The Book of Lost Things (2006) Page 25

  The guards who had been patrolling the gallery were gone. The voices were coming from the throne room below. Keeping to the shadows, David hid himself behind a large silver urn filled with ferns and looked down on the two men. One of them was the king, but he was not seated on his throne. He was sitting on the stone steps, wearing a purple dressing gown over a nightshirt of white and gold. His head was entirely bald on top and dotted with more brown spots. Lengths of white hair hung loosely over his ears and the collar of his gown, and he trembled in the cold of the great hall.

  The Crooked Man sat upon the king’s throne, his legs crossed and his fingers steepled before him. He seemed unhappy with something that the king had said, for he spit on the stone floor in disgust. David heard the spittle hiss and sizzle where it landed.

  “It cannot be rushed,” said the Crooked Man. “A few more hours will not kill you.”

  “Nothing, it seems, will kill me,” said the king. “You promised an end to this. I need to rest, to sleep. I want to lie in my crypt and decay to dust. You promised me that I would be allowed to die at last.”

  “He thinks the book will help him,” said the Crooked Man. “When he finds out that it has no value, he will listen to reason, and then we will both have our reward from him.”

  The king shifted position, and David saw that he had a book upon his lap. It was bound in brown leather and looked very old and ragged. The king’s fingers brushed lovingly across its cover, and his face was a mask of sadness.

  “The book has value to me,” he said.

  “Then you can take it to the grave with you,” said the Crooked Man, “for it will be useless to anyone else. Until that time, leave it where its presence can taunt him.”

  The king stood painfully and tottered down the steps. He walked to a small alcove in the wall and laid the book carefully upon a gold cushion. David had not noticed it before because drapes had been drawn across it during his meeting with the king.

  “Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” said the Crooked Man, his voice full of sarcasm. “Our bargain is almost concluded.”

  The king frowned. “It was no bargain,” he said, “not for me, and not for the one whom you took to secure it.”

  The Crooked Man leaped from the throne and, in a single bound, landed inches from the king. But the old man did not cower or try to move away.

  “You concluded no bargain that you did not wish to conclude,” said the Crooked Man. “I gave you what you desired, and I made clear what was expected of you in return.”

  “I was a child,” said the king. “I was angry. I did not understand the harm that I was doing.”

  “And you think that excuses you? As a child you saw things only in black and white, good and bad, what gave you pleasure and what brought you pain. Now you see everything in shades of gray. Even the care of your own kingdom is beyond you, so unwilling are you to decide what is right and wrong or even to admit that you can tell the difference. You knew what you were agreeing to on the day that we made our bargain. Regrets have clouded your memory, and now you seek to blame me for your own weaknesses. Mind your tongue, old man, or else I will be forced to remind you of the power that I still wield over you.”

  “What can you do to me that you have not already done?” asked the king. “All that is left is death, and you continue to deny that to me.”

  The Crooked Man leaned so close to the king that their noses touched. “Remember, and remember well: there are easy deaths and there are hard deaths. I can make your passing as peaceful as an afternoon snooze, or as painful and lengthy as your withered body and brittle bones will allow. Never forget that.”

  The Crooked Man turned away and walked to the wall behind the throne. A tapestry of a unicorn hunt moved briefly in the torchlight, and then there was only the king, alone in his throne room. The old man went to the alcove, opened the book once more, and stared for a time at whatever was revealed in its pages, then closed it again and left through a doorway beneath the gallery. David was now alone. He waited for the guards to return, but they did not come. When five minutes had passed, and all remained quiet, he took the stairs down to the throne room and padded softly across the floor to where the book lay.

  So this was the book of which the Woodsman and Roland had spoken. This was the Book of Lost Things. Yet the Crooked Man had declared it to be of no value, even though the king appeared to treasure it more than his crown. Perhaps the Crooked Man was wrong, thought David. Maybe he simply did not understand what was contained within its pages.

  David reached out and opened the book.

  XXVIII

  Of the Book of Lost Things

  THE FIRST PAGE to which David opened the book was decorated with a child’s drawing of a big house: there were trees, and a garden, and long windows. A smiling sun shone in the sky, and stick figures of a man, a woman, and a little boy held hands beside the front door. David turned another page and found a ticket stub for a show at a London theater. Underneath it, a child’s hand had written “My first play!” Across from it was a postcard of a seaside pier. It was very old and looked closer to brown-and-white than black-and-white. David turned more pages and saw flowers stuck down, and a tuft of dog hair (“Lucky, A Good Dog”) and photographs and drawings and a piece of a woman’s dress and a broken chain, painted to look like gold but with the base metal showing through. There was a page from another book, depicting a knight slaying a dragon, and a poem about a cat and a mouse, written in a boy’s hand. The poem wasn’t very good, but at least it rhymed.

