Inkheart (7 page)

I must find Dustfinger, she thought sleepily. He must be here somewhere. But then the book slipped from her fingers and she fell asleep.

The sun woke her the next morning. The air was still cool from the night before, but the sky was cloudless, and when Meggie leaned out of the window she could see the lake gleaming in the distance beyond the branches of the trees. The room Elinor had given her was on the first floor.

Mo was sleeping only two doors farther along, but Dustfinger had to make do with an attic room.

Meggie had seen it when she was looking for him yesterday. It held nothing but a narrow bed surrounded by crates of books towering up to the rafters. Mo was already sitting at the table with Elinor when Meggie came down to the kitchen for breakfast, but Dustfinger wasn't there.

"Oh, he's had breakfast already," said Elinor sharply, when Meggie asked about him. "Along with some animal like a Pomeranian dog. It was sitting on the table and it spat at me when I came into the kitchen. I wasn't expecting anything like that. I made it clear to your peculiar friend that flies are the only animals I'll allow anywhere near my kitchen table, and so he took the furry creature outside."

"What do you want him for?" asked Mo.

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"Oh, nothing special. I — I just wanted to ask him something," said Meggie. She hastily ate half a slice of bread, drank some of the horribly bitter cocoa Elinor had made, and went out.

She found Dustfinger behind the house, standing on a lawn of short, rather rough grass where a solitary deck chair stood next to a plaster angel. There was no sign of Gwin. A few birds were quarreling among the red flowers of the rhododendron, and there stood Dustfinger looking lost to the world, and juggling. Meggie tried to count the colored balls — four, six, eight. He plucked them out of the air so swiftly that it made her dizzy to watch him. He stood on one leg to catch them, casually, as if he didn't even have to look. Only when he spotted Meggie did a ball escape his fingers and roll at her feet. Meggie picked it up and threw it back.

"Where did you learn to do that?" she asked. "It looked — well, wonderful."

Dustfinger made her a mocking bow. There was that strange smile of his again. "It's how I earn my living," he said. With the juggling and a few other things."

"How can you earn a living that way?"

"At markets and fairs. At children's birthday parties. Did you ever go to one of those fairs where people pretend they're still living in medieval times?"

Meggie nodded. Yes, she had once been to a fair like that with Mo. There had been wonderful things there, so strange that they might have come from another world, not just another time.

Mo had bought her a box decorated with brightly colored stones and a little fish made of shiny green-and-gold metal, with its mouth wide open and a jingle in its hollow body that rang like a little bell when you shook it. The air had smelled of freshly baked bread, smoke, and damp clothes, and Meggie had watched a smith making a sword and had hidden behind Mo's back from a woman in a witch's costume.

Dustfinger picked up his juggling balls and put them back in his bag, which was standing open on the grass behind him. Meggie went over to it and looked inside. She saw some bottles, some white cotton wool, and a carton of milk, but before she could see any more Dustfinger closed the bag.

"Sorry, trade secrets," he said. "Your father's given the book to this Elinor, hasn't he?"

Meggie shrugged her shoulders.

"It's all right, you can tell me. I know anyway. I was listening. He's mad to leave it here, but what can I do?" Dustfinger sat down on the deck chair. His backpack was on the grass next to him, with a bushy tail spilling out of it.

"I saw Gwin," said Meggie.

"Did you?" Dustfinger leaned back, closing his eyes. His hair looked even paler in the sunlight.

"So did I. He's in the backpack. It's the time of day when he sleeps."

"I mean I saw him in the book." Meggie didn't take her eyes off Dustfinger's face as she said this, but it didn't move a muscle. His thoughts couldn't be read on his brow in the same way as she could read Mo's. Dustfinger's face was a closed book, and Meggie had the feeling that if anyone tried reading it he would rap their knuckles. "He was sitting on a letter," she went on. "On a capital N. I saw his horns."

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"Really?" Dustfinger didn't even open his eyes. "And do you know which of her thousands of shelves that bookmad woman put it on?"

Meggie ignored his question. "Why does Gwin look like the animal in the book?" she asked. "Did you really stick those horns on him?"

