The Kneebone Boy (17 page)

“Well, you’d have to be bloody blind not to,” growled a voice. She whipped around to find Saint George directly
behind her on the footpath. He wore a khaki green shirt and khaki green trousers, snug below the knee, due apparently to a pair of calves the size of prize-winning yams. Also, and most importantly, he had a rifle leaning against his shoulder.

In which we finally meet The Kneebone Boy. Sort of.

“Was that you?” Lucia asked breathlessly. “Back there? Dashing about?”

“I don’t
dash
,” he said. There was a quiet, sneering tone to his voice. If he had been dressed well, Lucia would have thought he was a terrible snob.

“I suppose you’re planning on shooting little bunnies,” Lucia said, trying hard to adopt a similar air of disdain and recover some of the dignity that she’d lost a moment ago.

“It’s none of your damn business what I’m doing,” he said, glowering at her. But then he seemed to reconsider her, and he added, “Anyway, I’m looking out for rarer game than bunnies. It’s curiosities that pay the bills. Now tell me, what was it you saw
dashing
about the woods?” he asked.

Lucia suddenly felt a peculiar resistance to talking about that shadowy figure. “I don’t know. Nothing. It was probably just an animal. What is the curiosity you’re hunting?”

Saint George sniffed, his lower lip pushing at his upper lip so that it nearly touched his nostrils. Lucia had the uncomfortable sensation that he was picking up her scent, the way a lion picks up the scent of a nervous zebra. Or of a white pony soon to be painted with black stripes. He gazed down at her importantly, and for the thousandth time in her life, Lucia wished that she were taller.

“Ever heard of The Kneebone Boy?” he asked.

Lucia shook her head.

“Well, he’s the one I’m after. He’s shifty, no doubt, but I’m on that boy’s scent. It won’t be long.”

“A boy!” Lucia cried, appalled. “You’re hunting a boy?”

“Maybe he’s a boy and maybe he isn’t.” Saint George glanced down at Lucia slyly. “Some say he’s part animal, covered with hair, with claws for hands and ears like a bat’s. When his mother first laid eyes on him she fainted dead away, and his father had him shut up in a tower room at Kneebone Castle, out of people’s sight. Still, for hundreds of years, people have been hearing wailing and screaming through the castle walls.”

“Hundreds of years?” Lucia snorted. Although she often read books about the supernatural, she was not so silly as to believe in it. “Are you saying that The Kneebone Boy is hundreds of years old?”

“Not that very one, no. There’s been generations of
them since that first one. It seems that in the Kneebone family, the firstborn sons always have something horribly wrong with them.”

“Like bat’s ears and claws?” Lucia said scornfully.

“Yeah, well . . . I didn’t say I believed that rot. Me, I guess it’s probably just some sort of deformity, something bad enough for the family to want to hide. Now he’s managed to escape from the tower room again, hasn’t he? He does from time to time and then they catch him and shut him up again, poor sod. He’s close by, though. I spied him back there just a bit ago.”

“Are you going to shoot him?” Lucia cried in horror.

“Shoot him? Of course not. What good would that do me? I’m going to catch him. Catch him and keep him for a bit. There’s a lot of gossip rags that’d pay sweet for a picture of The Kneebone Boy in the flesh. I don’t know what the going price is on a legend, but I imagine it’s a sight better than the price of a stuffed hedgehog.”

“Yes, I imagine,” Lucia agreed, nodding thoughtfully.

You might be surprised that she didn’t call him all sorts of names. But just wait, you’ll understand in a minute.

“How are you going to catch him then?” Lucia asked, in a pleasant and interested tone.

“Traps,” Saint George said proudly. “I’ve set dozens of them all through the woods. Just been to check on them now.”

“Traps! That’s clever. What sort of traps are they?” she asked. (Do you see now?)

“The sort that will catch a boy. Would you like me to show you where I’ve put them?” Saint George offered.

“Oh, yes,” Lucia said.

