1
It is a truth universally acknowledged that returning home after a long absence is one of the best feelings in the world. That’s how I felt, anyway, when I arrived back at Stolzenburg one rainy Friday afternoon to find the keep swathed in fog and the castle courtyard gray in the hazy afternoon light. It was unusually cold for August.
Nevertheless I stood for a long moment outside the double entrance doors, closed my eyes, and breathed the smell of wet, age-old masonry deep into my lungs. Raindrops splashed down onto my face like a blustery welcoming committee, while the wind tugged at my ponytail as if trying to get it to dance.
At last! I was home at last!
This was the place I’d called home for the past four years, at any rate: the first place I’d ever known that felt like a real home. I spread my arms wide and was about to spin on the spot for joy when I heard the noise of an approaching car and decided against it.
Through the gate came a gleaming black limousine, and out of it stepped Helena von Stein (the best student in my class, and currently head girl). She wafted toward me, opening an elegant umbrella.
I let my arms fall back to my sides.
“Emma.” Helena eyed my sodden suitcase and the mud stains on my red summer coat as the chauffeur lifted her luggage (suitcases, hatbox, and vanity case) out of the car. “Oh, dear. Did you walk here?” She raised one eyebrow.
“Hi, Helena.” I beamed at her. Not even Princess von Stein, as I liked to call her, could put me in a bad mood today. True, I’d had to walk some of the way to the castle because my dad had forgotten to pick me up at the airport again. In fact, I’d taken one train and two buses from Cologne Bonn Airport and then walked almost two miles from the village to the castle; all in all I’d been traveling for over eight hours. But I certainly wasn’t going to tell Helena that. “I like walking,” I said. “Anyway, how was your holiday? You didn’t get stalked by that boy at the pool again, did you?”
Helena’s lips twitched. “Of course not,” she said, pointing to her tanned face. “I’ve just got back from Mauritius, and it was amazing. And you? I’m guessing you went to see your mom in England again, right?” She made the word England sound not unlike a yawn. But Helena, whose parents were diplomats, had been to so many different countries that anything less than a trip to the moon probably wouldn’t have impressed her.
“This time we went on a road trip,” I offered nonetheless. “A, um, a cultural study tour, to be exact. It was fascinating.”
“Er, sure … how exciting. Anyway…” She flicked back her dark hair and followed her suitcases up the steps and into the castle before I could reply. Which was probably for the best, because I would honestly rather have dragged my suitcase another couple of miles uphill than give Helena any more details about my supposed “study tour.” And to think it had sounded like such a good idea when my mom had first suggested it.…
Initially, the fact that the summer holidays coincided with my mom’s new boyfriend’s lecture tour had seemed like a golden opportunity. “We’ve got invitations from all over the country,” Mom had gushed. “It means you’ll get to see a bit more of England this time, not just Cambridge.” Even though my mom had a habit of putting on a husky voice and obsessively touching up her makeup whenever John was around, I’d still been looking forward to spending the seven-week summer holiday with her. We’d made plans to explore London, Manchester, Brighton, and Newcastle together.
It soon transpired, however, that John (a distinguished professor of literature) didn’t approve of our proposed mother-daughter excursions. Instead he insisted we accompany him wherever he went, carrying his papers, pouring him glasses of water, and handing him pens with which to sign his books. By the end of the holiday, having sat through forty-two lectures in forty-two stuffy town halls the length and breadth of England, I felt that if I ever had to listen to John’s four-hour lecture on eighteenth-century women writers again, I would literally die of boredom. Some holiday this had been! But in spite of everything I’d decided to come out of it feeling positive—re-energized, even. True, I hadn’t spent weeks being “pestered” by a good-looking pool boy or the wealthy heir to a Cornish country estate. But my holidays had been so dull that they might almost have been described as … meditative. Yes, that was definitely the right word. There were people who would have spent seven weeks on a bed of nails in a Tibetan mountain monastery to achieve the kind of inner enlightenment I’d achieved (in a less monastic fashion, admittedly) over the course of forty-two lectures in a series of British town halls.