  David couldn’t understand it. All of these things belonged in his world, not this one. They were tokens and souvenirs of a life not unlike his own. He read further, and came to a series of diary entries. Most of them were very short, describing days at school, trips to the seaside, even the discovery of a particularly large and hairy spider in a garden web. The tone of them changed as they went on, the entries growing longer and more detailed, but also bitter and angry. They spoke of the arrival of a little girl, a potential sister, into a family, and of a boy’s rage at the attention being paid to the new arrival. There was regret, and nostalgia for a time when it had been just “me and my mummy and daddy.” David felt a kinship with the boy, but also a dislike for him. His anger at the girl, and at his parents for bringing her into his world, was so intense that it veered into pure hatred.

  “I would do anything to be rid of her,” read one entry. “I would give away all of my toys, and every book that I ever owned. I would give up my savings. I would sweep the floors every day for the rest of my life. I would sell my soul if she would just GO AWAY!!!!”

  But the final entry was the shortest of them all. It said simply: “I have decided. I will do it.”

  Glued to the last page was a photograph of a family, its four members standing beside a vase of flowers in a photographic studio. There was a father with a bald head and a pretty mother wearing a white dress decorated with lace. At her feet sat a boy dressed in a sailor suit, who scowled at the camera as though the photographer had just said something nasty to him. Beside him, David could just make out the hem of a dress and a pair of small black shoes, but the rest of the girl’s image had been scraped away.

  David turned back to the very first page of the book and saw what was written there. It read:

  Jonathan Tulvey. His Book.

  David closed the book with a snap and hastily stepped away from it. Jonathan Tulvey: Rose’s great-uncle who had disappeared along with his little adopted sister and had never been seen again. This was Jonathan’s book, a relic of his life. He remembered the old king, and the loving way in which he had touched the book.

  “The book has value to me .”

  Jonathan was the king. He had made a bargain with the Crooked Man, and in return he had become the ruler of this land. Perhaps he had even passed through the same portal that David had used to come here. But what was the arrangement, and what had happened to the little girl? Whatever bargain he had made with the Crooked Man had cost
him dearly in the end. The old king, pleading to be allowed to die, was living proof of this.

  A sound came from above. David shrank back against the wall as the figure of a guard appeared on the gallery, resuming his position now that the chamber was empty once again. There was no way David could get back to his room without being seen. He looked around and tried to find another way out. He could take the doorway the king had used, but that would almost certainly mean being confronted by guards. There was also the tapestry on the wall behind the throne. Somehow, the Crooked Man had found a way out through there, and David doubted that there would be guards where the Crooked Man had gone. David was also curious. For the first time, he felt that he knew more than the Crooked Man or the king thought he knew. It was time to try to use that knowledge.

  Silently, he made his way to the tapestry and lifted it back from the wall. Behind it was a door. David pushed down on the door handle, and it opened without a sound. Beyond lay a low-ceilinged passageway, lit by candles set in alcoves in the stonework. The roof of the passage was so low that it almost touched David’s hair as he entered. He closed the door behind him and followed the passageway down, down, deep into the cold, dark places that lay beneath the castle. He passed disused dungeons, some still littered with bones, and a chamber that was filled with instruments of pain and torture: racks upon which to stretch prisoners until they screamed; thumbscrews with which to break their bones; spikes and spears and blades to pierce the flesh; and, in a far corner, an iron maiden, shaped like the mummies’ coffins that David had seen in museums but with nails set into its lid so that anyone placed inside would face an agonizing death. It made David feel queasy, and he passed through the chamber as quickly as he could.

  At last he came to an enormous room dominated by a great hourglass. Each bulb of the glass was as tall as a house, but the top bulb was almost empty. The wood and glass from which the hourglass had been constructed looked very old. Time, for someone or something, was draining away, and now it was almost gone.

  Beside the hourglass room was a small chamber furnished with a simple bed, a stained mattress, and an old blanket resting upon it. On the wall across from the bed was an array of bladed weapons, daggers and swords and knives, all arranged in descending order of length. Another wall held a shelf covered in glass jars of different shapes and sizes. One of them seemed to glow faintly.

  David’s nose wrinkled at an unpleasant smell from close by. He turned to find the source and almost bumped his head against a garland of wolves’ muzzles hanging by a rope from the ceiling above, twenty or thirty in all, some still damp with blood.

  “Who are you?” said a voice, and David’s heart came close to stopping from the shock of hearing it. He tried to find the source of the sound, but there was nobody there.

  “Does he know you’re here?” said the voice again. It was the voice of a girl.

  “I can’t see you,” said David.

  “But I can see you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m over here, on the shelf.”

