The Hidden Boy Read online

  “Hello,” said Phoebe. Miss Hopkins looked up and gave them a gap-toothed smile. She put her finger to her lips and pointed at the brass sign.

  “We’re looking for a book about Arkadi,” whispered Bea. “Do you have any?”

  “Indeed we do,” Miss Hopkins whispered back. There was no sign of anyone else in the library. “Do you have a library card?”

  Bea frowned. “We just got here,” she said.

  “So you did,” said Miss Hopkins. She handed them two narrow forms and a pencil each. There was only one question at the top of each form. It said simply:

  Well?

  Bea thought for a moment; then she wrote: I would like to join the library. My name is Bea Flint, and I’m staying with the Millers at the moment.

  Phoebe licked her pencil, then wrote carefully on her own form: We are looking for a book about Arkadi. My name is an anagram of blue hope.

  Miss Hopkins took the two forms and read them. She produced two green cards from a drawer and wrote the girls’ names, one on each. She wrote Phoebe Lu without hesitation, and stamped the reverse of the cards in slow motion so as not to make a sound.

  “Where will we find it?” whispered Bea.

  “Find what?” said Miss Hopkins. She spoke so quietly that it was easier to lip-read than to hear her.

  “The book about Arkadi,” said Bea.

  “It’s on the top shelf at the back,” said Miss Hopkins.

  Bea looked at the shelf that Miss Hopkins indicated. It was the highest shelf of a very tall bookcase that stretched up to the floor of Captain Bontoc’s suspended office. “Could you get it for us, please?” she said.

  Miss Hopkins shook her head. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “It’s restricted. You’ll need a note from the Quorum.”

  “But the Quorum only meets once a week,” said Bea.

  “Once a fortnight, dear,” said Miss Hopkins. “But we’ve got plenty of other books to keep you amused in the meantime. We’ve got ones on abseiling, animals, archery, baking, bees, cakes, clothes, crossbows, dams, dreams, eating, eggs—”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Bea. “We’ll take a look around.”

  They wandered in among the bookshelves until they were out of sight of the librarian.

  “We’re still whispering,” muttered Phoebe, pulling a book from the nearest shelf. “I thought we came in here so we could talk.”

  “Never mind that,” said Bea. “We have to get hold of that book.”

  “I could climb up there,” said Phoebe. “But she’d see us.”

  Miss Hopkins billowed around the corner of a bookcase. “We’ll be closing in ten minutes,” she whispered. “I have to go upstairs to lock the filing cabinets. If you borrow any books just take the little cards out of the inside covers and drop them on my desk as you leave, like good girls.” She flipped open a book and mimed the act of removing the card in case they were in any doubt; then she replaced it on the shelf. Bea saw her glance up at the top shelf where the restricted books were kept; then she turned and trotted up the creaking stairs to Captain Bontoc’s office.

  “I could probably get up there and back down before she comes out again,” whispered Phoebe.

  Bea shook her head. “She’d notice it was gone,” she said. She frowned for a moment in concentration. The sound of metal drawers being closed rolled from the office above like distant thunder. “I’ve got a better idea,” said Bea. She took two books at random and quickly removed the little cards from inside. “Follow me,” she whispered, and she ran quietly to the front desk. She could hear Miss Hopkins’s key turn in the lock of the filing cabinet upstairs. “Quickly,” she said. She dropped the two cards on the desk and pulled Phoebe after her as she ducked behind the nearest bookshelf.

  The door of Captain Bontoc’s office closed, and Miss Hopkins tripped lightly down the stairs. They listened to her bustling about quietly behind her desk for a while. She hummed to herself, a hum so faint that even Bea could barely detect it. Miss Hopkins allowed the tiniest jangle to escape from her keys as she removed them from her handbag and stepped out onto the porch. Just before she closed and locked the door, Bea caught sight of a boy sitting with his back against a tree on the far side of the clearing. It was unmistakably Ike Ledbetter, and his large pale eyes stared straight into hers for a moment before the library door closed softly and blocked him from view.

  Dust

  Bea Flint and Phoebe Lu waited awhile to make sure that Miss Hopkins didn’t return. The evening sunlight shone through the tall windows, casting yellow rectangles on the bookshelves. As the sun began to dip below the tree line the yellow rectangles rolled themselves up slowly like luminous blinds.

