The Forgotten Book Read online

  The most bizarre thing about this whole bizarre situation was that I had foreseen it. No, more than that: I had described it. I’d written about it yesterday evening, in my latest entry in the book. In a fit of pique. Or madness. Or a mixture of the two. I couldn’t quite remember.

  First of all I’d described what had happened between Dr. Meier and Miss Berkenbeck in the dining hall—only I hadn’t named names, and I’d made it sound much less embarrassing than it actually had been. In my version it was a romantic kiss in a secluded corner behind the drinks machine, far from prying eyes. And then I’d thought of Charlotte, still waiting patiently for a message from Toby. I was in a strange mood (I think I was still high on sugar from all the sweets I’d eaten that evening while watching the rest of Shakespeare in Love) and I found myself writing something in the diary about Toby. It was just a throwaway remark, a couple of sentences saying he’d better come back to Stolzenburg soon or I was going to feed him to the lions.

  Now, as I crouched beside Charlotte and Toby, listening to the quiet snoring of a real, flesh-and-blood lion, an impossible idea began to take shape in my mind. It wormed its way into every corner of my brain until—despite having a lot of unanswered questions and serious doubts about my own sanity—I started to believe it.

  However crazy it might seem, I had to face the facts: I’d written about this. And what I’d written had now come to pass. Just like the kiss between Dr. Meier and Miss Berkenbeck, which I’d written about in the diary the day before it had happened. Both events were too surreal to be coincidences. And I’d never been much good at predicting things, especially bizarre things like this. So there was only one explanation, even if it seemed wildly improbable—no, impossible. The kiss and the lion could mean only one thing: The book was more than just a diary.

  In fact, it now started to dawn on me that it was exactly the opposite: The entries in the book did not describe things that had already happened; they made things happen. The things I’d written in the chronicle had miraculously come true because I’d written them.

  Oh my God! I must be mad! Was I seriously considering this as an explanation? My whole body was trembling now, but I couldn’t deny it. Yes, I was considering it. And not only that—I believed it. I felt sick.

  “Emma,” Charlotte whispered. “The lion’s asleep.” She patted me reassuringly, while I clutched her arm with icy-cold fingers. The book in my bedroom was … No, I had to stop this. It was impossible. End of story. But the lion … and Toby … I couldn’t … I stared past Charlotte into one of the bushes. My heart was racing. Beads of cold sweat stood out on my forehead.

  “I think she’s in shock,” said Toby.

  Charlotte hugged me tighter. “Don’t worry, Emma. The lion’s asleep. And help is on the way.”

  A few minutes later, as promised, a police van pulled up in the courtyard, and it wasn’t long before a vet had put the slumbering lion into an even deeper sleep with the help of a tranquilizer dart. The creature looked almost cuddly as it was lifted into a transport crate.

  My dad, of course, was absolutely beside himself. A dangerous predator had made its way onto the school grounds and had almost attacked several students, including his own daughter! He became so agitated at the thought that he ended up having an asthma attack and retired to bed around eight o’clock. Charlotte and I still felt a little frazzled, too, even though hours had passed since the lion had been taken away and the circus manager had apologized profusely for what had happened. We’d skipped dinner and taken long, hot showers to try to calm ourselves down a little. Now we were on our way to Miss Whitfield’s etiquette lesson, which was held in her cottage on the edge of the woods, and we ran part of the way so as not to have to be outdoors any longer than strictly necessary. Who knew what kind of wild beast was going to come prowling out of the undergrowth next? Although, technically …

  “Do you think he’s annoyed with me?” asked Charlotte as we passed the fountain. After we’d been rescued, Toby had left us standing in the middle of a throng of curious students who’d been watching the lion out of the window, and he’d disappeared into the west wing. It would have been the perfect opportunity to take Charlotte in his arms and apologize for his mysterious trip to Cologne and his radio silence. But Toby had done nothing of the sort—he’d simply vanished. Again. What was wrong with the guy?

  “No,” I replied firmly. Whatever the reason for the sudden change in Toby’s behavior, it surely didn’t have anything to do with Charlotte. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I really thought he liked me.”

  “I thought so, too,” I said. I stroked Miss Velvetnose’s back as we passed. “And he does. It’ll sort itself out, you’ll see. I’ll help.”

  Miss Whitfield’s living room was small and very British-looking. The curtains were the same pale pink color as the climbing roses outside the window and the crocheted cushion covers on the sofa. On the mantelpiece stood a row of family photos, and the shelves were full of beautifully bound books. There was an elegant bureau in one corner, and beside it an old gramophone was perched on a spindle-legged stool. To make sure all fifteen students taking the course had somewhere to sit, there was also an assortment of armchairs, dining chairs, and occasional tables, giving the room a cluttered look.

  The etiquette course was one of a number of elective modules that pupils at Stolzenburg could choose to study alongside the main curriculum. The purpose of this particular module was to prepare us for a life in the highest echelons of society, and teach us all the social graces we would need when attending formal dinners, balls, and official receptions. A world where I felt completely out of place, in other words. But Charlotte’s family had insisted that she take the course, so I’d immediately signed up, too, in order to provide moral support. I also happened to like Miss Whitfield, and it couldn’t hurt to know how to hold a teacup properly, could it?

