Bookweirdest

T
he sound of sparrows arguing outside the window was very familiar. These birds had woken him before. “The Shrubberies,” he muttered to himself. He was back in his own room. The idea was comforting. When you’ve woken up in as many strange places and times as Norman had, waking up in the real world was a relief.

Norman sat up in bed and raised his hand to tap at the window to shoo the birds away, but before his hand fell on the windowpane, he saw the grey sweater he was wearing.

He lowered his hand as it all came back to him. The grey sweater was the one that George Kelmsworth had lent him, the one that he had been wearing when he fell asleep on the steam train. But Norman hadn’t been alone on that train. He began to bat the crumpled sheets around him to see if anything else had come through from the other side. Under the covers he found the canvas knapsack. He fished around inside it with one hand and found his blue Rams sweatshirt and … nothing else. Beginning to worry now, he pulled the sweatshirt out and shook it as if something might be hiding in there. Nothing was.

He wasn’t going to panic. Instead, he opened the window and stuck out his head and called out in a loud whisper, “Malcolm? Malcolm, are you there?”

The only reply was a more urgent fluttering and chirping of sparrows evacuating the tree. But that’s right—if Malcolm was out there, the sparrows would have fled long ago.

Norman continued his search of the bedroom that had been his for the summer, standing back to see if there was anything on top of the wardrobe, wafting his arm under the bed, rifling through his pile of discarded laundry—all the while whispering the name of the missing stoat.

“Malcolm, where have you got to?” he muttered, frustrated with his furry friend’s wanderings. Norman’s mother knew a little bit about his own bookweirding travels, but she didn’t need to find out who he sometimes brought along on the journey.

They weren’t even supposed to be here at the Shrubberies. Comforting as it was for Norman to be back in the real world under the same roof as his family, this was not where he’d meant to wake up at all. He and Malcolm were supposed to have woken up far away from here, in a dark library, in the tower of a Crusader outpost, in the middle of a desert … in a book.

For most normal twelve-year-old boys, waking up in a book was just a fantasy, but Norman’s experience of sleep and waking was anything but normal. Since the day he first ate a page from a book, falling asleep had been … well, let’s say troublesome. That first book was
The Brothers of Lochwarren
, set in a world called Undergrowth, the place where Malcolm was born to be king. Eating that page had unleashed something called the bookweird, a force Norman only partially understood and could almost never control. The bookweird got you
into
a book. It had taken him to many strange places, and into the lives of his favourite characters. Without it, he would never have met Malcolm, or George Kelmsworth of the Intrepids adventure series, or the boy monk Jerome, who was the hero of
The Secret in the Library
. He wouldn’t trade those friendships for the world, but the bookweird had its difficulties. It got you into a book, but getting out wasn’t always easy. Getting out without making a terrible mess was almost impossible.

The thought of the boy monk Jerome, reminded Norman of
the urgency of finding Malcolm and getting out of here. He had made a serious mess of Jerome’s book. They needed to get back there to make things right. Compared to the disaster unfolding in
The Secret in the Library
, Malcolm running loose through the house was a minor setback. Nobody’s life was at stake here. But still, the last thing Norman needed was for his family to find out that he was friends with a talking medieval stoat.

He didn’t bother to dress—or rather, to undress and redress. He didn’t bother to take off George’s grey sweater. There was no point hiding it from anybody anymore. His mother would know by now that he’d disobeyed her and bookweirded off to Kelmsworth Hall.

He tiptoed down the corridor. The house was quiet except for the usual creaks and squeaks of its worn floorboards. If he was lucky, he was the first one awake. (There was a first time for everything.) The library was the obvious place to start. Back home in Undergrowth, Malcolm was stoat royalty. He had a castle and a library of his own, but it was a medieval library with just a few dozen books. For Malcolm, the library at the Shrubberies was a marvel. Norman just had to hope that his father wasn’t already in there working. He tried the door handle gingerly. The knob barely turned. He leaned into it and pushed harder, but still it stuck. Locked. That was strange. His father never locked the library.

A noise somewhere downstairs startled Norman, interrupting his thoughts. It was the clang of cups or dishes. The kitchen, of course! If there was one thing that Malcolm loved more than books, it was food. Norman descended the stairs warily. He had a picture in his mind of the tiny woodland creature sitting on the kitchen table with his face in a cereal bowl or his whiskers full of jam. Even as he worried about it, Norman couldn’t help smiling. Malcolm was an annoying little creature at the best of times, but he was also his best friend in this or any world.

At the bottom of his stairs, Norman paused to listen. There was the ring of a spoon against a porcelain bowl and a low singsong kind of chattering. These didn’t sound like stoat noises. They sounded decidedly human and annoyingly familiar. He dared a
peek and then took a tentative step into the kitchen. There, sitting at the kitchen table, was his little sister, Dora. She was dressed in her riding clothes, ready for her morning ride, and was singing a song to herself while she scarfed her breakfast—the biggest bowl of ice cream ever consumed by man or child. Norman smirked a little at the thought of what his mother would say when she found out his little sister had been eating ice cream out of a mixing bowl for breakfast.

Dora didn’t look up immediately. Norman let her continue to eat and sing blithely away while he began a surreptitious exploration of the kitchen cupboards. He quietly opened doors and examined the cupboard contents as if he were looking for something to eat. What he was hoping to see was Malcolm, sitting there with his head in a granola box or something, but there wasn’t even any granola. Something strange must have happened on his parents’ last shopping trip. The giant glass jars that his mother usually filled with granola and muesli were now packed to the brim with several varieties of colourful sugary cereal. They filled nearly every cupboard. Norman checked the pantry next. It too brimmed with jars of the stuff. Maybe they had won a contest for a year’s supply or something. It was the sort of thing Dora would enter. There was just one small pile of granola bars left on a high shelf. Norman grabbed two—one for himself and one for his friend.

“Hey!” Dora yelled, so loudly that it made Norman jump. “It’s about time you got up.”

Norman had a comment about the ice cream on her lips, but he kept it to himself. It would be more fun to wait to hear what his mother had to say.

“Are Mom and Dad awake?” he asked.

Dora just squinted at him as if he had said something incomprehensible. After a moment, she reached up to her ears and pulled out a pair of tiny white earbuds. The wire led to a little pink MP3 player that matched the colour of her ice cream. That was new.

Norman took a good look at her. People said that Dora looked like him, but he didn’t see it. She was skinny and pale and
had too many freckles, and her hair was blonde whereas his was plain old normal brown. This morning she had on a full riding outfit, from boots to jacket. Even Norman could tell it was expensive. It looked like she had had the best birthday ever, what with the MP3 player and the riding clothes. But the tiara on her head just looked silly.

“Aren’t you a little old to be playing princess?” He couldn’t resist.

Dora flicked her head to turn her nose up at him. “I’ll have you know that this crown belongs to Princess Cara of the Talingi,” she huffed. “It was given to me to look after.” She adjusted it on her head proudly.