The Forgotten Book Read online

“Yes, I—er—thanks, by the way … for last night. I’ve been meaning to say. It was … very nice of you,” I muttered, looking down at my feet.

  But Darcy simply shrugged. “We couldn’t exactly leave you lying there.”

  “Well, I would have gone inside eventually.”

  “Yes, if you’d been able to walk.”

  I sniffed. “I wasn’t that bad,” I said defensively. “Anyway, shall we see what’s down the last tunnel?” I tried to slip past him, but Darcy stood his ground.

  “Did you have a date last night?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I lied. “I always drink alone—I’m classy like that. A few swigs of vodka behind the rhododendrons, you know…”

  “Very classy.” A smile tugged at the corner of Darcy’s mouth, then he shook his head abruptly, turned away from me, and strode swiftly down the third tunnel. I stared after him in surprise. Had he accidentally smiled? No—my eyes must have been deceiving me, surely?

  After a few yards the third tunnel became so narrow that we were forced to walk in single file. The tunnel went on for quite a long way, which was unusual for a wine cellar and gave me a glimmer of hope. There were also metal brackets on the walls every few yards, with burned-out wooden torches still inside them. How long was it since anyone had been down this tunnel? I shuddered at the thought that we might be the first people for hundreds of years to breathe this stale air. Although the thought that we might not be the first made me shudder even more.

  “What were you and Toby doing wandering around the ruins at night, anyway?” I asked after a while, more to take my mind off my surroundings than anything else.

  He didn’t answer straightaway, and I sensed that he would rather have said nothing at all, but eventually he stopped and turned to face me.

  “I wanted to show Toby the statue,” he said, so confiding all of a sudden that I thought for a moment I must have written about him in the chronicle again. But I couldn’t for the life of me remember doing so.

  “The ugly angel?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Although it’s not actually an angel. It’s some other kind of creature. But I have no idea what.”

  “I think it’s a faun. Judging by its legs and feet, anyway.”

  “A faun? Like in ancient mythology? Hmm … you might be right.”

  “I didn’t know you were interested in the statue. Apparently your ancestors had it put there in the mid-1700s.” I vaguely remembered Frederick saying something like that last night.

  “In the middle of a church? That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?”

  “The monastery must already have been abandoned by then. I reckon the statue was put there to mark the location of something. The entrance to the tunnel, for example.”

  Darcy pressed his palms against the ceiling of the tunnel. Only now did I realize how silent it was down here.

  “Some of her classmates said Gina used to spend a lot of time out here by the ruins. So I wanted to find out what’s so special about them,” said Darcy softly. “And the statue does seem a bit unusual, doesn’t it? It fits with the weird stories Gina used to tell me about a creature with cloven hooves. Maybe she got hold of some old legend, and … I don’t know … took it too much to heart.”

  “So you’re hoping that if you find out what that old legend was, you’ll find her,” I surmised.

  Darcy lowered his eyes. “Let’s go,” he said, turning away again.

  We walked on in silence. The tunnel ran in a straight line for a while, then suddenly swerved uphill. The roof was now so low that Darcy had to stoop, and even I had to duck my head a little. Every now and again we heard a rustling beneath our feet. When I shone the light from my phone on the ground, I saw lots of tiny little silver leaves. In fact, I got the impression that the farther on we went, the more of them there were. But I couldn’t say for certain.

  After a few minutes, the tunnel bent around to the left. For a split second I was afraid that the vaulted space that opened up before us as we rounded the corner was nothing more than another empty storage room and that this tunnel, just like the other one, was leading us in a big circle back to the ruins. But then I spotted the apparatus. An enormous set of bronze scales on a workbench, surrounded by weights, measuring jugs, and corked glass flasks containing the dried-out remnants of liquids and powders. On another bench stood various old books, candlesticks covered in dried wax, and, of course, leaves.

  Thousands upon thousands of little silver leaves.