Because, in between John’s pompous speeches and my mom’s breathless giggles at all his lame jokes, I’d gradually formulated a plan. I was sixteen years old now, and I felt it was time to take a few things in hand. Things that were long overdue. It was about time I challenged Princess von Stein for the role of head girl, for example. And tidied up the library. And started being more elegant and intelligent and independent in general. And then, of course, there was Frederick …
Once Helena had disappeared I thought about having another go at dancing in the rain, but I was afraid the chauffeur might come back at any moment and that the other pupils might start arriving—and besides, I was starting to get cold—so I decided against it.
Instead, I made do with turning my face to the sky and taking one more deep breath. Pure, cool Stolzenburg air, fresh with rain. It really did feel good to be back: back in Germany and back at the castle. The gardeners had even planted out some of the pots around the entrance with pink fuchsias, which I loved. I smiled to myself.
The new school year was starting on Monday and I, Emma Magdalena Morgenroth, felt readier than I had ever been. Ready for Year 11. Ready to grow up. I heaved my suitcase up the flight of steps, squared my shoulders, and stepped inside the imposing entrance hall of Stolzenburg School.
* * *
That was the day I found the book.
Later on, I sometimes wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t stumbled across it. If we’d never gone into the library in the first place. Or if I had found it, but I’d cast it aside, just shoved it away on a bookshelf somewhere. What would have happened then?
The west wing library was located, unsurprisingly, in the west wing of the castle, which was hardly ever used for day-to-day school life anymore. The classrooms were all in the northern wing of the castle and the common rooms and bedrooms where the school’s elite boarders lived and slept were situated in the east wing. Most of the west wing, however, had stood empty since the last time the castle had been renovated some eighty years earlier.
At that time, one of the school’s former headmasters had decided that the teaching staff should no longer be housed in the castle itself but in apartments in the neighboring farm buildings. Ever since then the west wing, which was also the oldest part of Stolzenburg Castle, had been used mainly for storing tattered old maps, discarded furniture, and boxes full of yellowing exercise books. With its meter-thick walls and stone staircases, it was difficult to heat, and the water pipes often froze in winter. Only the ballroom on the first floor was in regular use. The rooms on the floors above remained for the most part in a state of cold, dusty hibernation.
I’d always thought it was a bit of a waste, especially considering how beautiful the west wing library was. I’d had an inkling that the room was going to be perfect for our purposes, and now that I saw it with my own eyes I was delighted: Bookshelves covered the walls from floor to wood-paneled ceiling. Even around the windows, shelves had been put in, and all of them were full of old, expensively bound books. (These had long ago been superseded by the school’s media center, of course, which gave every student access to library books online.)
There was also an open fireplace and a huge oak desk, several armchairs and sofas with carved wooden feet, a small intarsia table, and an impressive chandelier, which must have dated right back to the early days of electric lighting. There were a few things that were surplus to requirements—broken bits of furniture, antique lamps, piles of tattered papers, boxes full of old atlases bedecked with a thick layer of dirt and cobwebs—but it wouldn’t take long to get them out of the way. I rolled up the sleeves of my sweater.
“Nice,” said Charlotte, taking a photo on her phone of the clutter around us; no doubt she would post it online later. “But are you sure your dad’s okay with it?”
Charlotte was English, a little shorter and slimmer than me, and had the look of a porcelain doll with honey-colored curls. She had a thing about cats (the top she was wearing today had two black cats on it, with their tails entwined to form a heart) and she was also my best friend in the world. For four years now, ever since my first day at Stolzenburg, we’d sat next to each other in classes and shared all our secrets.
“’Course he is,” I said. “The room never gets used, anyway.” During the most boring holiday in the history of holidays, I’d pictured exactly how it was going to be: We would commandeer the library and turn it into our own private retreat, somewhere to get away from the stress of lessons and the hustle and bustle of the dormitories. I was sure my dad would agree—he let me do whatever I wanted most of the time, so asking his permission was really just a formality. I’d run it by him when I got the chance.
We clambered over cardboard boxes and other assorted clutter. “Just look at all these books. Isn’t this amazing?” I said as we stood in the center of the room. “And the fireplace! In winter we’ll have a fire, drink tea, and read the classics while the grandfather clock strikes the hour and ice crystals form on the windows. It’ll be lovely and cozy.”
