The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross (18 page)

Maybe if I had more time I could have figured out how to stop the ghost on my own. But I didn’t have more time. If I didn’t do something soon, Amelia was going to wind up trapped with the others in the Forgotten Library. Then I’d only get to see her again in those fleeting moments when I was dead after being killed on stage. It wasn’t exactly the ideal father-daughter relationship.

It was another of those moments when I needed help. But none of the usual suspects were going to do now. I needed specialized help.

I needed the Scholar.

I left the park and joined the crowd surging into the nearest Tube station for the morning commuter rush. I made my way around London’s underground maze until eventually I was sitting on a train heading out of the city, toward Oxford.

The Scholar had been in Oxford for centuries. Before that he’d been in the Sorbonne, and before that in the Vatican library, long before it ever became the Vatican. I don’t know where he was from originally any more than I knew his real name, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn he’d been in the great library of Alexandria before that had been destroyed. He was a bit of a snob about the libraries he chose to frequent.

Case in point: I found him in the Queens College Library at Oxford, tucked away in the wooden stacks, hunched over some ancient tome he’d pulled from one of the shelves. The air around him was thick with dust but it wasn’t from any of the books. The air around him was always thick with dust. That was just his nature.

He was shaking his head at the book and muttering to himself as I approached.

“If this is what passes for research these days, we’re all doomed,” he said. He ran a hand down a page and the ink flowed from the page and into his skin, travelling up his arm. I watched letters swirl across his eyes, and when I looked back at the page it was blank.

I placed the tome in his hand around the fifteenth century, only slightly older than the ornate wooden shelves around us. I decided not to say anything about the Scholar’s views on modernity. He could get a little cranky at times.

He frowned at me as I approached. Which was really his way of saying hello. He didn’t like to be bothered. Being bothered got in the way of reading books. And, apparently, consuming them.

“What is it you seek this time?” he muttered. “More scraps of useless trivia about the lost treasure ship of Columbus?”

“If I’d found it, I could have changed history,” I said.

He snorted and put the book down on a shelf, then took off his glasses to polish them on his dusty shirt. They were the sort of spectacles no one had worn in hundreds of years. As far as I could tell, he was just moving the smudges around on them.

“Yes, you would have been able to buy more expensive spirits with which to waste away your life,” he said.

All right, he may have had a point there.

The Scholar sighed and shook his head at the selections on the shelves. “This may as well be the children’s section of a public library,” he said. He scowled at a passing student, who quickened his pace to get away from us.

“What do you know about
Hamlet?
” I asked.

“Dreadfully misguided,” the Scholar said. He put his glasses back on and blinked at me like I had just appeared there. “Wasting all that time with plotting and vengeance when he could have been reading more books. That’s why he died, you know. If only he’d read more, his fate would have turned out differently.” He picked up the book again and shook his head at it.

I should point out the Scholar wasn’t trying to be funny. He owes his immortality to reading. I don’t know how it works exactly, but as long as he keeps reading and learning things from books, he stays alive. Maybe it has something to do with his little trick of consuming the books. I’d thought about asking him to show me how it was done, but I didn’t think I’d be able to do that to a book myself. Not the ones worth reading, anyway, and what was the point doing it with the ones not worth reading?

“I meant the play, not the character,” I told him.

The Scholar frowned at me again, or maybe he was still frowning at me.

“I know everything about the play, of course,” he said. “And all its variations. And its sequels. Why are you wasting my time with such silly questions? Aren’t there seraphim that need slaying? Shouldn’t you be bothering them?”

“Probably,” I said. “But I’m not so much interested in
Hamlet
or its sequels as I am the play that came before it. You know, the one that Shakespeare stole to make
Hamlet
.”

The Scholar sniffed. “It was entirely appropriate to use material from other works in that day,” he said. “There were no concerns about copyright, and the cult of authorial voice had yet to—”

“He took the whole thing,” I said.

The Scholar sighed at being cut off in mid-point, and a cloud of dust billowed about me. I held my breath for a few seconds.

“This is the trouble with your generation,” the Scholar said. “You have no patience. No doubt modern life’s distractions are to blame, what with all your telegrams and moving pictures and such.”

“We haven’t had telegrams since the war years,” I said, although, to be honest, I couldn’t remember the exact timeline of the rise and fall of the telegram.

“What war?” The Scholar asked.

“The Second World War,” I guessed.

“There was a First World War?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “I
am
behind on my reading.”

“The play,” I pleaded.

“
Which
play?” he asked.

So I told him everything. Well, almost everything. I told him about the deaths and the Witches and Marlowe and the Forgotten Library. I told him how Will had brought the ghost from the other play to life with his ink. The only parts I left out were about Amelia and Morgana. Not because I thought he’d use them against me like others might have, but because I knew he wouldn’t care. I also left out the part about Alice, because the Scholar and Alice really, really don’t like each other. They had very different ideas about books and their uses.

“I have read rumours Shakespeare had found a way to the Forgotten Library,” the Scholar said, gazing at the tomes around us as if those rumours were hidden away in them at this very moment. “But I had never dared believed those tales could be true. I was not even sure if the library even existed.” He looked back at me. “You must take me there at once,” he said.

“I need a break from getting killed for a while,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s not the way you want to travel there. Plus, you seem to be missing the fact that it’s haunted by a homicidal ghost.”

