Bookweirder Read online

  “You’ll give George his estate back?”

  “Well, not right away, of course—that’s books and books from here. It shouldn’t make much difference to George who occupies his ancestral home in the meantime. It sorts itself out eventually. Trust me.”

  Trusting Fuchs-Todd was the last thing that Norman would ever do.

  “You should be getting on. You’ll want to read that story thoroughly. You’ll want to know it inside and out.” He edged Norman ever closer to the door.

  Norman ran his hand over the black-and-gold cover of the book. “And you’ll protect Malcolm? You’ll deal with the poacher?”

  “Yes, yes,” the lawyer soothed. “We’ll sort that out when you get back. Don’t worry about that. Better to turn your mind to the fiasco at Lochwarren first. Things are a good deal more out of order there. Trust me.” And he shoved Norman firmly through the doorway.

  Norman paused in the hallway outside. He was not entirely satisfied with this meeting. He could never be sure he’d gotten through to that man.

  “My mom loves this book. She doesn’t want it wrecked.”

  “Nobody does. Nobody does,” Todd repeated, his face mockingly earnest. “I’ll do my best to fix what you’ve broken here.”

  Norman grimaced. “Why is it all my fault? You brought Malcolm here. Why did you do that? Why didn’t you bring him to the real world?”

  Todd ignored the question. “By the way, what’s your mother’s name?” he asked casually.

  “Meg,” Norman told him. Why did he always seem to change the subject?

  “Hmm. Meg. That would be short for Margaret, but Margaret what?”

  “Meg. It’s always just Meg, not Margaret,” Norman corrected him. “Meg Jespers-Vilnius, like me.”

  “Jespers-Vilnius? That’s quite an unusual name. I have a cat named Vilnius, you know.”

  Norman did know, of course. Todd’s question made him wonder again what this might mean. He was still wondering when the door closed behind him.

  Norman didn’t descend the stairs right away. He stood quietly beside the door and listened. Inside the library he could hear cupboard doors being opened, drawers being slammed shut and Todd’s frustrated mumbling. After a few minutes, the door swung open. Norman stepped back out of the way, but Todd didn’t even look as he stormed out empty-handed. Norman waited for him to disappear down the stairs, then tiptoed down to the kitchen and let himself out.

  As Norman rushed back to the lodge, his mind raced ahead of him. His mother knew something about the bookweird, but could she use the bookweird? Did she have her own ingresso? If she took the map, she must have known he had been dropping into books for some time now. Why hadn’t she said something before? And would she really have concealed the Undergrowth map in a Poe story? Norman had never read “The Purloined Letter,” but if it was anywhere near as scary as “The Tell-tale Heart,” he didn’t think he’d ever dare to go there, even to retrieve Malcolm’s map. Was his mother that fearless? Was his mother that mean? All this speculation and doubt rolled though his head like so many rocks in a rock-tumbler.

  Norman and Malcolm read the “The Purloined Letter” over and over together while they waited for George to return from the Book and Badger. Thankfully the story was short and easily digested. The purloined letter of the title was stolen from a French princess. The thief, a certain Minister D., was blackmailing the princess with the information it contained. The Parisian police had searched Minister D.’s apartment meticulously but could not find the letter. The hero of the story, the amateur detective Auguste Dupin, solved the mystery. Knowing that the police would search every secret compartment and hiding place in his house, the minister had hidden the letter in plain sight in his own letter box. Dupin discovered the letter and replaced it with a harmless copy.

  “Do you think the map is in the minister’s letter box?” Malcolm asked eagerly.

  “That would make sense, I guess. Todd thinks the map is in this story, and that’s the hiding place.”

  “You should let me go. I can sneak in without anyone noticing. It would be much harder for you.”

  “I don’t think you can,” Norman replied reluctantly. He would have liked to have his friend there for backup. “You needed help to get here, and my ingresso didn’t work when I tried to bring you with me last time. I have to go myself. It says here that the minister is usually out at night, and the servants are drunk and asleep. The Paris police have searched the apartment twice without them noticing.”