  “Now what?” said Phoebe, still whispering from habit.

  “Now you can climb up and get that book,” said Bea. “It shouldn’t take long to find out what we need to know; then we can put it back and get out through a window. Nobody will know we’ve looked at it.”

  They tiptoed back to the bookshelf at the back wall. “Wait a moment,” said Bea. She peeped out of the nearest window into the twilit clearing. There was nobody in sight. The Ledbetter boy had finally left his post. This did not come as the relief she had expected. At least when he was nearby she knew what he was up to. She wondered now what news he was bringing back to Maize Ledbetter, and she felt a sudden shiver. She turned around to see Phoebe perched at the top of the bookshelf.

  “How do you spell Arkadi?” said Phoebe. Her voice echoed in the empty library.

  “A-R-K—,” began Bea.

  “Found it!” said Phoebe. She slid a fat volume from the top shelf and dropped it without warning.

  “Ouch!” said Bea, as the book dropped into her outstretched hands like a leather-bound brick. “Careful!”

  “Sorry,” said Phoebe, who was back on the floor in an instant. “I had no free hands and it wouldn’t fit in my mouth.”

  Bea blew the dust off the book’s spine and placed it on the floor where a patch of dim light filtered in from the evening sky. There were lamps on the reading desks, but she did not want to risk turning one on. She began to flick through the book. She found to her dismay that there were over six hundred pages. She looked first for a photograph of Arkadi, but there did not seem to be any. There were several drawings of him, mostly done from memory by Pearlseeds who had been his pupils or friends. They showed him with a variety of hairstyles, sometimes with a beard or mustache, sometimes clean shaven. He looked different in each one, and Bea could not decide whether any of them looked like the ice-cream mechanic or not.

  Phoebe showed little interest in the book. She prowled around the library looking for places to climb, and took a couple of turns sliding down the long banister from Captain Bontoc’s office, until Bea told her irritably to stop.

  “Did you find anything?” she asked from the bottom of the stairs.

  Bea shook her head. She was squinting at a blurry charcoal drawing of Arkadi. Of all the ones she had seen this one most resembled the ice-cream mechanic. She read the caption with difficulty in the fading light. “‘Arkadi as drawn by Maize Ledbetter the year before her banishment.’”

  She began to read from the text. “‘Various accounts have been given of the falling-out between Arkadi and his favorite, young Maize Ledbetter. It was rumored that she had honed her powers to such a fine point that she could predict almost any event with complete clarity, and some Pearlseeds believed that it was a combination of jealousy and fear that led Arkadi to banish her along with her young husband. It seems more likely, however, that it was the girl’s well-known fits of rage and her disregard for the protocols of Mumbo Jumbo that led Arkadi to conclude she was a danger to the entire movement. The place he chose for his former protégée’s exile was the secret refuge of Bell Hoot, which Arkadi himself had discovered by accident less than a year previously.’”

  Bea rubbed her eyes. At that moment the moon emerged from behind a cloud and lit the open book with a pale blue glow. The smudgy image of Arkadi
seemed to spring to life, and Bea was almost sure that it depicted the Arkadi they knew, despite the fact that it must have been drawn some eighty years earlier. She was about to turn the page in search of more information when a familiar phrase caught her eye: the Hidden Boy. Where had she heard that phrase recently? She read on. “‘Many of the predictions made by Maize Ledbetter have since come true. Among those that she repeated most frequently was that she would live for a century, and that her successor as head of the Ledbetter clan would be a young child known only as the Hidden Boy.’”

  Bea stopped reading. The skin crawled on the back of her neck. Give us the Hidden Boy. That was the demand of the Ledbetters when they invaded people’s dreams. Granny Delphine believed that it referred to Theo, and Maize Ledbetter had made no effort to deny it. Bea looked around her. The bookcases loomed over her in the dark, and the library suddenly seemed an unwelcoming place. She closed the book. “Phoebe?” she said. Phoebe was at her elbow in a moment. “Let’s put this back and get out of here,” said Bea.

