Bookweird (19 page)

 

At Home Things Are Even Less Normal

D
ora's thumping at the door woke him up.

Norman rubbed his eyes and sniffed. The scent of wood smoke permeated the clothes in which he'd slept. “What?” he asked groggily.

Dora opened the door far enough to stick her head through.

“Mom says…” She stopped and came farther into his room. “Hey, that's my book.”

“What?” Norman still wasn't awake enough to just bark “Get out of my room!”

“What are you doing with my book?”

Norman looked down at the slim paperback lying open, cover up, on the floor beside his bed.

“You asked me to read it,” he replied, exasperated. “You wanted me to tell you how it ended.”

“You better not!” Dora warned shrilly, grabbing the book. “Mom,” she cried, “Norman's reading my book and he says he's going to tell me how it ends!”

Norman breathed deeply. Was this really better than being in the horse book? It wasn't even worth arguing that she'd already read the book and knew how it ended. It was a stupid argument, and for once he didn't let himself get drawn into it.

Do
“He'll do nothing of the sort. Will you, Norman,” his mother called up. It was a warning, but a cheerful warning.

Dora instantly found another way to be annoying. It was her gift. “Norman reads girl's books. Norman likes horsey books,” she began chanting, in her own special taunting, sing-song way.

“Just get out of my room, will you?” Norman growled, too tired to work up any real anger.

 

It didn't take any effort to find out how
Fortune's Foal
ended. Dora couldn't keep anything to herself. She always had to tell everybody about everything that ever happened to her. That night at dinner, after telling everybody about her day at school, including both recesses, snack time and the bus ride home, she regaled them with every needless detail of the book she was reading.

“Everybody thought that Serendipity had been kidnapped by the gypsies to be sold at the fair, but the gypsies are actually wanderers who know all about wild horses,” she narrated breathlessly. “So Leni, who is a gypsy girl—I mean, a
traveller
girl—she rescues the horse because she knows that the wolves are going to get him.” Norman wondered if she was going to take a breath. “But Amelie finds them on an island, where they are attacked by wolves again, but it's okay, even if that Nolan kid can't help 'cos he's totally useless. The gypsies shoot the wolf and they all come back to the farm, and there—”

“Wait a minute. Who's Nolan?” Norman had forgotten to pretend not to be interested.

“Oh, he's hilarious,” Dora declared, continuing with her relentless storytelling. “He's this kid from the next farm that has a total crush on Amelie. He's always trying to help, but he always messes up.”

Norman couldn't hide his outrage. How could she get it so wrong? “What do you mean, he messes up?”

“Well, it's him who leaves the barn door open for the wolves to get in, and when the gypsies are about to get the wolf the first time, he tackles them. He's such an idiot. Every time they're on the horse's trail, he wants to go the opposite direction.”

Norman wondered if he'd have been able to piece the book together from Dora's rambling, excited recap if he hadn't read it himself.

“Does Amelie ever cure Serendipity completely?” he asked. “Does Amelie train him for that horse therapy thing like you said?”

“It's true, you
do
like girl books,” Dora said tauntingly. “Do you want to borrow some other books?” She didn't seem to remember having been so worried about the book the night before, or having asked Norman to read ahead for her.

“No, I don't want to read more of your stupid books,” Norman replied exasperatedly. “Nothing even happens in them.”

Dora was unmoved by Norman's dig. “What? You need some Samurai Gerbils or something to make it exciting?”

Norman bit his tongue. All in all, it was a fun sort of argument to be having after everything he'd been through. He was thinking of a reply when his mother interrupted. “Norman, darling, shall we go to the library after dinner? You sound like you need some new books.”

 

Pleas Procedural

“H
mph,” muttered Norman's mother, slapping her paperback closed and sliding it onto the side table beside the couch. “That's weird.” Her thin eyebrows rose in that funny judgmental way of hers. Rummaging through her papers on the coffee table, she pulled out a different book.

Norman was no longer watching television. The moment his mother had said the word “weird,” his attention had been fixed on her. It had been more than a week since he'd returned from
Fortune's Foal,
but he was still sensitive to anything said about books. He'd taken to asking his family what they were reading. His mother had complimented him on his interest, but cautioned him that her book wasn't really suitable for him. Norman didn't care. He didn't want to read her psycho-killer murder mystery. He just needed to make sure nothing odd was happening in it. He wanted to believe that it was all over. Maybe, he'd thought, eating the page back at Amelie's farm had fixed it—evened things out and put everything right that had gone wrong since he'd eaten the first page—but the way his heart thumped when his mother said “weird” showed just how convinced he was of that.

“What's weird?” his father asked, saving Norman the trouble.

Norman looked from his mother to his father and back again. Between them on the wall was that painting of wolves in the wild. He found it impossible to look at now without a slight shiver. He took pains to avoid their eyes.