Dustfinger opened his eyes and blinked up at the sun.

"Hm, did I?" he inquired, looking at the sky. A few clouds were drifting over Elinor's house. The sun disappeared behind one of them, and its shadow fell across the green grass like an ugly mark.

"Does your father often read aloud to you, Meggie?" asked Dustfinger.

Meggie looked at him suspiciously. Then she knelt down beside the backpack and stroked Gwin's silky tail. "No," she said. "But he taught me to read when I was five."

"Ask him
why
he doesn't read aloud to you," said Dustfinger. "And don't let him put you off with excuses."

"What do you mean?" Meggie straightened up, feeling cross. "He doesn't like reading aloud, that's all."

Dustfinger smiled. Leaning out of the deck chair, he put one hand into the backpack. "Ah, that feels like a nice full stomach," he commented. "I think Gwin had good hunting last night. I hope he hasn't been plundering a nest again. Perhaps it's just Elinor's rolls and eggs." Gwin's tail twitched back and forth almost like a cat's. Meggie looked at the backpack with distaste. She was glad she couldn't see Gwin's muzzle. There might still be blood on it.

Dustfinger leaned back in Elinor's deck chair. "Shall I give you a performance this evening —

show you what the bottles, the cotton wool, and all the other mysterious things in my bag are for?" he asked without looking at her. "It has to be dark for that, pitch dark. Are you scared to be outdoors in the middle of the night?"

"Of course not!" said Meggie, offended, although really she was not at all happy to be out in the dark. "But first, tell me why you stuck those horns on Gwin! And tell me what you know about the book."

Dustfinger folded his arms behind his head. "Oh, I know a lot about that book," he said. "And perhaps I'll tell you sometime, but first the two of us have a date. Here at eleven o'clock tonight.

OK?"

Meggie looked up at a blackbird singing its heart out on Elinor's rooftop. "OK," she said. "Eleven o'clock tonight." Then she went back to the house.

Elinor had suggested that Mo set up his workshop next door to the library. There was a little room where she kept her collection of old books about animals and plants (for there seemed to be no kind of book that Elinor didn't collect). She kept this collection on shelves of pale, honey-colored wood. On some of the shelves the books were propping up glass display cases of beetles pinned to cardboard, which only made Meggie dislike Elinor all the more. By the only window was a handsome table with turned legs, but it was barely half as long as the one Mo had in his
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workshop at home. Perhaps that was why he was swearing quietly to himself when Meggie put her head around the door.

"Look at this table!" he said. "You could sort a stamp collection on it but not bind books. This whole room is too small. Where am I going to put the press and my tools? Last time I worked up in the attics, but now they're filled with crates of books, too."

Meggie stroked the spines of the books crammed close together on the shelves. "Just tell her you need a bigger table." Carefully, she took a book off the shelf. It contained pictures of the strangest of insects: beetles with horns, beetles with proboscises—one even had a proper nose.

Meggie passed her forefinger over the pastel-colored pictures. "Mo, why haven't you ever read aloud to me?"

Her father turned around so abruptly that the book almost fell from her hand. "Why do you ask me that? You've been talking to Dustfinger, haven't you? What did he tell you?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all." Meggie herself didn't know why she was lying. She put the beetle book back in its place. It felt almost as if someone were spinning a very fine web around the two of them, a web of secrets and lies closing in on them all the time. "I think it's a good question, though," she said as she took out another book. It was called
Masters of Disguise.
The creatures in it looked like live twigs or dry leaves.

Mo turned his back to her again. He began laying out his implements on the table, even though it was too small: his folding tool on the left, then the round-headed hammer he used to tap the spines of books into shape, the sharp paper knife . . . He usually whistled under his breath as he worked, but now he was perfectly quiet. Meggie sensed his thoughts were far away. But where?

Finally, he sat on the side of the table and looked at her. "I just don't like reading aloud," he said, as if it was the most uninteresting subject in the world. "You know I don't. That's all."