  “Strong Arm,” Malcolm reminded him wryly, “stealth isn’t exactly your greatest attribute.”

  Norman couldn’t help smiling. It was true that Norman’s greatest contribution to the Battle of Scalded Rock had been making noise.

  “I’ll be fine,” Norman assured him. “I’ll go at night, when the servants are drunk.”

  “When whose servants are drunk?” It was George appearing in the kitchen doorway. When neither Malcolm nor Norman answered, he repeated the question. “You’ll go where? When whose servants are drunk?”

  Malcolm and Norman exchanged a confidential glance. They had agreed not to mention the bookweird to George. His life was in enough turmoil. He didn’t need to find out now that he was a character in a book.

  “Minister Deschamps’s servants,” Malcolm replied after a moment’s thought. “Norman is going to retrieve something from the desk of Minister Deschamps.”

  George came closer, sat down and peered from human boy to stoat king. His face looked somehow different to Norman. Something about it had altered. When George spoke, Norman knew what it was. The glint of intrigue that had been missing from George’s eyes had returned.

  “I don’t know this minister. What is it that he’s got?”

  “A map,” Norman quickly replied. He didn’t dare look at Malcolm. He just hoped that the story they were inventing together made sense. “It’s a map that shows Malcolm’s homeland back in the forest. The minister doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll learn sooner or later. We have to find it before the secret of Malcolm’s people gets out. If people knew, they’d be destroyed.”

  George nodded. He understood the gravity of the situation. “When do we go?”

  Norman hadn’t counted on that. He should have known that George would want to be part of the adventure. He opened his mouth to speak, not sure yet what he was going to say.

  Malcolm came to his rescue. “Norman has to go himself. He has the key, and he has to go at night while the minister is having dinner with Norman’s father.”

  Norman thought this through. It made sense, but their lies were getting more and more complicated.

  “We have to stay here and watch the poacher,” Malcolm continued.

  “Oh,” said George, suddenly remembering something he’d meant to say earlier, “I have news of my own. I found out what the poacher was doing at the Book and Badger.”

  “What?” Norman and Malcolm asked in unison, relieved that he’d changed the subject.

  “He was buying a gun.”

  Norman stared. Could things get any worse?

  “A cannon, you mean?” Malcolm asked, perplexed because his medieval world didn’t include guns that you could carry.

  “We have to tell Todd,” Norman said. Turning to Malcolm, he repeated, “You have to go to Todd. You have to tell him it’s too dangerous now.”

  “Are you mad?” George sputtered. “You can’t have Malcolm giving himself away like that. Todd can’t know that Malcolm can speak. You’ve seen the way he’s taken over the house. The man’s a grasping schemer. You can guess what he’d do with a talking stoat.”

  Even if George didn’t know the whole story, he was perhaps right. Fuchs or Todd or whoever he wanted to be known as today hadn’t shown much sympathy so far. The only thing that interested him was the map. Once Norman got his hands on the map, he’d have a very different conversation with the lawyer and sometime librarian and abbot.

  The Purloined Letter

  The darkness
was nearly complete. It took a moment for Norman’s eyes to adjust, but slowly the outlines of the room began to emerge. He was on the couch. In the dim light he could make out the curved backs of two chairs and a small desk, perhaps. Norman brought himself up to a seated position and felt the thick carpet beneath his feet.

  On the table beside him he saw the outline of something that looked like a lamp. He groped around the ornately carved base for a power switch, inching his hand higher until he caught something dangling—a pull cord? He yanked decisively. Something came off in his hand and the whole lamp erupted into a musical jingling. Withdrawing his hand, he felt the object in his palm. It was smooth, shaped like a lozenge with sharp, faceted edges. He closed his hand over it quickly, as if to make it go away. Only then did he remember the flashlight that George had given him.

