side. Then she crept back out into the hallway.

There was a sign hanging on the door of Mo's workshop, a small metal plaque. Meggie knew the words on it by heart. When she was five she had often practiced reading the old-fashioned, spindly lettering:

Some books should be tasted

some devoured,

but only a few

should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

Back then, when she still had to climb on a box to read the plaque, she had thought the chewing and digesting were meant literally and wondered, horrified, why Mo had hung on his workshop door the words of someone who vandalized books. Now she knew what the plaque really meant, but tonight, she wasn't interested in written words. Spoken words were what she wanted to hear, the words being exchanged in soft, almost inaudible whispers by the two men on the other side of the door.

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"Don't underestimate him!" she heard Dustfinger say. His voice was so different from Mo's. No one else in the world had a voice like her father's. Mo could paint pictures in the empty air with his voice alone.

"He'd do anything to get hold of it." That was Dustfinger again. "And when I say 'anything,' I can assure you I mean
anything."

"I'll never let him have it." That was Mo.

"He'll still get his hands on it, one way or another! I tell you, they're on your trail."

"It wouldn't be the first time. I've always managed to shake them off before."

"Oh yes? And for how much longer, do you think? What about your daughter? Are you telling me she actually likes moving around the whole time? Believe me, I know what I'm talking about."

It was so quiet behind the door that Meggie scarcely dared breathe in case the two men heard her.

Finally, her father spoke again, hesitantly, as if his tongue found it difficult to form the words.

"Then what do you think I ought to do?"

"Come with me. I'll take you to them." A cup clinked. The sound of a spoon against china. How loud small noises sound in a silence. "You know how much Capricorn thinks of your talents. He'd be glad if you took it to him of your own free will, I'm sure he would. The man he found to replace you is useless."

Capricorn. Another peculiar name. Dustfinger had uttered it as if the mere sound might scorch his tongue. Meggie wriggled her chilly toes and wrinkled her cold nose. She didn't understand much of what the two men were saying, but she tried to memorize every single word of it.

It was quiet again in the workshop.

"Oh, I don't know," said Mo at last. He sounded so weary it tore at Meggie's heart. "I'll have to think about it. When do you think his men will get here?"

"Soon!"

The word dropped like a stone into the silence. "Soon," repeated Mo. "Very well. I'll have made up my mind by tomorrow. Do you have somewhere to sleep?"

"Oh, I can always find a place," replied Dustfinger. "I'm managing quite well these days, although it's still all much too fast for me." His laugh was not a happy one. "But I'd like to know what you decide. May I come back tomorrow? About midday?"

"Yes, of course. I'll be picking Meggie up from school at one-thirty. Come after that."

Meggie heard a chair being pushed back and scurried back to her room. When the door of the workshop opened she was just closing her bedroom door behind her. Pulling the covers up to her chin, she lay there listening as her father said goodbye to Dustfinger.

"And thank you for the warning anyway," she heard him add as Dustfinger's footsteps moved away, slowly and uncertainly, as if he were reluctant to leave, as if he hadn't said everything he'd
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wanted to say. But at last he was gone, and only the rain kept drumming its wet fingers on Meggie's window.

When Mo opened the door of her room she quickly closed her eyes and tried to breathe as slowly as you do in a deep, innocent sleep. But Mo wasn't stupid. In fact, he was sometimes terribly clever.

"Meggie, put one of your feet out of bed," he told her. Reluctantly, she stuck her toes out from under the blanket and laid them in Mo's warm hand. They were still cold.

"I knew it!" he said. "You've been spying. Can't you do as I tell you, just for once?" Sighing, he tucked her foot back underneath the nice warm blankets. Then he sat down on her bed, passed his hands over his tired face, and looked out of the window. His hair was as dark as moleskin.

Meggie had fair hair like her mother, whom she knew only from a few faded photographs. "You should be glad you look more like her than me," Mo always said. "My head wouldn't look good at all on a girl's neck." But Meggie wished she did look more like him. There wasn't a face in the world she loved more.

"I didn't hear what you were saying anyway," she murmured.

"Good." Mo stared out of the window as if Dustfinger were still standing in the yard. Then he rose and went to the door. "Try to get some sleep," he said.

But Meggie didn't want to sleep. "Dustfinger! What sort of a name is that?" she asked. "And why does he call you Silver-tongue?"

Mo did not reply.

"And this person who's looking for you — I heard what Dustfinger called him. Capricorn. Who is he?"

"No one you want to meet." Her father didn't turn around. "I thought you didn't hear anything.

Good night, Meggie."

This time he left her door open. The light from the hallway fell on her bed, mingling with the darkness of the night that seeped in through the window, and Meggie lay there waiting for the dark to disappear and take her fear of some evil menace away with it. Only later did she understand that the evil had not appeared for the first time that night. It had just slunk back in again.

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Chapter 2 – Secrets

"What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked.

And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live
without them."

"I couldn't live without them," Naftali said.

–
Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus

It was early dawn when Meggie woke up. Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment. The alarm clock said just before five, and Meggie was going to turn over and go back to sleep when she suddenly sensed someone else in the room. Startled, she sat up and saw Mo standing by her open closet door.

"Hello," he said, putting her favorite sweater in a suitcase. "I'm sorry, I know it's very early, but we have to leave. How about cocoa for breakfast?"

Still drowsy with sleep, Meggie nodded. Outside, the birds were twittering loudly as if they'd been awake for hours. Mo put two more pairs of jeans in her suitcase, closed it, and carried it to the door. "Wear something warm," he said. "It's chilly outside."

"Where are we going?" asked Meggie, but he had already disappeared. She looked out of the window, feeling confused. She almost expected to see Dustfinger, but there was only a blackbird in the yard hopping over the stones, which were wet after the rain. Meggie put on her jeans and stumbled into the kitchen. Two suitcases, a traveling bag, and Mo's toolbox stood out in the hall.

Her father was sitting at the kitchen table making sandwiches for the journey. When she came into the kitchen he looked up briefly and smiled at her, but Meggie could see he was worried about something. "Mo, we can't go away now!" she said. "The school holidays don't start for another week!"

"Well, it won't be the first time I've had to go away on business during the school term."

He was right about that. In fact, he went away quite often, whenever an antique dealer, a book collector, or a library needed a bookbinder and commissioned Mo to restore a few valuable old books, freeing them of dust and mold or dressing them in new clothes, as he put it. Meggie didn't think the word
bookbinder
described Mo's work particularly well, and a few years ago she had made him a sign to hang on his workshop door saying MORTIMER FOLCHART, BOOK DOCTOR.

And the book doctor never called on his patients without taking his daughter, too. They had always done that and they always would, never mind what Meggie's teachers said.

"How about chicken pox? Have I used that excuse already?"