Cornelia Funke - Inkheart

The boy blushed and stared at the girl for a long time, as if to commit the sight of her to memory. Then he turned back to Dustfinger. "I don't belong with them. "

"You don't belong with me either. " Dustfinger walked away again, but when he was a good way from the parking lot the boy was still behind him. He was trying to walk so quietly that Dustfinger wouldn't hear him, and when Dustfinger turned he stopped like a thief caught in the act.

"What's the idea? I'm not going to be here much longer anyway!" snapped Dustfinger. "Now that I have the book I will look for someone who can read me into it again, even if it's a stammerer like Darius who sends me home with a lame leg or a squashed face. What will you do then? You'll be left alone."

The boy shrugged his shoulders and looked at him with his black eyes. "I can breathe fire well now, " he said. "I practiced and practiced while you were gone. But I'm not so good at swallowing it yet."

"That's more difficult. You go at it too fast. I've told you so a thousand times. "

They found Gwin in the ruins of the burnt-out house, sleepy and with feathers around his muzzle. He seemed pleased to see Dustfinger and even licked his hand, but then he ran after the boy. They walked until it was light, always reaching south toward the sea. At last, they stopped for a rest and ate the food Dustfinger had brought from Basta's larder: some red spicy sausage, a piece of cheese, bread, olive oil. The bread was rather hard so they dipped it in the oil, ate in silence sitting side by side on the grass, and then went on. Blue and dusty pink wild sage flowered among the trees. The fairies moved in Dustfinger's pocket – and the boy walked behind him like a second shadow.

In the morning, when Mo found the book was gone, Meggie's first thought was that Basta had taken it, and she felt sick with fear at the thought of him prowling around them while they slept. But Mo had a different explanation.

"Farid is gone, too, Meggie, " he said. "Do you think he'd have gone with Basta?"

No, she didn't. There was only one person Farid would have gone with. Meggie could well imagine Dustfinger emerging from the darkness, just as he had on the night when it all began.

"But what about Fenoglio?" she said.

Mo only sighed. "I don't know whether I'd have tried to read him back, anyway, Meggie, " he said. "So much misfortune has come from that book already, and I'm not a writer who can make up for himself the words he wants to read aloud. I'm only a kind of book doctor. I can give books new bindings, rejuvenate them a little, stop the bookworms from eating them, and prevent them from losing their pages over the years like a man loses his hair. But inventing the stories in them, filling new, empty pages with the right words – I can't do that. That's a very different trade. A famous writer once wrote, 'An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher, or a magician – but the magician, the enchanter, is in the ascendant.' I always thought he was right about that. "

Meggie didn't know what to say. She only knew she missed Fenoglio's face. "And Tinker Bell, " she said. "What about her? Will she have to stay here, too, now?" When she'd woken up the fairy had been lying in the grass beside her. Now she was flying around with the other fairies. If you didn't look too closely they might have been a flock of moths. Meggie couldn't imagine how she had escaped from Basta's house. Hadn't he been planning to keep her in a jug?

"As far as I remember, Peter Pan himself once forgot she'd ever existed, " said Mo. "Am I right?"

Yes, Meggie remembered it, too. "All the same!" she murmured. "Poor Fenoglio!"

But as she said that her mother shook her head vigorously. Mo searched his pockets for paper, though all he could find was a shopping receipt and a felt-tip pen. Teresa took both from him, smiling. Then, while Meggie crouched in the grass beside her, she wrote: Don't be sorry for Fenoglio. It's not a bad story he's landed in.

"Is Capricorn still in it? Did you ever meet him there?" asked Meggie. How often she and Mo had wondered that. After all, he was one of the main characters in Inkheart . But perhaps there really was something behind the printed story, a world that changed every day just like this one.

I only heard of him there, her mother wrote. They spoke of him as if he had gone away for a while. But there were others just as bad. It's a world full of terror and beauty (here her writing became so small Meggie could hardly make it out) and I could always understand why Dustfinger felt homesick for it.

The last sentence worried Meggie, but when she looked anxiously at her mother, Teresa smiled and reached for her hand. I was far, far more homesick for you two, she wrote on the palm of it, and Meggie closed her fingers over the words as if to hold them fast. She read them again and again on the long drive back to Elinor's house, and it was many days before they faded.

Elinor hadn't been able to reconcile herself to the idea of another walk all the way down through the thorny hills where the snakes lived. "Do you think I'm crazy?" she said crossly. "My feet hurt at the mere thought of it. " So she and Meggie had set off again in search of a telephone. It was a strange feeling to walk through the village – a truly deserted village now – past Capricorn's smoke-blackened house and the half-charred church porch. Water lay in the square outside. The blue sky was reflected in it and made it look almost as if the square had turned into a lake overnight. The hoses Capricorn's men had used to save their master's house lay like huge snakes in the pools of water. In fact, the fire had ravaged only the ground floor, but all the same Meggie would not go in, and when they had searched over a dozen other houses in vain Elinor bravely went through the charred door on her own. Meggie told her where to find the Magpie's room, and Elinor took a gun just in case the old woman had come back to save what she could of her own and her robber son's treasures. But the Magpie had long gone, just like Basta, and Elinor came back with a triumphant smile on her lips, carrying a cordless phone.

They called a taxi. It was somewhat difficult to persuade the driver he must ignore the road barrier when he came to it, but luckily he had never believed any of the sinister stories that were told of the village. They arranged to wait for him by the roadside so he wouldn't see any of the fairies and trolls. Meggie and her mother stayed in the village while Mo and Elinor went in the taxi to the nearest town, and came back a few hours later driving the two small buses they had rented. For Elinor had decided to offer a home, or "asylum," as she put it, to all the strange creatures who had landed in her world. "After all, " she said, "many people here have little enough patience or understanding for their fellow human beings who are only superficially different than them – so how would it be for little people with blue skins who can fly?"

It took some time for them all to understand Elinor's offer – which was, of course, also made to the men, women, and children out of the book – but most of them decided to stay in Capricorn's village. It obviously reminded them of a home that their earlier death had almost made them forget, and, of course, they could use the treasure that Meggie told the children must still be lying in the cellars of Capricorn's house. It would probably be enough to keep them all for the rest of their lives. The birds, dogs, and cats who had emerged from the Shadow had not hung around, but had long ago disappeared into the surrounding hills, while a few fairies and two of the little glass men, enchanted by the broom blossoms, the scent of rosemary, and the narrow alleys where the ancient stones whispered their stories to them, decided to make the once sinister village their home.