  Under the flashlight’s beam, the object sent off light—it was a crystal bead. He turned the beam on the lamp and revealed a glistening tree of beads, a whole elaborate chandelier of dangling glass. It was impossible to tell where the bead belonged. He slipped it into his pocket.

  Sweeping the flashlight around the room, he could make out the contents more clearly. The room was crammed with furniture. There were tables everywhere, cluttered with lamps and statues and tiny boxes. Had Norman attempted to move around the room in the dark he would surely have knocked something over.

  He ran the beam of the flashlight up and down the walls, following the vertical stripes of the wallpaper in search of a light switch. There was something there, just at head height—some sort of lamp with small glass globes. On his tiptoes he could almost reach it, but again no switch. He slid his hand across the wall until he touched a small metal dial. Turning it slowly between his thumb and forefinger, he expected a sudden burst of light. There was only a slow hissing sound. Norman smelled something foul.

  “Jeeze … gas!” he cried out loud, and he quickly turned the dial the other way until the hissing stopped.

  His heart was beating faster now, making the room seem less silent. He strained to hear any other noise, hoping that his cry hadn’t awakened the servants in some other room. He swung the flashlight like a searchlight around the room again, seeking out the corners, the edges of curtains. This darkness was creeping him out.

  Crossing the room to the largest of the curtained windows, he felt carefully along its smooth silk surface until his fingers touched the tassels of the centre parting. He stuck his head through at first, just to confirm that he was where he was supposed to be. Outside, Paris was asleep. He gazed across the roofs to the wet streets and the dim streetlights. The apartment was about four storeys up, but few buildings reached higher. Out of the black and grey only one colour stood out, a flash of red here and there from a lit sign in the distance or from gaslight shining through a closed red curtain.

  He dared to leave the curtain open just a bit. The lights of Paris at night crept into the room, lighting up its floor with red and grey, but it was not only the lights cast from outside. The apartment seemed to have been painted with the same palette. The dark, wood-framed couch was upholstered in scarlet red. The two armchairs matched it. The wallpaper had an alternating pattern of black and red, an intricate weave of brambles and flowers, so thickly intertwined that they were dark stripes from afar. The whole room looked like an illustration from an old book, a black-and-white engraving enlivened by a single colour—red.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he muttered under his breath.

  A particularly strong beam of red light illuminated the small writing desk in the corner, and above it hung a bulletin board of some sort—the card rack. Norman inched closer and shone the flashlight into each of the four cubby holes. There were the visiting cards, little rectangles of thick paper with fussy inscribed names and addresses, and there in the top left compartment was a letter—the purloined letter itself!

  It looked harmless, like a piece of junk mail. The paper was ragged and had been ripped nearly in half. Only the large crimson seal of the minister made it look at all imposing. Norman leaned in to read the minister’s name from the address. He couldn’t help it. It bothered him that in the book the minister’s name was only ever written as “D—.”

  He read the name once and, startled, read it again slowly to make sure he’d got it right—Deschamps, the same name that he and Malcolm had made up for their story. How weird was that? Norman tried to think of another French name that started with D but couldn’t. His curiosity was getting the better of him now. What exactly was in this letter? He reached in and touched the seal. He had time to read it, didn’t he?

  A creak in the floor as he reached up made him jump and reminded him otherwise. He didn’t have time. The map was obviously not here in the card rack. Deschamps had left the purloined letter in full sight amongst other letters. That was the whole trick to the story. The stolen map would be hidden in plain sight amongst other maps.

  Norman shuffled the papers on the desk. They appeared to be bills and legal documents, but then, Norman knew only about five words of French. Anyway, they certainly weren’t maps. He turned and scanned the room again. There was a tall bookshelf in one corner and beside it another small desk. It was worth a try. The floorboards creaked as he stalked over there. He kept the beam of his light low along the floor to make sure he didn’t trip … but then something stopped him in his tracks. Footprints—muddy sneaker prints. He gazed down at his grimy white sneakers. They were his own footprints. He cursed himself under his breath.

