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through the doorway, and without a word Meggie would sit down beside him on the chair that was always ready for her and watch him at work, just as she had done even before she could read. She loved watching his hands free a book from its shabby dress, separate stained pages from each other, part the threads holding together a damaged quire, or soak rag paper to mend a sheet of paper worn thin. It was never long before Mo turned and asked her a question of some kind: Did she like the color he’d chosen for a linen binding, did she agree that the paper pulp he’d mixed for repairs had turned out slightly too dark? It was Mo’s way of apologizing, of saying: Don’t let’s quarrel, Meggie; let’s forget what we said just now.
    But that was no good today. Because he hadn’t disappeared into his workshop, he’d gone away to see some book collector or other and give the collector’s printed treasures a new lease on life.
    This time he wouldn’t come to her with a present to make up for the quarrel – a book he’d found in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, or a bookmark decorated with blue jay feathers found in Elinor’s garden. .
    So why couldn’t she have been reading some other book when he came into her room?
24
    “Good heavens, Meggie, you seem to have nothing in your head but those notebooks!” he had said angrily. It had been the same every time, these last few months, whenever he had found her like that in her room – lying on the rug, deaf and blind to all that went on around her, eyes glued to the words with which she had written down what Resa told her – tales of what she had seen
    “there,” as Mo bitterly called it.
    There.
    Inkworld was the name Meggie gave to the place of which Mo spoke so slightingly and her mother sometimes with such longing. Inkworld, after the book about it, Inkheart. The book was gone, but her mother’s memories were as vivid as if not a day had passed since she was there –
    in that world of paper and printer’s ink where there were fairies and princes, water-nymphs, fire-elves, and trees that seemed to grow to the sky.
    Meggie had sat with her mother for countless days and nights, writing down what Resa’s fingers told her. Resa had left her voice behind in the Inkworld, so she talked to her daughter either with pencil and paper or with her hands, telling the story of those years – those terrible magical years, she called them. Sometimes she also drew what her eyes had seen but her tongue could no longer describe: fairies, birds, strange flowers, conjured up on paper with just a few strokes, yet looking so real that Meggie almost believed she had seen them, too.
    At first Mo himself had bound the notebooks in which Meggie wrote down Resa’s memories –
    and each binding was more beautiful than the last – but a time came when Meggie noticed the anxiety in his eyes as he watched her reading them, completely absorbed in the words and pictures. Of course she understood his uneasiness; after all, for years he had lost his wife to this world made of words and paper. How could he like it if his daughter thought of little else? Oh yes, Meggie understood Mo very well, yet she couldn’t do as he asked – close the books and forget the Inkworld for a while.
    Perhaps her longing for it wouldn’t have been quite as strong if the fairies and brownies had still been around, all those strange creatures they had brought back from Capricorn’s accursed village. But none of them lived in Elinor’s garden now. The fairies’ empty nests still clung to the trees, and the burrows that the brownies had dug were still there, but their inhabitants were gone. At first Elinor thought they had run away or been stolen, but then the ashes had been found. They covered the grass in the garden, fine as dust, gray ashes, as gray as the shadows from which Elinor’s strange guests had once appeared. And Meggie had realized that there was no return from death, even for creatures made of nothing