Inkheart (58 page)

Elinor hadn't been able to reconcile herself to the idea of another walk all the way down through the thorny hills where the snakes lived. "Do you think I'm crazy?" she said crossly. "My feet hurt at the mere thought of it." So she and Meggie had set off again in search of a telephone. It was a strange feeling to walk through the village — a truly deserted village now — past Capricorn's smoke-blackened house and the half-charred church porch. Water lay in the square outside. The blue sky was reflected in it and made it look almost as if the square had turned into a lake overnight. The hoses Capricorn's men had used to save their master's house lay like huge snakes in the pools of water. In fact, the fire had ravaged only the ground floor, but all the same Meggie would not go in, and when they had searched over a dozen other houses in vain Elinor bravely went through the charred door on her own. Meggie told her where to find the Magpie's room, and Elinor took a gun just in case the old woman had come back to save what she could of her own and her robber son's treasures. But the Magpie had long gone, just like Basta, and Elinor came back with a triumphant smile on her lips, carrying a cordless phone.

They called a taxi. It was somewhat difficult to persuade the driver he must ignore the road barrier when he came to it, but luckily he had never believed any of the sinister stories that were told of the village. They arranged to wait for him by the roadside so he wouldn't see any of the fairies and trolls. Meggie and her mother stayed in the village while Mo and Elinor went in the taxi to the nearest town, and came back a few hours later driving the two small buses they had rented. For Elinor had decided to offer a home, or "asylum," as she put it, to all the strange creatures who had landed in her world. "After all," she said, "many people here have little enough patience or understanding for their fellow human beings who are only superficially different than them — so how would it be for little people with blue skins who can fly?"

It took some time for them all to understand Elinor's offer — which was, of course, also made to the men, women, and children out of the book — but most of them decided to stay in Capricorn's village. It obviously reminded them of a home that their earlier death had almost made them forget, and, of course, they could use the treasure that Meggie told the children must still be lying in the cellars of Capricorn's house. It would probably be enough to keep them all for the rest of their lives. The birds, dogs, and cats who had emerged from the Shadow had not hung around, but had long ago disappeared into the surrounding hills, while a few fairies and two of the little glass men, enchanted by the broom blossoms, the scent of rosemary, and the narrow alleys where the ancient stones whispered their stories to them, decided to make the once sinister village their home.

In the end, however, forty-three blue-skinned fairies with dragonfly wings fluttered into the buses and settled on the backs of the gray-patterned seats. Capricorn had obviously swatted fairies as carelessly as other people swat flies. Tinker Bell was among those who didn't come, which did not particularly trouble Meggie, for she had realized that Peter Pan's fairy was very
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self-centered. Her tinkling really got on your nerves, too, and she tinkled almost all the time if she didn't get what she wanted.

In addition to four trolls who looked like very small and hairy human beings, thirteen little glass men and women climbed into Elinor's buses — and so did Darius, the unhappy stammering reader. There was nothing to keep him in the village with its new inhabitants, and it held too many painful memories for him. He offered to help Elinor build up her library again, and she accepted. Meggie suspected she was secretly toying with the idea of getting Darius to read aloud again, now that Capricorn's malevolent presence no longer left him tongue-tied.

Meggie looked back for a long time as they left Capricorn's village behind them. She knew she would never forget the sight of it, just as you never forget many stories even though — or perhaps because — they have scared you.

Before they left, Mo had asked her, with concern in his voice, whether she minded if they drove to Elinor's first. Meggie did not mind at all. Oddly enough, she felt more homesick for Elinor's house than for the old farmhouse where she and Mo had lived for the last few years.

The scar left by the bonfire was still visible on the lawn behind the house, where Capricorn's men had piled up the books and burned them. But before Elinor had had the ashes taken away, she had filled a jam jar with the fine gray dust, and it stood on the bedside table in her room.

Many of the books that Capricorn's men had only swept off the shelves were already back in their old places, others were waiting on Mo's workbench to be rebound, but the library shelves were empty. As they stood looking at them, Meggie saw the tears in Elinor's eyes even though she was quick to wipe them away.

Elinor did a great deal of buying over the next few weeks. She bought books. She traveled all over Europe in search of them. Darius was always with her, and sometimes Mo went with them, too. But Meggie stayed in the big house with her mother. They would sit together at a window looking out at the garden where the fairies were building themselves nests, gently glowing globes that hung among the branches of the trees. The glass men and women settled into Elinor's attic, and the trolls dug caves among the big old trees that grew in abundance in Elinor's garden. She told them all that they should never leave her property, warning them urgently of the dangers of the world beyond the hedges that enclosed it, but soon the fairies were flying down to the lake by night, the trolls were walking along its banks and stealing into the sleeping villages, and the little glass people would disappear into the tall grass that covered the slopes of the mountains around the lake.

"Don't worry too much," said Mo, whenever Elinor bewailed their stupidity. "After all, the world they came from wasn't without its dangers."