"But why not? I mean, you make up stories. You tell wonderful stories. You can do all the voices and make it exciting and then funny .. "

Mo crossed his arms over his chest as if hiding behind them.

"You could read me
Tom Sawyer,"
suggested Meggie, "or
How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin."
That was one of Mo's favorite stories. When she was smaller they sometimes played at having crumbs in their clothes, like the crumbs in the rhino's skin.

"Yes, an excellent story," murmured Mo, turning his back to her again. He picked up the folder in which he kept his endpapers and leafed absentmindedly through them. "Every book should begin with attractive endpapers," he had once told Meggie. "Preferably in a dark color: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theater.

First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins."

"Meggie, I really do have to work now," he said without turning around. "The sooner I'm through with Elinor's books the sooner we can go home again."

Meggie put the book about creatures who were masters of disguise back in its place. "Suppose he didn't stick the horns on?" she asked.

"What?"

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"Gwin's horns. Suppose Dustfinger didn't stick them on?"

"Well, he did." Mo drew a chair up to the table that wasn't long enough for him. "By the way, Elinor's gone shopping. If you feel faint with hunger before she gets back, just make yourself a couple of pancakes, OK?"

"OK," murmured Meggie. For a moment she wondered whether to tell him about her date with Dustfinger that night, hut then she decided against it. "Do you think I can take some of these books to my room?" she asked instead.

"I'm sure you can. So long as they don't disappear into your box."

"Like that book thief you once told me about?" Meggie put three books under her left arm and four under her right arm. "How many was it he stole? Thirty thousand?"

"Forty thousand," said Mo. "But at least he didn't kill the owners."

"No, that was the Spanish monk whose name I've forgotten." Meggie went over to the door and opened it with her toe. "Dustfinger says Capricorn would kill you to get hold of that book." She tried to make her voice sound casual. "Would he, Mo?"

"Meggie!" Mo turned around with the paper knife pretending to point it at her threateningly. "Go and lie in the sun or bury your pretty nose in those books, but please let me get some work done.

And tell Dustfinger I will carve him into very thin slices with this knife if he goes on telling you such nonsense."

"That wasn't a proper answer!" said Meggie, making her way out into the hallway with an armful of books.

Once in her room, she spread the books out on the huge bed and began to read. She read about beetles who moved into empty snail shells as we might move into an empty house, about frogs shaped like leaves, and caterpillars with brightly colored spines on their backs, white-bearded monkeys, striped anteaters, and cats that dig in the ground for sweet potatoes. There seemed to be everything here, every creature Meggie could imagine, and even more that she could never have dreamed existed at all. But none of Elinor's clever books said a word about martens with horns.

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Chapter 6 – Fire And Stars

So along they came with dancing bears, dogs and goats, monkeys and marmots, walking
the tightrope, turning somersaults both backward and forwards, throwing daggers and
knives and suffering no injury when they fell on their points and blades, swallowing fire
and chewing stones, doing tricks with magic goblets and chains under cover of cloak and
hat, making puppets fence with each other, trilling like nightingales, screaming like
peacocks, calling like deer, wrestling and dancing to the sound of the double flute....

–
Herzt,
Book of Minstrelsy

The day passed slowly. Meggie saw Mo only in the afternoon, when Elinor came back from doing her shopping and half an hour later gave them spaghetti with some kind of premade sauce. "I'm afraid I have no patience with toiling over a stove," she said as she put the dishes on the table.

Perhaps our friend with the furry animal can cook?"

Dustfinger merely shrugged his shoulders apologetically, sorry, I'm no use to you that way."

"Mo cooks very well," said Meggie, stirring the thin, watery sauce into her spaghetti.

"Mo's here to restore my books, not to cook for us," replied Elinor sharply. "What about you, though?"

Meggie shrugged. "I can make pancakes," she said. "Why don't you get some cookbooks? You have books of every other kind. I'm sure you'd find cookbooks a help."

Elinor didn't even deign to reply to this suggestion.

"And by the way, there's a rule for nighttime," she said, when they had all been eating in silence for a while. "I won't have candlelight in my house. Fire makes me nervous. It's far too greedy for paper."