“Conran's really losing it now,” his mother replied.

Conran was the author of her novel. Norman was used to seeing that name in big silver letters on the well-worn paperbacks that were usually to be found face down on the coffee table.

“The last few books have been weaker than usual,” she said. “He seemed to have no new ideas and was just recycling old ones, but now he's really lost the plot.”

Norman could hide his interest no longer. “What do you mean, Mom?”

“Well, you might like it actually now, since you're into Dora's books,” she replied teasingly.

“What's that supposed to mean?” he said, in a voice more hurt than he had intended.

“Detectives Darwin and Rorschach are on the trail of this serial killer called the Magpie, who, by the way, sounds a lot like the Bower Bird killer from the first Darwin and Rorschach novel. Anyway, when they arrive at the crime scene, you're expecting the usual gory stuff that impressionable young boys like you don't need to know about yet. Instead they come face to face with…here, let me read it to you.”

She grabbed the paperback again and opened it at the page she'd last dog-eared. She read clearly and brightly in a tone that was awkwardly familiar to Norman. This was the voice that had read to him for years, the voice that had repeated the strange magic of foxes in boxes and told him the stories of borrowers and magicians and friendly giants. It was so strange now to hear it cheerfully relating the following scene.

 

Rorschach winced as he hoisted his thick limbs out of the car. The tension bandage the doc had given him was useless. The slightest movement tormented his cracked rib, and this getting in and out of cars, it was like
breaking the thing all over again. Darwin saw the grimace on his partner's face but knew better than to ask about it or offer sympathy.

“Suck it up, Rorscho,” the smaller man said. “It's game time.”

Rorschach only glowered back.

“Who called this in?” he asked as they flashed their badges and edged through the growing crowd of bystanders.

“Beat officer, just finishing his rounds. Called it in about an hour ago.”

“And we're just hearing about it now?” Rorschach growled.

Darwin shrugged. They had reached the band of yellow police tape that stretched across the mouth of the alley.

“Anyone touched the body?” he asked the uniformed cop who guarded the entrance.

“No, sir,” she replied. “The crime scene techs are waiting for you.”

Darwin nodded. This was the way it was supposed to go, but it seldom did. Some eager Sherlock six months out of the Academy always thought he could solve the crime in the first five minutes. The smaller man did his best to lift the yellow tape high enough for his big partner to duck through painlessly, but the big man still had nearly a foot on him. Darwin read the curse on Rorschach's lips as he ducked under.

“Where's the vic?” Rorschach asked hoarsely, his voice taut with impatience and lingering pain.

“Over there behind the dumpster.” The uniformed officer pointed.

The two detectives turned the corner at the same time. Neither said anything at first. Darwin reached into the inside pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a stick of gum. Rorschach rubbed his hands over his eyes in tired disgust.

“What the heck is this supposed to be?”

The thing that was waiting for them there behind the dumpster looked back at them with big, bored brown eyes, stomped a hoof and exhaled condensation from its nostrils into the cold city air.

“Where the heck did this come from?” Rorschach demanded.

“What?” Darwin deadpanned. “You've never worked with the Police Pony Squad?”

 

“Did he really say ‘heck'?” Norman's father asked smugly when his mother had put the
The Magpie
down again.

“I think Norman probably has heard the actual word he used before, but he doesn't need to hear it from his mother's mouth,” Meg Jespers-Vilnius replied with a smirk.

“Is it really a pony?” Norman asked, a quaver in his voice betraying his anxiety.

“Apparently a very well-behaved Shetland,” his mother answered.

“What happened to the body—the ‘
vic
'?” Norman's father pronounced the word “
vic”
with a fake gruff New York accent.

“Gone, disappeared,” his mother replied, ignoring his mocking tone. “And according to the book, there's no way in or out of the alley. There's no way someone could have moved the body and put a pony in its place without crossing the crime scene tape.”

“Ah, well, clearly you've got a corrupt cop there. Isn't there always a corrupt cop in these things?” his father continued cheerfully. “I'll bet it's the woman officer. She's probably got some pony thing—posters and little pink pony ceramics all over her apartment. She's the notorious Pony Killer.”

Norman's mother replied with her “are you done?” look, but it didn't take the smirk off his face.

“All right, Norman,” she said, as if suddenly remembering. “Bedtime.”

 

Norman lay in his bed awake as long as he could. This wasn't getting better at all. So far all he'd done was mess up kids' books. That somehow seemed semi-okay. But now his book problem had spread to adult books. That had to be worse. People would surely start to notice now. It would get on the news. It would get back to him somehow. Norman imagined the creepy librarian pulling a concerned face while denouncing him on the TV: “Well, there was this one kid…”

Fretting about someone from the book fraud squad knocking on the door kept him awake, which was a good thing, because he
was more afraid of falling asleep than of being caught for book-wrecking. This wasn't like the other times. He was afraid to go into an adult book. His mother wouldn't even let him read it. It couldn't be a pleasant place to visit.