  “And then you raise your little finger ever so slightly,” Miss Whitfield was explaining. Charlotte sipped daintily at her Earl Grey. (Contrary to the claims of the British tabloid press, Charlotte had impeccable table manners. When she wasn’t barfing, that is.)

  “Oh, man,” said Hannah, who was sitting with us at one of the tiny tables. (We’d managed to persuade her to come along to the etiquette class, too.) She’d wedged her thumb through the handle of the teacup and seemed to be having trouble getting it out again. “I think I’m stuck.”

  Miss Whitfield smiled benignly. “If you should ever have this problem while taking tea with a lord, you could always smash the cup over his head and shout ‘Down with the aristocracy!’” she suggested. Miss Whitfield was a tall woman with an ageless face. Her hair was shot through with silver strands, and I’d never seen her in anything other than an ankle-length dress or skirt. She eyed Hannah’s trapped thumb with a sigh. “I’m afraid that even if you were to raise your little finger, my dear, you would struggle to look elegant holding your cup like that. Come through into the kitchen and we’ll pour out that tea before you scald yourself. And we’ll see if we can’t use a little soap to set you free without breaking my favorite teacup.”

  Hannah and Miss Whitfield disappeared into the next room. I looked around surreptitiously, but everybody else was completely preoccupied with their own teacups and with conversations about lords and lions. Jonathan and Tom, the boys at the next table, were engrossed in a battle between swallows made out of folded napkins, so I pulled the book out of my bag and slid it across the table to Charlotte. “Remember this book? I found it that day we were tidying up the west wing library.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Yes. What is it?” She flicked through the first few pages. “An old diary?”

  “Sort of.” I bit my lower lip, then opened the chronicle to my latest entry. I’d written it about three-quarters of an hour earlier, with the intention of testing out my theory. “Look—this is what I wrote just now.”

  Charlotte skimmed my paragraph. It wasn’t very long. Then she looked at me uncomprehe
ndingly. “So…,” she said, “you knew we were going to be learning how to drink tea today?”

  I shook my head. “No. I made it up.”

  Charlotte frowned. “And the bit about my scone?”

  “I made that up, too. But I think if you…” I pointed to the cake stand in the middle of the table, which held four scones and a little pot of clotted cream.

  “Are you serious?” Charlotte looked from me to the scones and back again.

  “Trust me. I have a theory about … well, about this book. So, which scone are you going to pick?”

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Emma?” said Charlotte gently. “Toby did say you might be in shock, after what happened with the lion.”

  “I am in shock,” I said. “But it’s more to do with this book than the lion. So please, do me a favor and pick a scone.”

  I gnawed my lower lip again as Charlotte’s hand hovered over the cake stand. After lingering by the bottom tier for a moment, she eventually selected a scone from the top tier. She bit into it gingerly, chewed it for a moment, and stared at me.

  “I don’ beweeve it,” she mumbled with her mouth full. “Tha’s…”

  I nodded. “But next time you take tea with a lord, I recommend you don’t speak with your mouth full,” I said. Charlotte took my advice and swallowed everything that was in her mouth apart from the black trouser button that had been baked into her scone. The button was exactly as I’d described it. It lay between us on the tablecloth, dark and shiny.

  “Emma,” said Charlotte, “are you telling me…” She paused, presumably finding the idea too ludicrous to say out loud.

  “Exactly,” I said, stroking the cover of the book in my lap. “I don’t know how or why. It goes against all the laws of physics. But it’s a fact: The things you write in this book come true.”

  “No way!” Charlotte exclaimed. She reached for the cake stand and crumbled the remaining scones between her fingers one by one. “Miss Whitfield must have baked a little object into each scone, to see how we’d react. To see if we could keep our composure.”

  But, of course, none of the other scones had anything inside.

  A moment later, Hannah and Miss Whitfield came back into the living room. Miss Whitfield eyed the crumbled scones with a sorrowful shake of her head. “That isn’t very good manners, Charlotte. And you were drinking your cup of tea so beautifully a moment ago.”

  * * *

  “Make there be chocolate cake for breakfast tomorrow,” Hannah suggested. “And world peace.”

  It was already past midnight. The three of us were sitting on my bed leafing through the book. Charlotte was still skeptical, but Hannah was bursting with excitement. Since hearing about my amazing discovery, she’d been full of suggestions for things we could write in the book. But so far I’d hesitated to act on any of them. Now that there was conclusive evidence for my theory, in the form of an unassuming little black button, I was suddenly awestruck at the thought of the power this tatty old book possessed. Again I felt as though I was holding a living thing in my hands, something more than paper, ink, and glue. Something magic. Although I still hardly even dared think that word, let alone say it out loud.

  And besides, my sudden hesitation was surely justified: It was one thing to suspect that the book had incredible powers and even to prove it; it was quite another to embrace those powers and start using them as if it were the most normal thing in the world. If there was one thing this chronicle was not, it was normal.

