The Book of Story Beginnings Read online

  JUNE 1914

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE LETTER FROM AUNT LAVONNE

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BRICK

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ROWBOAT

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE COMPOSITION BOOKS

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A GOOD IDEA FOR A STORY

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN THE ATTIC

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FROM FAR AWAY IN TIME

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A CAT’S LIFE

  CHAPTER NINE

  A TERRIBLE MIDDLE

  CHAPTER TEN

  A BETTER BEGINNING

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE TRANSFORMING POTION

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  AUNT LAVONNE’S NOTES

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE BROKEN MOON

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CAPTAIN MACK

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  EXTREME THIRST

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A RARE BIRD

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE WAYS OF ROYALTY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FELLOW SORCERERS

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE KING’S FAMILIAR

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DIPLOMACY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE TRAVELING TALISMAN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE WRONG ENDING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  KINGS AND QUEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE BIRD TRADERS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A SHIP’S CAT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THINKING ABOUT TIME

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHOOSING

  brought to you by we-bee

  He was up late reading Treasure Island for the hundredth time when the story idea came to him. Like all of his ideas, it was only the beginning of a story. But a beginning was better than nothing at all, so he climbed out of bed — quietly, because the rest of his family was asleep and he didn’t want to wake them.

  Treasure Island was a book he had read so often that he hardly needed to look at the well-worn copy that Pa and Ma had given him for Christmas two years before. He needed only to open it and dream of adventure. That was how the story beginning had come to him, like a dream — the words falling into place like notes of music from Ma’s fiddle. He held them in his mind carefully, not wanting to forget them before he had time to write them down.

  He sat at his old worn desk — there were ink stains all over it — and drew out a secret book from the bottom of a drawer filled with papers. It wasn’t the five-cent composition book in which he kept his journal. That was where he wrote down his thoughts and observations on everything that mattered and didn’t matter. The secret book was one he had found in the attic among Ma’s things — secret things maybe, for the trunk had been locked, and perhaps he oughtn’t to have used the key he’d found in Ma’s room.

  As he had done many times since finding the book, he looked at the words on its title page: The Book of Story Beginnings. There was a verse beneath the title. It made him shiver a bit because it was so wonderful. Almost like a story beginning itself:

  And there were story beginnings inside, one written by some unknown writer — who knew how long ago (after all, the book was old) — and two that he had already written himself. There were blank pages as well, waiting for more story beginnings.

  Quickly he began writing — it was as if the pencil were moving of its own accord, making a pattern of words across the page:

  Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a farmhouse high on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Below the hill lay endless fields of corn and more corn, divided by long, dull roads that went on forever before they came to anywhere that was somewhere. The boy liked to imagine that his house was surrounded by the sea and that he could sail forth from his home to find adventure. Such thoughts seemed no more than a dream to him. Then one night, as he sat alone in his room, he had a feeling that something strange had happened outside. When he went to look, he saw that his dream had come true. His house on the hill was surrounded by a great black sea. And in the moonlight, he saw a little boat waiting for him on the shore.

  He stopped to read over his words. He was the boy, of course. The house was his own house in Iowa. The rest was all wishful thinking. He rolled the pencil between his fingers, wondering whether he ought to revise or whether he ought to go on. And then he stopped, holding his head up, listening. What sound was that he heard? Not the familiar, dark sounds of a summer night — crickets and frogs, corn rustling, and cattle lowing down below the barns. No — there was a deeper sound, a sound like sighing. He turned to the window just as a cold wind ruffled the lace curtain. It was a rough, wet breeze that smelled of salt.

  He pulled on his trousers and stepped out into the hall. He could see the moon through the large front window at the end of the hall as he crept down the stairs. And then, through the glass-paneled front door of the house, he saw two moons — one in the starlit sky and its reflection in the water below, where it rippled in shimmering stripes across the waves. He opened the door, hardly noticing it was there, and walked outside.

  Like the boy in his story beginning, he had never seen the sea before. How could he possibly have imagined it, so cold and dark and immense? He couldn’t have imagined the smell of the sea. He couldn’t have imagined the way it didn’t stop at the boundary between water and air. The sea was in the air. But he had imagined the rowboat, and there it was at the end of the gravel path, tied up to one of the cement urns that Ma used for geraniums.

  Was it real? Were the sea and the boat real? He stood there a minute, debating the matter. The Book of Story Beginnings was still in his hand, and he thought of the inscription inside. The warning, he thought, and for the first time, he shivered for a different reason. Beware, the book had said. But surely the time for being careful was past. He had already written the beginning. The story — if it was real — had already begun.

  On most afternoons, Lucy Martin sat on the dusty, sagging sofa near the front window of the first-floor apartment where she lived with her parents, waiting for her father to come home from work. She could always hear him, jogging up the cement steps outside, singing a song he liked to sing:

  “Can she make a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

  Can she make a cherry pie, charming Billy?