  The library of Minister Deschamps resembled the more boring shelves of the cottage library back in England. The books were curiously sized, either ridiculously small—small enough to fit into the pocket of your jacket—or crazy big. They were all bound in black or deep burgundy leather and engraved with gold curlicues and arabesques.

  The Undergrowth map was small, a single sheet of paper drawn by tiny weasel hands. Folded twice, it could be hidden in the pocket of Norman’s jeans. It didn’t need a huge book to hide it. Norman took a few of the smaller books and used the technique of the Parisian police as described by Dupin, shaking them vigorously upside down to see if anything fell out. Nothing.

  The beam of the flashlight passed over the titles on the spines of the larger volumes: Great Criminal Masterminds, Timeless Schemes and Conspiracies, An Atlas of Infamy. “A-ha,” Norman whispered dramatically to himself, “an atlas.”

  He slid it down from the shelf and, resting it on the table, opened it to the frontispiece, which was elaborately engraved with daggers, skulls and men hanging by their necks from trees. “Nice,” he muttered as he turned the thick, yellowing pages. Page after page of maps revealed themselves—biblical Egypt, the Roman forums, Hadrian’s Wall, the siege of Quebec—fascinating, but not Undergrowth. Again he turned the book upside down and shook out its pages.

  A single red banknote wafted to the floor. Norman bent down to retrieve it. Only then, with the flashlight level with the floor, did he notice the black leather tube beneath the little desk. His mother used translucent plastic tubes like that to carry posters and display materials to her talks. Minister Deschamps’s black leather one was just the sort of thing you’d put a map in.

  The lid of the tube came off with a satisfying pop. Norman reached in and felt a tightly rolled set of plans inside. They were too large for the desk, so he spread them out on the floor and kneeled down to pore over them. They were not maps but architectural plans to some palace. He flipped the pages cautiously. Nothing was concealed between them. He was running out of options. If the Undergrowth map wasn’t here, then where?

  “Come on, come on,” he muttered. “Be here. Please be here.”

  He rolled up the plans and was sliding the tube back into place when a cough interrupted him. Norman jumped to his feet defensively and trained the flashlight in the direction of the sound.

  The two upholstered chairs had definitely been empty when Norman arrived. They were not empty now. One was occupied by a tall man, dressed entirely in
black. His dark hair was swept back across his forehead, and he held his left arm across his chest, supporting the elbow of his other arm, which reached up to cradle his chin. His eyes narrowed under the beam of Norman’s light, but he did not take them off the boy for a moment.

  “I gather you have not found what you are looking for?” The voice spoke English with a thick French accent.

  Norman gulped and shook his head. The Frenchman’s eyes had apparently become accustomed to the light, as he stared unblinkingly back towards him.

  “I had heard that the English secret service occasionally employs children for certain delicate assignments. A child, after all, can go safely where a man might quickly be detected. But wouldn’t it be wiser, in France, to employ French children?”

  Norman did not answer his question. His mind was racing for a solution. What advantage did he have here? How could he save himself?

  “I know where the letter is,” he blurted out.

  “Indeed you do. Indeed you do,” the man replied calmly. “This is the most interesting thing about you.”

  “But, Minister Deschamps,” Norman said, the start of a plan forming, “someone else knows where it is. If you let me go—”

  The man in the chair let out a low, chuckling laugh. “Oh, I am not Minister Deschamps. I doubt the minister would have received you so politely. The minister would have beaten you soundly and turned you over to the police by now.”

  “Dupin?” Norman asked.

  “Indeed,” the man replied, running the tip of his finger over his eyebrow as if just registering another interesting fact. “You are quite the perspicacious little espion, aren’t you? May I ask,” he continued after a pause, “what it is you are looking for?”