Charlotte eyed me skeptically. “The classics? You mean like Nathan the Wise? And other such thrilling reads?”
She had a point. Charlotte clearly remembered my scathing comments about Lessing’s eighteenth-century play, which we’d read the year before.
I pushed a rickety floor lamp out of the way. “It’s not necessarily all about the books. I was thinking more of a kind of secret society.” I’d read an article recently about famous student fraternities in the USA, and ever since then I’d been toying with the idea of starting my own elite little club at Stolzenburg. This was one of the oldest and best schools in Europe, after all, and secretly I was imagining a society like Skull and Bones at Yale University. But without any embarrassing rituals like lying around naked in coffins and stuff. “We could just meet here and chat, watch films, do our homework, whatever. It’ll be awesome.”
“The idea of not having to fight for space on the common room sofas does have a certain appeal,” Charlotte conceded. She looked around the room for a moment, then sighed. “But we’re going to have to do some dusting.”
“Thank you!” I brushed my bangs out of my face and launched into a detailed explanation of my idea: “So, I’ve got it all planned out. The first thing we need to do is get rid of all this junk. I thought we could shove it in the bedroom opposite; there’s plenty of room in there. Though I don’t know if we’ll be able to carry everything ourselves. But we’ll give it a try. Then we’ll sweep the floor and get rid of the spiderwebs and their delightful inhabitants. And this chest of drawers here—oh!” Charlotte had suddenly enveloped me in a bear hug.
“I missed you. I didn’t even realize how much till now,” said Charlotte, still with her arms around me. She smelled a little of sea and sunscreen; she’d only just got back from holiday, too. Her family had been to Lanzarote. “I’m guessing it didn’t go the way you wanted with your mom?” she asked.
“Nah, it was fine,” I mumbled. Charlotte knew me too well. She knew that the more enthusiastically I threw myself into school life, the worse it meant things were going with my family. Although Mom and I hadn’t actually argued the whole holiday. “It was bearable. It was just…” I thought for a moment, wondering why the disappointment of the holiday was bothering me so much. Being bored wasn’t the end of the world, after all, but … “I think the whole thing just made me realize that I can’t expect my parents to sort anything out for me anymore. That’s all,” I explained at last.
It wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking realization, to be fair. I’d had to learn to rely on myself since my parents split up four years ago. My dad had been wrapped up in himself and his job as a headmaster, and my mom was preoccupied with her own chaotic life in England. Since the age of twelve I’d been washing my own clothes, checking my own homework, and deciding what to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
No, my realization was really more of an admission to myself that what I’d always thought of as a sort of temporary state of affairs was never going to change. My dad was always going to be a workaholic, and my mom was always going to be busy “finding herself.” And I was sixteen now, and officially not a kid anymore. Only I could decide what to do with my life, and from now on that was exactly what I was going to do. It was that simple. From now on, I was going to be in charge of my own destiny.
Charlotte pulled at my ponytail. “All right then,” she said. “Let’s make this year our best one yet. And let’s make this library our headquarters.”
We grinned at each other and set to work. Together we lugged boxes and stacks of paper, three-legged chairs and crinkled lampshades into one of the rooms across the corridor. On top of those we piled globes with out-of-date borders, moth-eaten cushions, and moldy tennis rackets. It took nearly two hours to empty the library of all the things we didn’t need. Eventually, however, all that remained was an old chest of drawers in the middle of the room, which absolutely refused to budge. The thing weighed a ton! We leaned our whole weight against it, dug in our heels, and pushed and pulled with all our strength. But the beast didn’t move an inch.
After a while Hannah (my new roommate—today was her first day at Stolzenburg) came to give us a hand. But not even our combined strength was enough to shift the chest of drawers. “Do you reckon it’s screwed to the floor?” Hannah panted as she and Charlotte pushed and I pulled as hard as I could.
“It feels like it’s put down roots,” I grunted through gritted teeth. “Anchored itself in the bowels of the earth. They probably built the whole castle around this chest of drawers.”
Hannah giggled.
The two of us had immediately clicked. I’d taken to Hannah the moment I’d seen her empty the contents of her suitcase unceremoniously into her closet, saying it didn’t matter because she was going to be rummaging through her clothes like a raccoon every morning, anyway.
