Chapter Twenty
“What the hell happened?”
I grabbed his hand to check that this wasn’t some weird joke and Darcy was hiding his fingers from me. But no, where his little and ring fingers should have been was nothing but air, the skin on his knuckle as smooth as if they had never existed.
“It is unclear,” Darcy said. “Last night when I tried to carry some beer glasses, I noticed something amiss with these two fingers, as if they had somehow become weaker, and then this morning I struggled to dress myself and hold a knife. But it was not until moments ago that I discovered they had gone altogether.”
“Does it hurt?”
“It has started to become a little uncomfortable, yes.”
“Has anything like this ever happened to you before?”
Darcy shook his head. “I assure you, no appendage of mine has ever disappeared prior to today.”
I racked my brain, trying to work out what could be going on. And then Nick’s words flashed through my mind.
We need to get him back before the damage is irreparable.
“Shit, Darcy! We need to get you to London, now.”
* * *
The return train journey seemed to take forever.
Darcy sat silently next to the window, staring out of it with his right hand held limply in his lap.
He didn’t make conversation or ask me what I’d been going to tell him earlier, so I was left to wallow in my own increasingly panicky thoughts.
Why the hell hadn’t Nick told me that bits of Darcy would start to disappear?
I might have taken his warnings a little more seriously if I’d known exactly what “damage” he’d been referring to.
I felt my stomach roll again, and I took a deep breath.
It was going to be OK. I just needed to take Darcy to Baskerville Books, and then Nick would be able to save him before he lost any more body parts.
I pulled out my phone and messaged Steve, asking him to send me Nick’s number. Once I had it, I fired off a quick message to Nick, telling him I urgently needed to see him. He replied almost immediately with no questions or accusations, just two sentences.
Come to Baskerville Books as soon as you can. Bring Darcy and the book.
When we got to Paddington Station, I tried to lead Darcy to the Underground, but he was looking a little unsteady on his feet, so I hailed a taxi instead.
He closed his eyes for the journey, and I sat there bouncing my foot on the floor, cursing every traffic light and pedestrian crossing.
It was almost 4:00 p.m. by the time we got back to the flat, and Darcy was looking quite pale.
“We won’t stop here long,” I told him as I helped him up the stairs. “I just need to grab something, and then we can go straight to see a man who will hopefully be able to help you.”
I let us into the flat and rushed straight to the bedroom, where I’d left the stolen copy of Pride and Prejudice. When I ran back out to the living room, I found Darcy half sitting, half lying on the sofa.
“Sorry, Darcy, but there’s no time to rest now.”
He looked up at me, his face gray. “My apologies, but I fear I am unable to go any further at present.”
“What’s wrong? Has anything else disappeared?”
“No, but I am deeply fatigued and in need of rest.”
“You can’t now. I need to get you to Baskerville Books.”
He frowned. “Why a bookshop? Surely a physician would be of more use.”
“I don’t have time to explain. Please just come with me.”
In response, he sank back into the sofa farther and closed his eyes. “I require a short nap, which I believe will restore me so that I may continue this journey with you.”
I sighed and put the book down so I could try to pull him up, but the man was a deadweight. I let out a growl of frustration.
“OK, you rest and I’ll go to the bookshop and bring Nick back here,” I said as I let go of Darcy’s arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to fix this, I promise.”
I’m not sure I’ve ever run as fast as I did to Kentish Town Tube station.
There wasn’t a direct train to Leicester Square, but rather than wait for the right one, I decided to face the hell of changing branches at Camden Town station along with hundreds of lost tourists, which should give you some idea of how desperate I was.
By the time I got to Baskerville Books, I was panting and sweaty from having run all the way there.
I pushed the door open and charged into the shop.
“Nick, are you here?”
“Zoe?”
I turned to see him standing by the shelves to my left, holding a pile of books.
Even in the midst of my blind panic, I couldn’t help noticing how good he looked: how his shirt hung perfectly from his broad shoulders, how his large hands cradled the books, and the dazzling blue of his eyes.