  She can make a cherry pie

  Quick as a cat can wink her eye;

  Sheeeeeeee’s . . .”

  Her father always timed his singing so he could hold this note while he fiddled with the lock on the outside front door. He held the note while his keys jingled at the inside front door. He held the note, taking intermittent breaths to replenish his oxygen supply, for the two steps from the inside front door to the door of their apartment. On most days, Lucy had already opened this last door so that she could let her own voice slide into the last line of the song with him:

  “. . . a young thing and cannot leave her mother.”

  But today was not most days, and Lucy didn’t get up from the sofa when she heard her father coming up the steps. She didn’t rush to the door, and she didn’t join in the last line of the song. She didn’t even look around as her father came into the apartment. She stared out the window, listening to him sort through the mail and check the answering machine in the front hall. She heard him walk across the floor and felt the other end of the sofa sink as he sat down.

  “I guess your mother told you the news,” he said.

  The news was that he had lost his job. He was
a chemistry professor, and the university wasn’t giving him tenure, which meant that they didn’t want him back to teach in the fall. No matter how you looked at it, this was bad news, for it meant they would not have enough money to live on.

  But there had been other news as well — news that Lucy’s mother had tried to present as good news. They were moving to Iowa.

  It was because of Aunt Lavonne that they were moving. Aunt Lavonne was Lucy’s father’s aunt, which made her Lucy’s great-aunt. She had died only a month ago. Lucy had known this fact already because her father had flown out to Iowa for the funeral. What she hadn’t known until that morning was that Aunt Lavonne had given them her house.

  “She left it to your father in her will,” Lucy’s mother had explained. “And we’re going to live there.”

  “But this is our home!” Lucy had protested.

  Home wasn’t merely the apartment where she had lived all her life. Home was the city, her neighborhood, everything she knew. Lucy thought of school — where she was getting A’s in everything except gym, where she had finally, after years of being too shy, found a best friend. She thought of youth orchestra, where she had just made it into the first violin section. She thought of the movie theater near their apartment that showed old films. She thought of the used bookstore down the street. The owner knew her by name and always set aside books he thought she would like. Everything that Lucy loved — everything that meant home — paraded through her mind.

  “Why?” she had asked her mother. “Why do we have to move?”

  “It’s a wonderful opportunity for us,” her mother had explained. “It’s going to be cheaper to live in Aunt Lavonne’s house. We won’t have to pay rent. And I can do my work there just as well as here.” She was an editor who worked at home. People were always sending her manuscripts for scientific books and magazine articles to read and revise. The books and articles were dull and technical, full of words like pyrolysis, mutase, and stoichiometric. Lucy always wondered how her mother could stand to work on them. After all, her mother had wanted to be a writer once upon a time. She had actually written stories. But writing stories didn’t make money. Editing articles and books for scientists did.

  “What about Dad?” Lucy had asked.

  “Oh, I expect he can find some sort of job in Iowa. There’s a community college nearby. He might try for a teaching position there.”

  “What I meant was, does he want to move?” It seemed to Lucy that if money was the reason they were moving to Iowa (and it clearly was), then it was obvious that her mother was behind the decision. Lucy’s mother was always worried about money.

  Now Lucy asked her father, “Why do we have to move?” Her voice came out angry because she was trying not to cry.

  “Oh, Lucy.” Her father frowned, not because he was angry but because he never knew what to say when somebody cried. “Maybe it’ll be all right once you get used to it,” he said. “You’ve always wanted to go to Iowa.”

  Lucy began pulling the stuffing out of a small hole in the padded arm of the sofa. She supposed she ought to be glad her father wasn’t going on about how they needed to save money. And he wasn’t doing what her mother had done, which was to list all the advantages of living in Iowa — having a house to themselves, meeting new children, making new friends. Lucy’s mother had made moving sound like the beginning of a whole new life, not the end of the one they already had. But Lucy didn’t feel glad. “I wanted to visit Iowa — not move there,” she told her father.

  He was fumbling in his jacket pockets and pulled out a handful of papers. “I’ve got something to show you,” he told Lucy as he unfolded them.

  “What is it?”

  “A letter from Aunt Lavonne.”

  “But she’s dead.”

  “I got this a few days after she died. She must have written it before.”

  In spite of herself, Lucy felt a prickle of interest. A letter from someone who had died sounded much more important than an ordinary sort of letter. “What’s it about?” she asked.

  “Oscar.” Lucy’s father looked at her over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses. “And you.”

  “Me!” Lucy stopped pulling the stuffing out of the sofa. “Oscar and me?”

  Of all the stories Lucy’s father had told her about Aunt Lavonne — and there were many because her father and his brother Byron had grown up in the town where Aunt Lavonne lived — Lucy’s favorite by far was the story of Oscar.