Of course, I would have loved to share a room with Charlotte now that Francesca, my old roommate, had left Stolzenburg. But Charlotte had been sharing with Princess von Stein for years, and Mrs. Bröder-Strauchhaus—who taught biology and math, and was also in charge of bedroom allocations—was less than accommodating when it came to changing people’s sleeping arrangements. (She had some inane reason for this—something to do with us developing good social skills.)
Luckily, Charlotte was the most tolerant and good-natured person I knew and had managed to put up with Helena von Stein’s moods without complaint since Year 6. We were also lucky in that Hannah (unlike Charlotte and me) was not afraid of spiders, and she released several of them in quick succession into the ivy outside the library window.
Meanwhile, Charlotte swept the wooden floor and I confronted the chest of drawers again. I’d decided to empty it out. That would make it lighter—hopefully light enough to lift. I started rifling through the drawers. First I unearthed a collection of hideous dried flower arrangements, then a stack of even uglier painted porcelain plates. These were followed by an assortment of candlesticks, broken bits of soap, and yellowed handkerchiefs.
And then I found the book.
It was inside a sort of secret compartment, hidden under a wooden slat in the bottom drawer that I’d almost overlooked. The grooves in the wood around the edges of the slat were practically invisible, and it was only when I happened to graze my left wrist on one of them and thought I’d gotten a splinter that I noticed them at all. But then I ran my fingertips over the bottom of the drawer again, and sure enough I felt the furrows in the wood around the edges of the slat. I dug my fingernails in underneath it, jiggled it about a bit, and finally managed to lift it out. In a compartment below, one that looked specially designed for the purpose, lay the book.
It was old. You could see that from the worn, dark cloth binding. The corners were frayed, and the fabric was so stained that I couldn’t even tell what color it must once have been. Gray? Brown? Blue? I lifted the book carefully out of its hiding place. It was heavier than I’d expected, and warmer. Alive, I thought, and the thought startled me.
I rubbed the cover with my sleeve, raising a little cloud of dust. As I wiped the dust away, delicate lines became visible on the cloth binding: not letters, not a title, but the vague outline of a figure imprinted on the fabric. I could only guess what it was supposed to be. Was it a man? Or … no, the figure didn’t really look human. It had what looked like curling horns on its head, and its legs were strangely crooked.
I ran my fingers over the rough fabric. What was inside this book? Why had someone hidden it? And from whom?
Suddenly there was a whispering in the air, a sigh, so quiet that I felt rather than heard it. A rustling murmur, a hum that made the hairs on the backs of my arms stand on end. It sounded almost like a name.
My name.
Er—okay …
Emma, whispered the book. Emmaaa.
I shivered, then shook my head firmly. This was ridiculous! My ears were obviously playing tricks on me.
It had been a long day, after all. Too long. The flight back from England, the journey from the airport to the castle, and the hours spent clearing out the library. I’d been on my feet for so long, it was no wonder I was in a bit of a daze. I was completely worn out: Obviously the book was not calling my name, or anything else for that matter. It certainly wasn’t alive. I needed to get a grip. Or some sleep. I yawned.
“Let’s sort out the rest another time. I reckon that’s enough for today,” I announced after a moment. But I found it hard to tear my gaze away from the shadowy figure on the front of the book.
When I did, I saw that Charlotte and Hannah had already called a halt to the cleanup operation. The broom stood propped against the wall in one corner, and my friends were leaning out of the window, peering down into the courtyard below.
“Are they students here?” Hannah was asking. She stood up on tiptoe, leaning out of the open window as far as she could go without falling.
“I don’t think so,” Charlotte replied. “They look a bit too old—though it’s hard to tell from up here.”
“Well, they’re not bad-looking—I can tell that from here!”
“Hmm,” said Charlotte, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you know these guys?”
I joined them at the window in time to see two tall young men climbing the steps to the entrance. They disappeared into the castle before I could catch a glimpse of their faces. “I don’t think so,” I said, looking at the Mini Cooper with the British license plate that was parked on the gravel right at the foot of the steps. “But whoever they are, they clearly think they’re too important to use a parking space like the rest of us mere mortals.”
* * *
I’d promised my dad I’d eat dinner with him that evening. So when Charlotte and Hannah eventually set off for the dining hall, I made my way across the courtyard to my dad’s apartment.
