Inkheart

2. SECRETS

It was early dawn when Meggie woke up. Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment. The alarm clock said just before five, and Meggie was going to turn over and go back to sleep when she suddenly sensed someone else in the room. Startled, she sat up and saw Mo standing by her open closet door.

"Hello," he said, putting her favorite sweater in a suitcase. "I'm sorry, I know it's very early, but we have to leave. How about cocoa for breakfast?"

Still drowsy with sleep, Meggie nodded. Outside, the birds were twittering loudly as if they'd been awake for hours. Mo put two more pairs of jeans in her suitcase, closed it, and carried it to the door. "Wear something warm," he said. "It's chilly outside."

"Where are we going?" asked Meggie, but he had already disappeared. She looked out of the window, feeling confused. She almost expected to see Dustfinger, but there was only a blackbird in the yard hopping over the stones, which were wet after the rain. Meggie put on her jeans and stumbled into the kitchen. Two suitcases, a traveling bag, and Mo's toolbox stood out in the hall.

Her father was sitting at the kitchen table making sandwiches for the journey. When she came into the kitchen he looked up briefly and smiled at her, but Meggie could see he was worried about something. "Mo, we can't go away now!" she said. "The school holidays don't start for another week!"

"Well, it won't be the first time I've had to go away on business during the school term. "

He was right about that. In fact, he went away quite often, whenever an antique dealer, a book collector, or a library needed a bookbinder and commissioned Mo to restore a few valuable old books, freeing them of dust and mold or dressing them in new clothes, as he put it. Meggie didn't think the word bookbinder described Mo's work particularly well, and a few years ago she had made him a sign to hang on his work shop door saying MORTIMER FOLCHART, BOOK DOCTOR. And the book doctor never called on his patients without taking his daughter, too. They had always done that and they always would, never mind what Meggie's teachers said.

"How about chicken pox? Have I used that excuse already?"

"Yes, last time. When we had to go and see that dreary man with the Bibles." Meggie scrutinized her father's face. "Mo. Is it… is it because of last night we have to leave?"

For a moment she thought he was going to tell her everything – whatever there was to tell. But then he shook his head. "No, of course not," he said, putting the sandwiches he had made into a plastic bag. "Your mother has an aunt called Elinor. We visited her once, when you were very small. She's been wanting me to come and put her books in order for a long time. She lives beside a lake in the north of Italy, I always forget which lake, but it's a lovely place, a day's drive away. " He did not look at her as he spoke.

Meggie wanted to ask: But why do we have to go now? But she didn't. Nor did she ask if he had forgotten that he was meeting someone at midday. She was too afraid of the answers – and she didn't want Mo to lie to her again.

"Is this aunt as peculiar as the others?" was all she said. Mo had already taken her to visit various relations. Both he and Meggie's mother had large families whose homes, so far as Meggie could see, were scattered over half of Europe.

Mo smiled. "Yes, she is a bit peculiar, but you'll get along with her all right. She has some really wonderful books. "

"So how long are we going to be away?"

"It could be quite some time. "

Meggie sipped her cocoa. It was so hot she burned her lips and had to quickly press the cold blade of a knife to her mouth.

Mo pushed his chair back. "I have to pack a few more things from the workshop," he said. "It won't take long. You must be very tired, but you can sleep once we're in the van. "

Meggie just nodded and looked out of the kitchen window. It was a gray morning. Mist drifted over the fields at the foot of the nearby hills, and Meggie felt as if the shadows of the night were still hiding among the trees.

"Pack up the food and take plenty to read!" Mo called from the hall. As if she didn't always! Years ago he had made her a box to hold her favorite books on all their journeys, short and long, near and far. "It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place," Mo always said. He himself always took at least a dozen.

Mo had painted the box poppy red. Poppies were Meggie's favorite flower. They pressed well between the pages of a book, and you could stamp a star-shaped pattern on your skin with their pepper-pot seed capsules. He had decorated the box and painted Meggie's Treasure Chest in lovely curly lettering on the lid. The box was lined with shiny black taffeta, but you could hardly see any of the fabric because Meggie had a great many favorite books, and she always added another whenever they traveled anywhere. "If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it… yes, books are like flypaper-memories cling to the printed page better than anything else. "

He was probably right, but there was another reason why Meggie took her books whenever they went away. They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends-daring and knowledgeable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored while Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from the many fingers leafing through them.

Some of her books always went away with Meggie. Others were left at home because they weren't right for where she was going or to make room for new, unknown stories she hadn't yet read.

Meggie stroked their curved spines. Which books should she take this time? Which stories would help to drive away the fear that had crept into the house last night? I know, thought Meggie, why not a story about telling lies? Mo told her lies. He told terrible lies, even though he knew that every time he told one she looked hard at his nose. Pinocchio, thought Meggie. No, too sinister. And too sad. But she wanted something exciting, a story to drive all other thoughts out of her head, even the darkest. The Witches, yes. She'd take the bald-headed witches who turn children into mice – and The Odyssey, with the Cyclops and the enchantress who transforms his warriors into pigs. Her journey could hardly be more dangerous than his, could it?

