"Can't you imagine? Haven't you told her about the place often enough?" He tried the handle again, as if that could change anything. Meggie had covered the whole door with quotations. They looked to him now like magic spells written on the white paint in a childish hand. Take me to another world! Go on! I know you can do it. My father has shown me how. Odd that your heart didn't simply stop when it hurt so much. But his heart hadn't stopped ten years ago, either, when the words on the page swallowed up Resa.
Elinor pushed him aside. She was holding the key in her trembling fingers, and she impatiently put it in the lock. Crossly, she called Meggie’s name, as if she, too, hadn't guessed long ago that nothing but silence waited behind that door: the same silence as on the night that had taught Mo to fear his own voice.
He was the last to enter the empty room, and he did so hesitantly. There was a letter on Meggie's pillow. Dearest Mo… He didn't read on; he didn't want to see the words that would only pierce him to the heart. As Resa picked up the letter he looked around the room – his eyes searching for another sheet of paper, the one the boy had brought with him – but it was nowhere to be found. Well, of course not, you fool, he told himself. She's taken it with her; after all, she must have been holding it while she read.
Only years later would he discover from Meggie that the original sheet of paper with Orpheus's writing on it had been there in her room all the time, hidden between the pages of a book – where else? Her geography book. Suppose he had found it? Would he have been able to follow Meggie? No, probably not. The story had another path in store for him, a darker and more difficult path.
"Perhaps she's only gone off with the boy! Girls of her age do that kind of thing. Not that I know much about it, but…" Elinor's voice reached him as if from very far away. In answer, Resa handed her the letter that had been waiting on the pillow.
Gone. Meggie was gone.
He had no daughter anymore.
Would she come back, like her mother? Fished out of the sea of words again by some other voice? If so, when? In ten years' time, like Resa? She'd be grown-up by then. Would he even recognize her? Everything was blurred before his eyes: Meggie's school things on the desk in front of the window, her clothes, carefully hanging over the back of the chair as if she really meant to come back, her soft toys beside the bed, their furry faces kissed threadbare, although it was a long time since Meggie had needed them to help her get to sleep. Resa began crying without a sound, one hand pressed to her mute mouth. Mo wanted to comfort her, but how could he with such despair in his own heart?
He turned, pushed aside Darius, who was standing there in the open doorway with a sad, owl-like gaze, and went to his study, where those damned notebooks were still stacked among his own papers. He swept them off the desk one by one, as if he could silence the words that way – all the accursed words that had bewitched his child, luring her away like the Pied Piper in the story, to a place where he had already been unable to follow Resa. Mo felt as if he were dreaming the same nightmare all over again, but this time he didn't even have a book whose pages he could have searched for Meggie.
Later, he couldn't say how he had gotten through the rest of that day without going crazy. All he remembered was wandering for hours through Elinor's garden, as if he might find Meggie somewhere there among the old trees where she liked to sit and read. When darkness fell and he set out to look for Resa, he found her in Meggie's room. She was sitting on the empty bed, staring at three tiny creatures circling just below the ceiling, as if they were looking for the door they had come through. Meggie had left the window open, but they didn't fly out, perhaps because the strange, black night frightened them.
"Fire-elves," said Resa's hands when he sat down beside her. "If they settle on your skin you must shake them off, or they'll burn you."
Fire-elves. Mo remembered reading about them in the book. Something always came back in return. There seemed to be just that one book in the whole world.
"Why three of them?" he asked. "One for Meggie, one for the boy…"
"I think the marten went, too," said Resa's hands.
Mo almost laughed out loud. Poor Dustfinger, he obviously couldn't shake off his bad luck – but Mo could feel no sympathy for him. Not this time. Without Dustfinger the words on the sheet of paper would never have been written, and he would still have a daughter.
"Do you think at least she'll like it there?" he asked, laying his head in Resa's lap. "After all, you liked it, didn't you? Or, at any rate, you told her so."
"I'm sorry," said her hands. "So very sorry."
But he held her fingers tight. "What are you talking about?" he said softly. "I was the one who brought the damned book into the house, remember?" And then they were both silent. In silence, they watched the poor, lost elves. At some point they did fly through the window, and into the strange night. As their tiny red bodies disappeared into the blackness like sparks going out, Mo wondered whether Meggie was wandering through an equally black night at this moment. The thought pursued him into his dark dreams.
12. UNINVITED GUESTS
"You people with hearts," he said once, "have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful."
L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
On the day when Meggie disappeared, silence moved back into Elinor's house, but not the silence of the old days when only her books lived there with her. The silence that now filled the rooms and corridors tasted of sorrow. Resa wept a great deal, and Mortimer said nothing, as if paper and ink had swallowed up not just his daughter, but all the words in the world with her. He spent a lot of time in his workshop, ate little, hardly slept – and on the third day Darius, looking very anxious, went to Elinor and told her that Silvertongue was packing up all his tools.
When Elinor entered his workshop, out of breath because Darius had been tugging her along behind him so fast, Mortimer was throwing the stamps he used for gold leaf into a crate, pell-mell – tools that he normally handled as carefully as if they were made of glass.
"What the devil are you doing?" inquired Elinor.
"What does it look like?" he replied and began clearing away his sewing frame. "I'm going to find another profession. I never want to touch a book again, curse them all. Other people can listen to the stories they tell and mend the clothes they wear. I want nothing more to do with them."
When Elinor went to fetch Resa to help her, Resa just shook her head.
"Well, I can understand why those two are useless just now," commented Elinor, as she and Darius sat at breakfast by themselves yet again. "How could Meggie do a thing like that to them? What was her idea – did she want to break her poor parents' hearts? Or prove once and for all that books are dangerous?"
Darius had no answer but silence. He had been the same all these last few sad days.
"For heaven's sake, all of you silent as the grave!" Elinor snapped at him. "We must do something to get the silly creature back. Anything. Good God, it can't be as difficult as all that! After all, there are no fewer than two Silvertongues under this roof!"
Darius looked at her in alarm and choked on his tea. He had left his gift unused for so long that no doubt it seemed like a dream to him, and he didn't want to be reminded of it.