My dad lived in the old coach house, in an apartment with light parquet floors and windows that looked out over the gardens. On the walls hung a collection of African masks and drums. Dad himself had never left Europe (partly due to his fear of flying) but he often got presents from parents or ex-pupils or people who were both at the same time. It was well known that he had a penchant for the exotic.
So, when we sat down to dinner I was relieved to see that none of his students had brought him back honey-roasted locusts or other such insectile delicacies from their travels this year. The last time we’d eaten together before I left for England there’d been insects on the menu, and it had put a bit of a damper on things. However nutritious Dad claimed they were, I was never—I repeat, never—going to let an exoskeleton pass my lips. And any creature with more than four legs was also out of the question.
Luckily, however, he’d ordered tonight’s dinner from my favorite Chinese restaurant, and the polished mahogany table was littered with boxes, chopsticks, and paper napkins.
“My poor little Emma,” Dad said now for the third time, picking at his sweet and sour chicken (and probably inwardly lamenting the fact that it wasn’t as crisp and crunchy as a giant grasshopper). “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to pick you up. I hope you didn’t catch cold. And in the pouring rain, too! Why didn’t you call me?”
“I did. Your phone was off.” As usual. My dad and modern technology really did not mix. The fact that he’d finally started communicating by email at work was nothing short of a miracle. If he’d had his way, he would still have been writing letters on a typewriter and only ever using the Internet to observe other countries from a safe distance on Google Earth. If at all. The Internet, according to my dad, was a force for evil, and a source of “uncontrolled overstimulation.” (At least that was how he’d described it eighteen years ago in his famous parenting guide The Modern Child, a seminal reference work that appeared on many a parental bookshelf to this day, and which was essentially responsible for landing Dad this job and for the fact that I—perhaps the ultimate “modern child”—had been permitted to have a smartphone last year only after a series of tense negotiations.)
“What about the landline in my office?” my dad continued. “You could have reached me there.”
“It was busy.”
“Really? All that time?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I tried seven times. At one, at quarter past, and half past, at quarter to two, at…”
My dad put his head in his hands and sighed. “Ah, yes—that blasted sheikh. Exasperating! He seems to want to know the shoe size of every member of staff at the school before he will even consider sending his son here,” he muttered. “I was on the phone with him for three hours. I feel a migraine coming on just thinking about it.”
If you’d had to hazard a guess at my dad’s age—given his aversion to technology and the myriad ailments and illnesses he suffered from (or thought he suffered from) on a daily basis—you could have been forgiven for thinking he was about 120 years old. In actual fact he would be celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday in two months’ time. But his eccentric manner belied his age (and as an eminent authority on pedagogical matters and a holder of two PhDs, he got away with it without anybody questioning his ability to manage an elite institution like Stolzenburg).
“How did it go with your mother?” he inquired between two mouthfuls of rice.
“Fine. She says hi,” I said, taking a bite out of a spring roll. I usually tried to avoid talking to Dad about Mom whenever possible. This was because of the look that came into his eyes at the slightest mention of her—a look that gave him the air of a mournful old dog that has just been kicked. Now, as ever, he looked as if he were simply awaiting the next blow.
“Thanks. Is she … is everything all right?” he went on gamely.
“Oh, yes—she’s still living in Cambridge. She only cooks ayurvedic meals now. When she cooks, that is. We mostly ended up having pizza.… Well, you know what she’s like.” I cleared my throat. “But how was your summer, anyway?”
“Hmm…” He swallowed a mouthful of rice and then, visibly relieved at the change of topic, launched into a detailed account of his recurring sore throats; problems with the caretaker, Mr. Schade; bouts of fever; applications from new students and meetings with prospective parents; and, of course, the attack of flu that had left him a shadow of his former self. Not to mention the migraines he’d been having the past few days. “And now these two young men turn up here unannounced, demanding to be housed here for several weeks. As if we had anywhere to put them, with three hundred students on the waiting list! But what am I supposed to do—I can’t exactly have them camping out in the courtyard, can I?” he concluded, and he began massaging the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, presumably to fend off another migraine.
“Why not?”
