The Book of Lost Things(78)
“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.