“I don’t know exactly because I’ve never seen it happen before. But given how quickly he lost two fingers, I imagine it won’t take long: a day, maybe two at most.”
One day. I felt my heart contract as the realization hit me. Even though I no longer wanted Darcy as a boyfriend, I still didn’t want to have to say goodbye to him forever. But from what Nick was saying, the man was about to slowly and painfully disintegrate, and I’d never get to see him or talk to him again. Then another thought occurred to me, and I let out a little gasp of relief.
“Hang on, once Darcy’s safely back in the book and restored to health, I can make him come out and visit me again, right?” I said. “I’ve done it once before, so surely you can teach me how to do it again?”
I glanced at Nick, who was staring at me with a strange expression on his face. Was that pity?
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Why are you looking me at like that?”
“You can’t read him out again, Zoe. Even if you worked out how to, it’s far too dangerous. That’s why my family had the rule about only allowing fictional characters to stay in our world for a short time.”
“I’m sorry, but how is me hanging out with one perfectly harmless character dangerous? I promise I won’t keep him here for more than two hours or have any more physical contact with him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
In response, Nick walked around to the other side of the desk and began flicking through one of the books lying on top of it. “Have you readHeatherwick Hall?”
“No, I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s by Emily Brontë. It was first published in 1850, two years after her death.”
I frowned. “Emily Brontë only wrote one novel,Wuthering Heights.” I knew this fact very well because Heathcliff had always been a guilty-secret book boyfriend.
Nick stopped flicking when he found what he was looking for and turned the book for me to see. It was obviously very old, the leather cover moth-eaten and the script on the pages faded and pale, but I could make out rows of spidery handwriting.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“My great-grandmother kept a record of every time she read a character out of a book. Take a look.”
I leaned closer and squinted to read the handwriting. After a moment, I began to make out familiar names.
16th December 1952: Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, W.M. Thakeray.
7th February 1953: Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, L. Carroll.
14th March 1953: Fitzwilliam Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, J. Austen.
I let out a small gasp at seeing Darcy’s name. “Your great-grandmother read out Darcy!”
“Of course she did. He’s been here many times before—not that he’d ever remember it; characters don’t retain any memories of their time in our world. But that’s not the point. Look again.”
I carried on reading and spotted a name I didn’t recognize.
2nd April 1953: Gideon Blackwood from Heatherwick Hall, E. Brontë.
I looked up from the page at Nick. “If your family has a copy of an unpublished Emily Brontë book, then you need to make it public. You can’t just sit on a novel by one of the most revered English authors; the rest of the world deserves to read it!”
“I don’t have a copy of the book. No one does.”
“But then, what happened to it?”
I saw Nick swallow before he answered. “In the earliest days of this shop, before Ava introduced her rules, Gideon Blackwood was one of the fictional characters she read out the most. I haven’t gone throughall her diary entries, but his name comes up on most pages, so she must have read him out hundreds of times. In fact, Ava read Gideon out so much that he started to fade. But she didn’t realize what that meant, so she carried on doing it, until eventually—”
He stopped, staring at me as he waited for me to draw my own conclusion.
“Gideon Blackwood disappeared,” I said.
Nick nodded slowly. “And when he disappeared, his book disappeared too. That’s why you’ve never heard ofHeatherwick Hall. The book is gone, along with all memories of it. It’s like it never existed.”
Chapter Twenty-One