On the left-hand side of the box there were two picture books that Meggie had used when she was teaching herself to read – five years old, she'd been, and you could still see where her tiny forefinger had moved over the pages – and right at the bottom, hidden under all the others, were the books Meggie had made herself. She had spent days sticking them together and cutting up the paper, she had painted picture after picture, and Mo had to write what they were underneath them. An Angel with a Happy Face, from Meggie for Mo. She had written her name herself, although back then she always left the "e" off the end. Meggie looked at the clumsy lettering and put the little book back in the box. Mo had helped her with the binding, of course. He had bound all her homemade books in brightly patterned paper, and he had given her a stamp for the others so that she could print her name and the head of a unicorn on the title page, sometimes in black ink and sometimes in red, depending on how she felt. But Mo had never read aloud to her from her books. Not once.

He had tossed Meggie up in the air, he had carried her around the house on his shoulders, he had taught her how to make a bookmark of a blackbird's feathers. But he had never read aloud to her. Never once, not a single word, however often she put books on his lap. Meggie just had to teach herself how to decipher the black marks and open the treasure chest.

She straightened up. There was still a little room in the box. Perhaps Mo had a new book she could take, an especially big, fat, wonderful book…

The door to his workshop was closed.

"Mo?" Meggie pressed the handle down. The long table where he worked had been swept clean, with not a stamp nor a knife in sight. Mo had packed everything. Had he been lying after all?

Meggie went into the workshop and looked around. The door to the Treasury was open. The Treasury was really just a storage room, but Meggie had given the little cubbyhole that name because it was where her father stored his most precious materials: the finest leather, the most beautiful fabrics, marbled paper, stamps to print patterns in gold on soft leather. Meggie put her head around the open door and saw Mo covering a book with brown paper. It was not a particularly large book and not especially fat. The green linen binding looked worn, but that was all Meggie could see because Mo quickly hid the book behind his back as soon as he noticed her.

"What are you doing here?" he snapped.

"I -" For a moment Meggie was speechless with shock, Mo's face was so dark. "I only wanted to ask if you had a new book for me. I've read all the ones in my room, and…"

Mo passed his hand over his face. "Yes, of course. I'm sure I can find something," he said, but his eyes were still saying: Go away, go away, Meggie. And the brown paper crackled behind his back. "I'll be with you in a moment," he said. "I have a few more things to pack. OK?"

A little later he brought her three books, but the one he had been covering with brown paper wasn't one of them.

An hour later, they were taking everything out into the yard. Meggie shivered when she stepped outdoors. It was a chilly morning after the night's rain, and the sun hung in the sky like a pale coin lost by someone high up in the clouds.

They had been living in the old farmhouse for just under a year. Meggie liked the view of the surrounding hills, the swallows' nests under the roof, the dried-up well that yawned darkly as if it went straight down to the earth's core. The house itself had always been too big and drafty for her liking, with all those empty rooms full of fat spiders, but the rent was low and Mo had enough space for his books and his workshop. There was a henhouse outside, and the barn, which now only housed their old camper van, would have been perfect for a couple of cows or a horse. "Cows have to be milked, Meggie," Mo had said when she suggested keeping a couple. "Very, very early in the morning. Every day. "

"Well, what about a horse?" she had asked. "Even Pippi Longstocking has a horse, and she doesn't have a stable. "

She'd have been happy with a few chickens or a goat, but they, too, had to be fed every day, and she and Mo went away too often for that. So Meggie had only the ginger cat who sometimes came visiting when it couldn't be bothered to compete with the dogs on the farm next door. The grumpy old farmer who lived there was their only neighbor. Sometimes his dogs howled so pitifully that Meggie put her hands over her ears. It was twenty minutes by bike to the nearest village, where she went to school and where two of her friends lived, but Mo usually took her in the van because it was a lonely ride along a narrow road that wound past nothing but fields and dark trees.

"What on earth have you packed in here? Bricks?" asked Mo as he carried Meggie's book box out of the house.

"You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside them," said Meggie, making him laugh for the first time that morning.

The camper van, standing in the abandoned barn like a solid, multicolored animal, was more familiar to Meggie than any of the houses where she and Mo had lived. She never slept more deeply and soundly than in the bed he had made in it for her. There was a table, too, of course, a kitchen tucked into a corner and a bench to sit on. When you lifted the seat of the bench there were travel guides, road maps, and well-worn paperbacks under it.

Yes, Meggie was fond of the van, but this morning she hesitated to get in. When Mo finally went back to the house to lock the door, she suddenly felt they would never come back here, that this journey was going to be different than any other, that they would drive farther and farther away, in flight from something that had no name. Or at least none that Mo was about to tell her.

"Very well, off we go south," was all he said as he got behind the steering wheel. And so they set off, without saying good-bye to anyone, on a morning that still seemed much too early and smelled of rain.

But Dustfinger was waiting for them at the gate.