The Forgotten Book Read online

  Luckily, Charlotte was the most tolerant and good-natured person I knew and had managed to put up with Helena von Stein’s moods without complaint since Year 6. We were also lucky in that Hannah (unlike Charlotte and me) was not afraid of spiders, and she released several of them in quick succession into the ivy outside the library window.

  Meanwhile, Charlotte swept the wooden floor and I confronted the chest of drawers again. I’d decided to empty it out. That would make it lighter—hopefully light enough to lift. I started rifling through the drawers. First I unearthed a collection of hideous dried flower arrangements, then a stack of even uglier painted porcelain plates. These were followed by an assortment of candlesticks, broken bits of soap, and yellowed handkerchiefs.

  And then I found the book.

  It was inside a sort of secret compartment, hidden under a wooden slat in the bottom drawer that I’d almost overlooked. The grooves in the wood around the edges of the slat were practically invisible, and it was only when I happened to graze my left wrist on one of them and thought I’d gotten a splinter that I noticed them at all. But then I ran my fingertips over the bottom of the drawer again, and sure enough I felt the furrows in the wood around the edges of the slat. I dug my fingernails in underneath it, jiggled it about a bit, and finally managed to lift it out. In a compartment below, one that looked specially designed for the purpose, lay the book.

  It was old. You could see that from the worn, dark cloth binding. The corners were frayed, and the fabric was so stained that I couldn’t even tell what color it must once have been. Gray? Brown? Blue? I lifted the book carefully out of its hiding place. It was heavier than I’d expected, and warmer. Alive, I thought, and the thought startled me.

  I rubbed the cover with my sleeve, raising a little cloud of dust. As I wiped the dust away, delicate lines became visible on the cloth binding: not letters, not a title, but the vague outline of a figure imprinted on the fabric. I could only guess what it was supposed to be. Was it a man? Or … no, the figure didn’t really look human. It had what looked like curling horns on its head, and its legs were strangely crooked.

  I ran my fingers over the rough fabric. What was inside this book? Why had someone hidden it? And from whom?

  Suddenly there was a whispering in the air, a sigh, so quiet that I felt rather than heard it. A rustling murmur, a hum that made the hairs on the backs of my arms stand on end. It sounded almost like a name.

  My name.

  Er—okay …

  Emma, whispered the book. Emmaaa.

  I shivered, then shook my head firmly. This was ridiculous! My ears were obviously playing tricks on me.

  It had been a long day, after all. Too long. The flight back from England, the journey from the airport to the castle, and the hours spent clearing out the library. I’d been on my feet for so long, it was no wonder I was in a bit of a daze. I was completely worn out: Obviously the book was not calling my name, or anything else for that matter. It certainly wasn’t alive. I needed to get a grip. Or some sleep. I yawned.

  “Let’s sort out the rest another time. I reckon that’s enough for today,” I announced after a moment. But I found it hard to tear my gaze away from the shadowy figure on the front of the book.

  When I did, I saw that Charlotte and Hannah had already called a halt to the cleanup operation. The broom stood propped against the wall in one corner, and my friends were leaning out of the window, peering down into the courtyard below.

  “Are they students here?” Hannah was asking. She stood up on tiptoe, leaning out of the open window as far as she could go without falling.

  “I don’t think so,” Charlotte replied. “They look a bit too old—though it’s hard to tell from up here.”

  “Well, they’re not bad-looking—I can tell that from here!”

  “Hmm,” said Charlotte, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you know these guys?”

  I joined them at the window in time to see two tall young men climbing the steps to the entrance. They disappeared into the castle before I could catch a glimpse of their faces. “I don’t think so,” I said, looking at the Mini Cooper with the British license plate that was parked on the gravel right at the foot of the steps. “But whoever they are, they clearly think they’re too important to use a parking space like the rest of us mere mortals.”

