The Kneebone Boy (10 page)

“Don’t you think it’s cruel to make those little ponies pull us along?” Otto said, staring out the front window, past Saint George’s back and at the trotting ponies.

“Not as cruel as killing one and stuffing it to make it look like a miniature zebra,” Max said, watching the ponies thoughtfully.

“No! He wouldn’t have!” Lucia cried. But even as she said it, she realized that it might be true. The ponies did look exactly like that zebra, only without the stripes. And stripes could always be painted on.

“Do you think he planned on killing the cat as well?” Otto asked, holding him a little tighter in his arms.

“I guess a stuffed curiosity is no different from a live one,” Max said. “And you wouldn’t have to feed it or change the litter.”

“That’s fiendish!” Lucia cried.

The carriage ride now took on a whole different aspect for the Hardscrabbles. Each one considered how idiotic they had been in accepting a ride from a stranger, especially a stranger who didn’t even bother to hide the fact that he was a nasty brute. He had even come to the door
with a knife in his hand, hadn’t he? What on earth had they been thinking!?

It was Lucia, though, who had suggested they stay and talk to him. And it was Lucia who had agreed to let him take them to their great-aunt Haddie. All three Hardscrabbles remembered this at the same time. Max and Otto turned to glare at their sister, while Lucia flared her nostrils very extravagantly to show that she would not accept the blame for this catastrophe. But secretly she felt awful and her mind was full of grisly visions of three hastily dug graves.

The moon slipped back behind the clouds and the trees on the edge of the road grew taller and pressed together more closely, blotting out the view on either side. Up ahead, the frantic hoofbeats of the white ponies seemed to be rushing the Hardscrabbles to their doom.

Adventures work in peculiar ways, Lucia now thought. You wished and wished for one, then suddenly, without even knowing how, you were in one. It was just as exhilarating as you imagined it would be from the novels. Until something happened, like a nighttime ride in a funeral carriage and the murder of a little white pony. Then you forgot all about the novels, and instead remembered the news stories about unfortunate kids who ended up decapitated in the woods.

“Do you think we could jump?” Lucia asked Max.

He shook his head decisively, as though he’d already considered it. “Too dangerous.”

So they once again felt stupid, as well as in terrible danger.

Suddenly, the road dipped down sharply and they slid forward along the black varnished floor. The ponies picked up their pace, and the Hardscrabbles braced their trainers against the floor to keep themselves steady. Even the cat, which had been sleeping soundly through much of the ride, raised its head from the crook of Otto’s arm and gazed out at the black blur of trees on either side. It seemed like a ride the cat had been accustomed to taking, or else he had seen such strange, wild things while in the company of Saint George that nothing surprised him anymore. He sneezed, flicked his tail, and then tucked his head back into Otto’s arm.

After a while the road levelled out. The air seeping through the vent at the front of the carriage smelled slightly different. More complicated, like a cool brew of soil and sky and dusky faraway places. The trees thinned out and now they could see a formidable dark shape in the distance. It was too lumpy and large to be a house, yet it wasn’t a hill either.

“What do you think it is?” Lucia asked.

“It looks like something that’s gone all wrong,” Otto said.

Lucia knew exactly what he meant. It had bumps in the wrong places and tilted in odd ways. If it was a house, Lucia thought, it must have been built by a madman.

With a twitch of the reins, Saint George drove the ponies into a sharp left turn and the carriage wheels were now crunching across a rough gravel road. The road wound its way between the trees and in a few minutes it became
clear that they were headed directly for the large lumpish thing. At that moment, Lucia did a most uncharacteristic thing. She reached out her arms on either side and wrapped them protectively around the shoulders of her brothers.

In which the Hardscrabbles discover a Tyrolean traverse, meet Great-aunt Haddie, and get spat upon

Even the ponies seemed to want to avoid the huge structure. As the carriage approached it, the ponies suddenly swerved off the gravel path and onto a broad meadow, but Saint George set them straight with a sharp yank on their reins. Lucia supposed that was a lucky thing too, since the meadow ended abruptly at what she could only imagine was a deep cliff. Far below and off in the distance, she could make out the indolent waves of the sea, churning up that strange odor she’d detected earlier. Close to, the odor was sharper and she couldn’t decide if it was a good smell or a foul one, sort of like the smell in a barn.

The shifty moon emerged from under clouds again, casting a dirty yellow light on the landscape. The large lumpish thing could now be seen for what it was: a castle of some sort, though it was nothing like the castles you see
in book illustrations or in the movies. Yes, it had all the parts of a castle, like towers and turrets and a curtain wall that surrounded it, but they were sloppily formed and slapped together. It seemed incredible that such a thing could even stand on its own, but there it was. Even more incredibly, someone was living in it. Lights could be seen in some of the pinchy-narrow windows, mostly on the upper floors.

It was Max who suddenly crawled over to the back of the carriage and swung open the door.

“What are you doing?” Lucia called to him, but he ignored her. Crouching at the edge of the open door, he reached up and grabbed the railing along the roof of the carriage. Then he pulled himself up and stood on the back step so that he was riding outside.

“Excuse me,” Max called out to Saint George, “but do you
really
know where Haddie Piggit lives?”

“You’re looking at it,” Saint George called back without turning his head.

“There?” Max exclaimed. “No, no, I don’t think so. Look, why not leave us off right here and we’ll find her ourselves.”

“Yes! Leave us off!” Lucia screamed. She had scooched up to the back and poked her head out.