  They were everywhere. They filled the huge copper basin in the middle of the room. They dangled from the cobwebs above our heads. And with every step we took we sent little flurries of them swirling up into the air, along with thick clouds of dust.

  “The laboratory,” I breathed.

  “The what?” asked Darcy.

  “The lord of Stolzenburg,” I began, “kept talking about these secret laboratories in his notes from 1758. Saying he wanted to create an heir.” I moved closer to the copper basin. It was larger than the average bathtub. A creature the size of the statue would probably have fit inside it.… Seriously? What was I thinking?

  The basin drew me toward it like a magnet. I leaned over the edge and was about to plunge my hand into the leaves—they were already tickling my fingertips—when my phone battery finally gave up the ghost and the flashlight went out.

  Taken by surprise, I took a step backward, tripped over my own feet, and lost my balance. I would have fallen over if Darcy hadn’t caught me.

  “Th-thanks,” I stammered. He smelled of fresh laundry. I quickly extricated myself and stood up again.

  “No problem,” said Darcy. Now he, too, leaned over the edge of the basin and shone his flashlight onto the leaves. “What do you mean, he wanted to create an heir?”

  “Well,” I said, “as far as I know, he had no children and had never been able to accept that fact. And he was probably losing it a bit, too. Anyway, he tried to create ‘a creature of paper and ink’—I think that’s how he put it. Something that would live on after his death. And it looked very much like the statue.”

  Darcy frowned. “That sounds completely insane.”

  “I know. But I do wonder…” I was still staring at the copper basin, and in my mind’s eye the ink drawings in the chronicle melted into the sweeping handwriting of the lord of Stolzenburg. “I do wonder—what if he actually succeeded?” I whispered.

  Darcy squared his shoulders. “That’s ridiculous,” he snorted. “Yes, I know there was an eighteenth-century earl in our family who lived alone in the castle and apparently went a bit bonkers toward the end of his life. But he definitely didn’t leave an heir. That was why the British branch of the family took over the castle, along with the lands and the title.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but … oh, I don’t know. Frederick said he didn’t think you took those old legends seriously enough four years ago, and if we wanted to find Gina—”

  “Frederick,” Darcy broke in sharply, “has no idea what he’s talking about. You should stay away from him.”

  A few seconds earlier, in a moment of madness, I’d actually been considering mentioning the chronicle to Darcy. But now—seeing his rigid posture, his wrinkled nose, the hint of scorn that was always present in his dark eyes, the way he was looking down his nose at me again as if I was a stupid kid—I thought better of it.

  “Well, something must have happened to your sister; otherwise, she wouldn’t have disappeared.” I looked at him with a hint of defiance. “And you must think those old legends have something to do with it, too; otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken such an interest in all this stuff in the first place.”

  He took a step toward the basin, so abruptly that it made me jump. Then he began to stride up and down, his feet making a dull thudding sound that echoed around the room. “The stories might be important,” he said. “But not the mythical creatures in the stories, Emma. That’s just ridiculous!”

  I leaned back against one of the workbench
es and watched Darcy pace the length of the room and back again. “I see,” I said slowly. “So you’re not even prepared to consider it. Because you’re so vain that you can’t think of anything worse than looking even the tiniest bit ridiculous.”

  “I’m not prepared to consider it because I’m a rational pers—” He paused, stopped pacing, took a step backward, and squatted down on the ground.

  “What is it?” I asked. What had he found? I hurried across the laboratory to join him. Darcy was shining his flashlight beam over the ground. “They’re not ours, are they?” he murmured.

  In the light from his phone I could see yet more silver leaves, and a thick layer of dust. Clearly imprinted in the dust was a set of footprints. The feet that had made them must have been small and delicate: smaller than Darcy’s feet and smaller than my size seven sneakers.

  The footprints ran alongside the wall for a few yards before turning off into the middle of the room, where they approached the copper basin and were lost in the muddle of our own footprints.

  I gulped. So we were not the first people for hundreds of years to breathe this air. Someone had been here not long ago. A girl, judging by the size of the footprints. Darcy and I looked at each other.

