‘Oh, he has a heart, does he?’ enquired Elinor bitterly.
‘It would be better for him if he didn’t,’ replied Mo. ‘More than a week passed before he was back at my door again. It was night, of course. He prefers night to day. I was just packing. I’d decided it was safer to leave, since I didn’t want to be driving Basta and Capricorn out of my house at sword-point again. Dustfinger’s reappearance showed that I was right to feel anxious. It was well after midnight when he turned up, but I couldn’t sleep anyway.’ Mo stroked Meggie’s hair. ‘You weren’t sleeping well then either. You had bad dreams, however much I tried to keep them away with my stories. I was just packing the tools in my workshop when there was a knock on the front door, a very soft, almost furtive knock. Dustfinger emerged from the dark as suddenly as he did when he came to our house four days ago – heavens, was it really only four days? Well, when he came back that first time he looked as if it had been too long since he’d eaten. He was thin as a stray cat and his eyes were dull. “Send me back,” he begged, “send me back! This world will be the death of me. It’s too fast, too crowded, too noisy. If I don’t die of homesickness I shall starve to death. I don’t know how to make a living. I don’t know anything. I’m like a fish out of water,” he said. And he refused to believe that I couldn’t do it. He wanted to see the book and try for himself, even though he could scarcely read, but there was no way I could let him have it. It would have been like giving away the very last part I still had of your mother. Luckily, I’d hidden it well. I let Dustfinger sleep on the sofa, and came down next morning to find him still searching the bookshelves. Over the next few years he kept on turning up, following us wherever we went, until I got sick and tired of it and made off with you in secret like a thief in the night. After that I saw no more of him for five years. Until four days ago.’
Meggie looked at him. ‘You still feel sorry for him,’ she said.
Mo was silent. At last, he said, ‘Sometimes.’
Elinor’s comment on that was a snort of contempt. ‘You’re even crazier than I thought,’ she said. ‘It’s that idiot’s fault we’re in this hole, it’s his fault if they cut our throats, and you still feel sorry for him?’
Mo shrugged his shoulders and looked up at the ceiling, where a few moths were fluttering around the naked light bulb. ‘No doubt Capricorn has promised to take him back,’ he said. ‘Unlike me, he realised that Dustfinger would do anything in return for such a promise. All he wants is to go back to his own world. He doesn’t even stop to ask if his story there has a happy ending!’
‘Well, that’s no different from real life,’ remarked Elinor gloomily. ‘You never know if things will turn out well. Just now our own story looks like coming to a bad end.’
Meggie sat with her arms clasped round her legs, her chin on her knees, staring at the dirty white walls. In her mind’s eye she saw the ‘N’ in front of her, the ‘N’ with the horned marten sitting on it, and felt as if her mother were looking out from beyond the big capital letter, her mother as she was in the faded photograph under Mo’s pillow. So she hadn’t run away after all. Did she like it in that other world? Did she still remember her daughter? Or were Meggie and Mo just a fading picture for her too? Did she long to be back in her own world, just as Dustfinger did?
And did Capricorn long to be back in his own world as well? Was that what he wanted – for Mo to read him back again? What would happen when Capricorn realised that Mo simply couldn’t do it? Meggie shuddered.
‘It seems Capricorn has someone else to read aloud to him now,’ Mo went on, as if he had guessed her thoughts. ‘Basta told me about the man, probably to show me I’m not by any means indispensable. Apparently he’s read several useful assistants for Capricorn out of a book already.’
‘Oh yes? Then why does he want you?’ Elinor sat up, rubbing her behind and groaning. ‘I don’t understand any of this. I just hope it’s all a bad dream, the kind you wake up from with a stiff neck and a bad taste in your mouth.’