  Oscar was Aunt Lavonne’s older brother. He had disappeared when he was fourteen years old, way back in 1914, when Aunt Lavonne was a little girl and people drove around in Model T’s. Aunt Lavonne had woken up one summer night and found an ocean surrounding their house in Iowa. That was the most interesting part of the story, for there shouldn’t have been an ocean — there weren’t oceans in Iowa — and Aunt Lavonne’s house stood on a hill overlooking the Missouri River valley. But there the ocean had been, according to Aunt Lavonne, with waves rolling right up the front lawn. Oscar had been pushing a rowboat into the surf. She had run outside to stop him. She had called out to him, but he hadn’t listened. He had rowed out to sea, and nobody had ever seen him again.

  Unfortunately, the sea around the house had vanished. Nobody had believed Aunt Lavonne’s account of what had happened, not even when Oscar’s rowboat came back a month later. Lucy really loved that part of the story — how one morning when the family was sitting at the table having breakfast, the hired girl had come in from gathering eggs, wondering why in heaven’s name there was a rowboat sitting on the front lawn. Lavonne was sure it was the boat Oscar had rowed away in, but her parents hadn’t listened. They believed that Oscar had run away. Eventually, they decided that he must have met with some sort of accident, that he must have died.

  Lucy’s father handed her the letter. “You’ll see where she mentions you. She wanted us to come visit. I thought maybe we could go this summer, after classes ended. But now . . .”

  Looking up at him, Lucy saw a sad expression on her father’s face. Then she began to read:

  Dear Shel,

  I’ve just counted the years since we last saw each other. Would you believe I counted ten? I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s about time you come for a visit!

  When you come (notice that I say when, not if), I have something exciting to show you. It’s a new book about alchemy. New to me, that is, for I’m quite sure the book is much older than I dare to guess. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, Shel. The parts I’ve been able to translate have got me to thinking about a dream I had recently.

  You will remember, of course, that I told you Oscar said something to me across the water that night he disappeared, something I couldn’t quite hear. Well, a few nights ago, I dreamed it all again. I dreamed I was a girl, and I dreamed of that night. Only this time, I did hear what Oscar said, Shel. As clear as anything, I heard him say, “Lucy will explain!”

  In the dream, I called out, “Explain what? What will she explain?” But then Oscar was gone, and all I saw was the sea.

  The next thing I knew, I was lying awake in my bed, an old woman once more. I lay there for a while wondering what it meant. How could Lucy be involved? What was it that she could explain?

  Those questions have led me back to Oscar’s old composition books. I’ve been reading them again, even though I practically have them committed to memory by now. But that’s just it. Maybe they’re too familiar to me. I wonder if new eyes are needed — Lucy’s eyes, perhaps. Oh, I know it sounds crazy. But please write when you can, Shel, and let me know what you think.

  Love to you and Jean and Lucy,

  Lavonne

  The story of Oscar’s disappearance had always made Lucy feel shivery — magical. Now, finishing the letter, she got that same shivery feeling all over again. Aunt Lavonne had dreamed about her! What was it Oscar had said in the dream? Lucy will explain!

  She looked down at the letter, letting her eyes brush over the words. “What does she mean, a
book about alchemy?”

  “I’ve told you how she got involved in that sort of thing,” said her father.

  “You mean magic,” said Lucy. One of the most intriguing things about Aunt Lavonne (in Lucy’s opinion, at least) was that she had believed in magic. She had devoted her life to the study of it, reading every book she could find about spells, incantations, astrology, numerology, potions, and alchemy.

  “She always insisted that something magical had happened to Oscar,” said her father, shaking his head. “She never gave up on that belief.”

  Lucy could tell that her father didn’t think anything magical had happened. She felt a rush of compassion for Aunt Lavonne. How awful to have nobody believe you!

  She looked down at the letter. “What does she mean by ‘Oscar’s composition books’?” she asked.

  “Oscar wanted to be a writer. He wrote all the time. Aunt Lavonne had notebooks filled with his writings. Sort of a journal, really.”

  “Could there be some kind of clue in them?”

  “It’s hard to believe Aunt Lavonne would have missed something like that. She wasn’t exaggerating when she said she had those notebooks memorized.”

  “But she was too familiar with them. That’s what she says. Maybe there’s something there and she just couldn’t see it. It’s like she says; it needs new eyes,” said Lucy. My eyes, she thought. And for the first time that day, going to Iowa didn’t sound so bad after all.

  Lucy woke up suddenly. The station wagon was slowing down. The sun was much lower in the sky than she remembered, and it took her a moment to understand that she had been asleep. As the car stopped, then turned onto another highway, she asked, “Are we almost there?”

  Compared to how quickly they had packed up their belongings and moved out of their apartment, driving to their new home seemed to be taking forever. They had been on the road for three days, and Lucy was tired of sitting in the back of the station wagon along with all the boxes that hadn’t fit into the rented trailer that was rattling behind the car.