Saint George let out a nasty, barking laugh. “Oh, yes, I’m sure you would. Do you honestly think I’m that daft?”

Lucia turned bright red because she hated to be laughed at, especially when she thought she was being so shrewd.

“Yes, I do think you’re that daft!” she cried out at him. “And unethical! And absolutely repulsive!”

She stormed off then, no longer afraid to be in the woods alone. If it was The Kneebone Boy who was lurking, she’d rather run into him than be in the company of Saint George for a moment longer.

“Take the right-hand turn if you want to get to town!” Saint George called after. “If you go left, you’ll wind up at Wigbottom’s place, and Mrs. Wigbottom will feed you canned peaches and talk your ear off about the . . .” He was far behind her at this point, so his last word was not very clear but she thought he said “ruddy winnies.” It might have been the “ruddy windies.” In either case it didn’t make any sense. She could still hear the laughter in his voice, so that when she did come to the fork in the path, she very nearly took the left turn. But she could see that the woods began to thin along the right-hand path, and it seemed foolish to go the wrong way just on principle.

A few minutes later, she found herself on an open country lane. She hurried past a stone farmhouse with a vast, mucky pasture speckled with cattle. The animals
lifted their heads lazily to stare at her as she passed. It reminded her of the way some of the bolder kids in Little Tunks stared at Otto before she taught them not to, with her fists.

Off in the distance she heard a rumble. It was so faint that she thought nothing of it, but as she walked the rumble grew louder. She glanced over the stretch of fields to her right, in the direction of the noise. At first she saw nothing. But by the time the lane turned into paved road, and more houses appeared, huddling closer and closer together as the road progressed, Lucia heard a whistle and saw flashes of metal in the distance, appearing between the trees. The train!

She began to run now, knowing full well that it was an impossible race. Yet it was the only thing she could think to do. The train was roaring through the town so loudly that she could barely hear her own shoes as they pounded on the pavement.

She spotted Saint George’s shop, noting the
CLOSED
sign out front, and sneered even as she ran past. Still, her mind was so full of Otto there was hardly room in it to hate Saint George properly.

In the heart of town, she passed several people who stared at her suspiciously as she darted by. This was the sort of town, like Little Tunks, where a kid couldn’t run without someone wondering if she’d just pinched something at the store.

The train’s roar subsided then stopped altogether. Otto would be boarding the train now. Without her. She kept up
her pace anyway, even though the station was still far off, too far for her to make it in time. Her legs were aching and her breath came in wobbly gasps, the sound of which made her feel more desperate. Why desperate? you are probably thinking. But you have never been the sister to a brother who is very odd and unpredictable. And you have never been the sort of sister who has rarely been more than a few rooms apart from her odd brother, and is not sure what would happen to either of them if they ever were.

By the time Lucia reached the station, the tail of the train was winding around the curve on the track. At the far end of the platform a man in a brown suit and carrying a briefcase walked past the station building and down the steps, but apart from that the platform was empty. Lucia stared after the train despairingly, watching it whip around the final bend and disappear from view.

Did all grand adventures go so utterly wrong? Sometimes they did in books, but in real life they feel far worse. In real life you can’t put the book down and collect yourself with a piece of charred toast and butter. You have to keep on feeling bad, and hungry too, if you haven’t had any breakfast, which Lucia had not.

She stood there for a moment, her breath still drawing in hard, shivery gulps from her run. Out of the corner of her eye, from behind the brick station building, she saw a slender black ribbon twitch in the breezeless air then disappear as though someone had yanked it back. She stared curiously at the spot where it had been.

A few seconds later a black cat appeared from behind
the building, its tail curled into a question mark and a fifth leg swinging right in front of its hind one. Lucia opened her mouth to call out in joy, then ran instead, laughing while the cat watched, its tail unravelling then re-forming its question mark. Scooping up Chester, Lucia peered around the side of the station building. And there he was! There they
both
were! Otto, sitting on a bench bolted to the building, with a disgruntled look on his face, and Max standing in front of him with his hands tucked into his back pockets.

