Inkheart by Cornelia Funke Page A

letters there — and there's your secret message. The signpost pointing to the treasure. Who knows how long it will be before your father comes back? You'll have to do something to pass the time here."
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    Before Meggie could answer that one, Elinor bent to pick up a piece of paper lying on the carpet beside her bed. It was Meggie’s good-bye note. She must have dropped it when she saw the book in Elinor's arms.
    "What on earth's this?" asked Elinor, when she had read it, frowning. "You were planning to go and look for your father? Where, for heaven's sake? You're even more foolish than I thought."
    Meggie pressed Inkheart close to her. "Who else is going to look for him?" she said. Her lips began to tremble, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it.
    "Well then, we'll just have to go and look for him together!" replied Elinor, sounding annoyed.
    "But first let's give him a chance to come back. Do you think he'll be pleased to get back here only to find you've disappeared, gone looking for him in the big, wide world?"
    Meggie shook her head. Elinor's carpet was swimming before her eyes. A tear ran down her nose.
    "OK, that's all settled, then," growled Elinor, offering Meggie a cotton handkerchief. "Blow your nose and then we'll have breakfast."
    She wouldn't let Meggie out of the house before she had eaten a roll and swallowed a glass of milk. "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," she announced, buttering her own third slice of bread. "And what's more, when your father gets back I don't want you telling him I've been starving you. Like the wicked stepmother in the fairy tale, you know."
    An answer sprang to the tip of Meggie's tongue, but she swallowed it along with the last of her roll and took the book outside.
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    Chapter 1O – The Lion’s Den
    Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.
    – William Goldman, The Princess Bride
    Meggie sat on the bench behind the house. Dustfinger's burnt-out torches were still stuck in the ground beside it. She didn't usually hesitate so long before opening a book, but she was afraid of what was waiting for her inside this one. That was a brand-new feeling. She had never before been afraid of what a book would tell her. Far from it. Usually, she was so eager to let it lead her into an undiscovered world, one she had never been to before, that she often started to read at the most unsuitable moments. Both she and Mo often read at breakfast and, as a result, he had more than once taken her to school late. And she used to read under the desk at school, too, and late at night in bed until Mo pulled back the covers and threatened to take all the books out of her room so that she'd get enough sleep for once. Of course he would never have done such a thing, and he knew she knew he wouldn't, but for a few days after such a threat she would put her book under her pillow around nine in the evening and let it go on whispering to her in her dreams, so that Mo could feel he was being a really good father.
    She wouldn't have put this book under her pillow for fear of what it might whisper to her. For the very first time in her life Meggie wasn't sure that she wanted to enter the world waiting for her between the covers of a book. All the bad things that had happened over the last three days seemed to have come out of this book, and perhaps they were only a faint reflection of what still awaited her inside it.
    All the same, she had to begin. Where else was she to look for Mo? Elinor was right; there was no point in simply running off at random. She had to look for Mo's trail among the printed letters in Inkheart. But she had hardly opened it at the first page when she heard footsteps behind her.
    "You'll get sunstroke if you keep on sitting in the full sunlight," said a familiar voice.
    Meggie spun