He couldn't be transported into
The Magpie
anyway, Norman told himself. He hadn't actually read any of it. To go into the book, Norman reasoned to himself, you have to actually read. Another argumentative voice in his head wondered if it was enough to have heard someone else read it to you, but he worked hard to dismiss the suggestion. Even if being read to could bring on the weirdness, surely you'd have to hear more than just a page. That's where Norman wanted to leave the argument being waged in his head. He told himself that he was confident and that nothing would happen, but anyone watching might have asked why he was lying in bed fully dressed, wearing not only his shoes, but also his jacket.

 

Waking up standing up is as surprising and uncomfortable as it sounds. Norman's first sensation was of falling backward, and by the time the reflexes to lock his knees kicked in, it was already too late. A lesson from karate class whispered to his body. He tucked his chin in and brought his arms in close, ready to slap out and break his fall. It was a good thought, but he needn't have bothered. The pony cushioned his landing.

Norman made more noise than the pony, letting out a muffled “whaaa…wmph” as he fell and his breath was knocked out of his lungs from the contact with the animal's flank. The little horse merely turned and snorted. It was, if this was possible for a horse, an amused kind of snort, exactly like the involuntary snigger Norman's so-intellectual father let out when he surreptitiously watched TV blooper shows. The pony, on the other hand, didn't seem embarrassed by his amusement. There was a glint in his big brown eyes, as if he enjoyed the odd bit of human stupidity every now and then.

“Hi,” Norman said, pushing himself up from the pony's side as gently as he could. “I'm Norman.”

The creature smiled with his eyes. If he was half as surprised to find himself lying in a dirty city alleyway behind a stinking dumpster as Norman was, he was doing a very good job of hiding it. He lay there casually, legs folded underneath him on the pavement, head back against the graffiti-covered brick wall, his breathing steady.

“I, ah…I don't speak horse,” Norman explained apologetically. “I mean, I can't do that gypsy thing. One of my friends can, but…well, she's not here. At least I don't think so.”

The pony nodded its shaggy head and exhaled a cloud of condensation from its nostrils. Overhead, the morning sky was as overcast and grey as the pony's coat. This was not a foal, like Serendipity. It was a fully grown pony.

“Are you the missing pony from Serendipity's stall that everyone seemed to have forgotten?” Norman asked, not really expecting an answer. “Sorry about the wolves…” Norman didn't have to hear the pony's thoughts to feel the calm power as the animal rose in one smooth motion to his feet. It was as if he knew the policemen would be coming around the corner at that moment.

“What the hell?”

Norman's mother hadn't read Rorschach's words accurately. The fat man said a lot worse now, too. The gist of his angry rant was that he'd like to know who thought it was funny to pull a stunt like this, when the good people of the city were out there murdering each other. Once this was off his chest, he stormed off to find someone to hold responsible and berate. “You deal with the kid,” he told the smaller guy as he left.

Darwin remained where he was, a few yards distant, both hands in his jacket pockets, studying Norman and the grey pony with an inscrutable look on his face while he chewed gum. Then he strolled nonchalantly around the alley examining it disinterestedly, removing one hand from the pocket of his leather jacket only to rattle a fire-escape ladder while his eyes followed its steps up to the rooftop.

Apparently satisfied that the fire escape could not be success
fully navigated by a horse of any size, Darwin turned to Norman and asked in a cool, nasal voice, “That your horse, son?”

Norman realized that he was standing close to the pony, his finger buried in the animal's grey mane, as if trying to reassure himself. He shook his head no in reply to Detective Darwin's question, and they were silent again.

Norman's mother definitely wouldn't have repeated the curses that the uniformed policewoman swore when she and Rorschach came around the corner and saw a shaggy grey pony and an eleven-year-old boy standing where a murder victim had previously lain in a pool of blood.

 

An hour later, Norman was sitting in an interrogation room at the police headquarters. It was exactly like every interrogation room he had ever seen in a TV police drama, bare and dingy, with just four metal chairs separated into pairs by a peeling Formica table. Norman was seated on one side of the table. Rorschach sat diagonally across from him. The other two chairs were empty. Darwin leaned against the wall in the corner, chewing gum. So far their interrogation hadn't amounted to much. They had brought Norman an orange juice and a chocolate chip muffin and chatted back and forth between themselves about the case.

“I had a word with the boys down in the mounted squad about that horse,” Rorschach told Darwin, as if he was just making idle conversation.

“They reckon it escaped from the circus or something? We get any calls about stolen ponies?” Darwin asked.

“Naw, they said it probably wasn't worth stealing. That old pony has seen better days. It was probably headed to the boneyard anyway.”