“You didn’t leave! Oh, thank goodness! How did you get here so fast? Saint George is despicable. You’ll hate him when I tell you . . .” She spoke to Otto then to Max then to both, all the while clutching Chester to her chest. She was so excited that she squeezed the cat too tightly. It yowled in complaint. Otto rose to snatch him out of Lucia’s arms, then collapsed back onto the bench.

“They wouldn’t let him on the train without a cat carrier,” Max explained.

“Thank you, cat,” Lucia said to Chester, smiling.

Otto scowled up at her, and her smile faded.

“If I’d known that was the rule, I would have put him in my shirt when I tried to buy the ticket,” he grumbled.

It hurt Lucia that he had wanted to leave so badly; that he felt he could manage the train ride and the strange faces, even Mrs. Carnival, without her with him.

“What took you so long to get here?” asked Max.

“Well, I don’t have wings, do I?” she said, preferring to be irritated instead of hurt.

“Neither do I but I’ve been here a solid twenty minutes ahead of you. You must have taken the wrong path. The castle’s gatehouse was facing us when we arrived last night, didn’t you notice?”

“Of course,” Lucia said (she hadn’t).

“Then why didn’t you take the path opposite?” Max persisted.

“Because I spotted something more interesting on another path,” she said. It was not exactly the truth, but never mind.

“What was it?” Max asked.

“The Kneebone Boy,” Lucia said. She waited for Max to ask her to explain.

“There’s no such thing,” Max said. “The Kneebone Boy is just a fairy tale.”

“You’ve heard of him?” Lucia immediately regretted the shock in her voice.

“Of course. There’s a whole section about him in Binwater’s
Castle Myths and Legends
and the BBC had a show on monsters of the British Isles last summer. Covered in hair. Bat’s ears and claws, locked in a secret room, once ripped out the lungs of a doctor who came to see him. . . .”

Lucia hadn’t heard that last part.

“Yes, well, the thing I saw in the woods was real enough,” she said. “Saint George saw him too.”

And she told her brothers the entire story, winding the whole thing up with a finger jab at Max’s face. “So you see, genius, there is such a thing as The Kneebone Boy.”

Max told her to take her stupid finger out of his face,
which made her poke it into his forehead. This was headed in a bad direction and things might have gotten ugly if Otto hadn’t suddenly said, “Do you think you could find them again?”

“Find what?” Lucia asked, noticing that Otto’s one visible eye was looking especially alert.

“The two birch trees. You know, the spot where you saw . . . the boy.”

“Yes, I think so,” Lucia said slowly. “Why?”

“Well, maybe we could find him.” There was a sheepish tone in Otto’s voice, which Lucia understood immediately.

“Well, we
must
find him, mustn’t we?” Lucia said with sudden energy. “What kind of people would we be if we didn’t at least try to warn him about Saint George’s traps?”

Max says that Lucia was being shamelessly mercenary here. He says that she
knew
searching for a boy with claws and bat ears and whatnot would be irresistible for Otto; that it would keep his mind off of leaving Snoring-by-the-Sea.

Lucia, however, maintains that sometimes you have to start a thing for all the wrong reasons in order to discover the right ones.

In which Mr. Pickering tells us a story

So we’ve come to the part of the book in which the Hardscrabbles begin to be less ordinary and more heroic. I wish it had come sooner, so you didn’t see us arguing about stupid things so much. And also because of Mr. Dupuis.

“Two important points, old man,” Max said, sitting beside Otto and draping his arm across his shoulder. “Number one, I don’t know what it is Lucia and Saint George saw, but I’ll guarantee you it wasn’t The Kneebone Boy.”

“Shut up, why don’t you?” Lucia hissed at him.

“And number two,” Max went on, ignoring Lucia completely, “whatever it was she saw, is not going to be hanging around, waiting for us to find it.”