“So Basta’s back with a brand-new knife and a mouth full of peppermint leaves, I suspect. Bloody hell!” Elinor was apt to swear when she was anxious or annoyed. “As if it wasn’t bad enough waking up every third night drenched in sweat because I’ve seen his foxy face in my dreams ..
not to mention his knife. But let’s try to keep calm! Look at it like this: Basta knows where I live, but obviously it’s Mo and Meggie he’s after, not me, so this house ought really to be safe as –
well, safe as houses, for you. After all, he’s not likely to know you’ve moved in here, is he?” She looked at Resa and Meggie triumphantly, as if this were a conclusive argument.
But Meggie’s response made Elinor’s face darken again at once. “Farid knew,” she pointed out.
“So he did,” growled Elinor, her glance turning to Farid again. “You knew, too. How?”
Her voice was so sharp that Farid instinctively flinched. “An old woman told us,” he said in a wavering voice. “We went back to Capricorn’s village after the fairies Dustfinger took with him turned to ashes. He wanted to see if the same thing had happened to the others. The whole village was deserted, not a soul in sight, not even a stray dog. Only ashes, ashes everywhere. So we went to the next village and tried to find out just what had happened, and .. well, that was when we heard how a fat woman had been there, saying something about dead fairies, but at least, she said, luckily the human beings hadn’t died on her, too, and they were living with her now. . ”
Elinor lowered her gaze guiltily and collected a few crumbs from her plate with one finger.
“Damn it,” she muttered. “Yes. Perhaps I did say rather too much in that shop when I phoned you from there. I was in such a state after seeing the empty village! How could I guess those gossips would tell Dustfinger about me? Dustfinger, of all people! Since when do old women talk to someone like him?”
Or to someone like Basta, thought Meggie.
But Farid just shrugged his shoulders, rose to his feet, which were now covered with bandages, and began limping up and down Elinor’s kitchen. “Dustfinger thought you’d all be here in any case,” he said. “We even passed this way once because he wanted to see if she was all right.”
He jerked his head Resa’s way. Elinor snorted scornfully. “Oh, did he, indeed? How good of him.”
She had never liked Dustfinger, and the fact that he had stolen the book from Mo before disappearing had done little to lessen her dislike. Resa, however, smiled at Farid’s words, though she tried to hide her smile from Elinor. Meggie still clearly remembered the morning when Darius had brought her mother the strange little bundle he’d found outside the front door – a candle, a few pencils, and a box of matches, all tied up with stems of blue speedwell. Meggie had known at once who the bundle came from. And so did Resa.
“Well,” said Elinor, drumming on her plate with the handle of her knife, “I’m delighted to hear that the matchstick-eater’s back where he belongs. The very idea of him slinking around my house by night! It’s just a pity he didn’t take Basta, too.”
Basta! When Elinor said his name Resa suddenly rose from her chair, went out into the corridor, and came back with the telephone. She held it out to Meggie with a look of entreaty in her eyes and began gesticulating so excitedly with her other hand that even Meggie had difficulty in reading the signs she traced in the air. But finally she understood.
Resa wanted her to call Mo. Of course.
It seemed forever before he came to the phone. He’d probably been working. When Mo was away he always worked late into the night, so that he could get home sooner.
“Meggie?” He sounded surprised. Perhaps he thought she was calling because of their quarrel, but who’d be interested in that stupid argument now?
It was some time before he could make anything of the words she was hastily stammering out.
“Slowly, Meggie!” he kept saying. “Take it slowly.” But that was easier said than done when your heart was in your mouth, and Basta might be waiting at Elinor’s garden gate this very minute ..
Meggie didn’t even dare to think this idea through to its logical conclusion.
Mo, on the other hand, remained strangely calm – almost as if he had expected the past to catch up with them again. “Stories never really end, Meggie,” he had once told her, “even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.” “Has Elinor switched on the burglar alarm?” he asked now. “Yes.”
“Has she told the police?”
“No. She says they wouldn’t believe her, anyway.”
“She ought to call them, all the same. And give them a description of Basta. You can describe him between you, right?” What a question! Meggie had tried to forget Basta’s face, but it would live on in her memory for the rest of her life, as clear as a photograph.
“Listen, Meggie.” Perhaps Mo wasn’t quite as calm as he pretended. His voice didn’t sound the same as usual. “I’ll drive back tonight. Tell Elinor and your mother. I’ll be with you by tomorrow morning at the latest. Bolt everything and keep the windows closed, understand?”
Meggie nodded, forgetting that Mo couldn’t see her over the phone. “Meggie?”
“Yes, I understand.” She tried to sound calm and brave, even if she didn’t feel that way. She was scared, badly scared. “See you tomorrow, Meggie!”
She could tell from his voice that he was going to set out right away. And suddenly, seeing the moonlit road in her mind’s eye, the long road back, a new and terrible thought came into her mind. .
“What about you?” she exclaimed. “Mo! Suppose Basta’s lying in wait for you somewhere?” But her father had already hung up. Elinor decided to put Farid where Dustfinger had once slept: in the attic room, where crates of books were stacked high around the narrow bedstead. Anyone who slept there would surely dream of being struck dead by printed paper. Meggie was told to show Farid the way, and when she wished him good night he just nodded abstractedly.
He looked very lost sitting on the narrow bed – almost as lost as on the day when Mo had read him into Capricorn’s church, a thin, nameless boy with a turban over his black hair.
That night, before she went to sleep, Elinor checked the burglar alarm several times to make sure it really was switched on. As for Darius, he went to find the rifle that Elinor sometimes fired into the air if she saw a cat prowling under one of the birds’ nests in her garden. Wearing the orange bathrobe that Elinor had given him last Christmas – it was much too big for him – he settled down in the armchair in the entrance hall, the rifle on his lap, staring at the front door with a determined expression. But when Elinor came to check the alarm for the second time he was already fast asleep.
It was a long time before Meggie could sleep. She looked at the shelves where her notebooks used to stand, stroked the empty wood, and finally kneeled down by the red-painted box that Mo had made long ago for her favourite books. She hadn’t opened it for months. There wasn’t room in it for a single extra book, and by now it was too heavy for her to take it when she went away.