  * * *

  I’d promised my dad I’d eat dinner with him that evening. So when Charlotte and Hannah eventually set off for the dining hall, I made my way across the courtyard to my dad’s apartment.

  My dad lived in the old coach house, in an apartment with light parquet floors and windows that looked out over the gardens. On the walls hung a collection of African masks and drums. Dad himself had never left Europe (partly due to his fear of flying) but he often got presents from parents or ex-pupils or people who were both at the same time. It was well known that he had a penchant for the exotic.

  So, when we sat down to dinner I was relieved to see that none of his students had brought him back honey-roasted locusts or other such insectile delicacies from their travels this year. The last time we’d eaten together before I left for England there’d been insects on the menu, and it had put a bit of a damper on things. However nutritious Dad claimed they were, I was never—I repeat, never—going to let an exoskeleton pass my lips. And any creature with more than four legs was also out of the question.

  Luckily, however, he’d ordered tonight’s dinner from my favorite Chinese restaurant, and the polished mahogany table was littered with boxes, chopsticks, and paper napkins.

  “My poor little Emma,” Dad said now for the third time, picking at his sweet and sour chicken (and probably inwardly lamenting the fact that it wasn’t as crisp and crunchy as a giant grasshopper). “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to pick you up. I hope you didn’t catch cold. And in the pouring rain, too! Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did. Your phone was off.” As usual. My dad and modern technology really did not mix. The fact that he’d finally started communicating by email at work was nothing short of a miracle. If he’d had his way, he would still have been writing letters on a typewriter and only ever using the Internet to observe other countries from a safe distance on Google Earth. If at all. The Internet, according to my dad, was a force for evil, and a source of “uncontrolled overstimulation.” (At least that was how he’d described it eighteen years ago in his famous parenting guide The Modern Child, a seminal reference work that appeared on many a parental bookshelf to this day, and which was essentially responsible for landing Dad this job and for the fact that I—perhaps the ultimate “modern child”—had been permitted to have a smartphone last year only after a series of tense negotiations.)

  “What about the landline in my office?” my dad continued. “You could have reached me there.”

  “It was busy.”

  “Really? All that time?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I tried seven times. At one, at quarter past, and half past, at quarter to two, at…”

  My dad put his head in his hands and sighed. “Ah, yes—that blasted sheikh. Exasperating! He seems to want to know the shoe size of every member of staff at the school before he will even consider sending his son here,” he muttered. “I was on the phone with him for three hours. I feel a migraine coming on just thinking about it.”

  If you’d had to hazard a guess at my dad’s age—given his aversion to technology and the myriad ailments and illnesses he suffered from (or thought he suffered from) on a daily basis—you could have been forgiven for thinking he was about 120 years old. In actual fact he would be celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday in two months’ time. But his eccentric manner belied his age (and as an eminent authority on pedagogical matters and a holder of two PhDs, he got away with it without anybody questioning his ability to manage an elite institution like Stolzenburg).

  “How did it go with your mother?” he inquired between two mouthfuls of rice.

  “Fine. She says hi,” I said, taking
a bite out of a spring roll. I usually tried to avoid talking to Dad about Mom whenever possible. This was because of the look that came into his eyes at the slightest mention of her—a look that gave him the air of a mournful old dog that has just been kicked. Now, as ever, he looked as if he were simply awaiting the next blow.

  “Thanks. Is she … is everything all right?” he went on gamely.

  “Oh, yes—she’s still living in Cambridge. She only cooks ayurvedic meals now. When she cooks, that is. We mostly ended up having pizza.… Well, you know what she’s like.” I cleared my throat. “But how was your summer, anyway?”