“Go back inside before you get tossed on your loaf,” Saint George yelled. He then yanked the reins, making the ponies turn to the right so suddenly that Max would have been tossed on his loaf if Lucia hadn’t grabbed his legs just in time. She hauled him back inside, leaving the back door
open and flapping wildly. They were approaching the front of the castle now. Across the castle moat, they could see the great misshapen lumps of stone. They looked damp, as though they were in a cold sweat. A light from one of the tower rooms flicked off, and there was the distinct sound of a wail, short and high-pitched. Then silence, except for the slap of waves against the cliff and the snorting of the ponies, and finally the thud of the carriage’s back door as it slammed shut once again.

“I wish we were back in Little Tunks,” Otto said.

In certain novels with eerie castles, they might have suddenly been whisked back to Little Tunks at that very moment, and found themselves snug in their own beds. In fact, at Otto’s words, Lucia closed her eyes tightly and on opening them again half-expected to see the face of the Sultan of Juwi staring back at her from his place on her bedroom wall.

Instead, when she opened her eyes, she saw something quite remarkable. In fact, she thought she
was
seeing magic. The huge, lumpy castle had quite suddenly shrunk. It was all there—the towers, the turrets, the curtain wall. Except that it was now the size of one of those fake castles that you find in theme parks.

This book is not about magic, however. When Lucia got her bearings she saw that the real castle was behind them and they were facing a replica, almost like the original castle had given birth to a baby version of itself.

“It’s a castle folly,” cried Max.

“No, it’s not,” Lucia said, because she counted herself
the authority on castles, since she read about them so often, and she’d never heard of a castle folly.

The reins were pulled taut and the ponies slowed to a stop.

“Right, out you go!” Saint George called back to them.

Out they went.

For a moment, all they felt was relief at not being murdered.

“Mind the moat,” was all Saint George said before he flicked the reins against the ponies’ backs and drove off.

They stood there for a moment, looking baffled.

“Well, this was a brilliant idea,” Lucia said to Max.

“Would you rather be at home with Mrs. Carnival’s cyst?” Max replied.

“It doesn’t bother
me
,” Lucia said.

“Good. Then next time I’ll tell her that you want to be the one who drains it.”

They argued like this for some time, since it was preferable to actually knocking on the little castle’s door and waking up an old lady who might not be happy to see them. And who might have gruesome breath, like old Mr. Abernathy, who stocked the shelves at the supermarket back in Little Tunks.

“What if she won’t let Chester in?” Otto said.

“Who’s Chester?” Lucia asked.

“The cat. I’ve named him Chester. What if she won’t let him in?”

Chester the cat had been circling Otto’s ankles, and now he stopped and looked at the little castle speculatively.

“Then she’s a nasty old cow,” Lucia declared. She needed a dose of righteous anger to make her braver. So she was the first to march up to the edge of the moat, looking for a way across it.

There wasn’t one.

Although this castle was not as big as the first one, the moat was just as wide as the first moat. They did spot a drawbridge, but it was clapped up against the side of the castle.

“We could swim it,” Lucia suggested.

“We could, but there’s nothing to take hold of once you’re across,” Max said.

It was true. There was nothing to grip on to by the castle. And though you could jump off the bank into the water, it would be very difficult to climb back up since the bank had such a long, deep drop.

“We could yell for her to let down the drawbridge,” Lucia suggested.

So they did. They sounded like a right pack of idiots too. Still, the drawbridge remained up and not a single light came on in the castle.

“Maybe she can’t hear very well,” Max said.

“Or maybe she’s ignoring us,” said Lucia, “hoping we’ll just go away.” She narrowed her eyes at the castle. She felt as though she were being dared. “Wait here,” she commanded.

Slowly, she walked the perimeter, examining the steepness of the bank, the sides of the curtain wall, the trees that flanked the moat. There was a very tall wooden tower as well, so tall that it loomed over several of the trees. It
was made of crisscrossed timbers, set on wheels. A narrow, rickety-looking ladder was bound to the timbers, leading up to a roofed platform. It was while Lucia was looking up at the platform that she saw something unusual. Dangling high above her head was a bicycle, floating in the night sky, waiting for someone to hop on.

“Bloody hell,” she whispered. But as I said before, this is not a book about magic—not the kind you’re thinking of anyway—so Lucia came to her senses and asked herself, “How is it that a bicycle
appears
to be floating in the night sky?”

After a careful investigation into the matter, she discovered that the bicycle was attached by hooks to one of two slender cables that ran from the wooden tower all the way across the moat and to the upper part of the castle.

“I’ve found it!” she called out to her brothers. “I’ve found a way in!”

They hurried over, Chester jogging alongside, and she pointed up to the bicycle. She didn’t explain to them about the cable right away. She wanted them to think it was magic at first, like she had. She understood that even when you don’t strictly believe in magic, it’s always nice to think it’s possible, just for a second.

“It looks exactly like it’s enchanted,” Otto said, staring up at the bicycle.

“It looks exactly like a Tyrolean traverse,” Max said flatly. “In fact, it is one.”

“Nonsense,” Lucia sniped. “Look, it’s attached to a cable. You can ride it straight over the moat.”

“Like a Tyrolean traverse,” Max muttered.

“In any case”—she lowered her eyelids to half-mast and flared her nostrils at him—“it will get us in the castle. It’s attached to the top of that left-hand tower. One of us can slip in the house through the roof and let down the drawbridge for the others.”

“Someone’s watching us,” Otto said suddenly.

“Great-aunt Haddie, do you think?” Max asked.

“No. Someone else.” Otto wasn’t looking at the little castle, but at the large castle that loomed behind them in the blackness. His eyes were wide with alarm. It made them all feel squirrelly—even Chester stood very still, his tail curled like a question mark—so they told Otto to cut it out.

“I don’t know,” Max said, staring back up at the bicycle doubtfully, his spidery arms crossed against his chest. “It seems a sneaky way to get into the house.”