“Surely there must be an alternate route if Shakespeare was able to make the voyage,” he said, gritting his teeth at my obvious ignorance.

“Yeah, but there’s no way we can ask him about the path he took,” I said. “And Marlowe claims to not know anything more of the place than what he told me.”

“Perhaps you should let me talk to Marlowe,” the Scholar muttered. “I didn’t even know he was alive.”

“He isn’t alive,” I said. “Not really.”

“Is he still writing?” The Scholar asked. “I would love to read more of his work.”

“You’re missing the point here,” I said. “Do you know anything about the other play or not?”

“Of course,” he snapped. “What kind of scholar would I be if I didn’t know such things? Although personally I think you need to broaden your reading. I find the Jacobeans far more complex than Shakespeare. Now, take
The Duchess of Malfi
, for example. . . .”

I held up my hand to stop him before he entered full-blown lecture mode and someone complained to the librarians and security was called. I’d been through that chapter before.

“Please,” I said. “I know all about the Jacobeans. I was there, remember? I just need to know about the ghost’s play.”

The Scholar took off his glasses again and polished them once more, to about the same effect as the first time.

“Very well,” he said. “Let us discuss terms then.”

I sighed. “You know, it would be nice if someday I asked a favour of someone and they told me what I needed to know out of the kindness of their heart.”

“No doubt that day will be very lovely for you,” the Scholar said. “But that day is not today. I haven’t had a heart in centuries.”

“I’m surprised to learn you had one at all,” I said.

The Scholar placed his glasses back on his beak-like nose and turned his attention back to the book he’d been consuming.

“Well, perhaps you can find someone else to help you,” he said. “Maybe that girl from the children’s tale. I imagine she has all sorts of interesting things to say about
Hamlet
.”

The Scholar was no fool. He knew I would have tried Alice first, and I was here only because there were no other options left to me. It was time to offer him an incentive. I took out the book Polonius had given me and showed it to him.

The Scholar studied the book like an owl studying a mouse. “What is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is a dead man in the Forgotten Library gave it to me.”

The Scholar seized the book from my hands before I’d even finished speaking and he tore it open. The pages were still blank, but he ran his hand down one of them anyway. I expected nothing to happen, but words flowed up his arm from the blank page just like any other book, and his eyes filled with ink.

I recognized the words. They were in the same strange language as the words made of mist that came from the mouths of anyone who spoke in the Forgotten Library.

I grabbed the book back from the Scholar before he could consume another page. He stumbled toward me, reaching for it, and I had to push him back against the opposite shelf.

“What is it?” I asked him.

The Scholar stared at the book for a moment longer. He looked like an addict caught in the haze of a high. I snapped my fingers in front of his face to draw his attention back to me.

“Tell me what’s in the book,” I said.

The Scholar shook his head. “Nothing’s in the book,” he murmured.

“I saw you take the words,” I said. “The same words that I saw in the Forgotten Library.”

“They are no more real than that library,” the Scholar said. “The words are a dream.”

I looked down at the book in my hands. The pages inside were still blank. I ran my own hand down one of them, but nothing happened.

The Scholar licked his lips as he stared at the book. “Are there more texts like this there?” he asked.

“More than I could count,” I said. I wasn’t sure what was going on with the Scholar and the book, but it was clear that it was something valuable to him. “Tell me what you know about the play Will ransacked and I’ll let you have this again. I may even bring you back another book the next time I’m in the Forgotten Library.”

The Scholar’s eyes drifted back to me. They were black with ink from the book. He considered me for a moment before answering.

“No one knows the name of the play that begat
Hamlet
. There have been many contenders, but even the scholars are uncertain. Perhaps a lost play by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, perhaps an earlier play by a certain nobleman who did not wish to be known. Perhaps another text entirely that no one knows of.” He scratched underneath his robes in a way that would have offended most polite company and gotten him arrested in certain countries.

“Can’t you at least point me to a list of possible suspects?” I asked. “Give me the names of the authors of these other plays.”

“Well, you know how writers are,” the Scholar said. “Always lifting from other writers and claiming the stories as their own. One copies something and then another later writer copies that and just changes a few names or makes a tragedy a comedy and vice versa. Writer after writer takes elements from their predecessors.”

“So you’re saying writers are a bunch of thieves,” I said. Which was a fair point, given the writers I’d known in my time.

“Bah, they are murderers,” the Scholar said. He began to pace up and down the aisle now, spreading dust wherever he went. “Imagine it. One bard after another taking the story and killing the father text, hiding its body in the graveyard of obscurity and anonymity. Usurping the throne of literary greatness, until the next bard strikes, with quill and fresh parchment. Who’s to say which one of those lost texts was the source for Shakespeare’s greatest play?”

“You have no idea who wrote that other play, do you?” I said.

“The only one who can say for certain is Shakespeare himself,” the Scholar said. “Oh, and the ghost, I suppose.” He shook his head. “The Forgotten Library is no doubt full of contenders for Shakespeare’s source material. Who knows how many plays have been lost to the ages and wound up there?”

I felt the last warmth coming through the window fade as the sun slipped below the buildings outside. If I didn’t know anything about that other play or who its original author was, I’d never be able to learn anything about the ghost or where it had come from. I couldn’t know any more than I already did, which wasn’t enough.

I couldn’t save Amelia from death.