He sniffed. “Well, I’d have no qualms about sending one of them packing—a certain Toby Bell—I don’t know him from Adam. But the other one, you see, is Darcy de Winter, which means, of course … But all I could offer them at such short notice was a couple of rooms in the west wing.”
“I see,” I mumbled with my mouth full, though I didn’t see at all. No, hang on … the name de Winter did ring a bell. It was the name of the English lord whose family had once lived at Stolzenburg and had set up the school. It was well documented that a son of the Stolzenburg family had married into a branch of the British de Winter family several hundred years ago, and that when the Stolzenburg line had died out the castle had passed to the de Winters. I’d never heard of a boy called Darcy de Winter, though. “Did they say what they’re doing here?”
“Not exactly. Apparently they’re on a road trip around Europe and thought they’d make a stop here.”
“For several weeks? It’s not like there’s a lot to see round here.”
Dad sighed.
“Strange,” I murmured, but my mind had already started to wander, from the boys who were to stay in the west wing to my beautiful library and from the library to the book I’d found. Especially the book.
Somehow I just hadn’t been able to bring myself to put it back in its secret compartment, so I’d taken it away with me for a closer look. I wasn’t quite sure why. There was just something about that book—something that made me curious. Intrigued, even.
“Anyway, I’ve said they could have two of the old guest rooms on the second floor. I was planning to make them available for the sheikh’s entourage, in case he should decide to grace us with his presence, but it’ll be all right for a few nights, I suppose, and after that we’ll see,” Dad went on. I was still thinking about the book, lying in my shoulder bag a few inches from my chair, waiting to be read. It looked like a perfectly ordinary book, the same as hundreds or possibly thousands of others in this castle. It was probably just an old textbook. Or a deathly dull treatise on garden herbs, or a corny old-fashioned love story. Nothing that could possibly be of any interest to me. And yet …
* * *
Wanting, if nothing else, to silence the nagging voice in my head that kept telling me there was something special about the book, I took it out again later that evening when I got back to my room.
As Hannah slept soundly in the bed opposite mine, dressed in a mismatched pair of pajamas (the top was pink and the bottoms were red with little Santa Clauses on them), I leafed carefully through the book by the light of my bedside lamp. I was struggling to stay awake, but I wanted to do this before settling down for the night. A sneaking suspicion that you might not be of sound mind is not exactly conducive to a good night’s sleep.
As it turned out, of course, the book was just a book—just as I’d expected—though not a novel or a gardener’s handbook. It seemed to be some kind of chronicle. I thought at first that it was a diary, because it was full of dates followed by separate paragraphs. All the entries were written by hand, and by lots of different people. The paragraphs at the beginning of the book were in an archaic script full of flourishes—more painted than written—but there were passages in the middle written with fountain pen in an old-fashioned hand, and sections toward the end with more recent dates that someone had written in ballpoint, and in some places even in felt tip.
Most of the entries, as far as I could make out, talked about Stolzenburg. Chroniclers from different eras had recorded all sorts of events, both major and minor, throughout the castle’s history. I found accounts of a kitchen fire in the summer of 1734, the founding of the school in 1825, and an unusually large snowfall in 1918. One diarist had written about the night-time bombing raids during the Second World War, and someone else had described the opening of the new chemistry lab five years ago. And the paper was so gossamer-thin that the book must have a lot more pages than I’d thought at first glance.
Okay, so the book was a bit special after all. Just not in a freaky, name-whispering way.
I flicked back and forth through the pages for a while. Right at the beginning was a very old text that seemed to date back to the time when the castle had first been built. It even mentioned the former monastery (which now lay in ruins in the woods near the castle) and the monks who had once lived there and produced a special type of paper from which to make their books.
A few chapters on, I found an ink drawing of the figure on the cover. Somebody had captured the creature on paper in sharp pen strokes, and it was much clearer here than in the embossed image on the cloth binding. Its upper body was human, but it had the legs of a goat and cloven hooves. From its misshapen head sprouted two huge, curling horns encircled by a crown of leaves and insects. It reminded me of those creatures you find in ancient myths and legends—a faun, perhaps. Yes, a faun, with a mournful look in its eyes.