  “You’ll have to lend me the backpack to carry it up in,” said Phoebe. “But I don’t think we’ll be leaving here until the morning.”

  Bea looked at her with a sinking feeling. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I’ve tried all the windows,” said Phoebe. “They’re painted shut, every one of them. They mustn’t have been opened for years.”

  “What about the door?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “Locked with a key,” she said. “I think we’d better make ourselves comfortable.”

  They did another complete circuit of the library, double-checking the windows in case they had missed one that could be opened. They searched the desk for a spare key to the front door, but without success. “Pa will come looking for us when we don’t arrive home,” said Bea.

  “We’ll be in trouble,” said Phoebe.

  Bea shivered. “I’d rather be in trouble than spend the night in here,” she said. “Anyway, we can pretend we got locked in by accident.”

  They released Nails from the backpack and put in the book instead. Phoebe climbed the bookshelves and replaced it among the other books. They looked out into the clearing again, but it was deserted. Bea turned on a table lamp so that if anyone came looking for them they would see the library was not empty.

  They dragged two large armchairs out into the middle of the room and settled down to wait. Phoebe had found a large jotter and a pencil behind Miss Hopkins’s desk and she began to draw a world where volcanoes spewed chocolate and people turned into dragonflies. Beside the things she drew she wrote the anagrams that popped into her head—nailed frogs and darling foes for dragonflies, coal ovens and oval cones for volcanoes. Bea took out the Squeak Jar and listened for Theo’s voice. It took a few minutes to locate him. He was whispering for once.

  “I can’t talk now,” he said. “The Tree People are listening. They were pretty annoyed when I tried to start a fire.”

  “Are you okay?” whispered Bea. She saw Phoebe glance up at her.

  “I’m fine. We’ll talk later, okay?”

  “Okay,” said Bea. She could try to find him in her dreams. She put the Squeak Jar down and went looking for a book about bees, then seated herself in the comfortable armchair with the jar and the book in her lap. Nails returned from his explorations, disappointed at the lack of insect life and the total absence of worms, and climbed into the backpack of his own accord. Bea began to read about the complex life of bees, trying to distract herself from the creeping sense of foreboding in her bones.

  Outside the library window the blue moon shone down on clearing and forest. It shone on the churning pool of Cambio Falls, and beyond it on the still waters of Mumpfish Lake, dark as midnight and cold as last week’s soup. It shone on the rickety wooden causeway that ran from the bare island to the lakeshore. It shone on the blank-eyed, straggle-haired Ledbetter clan, who ran silently along the causeway and slipped into the shadows of the forest, drifting from tree to tree like blown ash, heading for the Bell Hoot Library.

  Dreaming

  Bea Flint sat in the armchair and struggled to keep her eyes open. The book lay on her lap, words crawling over the pages like bees. She looked up at Phoebe, who had her head down and was drawing busily.

  “We can talk now,” said Theo’s voice in her ear. “I promised them I wouldn’t set fire to the trees again.” Bea tried to look around, but she could not turn her head. She realized she must be dreaming.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Right beside you. What’s the book about?”

  “Bees,” said Bea.

  Theo clucked scornfully. “Bees! That’d be like me reading a book about Theos. Is there such an animal as a Theo?”

  “No. I’m only—,” began Bea; then she stopped with an effort. This was no time for silly arguments. “We went looking for you,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Theo, “that reminds me: I figured out where I am.”

  Bea’s eyes opened wide and she struggled to sit up. It felt as though an elephant sat on her chest. She frowned and tried to concentrate on Theo’s words. “Tell me!” she said.

  “Well,” said Theo casually, “you know the way I said the trees were thin and wavy?”

  Theo’s voice itself seemed to be going thin and wavy, and Bea struggled to grasp what he was saying. Phoebe had abandoned her drawing and seemed to be squatting on the floor, staring hard at her. Her eyes had grown bigger and her armchair had evaporated. The library walls were moving closer, and there were fewer bookshelves. No, Bea corrected herself, there were no bookshelves at all.