  “Hmm…” He swallowed a mouthful of rice and then, visibly relieved at the change of topic, launched into a detailed account of his recurring sore throats; problems with the caretaker, Mr. Schade; bouts of fever; applications from new students and meetings with prospective parents; and, of course, the attack of flu that had left him a shadow of his former self. Not to mention the migraines he’d been having the past few days. “And now these two young men turn up here unannounced, demanding to be housed here for several weeks. As if we had anywhere to put them, with three hundred students on the waiting list! But what am I supposed to do—I can’t exactly have them camping out in the courtyard, can I?” he concluded, and he began massaging the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, presumably to fend off another migraine.

  “Why not?”

  He sniffed. “Well, I’d have no qualms about sending one of them packing—a certain Toby Bell—I don’t know him from Adam. But the other one, you see, is Darcy de Winter, which means, of course … But all I could offer them at such short notice was a couple of rooms in the west wing.”

  “I see,” I mumbled with my mouth full, though I didn’t see at all. No, hang on … the name de Winter did ring a bell. It was the name of the English lord whose family had once lived at Stolzenburg and had set up the school. It was well documented that a son of the Stolzenburg family had married into a branch of the British de Winter family several hundred years ago, and that when the Stolzenburg line had died out the castle had passed to the de Winters. I’d never heard of a boy called Darcy de Winter, though. “Did they say what they’re doing here?”

  “Not exactly. Apparently they’re on a road trip around Europe and thought they’d make a stop here.”

  “For several weeks? It’s not like there’s a lot to see round here.”

  Dad sighed.

  “Strange,” I murmured, but my mind had already started to wander, from the boys who were to stay in the west wing to my beautiful library and from the library to the book I’d found. Especially the book.

  Somehow I just hadn’t been able to bring myself to put it back in its secret compartment, so I’d taken it away with me for a closer look. I wasn’t quite sure why. There was just something about that book—something that made me curious. Intrigued, even.

  “Anyway, I’ve said they could have two of the old guest rooms on the second floor. I was planning to make them available for the sheikh’s entourage, in case he should decide to grace us with his presence, but it’ll be all right for a few nights, I suppose, and after that we’ll see,” Dad went on. I was still thinking about the book, lying in my shoulder bag a few inches from my chair, waiting to be read. It looked like a perfectly ordinary book, the same as hundreds or possibly thousands of others in this castle. It was probably just an old textbook. Or a deathly dull treatise on garden herbs, or a corny old-fashioned love story. Nothing that could possibly be of any interest to me. And yet …

  * * *

  Wanting, if nothing else, to silence the nagging voice in my head that kept telling me there was something special about the book, I took it out again later that evening when I got back to my room.

  As Hannah slept soundly in the bed opposite mine, dressed in a mismatched pair of pajamas (the top was pink and the bottoms were red with little Santa Clauses on them), I leafed carefully through the book by the light of my bedside lamp. I was struggling to stay awake, but I wanted to do this before settling down for the night. A sneaking suspicion that you might not be of sound mind is not exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep.

  As it turned out, of course, the book was just a book—just as I’d expected—though not a novel or a gardener’s handbook. It seemed to be some kind of chronicle. I thought at first that it was a diary, because it was full of dates followed by separate paragraphs. All the entries were written by hand, and by lots of different people. The paragraphs at the beginning of the book were in an archaic script full of flourishes—more painted than written—but there were passages in the middle written with fountain pen in an old-fashioned hand, and sections toward the end with more recent dates that someone had written in ballpoint, and in some places even in felt tip.

  Most of the entries, as far as I could make out, talked about Stolzenburg. Chroniclers from different eras had recorded all sorts of events, both major and minor, throughout the castle’s history. I found accounts of a kitchen fire in the summer of 1734, the founding of the school in 1825, and an unusually large snowfall in 1918. One diarist had written about the night-time bombing raids during the Second World War, and someone else had described the opening of the new chemistry lab five years ago. And the paper was so gossamer-thin that the book must have a lot more pages than I’d thought at first glance.

  Okay, so the book was a bit special after all. Just not in a freaky, name-whispering way.