"But it was different!" cried Elinor. "There were no cars — suppose the fairies fly into a windshield? And there were no hunters with rifles shooting at anything that moves, just for the fun of it."

By now Elinor knew everything about the world of
Ink-heart.
Meggie's mother had needed a great deal of paper to write down her memories of it. Every evening Meggie asked her to tell more stories, and then they sat together while Teresa wrote and Meggie read the words and sometimes even tried to paint pictures of what her mother described.

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The days went by, and Elinor's shelves filled up with wonderful new books. Some of them were in poor condition, and Darius, who had begun to draw up a catalog of Elinor's printed treasures, kept interrupting his own work to watch Mo at his. He sat there wide-eyed as Mo freed a badly worn book from its old cover, fixed loose pages back, glued the spines in place, and did whatever else was necessary to preserve the books for many more years to come.

Long after all this, Meggie couldn't have said exactly when they had decided to stay on with Elinor. Perhaps not for many weeks, or perhaps they had known from the first day they were back. Meggie was given the room with the bed that was much too big for her, and which still had her book box standing under it. She would have loved to read aloud to her mother from her own favorite books, but of course she understood why Mo very seldom did so, even now. And one night when she couldn't get to sleep, because she thought she saw Basta's face out in the dark, she sat down at the desk in front of her window and began to write, while the fairies played in Elinor's garden and the trolls rustled in the bushes. For Meggie had a plan: She wanted to learn to make up stories like Fenoglio. She wanted to learn to fish for words so that she could read aloud to her mother without worrying about who might come out of the stories and look at her with homesick eyes. So Meggie decided words would be her trade.

And where better could she learn that trade than in a house full of magical creatures, where fairies built their nests in the garden and books whispered on the shelves by night? As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

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Sources & Acknowledgements

The Artist and Publisher would like to thank the following for permission to use copyrighted materials:

pp. 350, 466 - Richard Adams: from
Watership Down
(Penguin Books, 1974), reprinted by permission of David Highani Associates;

p. 394 - Hans Christian Andersen: from
HansAndersen: His Classic
Fairy
Tales
, translated by Erik Haugaard (Gollancz, 1976);

pp. 282, 359, 469 - J. M. Barrie: from
Peter Pan
(Penguin Popular Classics, 1995), reprinted by permission of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity;

p. 1-Lucy M.Boston: from
The Children of Green Knawe
(Puffin Books, 1975); pp. 153, 343 - Ray Bradbury: from
Fahrenheit 451
(Flamingo Modern Classics, 1993); pp. 74, 377 - Roald Dahl: from
The BFG
Qonathan Cape, 1982) and
The Witches
(Jonathan Cape, 1983), reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates; p. 511 - Richard de Bury: from
Philobiblon
(Blackwell, 1970), reprinted by permission of the publisher;

pp. 131, 203, 407 - Michael de Larrabeiti: from
The Borrible Trilogy
(Macmillan, 2002), reprinted by permission of the publisher;

p. 79 - Solomon Eagle: quoted in
A Gentle Madness
by Nicholas Basbanes (Henry Holt & Company, 1995);

pp. 400, 520 - Michael Ende:
from Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver
(Penguin Books, 1990) and
The Neverending Story
(Penguin Books, 1984);

pp. 90, 136, 266, 288, 353 - William Goldman: from
The Princess Bride
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990);

pp. 21, 96 - Kenneth Grahame: from
The Wind in the Willows
(Puffin Books, 1994); p. 316 - Eva Ibbotson: from
The Secret of Platform 13
(Macmillan Children's Books, 2001);

pp. 187, 484 - Rudyard Kipling: from
The Jungle Book
(Puffin Classics, 1994), reprinted by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd. on behalf of The National Trust for Places of Historical Interest or Natural Beauty;

p. 382 -Edward William Lane (translator): from
The Arabian Nights'Entertainments
(East-West Publications, 1982);

p. 123 - C. S. Lewis: from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
(Collins, 1987); p. 368 - Otfried Preussler: from
Satanic Mill
(Peter Smith Publishers, 1985);
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p. 527 - Maurice Sendak: from
Where the Wild Things Are
(The Bodley Head, 1967); pp. 236, 246-7 - Shel Silverstein: from
Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems & Drawings
of Shel Silverstein
(HarperCollins Publishers, 1974), © 1974 by Evil Eye Music, Inc.; pp. 12, 108 - Isaac Bashevis Singer: from
Naftali the Storyteller and His Horse, Sus, & Other Stones
(Oxford University Press, 1977);

pp. 424, 443 - J. R. R. Tolkien: from
The Hobbit
(HarperCollins, 1994) and
The Lord of the Rings
(HarperCollins, 1994), reprinted by permission of the publisher;

p. 417 - Evangeline Walton: from
The Mabinogian Tetrakgy
(Overlook Press, 2002); pp. 307, 333 - T H. White: from
The Sword in the Stone
(Harper & Row, 1973) and
The
Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King
(University of Texas Press, 1988).

***Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be
pleased to rectify any omissions brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.

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