  Panic rose in her chest. She looked closely at the figure in front of her. Something was wrong. “You’re not Phoebe!” she said. How could she have mistaken this blank-faced person for her friend? It wasn’t even a girl. It was…She couldn’t remember the name. He squatted before her. With an enormous effort Bea managed to turn her head and look around her. There was no sign of anyone else. “Theo?” she said. Her voice was deadened by the damp white walls, and there was no answer. She turned back to face the stranger, her eyes pricking with tears. “What have you done with Theo?” she choked.

  The pale eyes stared at her, neither friendly nor hostile. She remembered who it was now. Ike Ledbetter, the boy who had been following them, the boy who had fallen into the thornbush. He had looked slightly helpless then, but he did not look helpless now. He looked right at home, squatting there before her. He had been in her dream only minutes—or was it hours?—but already she could tell that he would never leave.

  Ike Ledbetter opened his colorless lips. “Give us the Hidden Boy,” he said.

  Bea felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. She was back in the library, dimly lit by a table lamp. She struggled from her chair, desperate to escape the traces of her dream. She felt a weight slide from her lap and heard the dull thump of the book and the clunk of the heavy jar hitting the wooden floor at the same time. She gasped with fright, but the Squeak Jar rolled away unbroken and came to rest beneath a bookshelf.

  “Are you all right, child?” said Granny Delphine’s voice. Bea barely heard her. She scrambled after the jar, feeling Ike Ledbetter’s stare clinging to her skin like a damp cobweb. She reached for the Squeak Jar in the shadow of the bookcase. It was reassuringly whole. Her fingers brushed against something round and flat on the floor beside it. It took her a moment to realize what it was. The lid! It must have come off with the impact. Bea’s heart sank.

  She grabbed the lid and fumbled it back into place, screwing it tight. For how many seconds had the jar been open? Would a voice escape like a puff of air, or linger in the jar like smoke? She remembered Captain Bontoc’s urgent shout when Ma had tried to unscrew the lid at Cambio Falls, and she felt a tightness in her chest as she picked up the Squeak Jar and rose unsteadily to her feet. What if Theo were gone for good?

  Granny Delphine took the jar gently from Bea’s hands and placed it on a table. She held Bea’s shoulders and loo
ked into her face. “Are you all right?” she asked again.

  Bea nodded numbly. She could see Pa over Granny Delphine’s shoulder, shoving the armchairs back against the wall, and Miss Hopkins hovering nervously with a set of keys dangling from one plump finger.

  She did not want to tell her grandmother about Ike. It had been her foolish idea to hide in the library without checking that escape would be possible. She did not know how she would make things right, but she was sure it was something that she alone would have to do. With a huge effort she smiled and looked straight into her grandmother’s eyes. “I’m fine,” she said. “We got locked in by mistake, that’s all.”

  “Just as well you were locked in,” said Pa, dusting his hands. “That weird bunch were staring in the windows when we got here, all wrapped up like deranged carol singers. Don’t know what they’d be wanting to steal from a library. Can’t exactly see them running a book club.”

  “The Ledbetters were here?” said Phoebe, and Bea knew at once from her wide-eyed look that no Ledbetter had managed to invade her dreams.

  “They looked like they were trying the windows,” said Pa, who obviously had no idea what the Ledbetters were really up to, “but we soon sent them packing. Then your granny went off to get Miss Hopkins here to open the place up.”

  “Which would not have been necessary,” said Granny Delphine frostily, “if Miss Hopkins would think to check her library for stragglers before locking up for the night.”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” said Bea quickly. “We—”

  “We went back at the last minute to look for another book,” said Phoebe.

  “And we didn’t hear the door closing,” finished Bea. She closed her tired eyes for a moment, but Ike Ledbetter’s stare appeared in the darkness, and she opened them straightaway.

  “Come,” said Granny Delphine. Bea picked up the Squeak Jar and slipped it into the backpack beside the sleeping meerkat. Her bones felt like lead and she wanted nothing more than to be picked up by Pa and carried home, but she was determined to hide at least one thing from her grandmother’s sharp eyes. If the Squeak Jar really was empty and her dreams were squatted by the Ledbetters, she no longer had any way to speak to Theo, and she was afraid that Granny Delphine would lose confidence in her. She made up her mind that she would have to confront Arkadi first thing in the morning. She was as sure as she could be that he was the real Arkadi, and she would threaten to expose him unless he could help her find her brother.