  “Who—?” I whispered.

  “Gina?” called Darcy. “Gina?”

  August 1794

  A Faun’s Dream

  A Fairy Tale by Eleanor Morland

  Once upon a time there was a faun. He lived in a castle in a faraway land and he often dreamed of what it would be like to be human.

  For the faun was big and ugly and terribly lonely. From his head grew a pair of long, curling horns, and his legs were like those of an enormous goat. Anybody who had ever laid eyes on him had been frightened half to death. They had thought him a monster; they had shouted at him and struck him and chased him away, and not even the melancholy little tune he had played for them on his flute had been enough to change their minds.

  And so the faun had kept himself out of sight for many, many years, hidden away in the tunnels beneath the castle like the Minotaur in his Labyrinth. It was dark and lonely in the tunnels and the faun would surely have died long ago, had he been any ordinary faun. But he was not an ordinary faun: He was a product of his creator’s imagination, born of words on paper. Ink ran through his veins, and it was the magic of words that kept him alive and that, one night, would help to make his dream come true.

  A storm was raging that night; lightning rent the sky and rain thundered down onto the battlements and dripped into every nook and cranny of the castle, even into the secret underground tunnels where the faun lived, and where he now sat eating his supper. Because he was no ordinary faun, he ate words from books instead of food; and tonight’s book was a particularly tasty one. The words tasted serious and slightly salty. As ever, the faun longed for nothing more than to share these words with somebody else. If only he had somebody to talk and laugh and cry with, he thought as he chewed on the beginning of a juicy sentence. If only he had been human!

  And as he sat there, big and ugly, dark and lonely, something happened that only ever happens once in a hundred years: All of a sudden, one of the thunderclaps high in the sky created a fairy.

  The fairy’s tiny body glinted as the lightning lit up the sky and she plunged down, down, down through the clouds and the rain and the wind, past the rooftops of the castle, past turrets and windows, past gates and walls. She flapped her gossamer wings wildly as she fell through the night, but she went on falling. Even when she came to stone and roots and earth, she fell straight through them until at last she landed in the faun’s lap.

  “Ugh!” cried the little fairy, shaking herself. “Ugh, what a wet night!” Little droplets flew off her in all directions.

  “Who are you?” asked the faun, staring at this strange creature. Just like him, she was made of paper. She was slender and delicate and looked a little like a dragonfly, cleverly folded from the page of an old book. Letters were printed on her dainty body, and her eyes shone like pearls in the moonlight. She did not answer; instead she fluttered her wings and looked at him so intently that it was as if she could see into his soul.

  “Who are you?” the faun said again. “Where do you come from? What are you doing here?”

  “Not an easssy matter,” whispered the fairy. “Not an easssy wish to grant. But”—she nodded sagely—“you can become human, if you wish. Yesss, you can. Yes, yesss.”

  She flew up into the air, buzzed around his head, and landed on one of his large horns.

  “How?” asked the faun. “I would give anything to be human. Please, tell me what I must do.”

  “I will ssspin you a cloak made from ssspiders’ sssilk,” said the fairy. Then she crawled across his face, touching his nose, his eyes, and his lips, then farther down his neck, across his chest, over his shoulders, and along his arms. And wherever she touched him, silver threads sprang up and began to weave their way across his skin. They formed a web, which quickly grew thicker and thicker, enveloping him, binding him tighter and tighter until he could scarcely breathe.

  “As long as you wear this cloak, nobody will be able to sssee your true nature. They will think you are human, just like them,” the fairy explained, seeming pleased with her handiwork. “But if you want to become human, you must do more. You must find sssomebody to whom you can reveal your true nature. Sssomebody who lovesss you just as you are. Sssomebody who is willing…,” the fairy hissed, flying very close to his ear. She lowered her voice to a whisper that sounded like a delicate piece of paper being torn in two.