And then I mentally slapped myself for ogling him while Mr. Darcy was literally disintegrating in my flat.
“Where’s Darcy?” Nick asked.
“Back at mine. He was too weak to come here.”
Nick didn’t say anything as he moved behind me to lock the front door, then crossed the shop floor toward the door behind the counter.
Unsure what I was supposed to do, I followed him through into a small, windowless room, the walls lined with shelves full of old books.
There was an antique wooden desk in the middle of the room, on which lay several large leather-bound volumes, an old-fashioned hourglass, and a picture frame.
I just had time to register a photo of a pretty redheaded woman in the frame before Nick slammed it face down on the desk and turned to look at me.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
“Darcy’s started to disappear.”
I’d wondered if he’d show surprise on hearing this sentence, but he didn’t so much as blink.
“When did it start?” he asked.
“He said his fingers started feeling a bit funny yesterday, and then two of them disappeared earlier today.”
“And it’s only his fingers so far?”
“What do you mean, so far? What the hell’s going on, Nick? People don’t just lose their fingers for no obvious reason.”
“But he’s not a person, is he?” Nick said matter-of-factly. “He’s a fictional character.”
“Whatever, I need you to tell me how I can stop it. Is it because he and I kissed?” I saw something flicker across Nick’s face as I said this, but he hid it quickly.
“Or is it because he was too far away from the book he came out of? You have to tell me what’s going on so I can make sure it never happens again. ”
“You need to bring him here.”
“I tried, but he was too tired. Can you come to my flat and mend him there? Do you have some kind of magic book medicine?”
Nick was watching me, his eyes intent on my face. “There’s no way of mending him, Zoe. Mr. Darcy is starting to fade, and unless you read him back into Pride and Prejudice soon, he’ll disappear completely.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed. “What do you mean, he’ll disappear completely?”
“Exactly what I said. Fictional characters can’t survive in our world, and parts of him will continue disappearing until there’s nothing left. That’s why I was so freaked out last night, because Darcy has already been here way longer than he should have been. You’ve broken all the rules.”
“Hang on, I didn’t even know how this weird book magic worked until last night, let alone that there was a rule book about the stuff,” I said. “Who came up with them?”
“My great-grandmother, Ava. Back when she owned this shop, she made a strict set of rules. Readings had to take place within the walls of Baskerville Books, characters were only allowed to stay here for up to two hours at a time, and there was to be absolutely no physical contact between humans and fictional characters.”
I grimaced, seeing as I’d broken every one of Great-Granny Ava’s rules.
“The other rule was that my family had to keep what they did top secret. They weren’t allowed to advertise their skills, and they could only offer help to customers who they deemed to be in desperate need of their services: people who were in some kind of crisis and who my relatives knew could be helped by a particular fictional character. ”
As Nick said this, I thought back to the romance book club Lily had mentioned and the Reddit post I’d seen with people asking how to join it. Was this what they’d been talking about: a secretive service offered by Nick’s female relatives to help readers meet their book heroes?
“Could I talk to one of your female relatives?” I asked him. “Maybe one of them will know how to stop Darcy fading.”
“I’m afraid there’s no one left to talk to,” Nick said.
“I’m an only child, as was my mum, and my only living female relative is a great-aunt who’s ninety-eight and in a hospice, so she’s not in a position to help.
I honestly thought the magic had disappeared when I lost Mum, but somehow you’ve not only managed to bring Darcy to life, but you’ve kept him here in London for ten days, which by all accounts should be impossible. ”
“Except he’s fading now. How long will he…” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
“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 read Heatherwick Hall?”
“No, I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s by Emily Bronte. It was first published in 1850, two years after her death.”
I frowned. “Emily Bronte 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. Bronte.
I looked up from the page at Nick. “If your family has a copy of an unpublished Emily Bronte 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 through all 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 of Heatherwick Hall. The book is gone, along with all memories of it. It’s like it never existed.”