  David followed the sound of the voice to the shelf of jars. There, in a green jar close to the edge, he saw a tiny little girl. Her hair was long and blond, and her eyes were blue. She shone with a pale light, and wore a simple white nightdress. There was a hole in the gown at her left breast, with a large chocolate-colored stain around it.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” said the little girl. “If he finds you, he’ll hurt you, just like he hurt me.”

  “What did he do to you?” asked David.

  But the little girl only shook her head and clenched her lips tightly, as though trying not to cry.

  “What’s your name?” asked David, trying to change the subject.

  “My name is Anna,” said the little girl.

  Anna.

  “I’m David. How can I get you out of there?”

  “You can’t,” said the girl. “You see, I’m dead.”

  David leaned in a little closer to the jar. He could see the girl’s small hands touching against the glass, but they left no fingerprints upon it. Her face was white and her lips were purple, and dark rings surrounded her eyes. The hole in her nightdress was clearer now, and David thought that the stains surrounding it might be dried blood.

  “How long have you been here?” he said.

  “I’ve lost count of the years,” she said. “I was very young when I came here. There was another little boy in this room when I arrived. I dream of him sometimes. He was like I am now, but he was very frail. He faded away when I was brought to this room, and I never saw him again. I’ve been growing weak, though. I’m afraid. I’m scared that what happened to him is going to happen to me. I’ll disappear, and then no one will ever know what became of me.”

  She began to cry, but no tears fell, for the dead can no longer weep or bleed.

  David placed his little finger against the jar, just where the girl’s hand was touching it from the inside, so that only the glass separated them.

  “Does anyone else know that you’re here?” asked David.

  She nodded. “My brother sometimes comes, but he’s very old now. Well, I call him my brother, but he never was, not really. I just wanted him to be. He tells me that he’s sorry. I believe him. I think he is sorry.”

  Suddenly, everything began to make awful sense to David.

  “Jonathan brought you here, and he gave you to the Crooked Man,” he said. “That was the bargain he made.”

  He sat down hard on the cold, uncomfortable bed.

  “He was jealous of you,” he continued, speaking more softly now, talking as much to himself as to the girl in the jar, “and the Crooked Man offered him a way to be free of you. Jonathan became king, and the one who preceded him, the old queen, was allowed to die. Perhaps, many years before, she had made a similar bargain with the Crooked Man, and the boy you saw in the jar when you came was her brother, or cousin, or some little boy next door who annoyed her so much that she dreamed of getting rid of him.”

  And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power lay always in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle…

  David stood and returned to the girl in the jar.

  “I know it’s hard for you, but you have to tell me what happened to you when you came here. It’s very important. Please, try.”

  Anna screwed her face up and shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It hurt. I don’t want to remember it.”

  “You must,” said David, and there was a new force to his voice. It sounded deeper, as though the man that he would become had briefly shown himself before his time. “If it’s not to happen again, you have to tell me what he did.”

  Anna was trembling. Her lips were pressed as thin as paper, and her tiny fists were clenched so tightly that the bones threatened to break through her skin. At last, she released a moan of sorrow and anger and remembered pain, and the words poured out.

  “We came through the sunken garden,” she began. “Jonathan was always being so mean to me. He would tease me, when he spoke to me at all. He would pinch me and pull my hair. He would take me into the forest and try to lose me there, until I started to cry and he had to come back for me in case his parents heard me. He told me that if I ever said anything to them, he would give me away to a stranger. He said that they wouldn’t believe me anyway because he was their real child and I wasn’t. I was just a little girl that they’d taken pity on, and if
I disappeared then they wouldn’t be sad for very long.

  “But sometimes he could be so kind and so sweet, as though he forgot that he was supposed to hate me and the real Jonathan shone through instead. Perhaps that was why I followed him down to the garden that night, because he’d been so nice to me that day. He’d bought me sweets with his own money, and he’d shared his pie with me after I dropped mine on the floor. He woke me in the night and told me that he had something to show me, something special and secret. Everyone else was asleep, and we sneaked down to the sunken garden, my hand in Jonathan’s. He showed me a hollow place. I was scared. I didn’t want to go inside. But Jonathan said that I’d see a strange land, a fabulous land, if I did. He went ahead, and I followed. At first, I couldn’t see anything. There was only darkness and spiders. Then I saw trees and flowers, and smelled apple blossom and pine. Jonathan was standing in a clearing, dancing around in circles, laughing and calling to me to join him.

  “So I did.”

  She fell silent for a moment. David waited for her to continue.

  “There was a man waiting: the Crooked Man. He was sitting on a rock. He stared at me and licked his lips, then spoke to Jonathan.

  “ ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  “ ‘Her name is Anna,’ said Jonathan.

  “ ‘Anna,’ said the Crooked Man, as if he was trying my name out to see if he liked how it tasted. ‘Welcome, Anna.’