I flicked through to the entries written after Stolzenburg had become a school. This was the most interesting part of the book. There were descriptions of balls, new headmasters and headmistresses, and visits from peers and politicians and famous actors. Information that might be worth its weight in gold next spring, when the school would vote to pick the next head girl. Information that meant—I felt sure of it—I had been destined to find this book.
Yawning, I put it down on my bedside table. I’d have a proper read through it tomorrow, when I felt a bit more awake.
* * *
I soon drifted into an uneasy sleep, full of disorienting dreams. In one of them, the west wing library had turned into a classroom. John was the teacher, and he was giving one of his interminable literary lectures. To my surprise, my classmates were hanging on his every word as if they found the whole thing incredibly exciting. Charlotte in particular was absolutely spellbound. Helena, meanwhile, who was sitting in the row in front of me, turned round and asked me why I’d walked all that way in the rain—my hair was a mess. Frederick, in the seat next to mine, said it didn’t matter: Even with wet hair I was gorgeous. And behind the screen where John’s PowerPoint presentation was displayed, oblivious to everything around them, my parents were dancing the tango.
Then, all of a sudden, something landed on my hand.
An animal.
For a moment I was afraid it was one of the spiders Hannah had released into the ivy. I often had nightmares about spiders. But even as I wondered how it was that I was able to think so clearly in a dream, I realized the creature was not a spider at all but a kind of dragonfly. It was a strange color for a dragonfly, though: Instead of a shimmering bluish-green body, it had a snow-white back and pearly round eyes. There were gray flecks on its body that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be tiny little letters. This was probably because the thing on my hand was not a real live dragonfly but an elaborately folded piece of paper made to look like an insect. A piece of origami fashioned from the page of a book, perhaps.
But then, just as I was thinking this, the paper dragonfly started to flutter its shimmering wings and rose into the air. It buzzed away over the heads of my classmates and flew in a circle around John and then my parents. Then it came back to me, flew away again, came back again.
Nobody in the dream seemed to be aware of the creature. But it looked as if it wanted me to follow it. I got up from my seat and clambered over the legs and schoolbags of my fellow students.
The paper dragonfly was flying more quickly now. It led me through the school corridors and out of the castle, through the castle gardens and deep into the woods. The moonlight gleamed on its blanched paper body and its wings rustled quietly like pages turning.
Not until we reached the bank of the river did the creature come to a halt. It landed on a rock (or was it the remnants of an old stone wall?) and stretched out its antennae toward me. I crouched down in front of it in the grass and watched it crawl on its delicate little paper legs until it was only inches away from my face. It blinked its pearly eyes as I tried to decipher the letters and words on its body.
Emma, whispered the dragonfly suddenly, making me jump. Emmaaa!
“This is ridiculous,” I scoffed. My breath sent the dragonfly tumbling backward, almost into the water. But it managed to cling on to the rock and immediately came crawling back toward me. Emma, it whispered again. Emmaaa!
“Stop it,” I said. “You’re made of paper. You can’t fly and you can’t talk.”
But the dragonfly said my name again, and this time I’d had enough. I took a deep breath and blew the dragonfly off the rock.
It rustled angrily as it whirled away from me, far, far away across the moonlit Rhine.
A moment later I woke up in my own bed, bewildered. A talking dragonfly? I’d had some bizarre dreams in my time, but this one was definitely the weirdest!
13th August, in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and three
On this day the brothers from the Abbey of Saint George did deliver to my master, His Grace the Earl of Stolzenburg, the three reams of paper that they had promised him from their new paper mill, whereupon His Grace requested that they make and bind six books and decorate them with beautiful illustrations, like to this volume that His Grace hath kindly given me for my records. The Earl doth wish to give the six illuminated books as a gift to his most excellent lady wife upon the birth of his second child.
Unhappily one of the brothers was crushed between the mill wheels as he worked, and the monks have asked that they might be given a week’s grace to bury their brother and mourn his death. The Earl hath most graciously granted their request.
Yet since the unfortunate event took place, some of the holy brothers do seem to fear the mill and the paper that doth issue from it. ’Tis likely owing to the shock they suffered, for many of the men did witness the accident with their own eyes.
Text copyright © 2017 by Mechthild Gläser
Translation copyright © 2018 by Romy Fursland