  The faun listened. He could barely breathe inside the cloak of spider silk that bound him like an icy cloth. “But,” he whispered at last, “what will happen if I choose the wrong person? If I take off the cloak too soon?”

  The fairy crawled up onto the tip of his nose and looked him squarely in the eye. “Then,” she said, “you will belong to me. You will pay with your life. So choose wisssely.”

  9

  “I wanted to order the flowers from the same florist the Swedish royal family uses. They looked so beautiful at Sofia and Carl Philip’s wedding.…” Miss Berkenbeck had settled herself on the edge of our table by the entrance to the dining hall, dislodging most of the name tags that Hannah, Charlotte, and I had spent the last fifteen minutes sorting into alphabetical order and laying out in rows. We dived off our chairs and started collecting them up off the floor. But Miss Berkenbeck was in full flow, and went on without missing a beat: “The delivery costs wouldn’t have been a problem: They said on TV that the florist lives in Heidelberg and is a close friend of Queen Silvia. But unfortunately our budget still wouldn’t stretch to…” Only now did she realize that the three of us were scrabbling around on all fours at her feet. “Goodness gracious, what are you all doing down there?”

  I held up a fistful of name tags.

  “Oh, dear, did I knock them off? I’m so sorry!” Miss Berkenbeck started fiddling with the name tags that were left on the table, trying to line them up again. But she only succeeded in making things worse, because now they were all in the wrong order. Luckily she soon gave up and declared: “I’m going to give you all some doughnuts to make up for it. Just a minute, I’ll go and fetch them. They’re still warm. Dr. Meier tried one earlier and he said it was delicious.…” She hurried off, still talking (though nobody was quite sure to whom).

  “Er,” said Hannah, “weren’t those doughnuts meant to be for tomorrow? For the parents and the new students?”

  “Yep,” said Charlotte. “You could try telling her that. Or you could just not ask any awkward questions, and help yourself to a free doughnut. They’re still warm, you know.”

  Hannah grinned. “Okay. It was just that I thought everything had to be perfect for tomorrow.…”

  “It will be, don’t worry. Every time we have an open day, the Berkenbecks make three times as many doughnuts as there are guests,” I reassured her, and returned to my task of allocating name tags to welco
me packs.

  The next day was Saturday, and it was a very important day—one of my favorite days on the school calendar. Tomorrow morning we would be showing the families of prospective students around the school, and there would be all sorts of sample lessons, tours, speeches, and activities, as well as plentiful supplies of cake (naturally). From the late afternoon onward, ex-students would start arriving for the school’s 190th alumni reunion, and the climax of the festivities would be on Sunday evening at the annual Stolzenburg Autumn Ball.

  Charlotte, Hannah, and I were to be in charge of registering the visitors and giving them their name tags, school prospectuses, and event schedules. I’d also volunteered to show small groups of parents and children around the grounds and tell them a bit about the castle. I’d been looking forward to it all week. All the more so since I’d come across a fairy tale in the chronicle by Eleanor Morland, which she must have written while she was staying at Stolzenburg. I was planning to read out excerpts from the story as a special highlight of my tour.

  Preparations for the open day had kept me busy most of the week. What was more, our teachers had really started to pile on the work recently—the school year was in full swing now, and next week we would have our first exams. I was also doing extra swimming training in preparation for an interschool competition in November. So, what with one thing and another, I’d been so busy that I hadn’t had time to write in the chronicle all week. I’d had to content myself with flicking through past entries written by other chroniclers (I always ended up discovering new pages when I did that) and looking back at my own entries to see whether they’d taken effect yet.

  I’d managed to use the chronicle to avoid running into Frederick for a few days after our date at the Golden Lion. I’d been so embarrassed by the state I’d gotten myself into that it had seemed a good idea to steer clear of him for a while, until it had all blown over. I’d finally decided to lift the ban that morning, but it still took me by surprise when I saw him come staggering into the dining hall carrying an enormous vase. Our eyes met, and he smiled his crooked smile.