  I flicked back and forth through the pages for a while. Right at the beginning was a very old text that seemed to date back to the time when the castle had first been built. It even mentioned the former monastery (which now lay in ruins in the woods near the castle) and the monks who had once lived there and produced a special type of paper from which to make their books.

  A few chapters on, I found an ink drawing of the figure on the cover. Somebody had captured the creature on paper in sharp pen strokes, and it was much clearer here than in the embossed image on the cloth binding. Its upper body was human, but it had the legs of a goat and cloven hooves. From its misshapen head sprouted two huge, curling horns encircled by a crown of leaves and insects. It reminded me of those creatures you find in ancient myths and legends—a faun, perhaps. Yes, a faun, with a mournful look in its eyes.

  I flicked through to the entries written after Stolzenburg had become a school. This was the most interesting part of the book. There were descriptions of balls, new headmasters and headmistresses, and visits from peers and politicians and famous actors. Information that might be worth its weight in gold next spring, when the school would vote to pick the next head girl. Information that meant—I felt sure of it—I had been destined to find this book.

  Yawning, I put it down on my bedside table. I’d have a proper read through it tomorrow, when I felt a bit more awake.

  * * *

  I soon drifted into an uneasy sleep, full of disorienting dreams. In one of them, the west wing library had turned into a classroom. John was the teacher, and he was giving one of his interminable literary lectures. To my surprise, my classmates were hanging on his every word as if they found the whole thing incredibly exciting. Charlotte in particular was absolutely spellbound. Helena, meanwhile, who was sitting in the row in front of me, turned round and asked me why I’d walked all that way in the rain—my hair was a mess. Frederick, in the seat next to mine, said it didn’t matter: Even with wet hair I was gorgeous. And behind the screen where John’s PowerPoint presentation was displayed, oblivious to everything around them, my parents were dancing the tango.

  Then, all of a sudden, something landed on my hand.

  An animal.

  For a moment I was afraid it was one of the spiders Hannah had released into the ivy. I often had nightmares about spiders. But even as I wondered how it was that I was able to think so clearly in a dream, I realized the creature was not a spider at all but a kind of dragonfly. It was a strange color for a dragonfly, though: Instead of a shimmering bluish-green body, i
t had a snow-white back and pearly round eyes. There were gray flecks on its body that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be tiny little letters. This was probably because the thing on my hand was not a real live dragonfly but an elaborately folded piece of paper made to look like an insect. A piece of origami fashioned from the page of a book, perhaps.

  But then, just as I was thinking this, the paper dragonfly started to flutter its shimmering wings and rose into the air. It buzzed away over the heads of my classmates and flew in a circle around John and then my parents. Then it came back to me, flew away again, came back again.

  Nobody in the dream seemed to be aware of the creature. But it looked as if it wanted me to follow it. I got up from my seat and clambered over the legs and schoolbags of my fellow students.

  The paper dragonfly was flying more quickly now. It led me through the school corridors and out of the castle, through the castle gardens and deep into the woods. The moonlight gleamed on its blanched paper body and its wings rustled quietly like pages turning.

  Not until we reached the bank of the river did the creature come to a halt. It landed on a rock (or was it the remnants of an old stone wall?) and stretched out its antennae toward me. I crouched down in front of it in the grass and watched it crawl on its delicate little paper legs until it was only inches away from my face. It blinked its pearly eyes as I tried to decipher the letters and words on its body.

  Emma, whispered the dragonfly suddenly, making me jump. Emmaaa!

  “This is ridiculous,” I scoffed. My breath sent the dragonfly tumbling backward, almost into the water. But it managed to cling on to the rock and immediately came crawling back toward me. Emma, it whispered again. Emmaaa!

  “Stop it,” I said. “You’re made of paper. You can’t fly and you can’t talk.”

  But the dragonfly said my name again, and this time I’d had enough. I took a deep breath and blew the dragonfly off the rock.

  It rustled angrily as it whirled away from me, far, far away across the moonlit Rhine.