  The events of the last two days had also made me realize that I needed to think carefully about what and how to write in the book, given that the real-world consequences were not entirely predictable. It was probably best not to conjure up anything too outlandish, anyway, which was why I’d provisionally vetoed Hannah’s request for a unicorn.

  “We have to find out where it comes from,” said Charlotte firmly. “Where did you say you found it again? In the west wing library?”

  I nodded. “In a secret compartment in the bottom drawer of that chest we couldn’t move.”

  “Mhm.”

  “Hang on, go back a few pages,” Hannah said.

  We’d spent the past few hours perusing hundreds of the entries in the chronicle, but we’d still managed to read only about a quarter of them. Some were penned in microscopically tiny writing and were barely legible; others featured handwriting so old-fashioned that none of us could read it. And some contained nothing more than mundane details (and a few flowery, rather overwrought poems about dark nights). As we’d flicked through the pages, I’d scanned the text for information about the book itself. Had all the “chroniclers” understood how it worked? Had they left any hidden clues? And why couldn’t I shake the feeling that the further I leafed through the book, the more pages there were?

  “Stop.” Hannah pointed to the drawing of the strange faun-like creature I’d come across a few days earlier. “I know it’s not a unicorn,” she said. “But couldn’t we—”

  “No,” said Charlotte and I together.

  “Why not?”

  We bent over the paper. The ink drawing and the accompanying text were dated 1758 and had clearly been penned by one of the de Winters’ ancestors, because the author kept referring to himself as the “lord of Stolzenburg.” His first few entries, from the beginning of 1758, showed that he must have been a very lonely man. Again and again he lamented his solitary life and the fact that he had no wife or children.

  But as time went on, his entries started to change. They grew darker, more purposeful and … more unbalanced. Not only had the lord of Stolzenburg been a lonely man, but a paranoid one, too. He’d had several secret passages built into the castle, as well as concealed rooms he referred to as “laboratories,” in which he’d shut himself away with increasing regularity throughout the spring of 1758. After a while he started mentioning a son, or a creature, who would outlive him and carry his words into the future. A creature that would transcend the barriers of time and mortality. Huh?

  I began to suspect that the lord of Stolzenburg had been a few sandwiches short of a picnic. From October 1758 onward his entries became completely incomprehensible, and were frequently illustrated with the same ink drawing. We stopped reading. This wasn’t getting us anywhere.

  But Hannah was still pointing triumphantly at one of the sketches. “Look: He did create a unicorn!”

  Charlotte snorted. “That’s enough now. We have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into. Lion or no lion, we have to be sensible about this. It’s all getting way too weird.” She took the book out of my hands, snapped it shut, and slid it under my pillow. “Let’s go to bed and talk about it tomorrow, okay? There’s no such thing as magic.”

  Really?

  “Good night,” I said.

  Charlotte was almost at the door. Before she went out of the room she checked her phone for what must have been the millionth time that day. But it seemed she still hadn’t had a reply, because she shoved the phone straight back into her pocket. Hannah went through to the bathroom to brush her teeth, and I was left alone. There was a slight bulge in my pillow where the book lay.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned my head against the wall. What on earth was going on? I was sixteen years old: almost an adult. Next spring I planned to stand for election as head girl, and once I’d finished my A-levels in three years’ time, I was going to travel the world. After that I would go to university and pursue a career. Possibly as a lawyer or a journalist. I was a sensible person, for heaven’s sake. Was I seriously sitting here with an antique book wondering whether there was really such a thing as magic?

  On the other hand there was the button in the scone, the lion, and Dr. Meier’s bizarre behavior in the dining hall. I’d managed to set a full-grown lion on Toby Bell! The thought still made me shiver. That had been a very reckless thing to write. The way events actually unfolded after being written about in the chronicle seemed to be pretty unpredictable in general. Although the button baked into t
he scone had gone exactly to plan—perhaps because my description had been very precise?

  I listened to the sound of running water and Hannah’s electric toothbrush. My hand slipped under the pillow as if of its own accord and pulled out the chronicle.

  Knowledge—as I’d heard John attest some forty-two times that summer—was not about simply believing things to be true but about establishing hypotheses and testing them. Either I’d completely lost my marbles today, or I’d made a groundbreaking discovery. And either way, wasn’t it safest to take a logical and scientific approach? To test my hypothesis? If I wanted to find out what was really going on here, surely there was nothing for it but to experiment a little.…

  I looked at the embossed creature on the binding, the madman’s creature, which looked—even now that I knew the impossible was possible—like something out of a fairy tale. I had to know how the book and the diary entries worked. I had to find out more. And fast.

  Of course, I would have to be extremely cautious and start off with small things, like the button. But I was going to come to grips with this thing and I was going to do it tonight. Emma Magdalena Morgenroth was a woman of action.

  I went over to my desk, fished out a pencil, and started writing very faintly on the next blank page. When Hannah emerged from the bathroom and saw what I was doing, she grinned. “Am I getting my unicorn?”