FLEAS. THAT WAS WHAT THE STOCKINGS WERE FOR. Fleas.
In the short time it took to prepare for bed, Greg discovered many annoying and disgusting things about the seventeenth century. The lack of indoor plumbing, for one. Aramis had proudly told him Notre Dame had one of the finest “privies” in the world. Upon seeing it, Greg realized this meant the rest of the world’s plumbing was in very sorry shape. The toilet—which was all the way at the far end of the cathedral from Aramis’s room—was nothing more than a wooden seat suspended over a foul-smelling chute that dumped its mess directly into the Seine. Plus, the seat gave splinters. Then there was no toothpaste, or soap, or washcloths. . . . And not only was the bed merely a small thatch of hay, but Aramis expected to share it with him; there was nowhere else to sleep. Greg could hear rats scurrying through the walls, and bats fluttering in and out of the belfry.
But the fleas were the worst.
Despite Aramis’s warning, Greg tried to sleep without the stockings at first. Within a minute, he’d suffered a dozen bites on his legs. So he shimmied into the hot and itchy cloth, but the fleas simply migrated to other parts of his body: his arms, his torso, his neck, his ears. No bite was terribly painful, but they added up. And they didn’t stop coming.
Aramis, on the other hand, was completely inured to them. He was already snoring, despite the thousands of little mites siphoning his blood.
After a while, Greg gave up. Sleep was impossible.
Though his body was tired, his mind kept racing. How was he going to rescue his parents? And even if he did pull off that feat by some miracle, how would they ever get back to their own time? Unless . . . The crystal. Would that work? Dinicoeur had used it to bring them here, so maybe it could bring them back. Yes, they’d left the stone in the future—in the Louvre—but if it existed then, it probably existed now, in the past too, right? Only, finding it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it could very well be impossible. Greg didn’t even know where on the entire planet to begin looking for it. Which meant he and his parents might be stuck in a world of poorly made toilet seats and ravenous bloodsucking fleas forever.
Greg glanced at his watch. It was only ten. He rarely went to sleep before midnight, although Aramis had claimed this was the latest he’d ever stayed awake. This was what life was like before the advent of electricity. Without televisions, computers, video game consoles—or even lightbulbs—life took place while the sun was up. Once it went down, there wasn’t much to do except sleep. . . .
But there was something Greg could do. He could read Jacob Rich’s diary.
Greg slunk across the creaky wooden floor and sat by the garret’s single window. The half-moon had risen. Over the pitch-black nighttime city, it was surprisingly bright. A shaft of light spilled into the room, more than enough to read by. Greg emptied his pockets. In addition to the diary, he had a souvenir matchbook from his lunch at the restaurant at the Eiffel Tower, his plastic hotel card key, and a half-empty pack of gum. Oh, and forty euros’ worth of money that wouldn’t be minted for another four hundred years.
Last: his cell phone. Great, he thought dismally. A lot of good that would do him now. Back home, he couldn’t go five minutes without looking at it. Here, he’d forgotten it even existed. The battery was three-quarters drained. He turned it off. For a second, he was half tempted to hurl it out the window along with the rest of his meager and useless belongings, but he caught himself at the last second. He couldn’t afford to get frustrated or freak out. Time travel might only be temporary. If he came back, he’d need the money, his phone, and his room key.
“Just read the diary,” he told himself. That would distract him.
Unfortunately, after three minutes of poring over his great-great-grandfather’s polished scrawl, Greg yawned. It wasn’t just dull, it was the most deathly boring thing he’d ever read—the minutiae of running the family estate: how much hay had been baled for the horses, the construction of a new trough for the pigs, guest lists for dinner parties full of names that didn’t mean anything . . . Jacob did mention, more than once, that he was doing research into the family history and discovering “fascinating truths.” But he didn’t bother to share them. Eventually, even Jacob himself seemed to have grown bored. He simply stopped writing, leaving over half the pages in the book blank.
Greg scowled. His great-great-grandfather went through all that trouble to hide this? Why? Because he was embarrassed about how lame it was? Greg flipped back to the first lines again.
4/7
In any life, there comes a time for introspection. This is my time. Or more importantly, to detail what I know. Here now, perhaps more than ever, it is important that pen meets paper. This is the task I will undertake for thine eyes.
Now that he reread them, the lines struck him as odd. The writing was stilted, and if it was supposed to be an introduction, it raised more questions than it answered. Whose eyes did Jacob think he was writing for? And if the time had really come for introspection—or to detail what he knew—then why had he spent the whole diary writing about such uninteresting things? Maybe the boring stuff was somehow designed to camouflage something of more interest. . . .
Could it be a code?
Greg started reading with fresh eyes. But no matter how intently he studied the pages, he couldn’t deduce any hidden message within them. Either there wasn’t a code, or he didn’t have the slightest idea how to find it. Another yawn escaped his lips. Well. There was only one upside to finding such a mind-numbing piece of garbage. Greg tucked it back in his pocket, sprawled on the straw beside Aramis, and—despite the fleas—fell fast asleep.