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Informationen zum Autor John Barrowman has appeared onstage, including on London's West End, and on-screen. He is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who and Torchwood, as well as appearances on Desperate Housewives, and Scandal. He is currently a series regular on Arrow. Carole E. Barrowman is a journalist and a professor of English in Wisconsin. Klappentext Lots of twins have a special connection! but 12-year-old Matt and Emily Calder are able to bring art to life and enter paintings at will. Their extraordinary abilities are highly sought after! particularly by a secret group who want to access the terrors called Hollow Earth. ONE THE MONASTERY OF ERA MINA AUCHINMURN ISLE, WEST COAST OF SCOTLAND MIDDLE AGES The book the old monk was illuminating began with these words: THIS Book is about the nature of beasts. Gaze upon these pages at your peril, The old monk yawned, his chin dropped to his chest, and his eyes fluttered shut. The quill dropped from his fingers, leaving a trail of ink like tiny teardrops across the folio. He was working on one of the book’s later pages, a miniature of a majestic griffin with talons clutching an imposing capital G . As the old monk nodded off, the griffin leaped from its place at the corner of the page and darted across the parchment. In its haste to flee, the beast brushed its coarse wings across the old monk’s fingers. The monk’s eyes snapped open. In an instant, he thumped his gnarled fist onto the griffin’s slashing tail, pinning the beast to the page. He glared at it. The griffin snorted angrily and scratched its talons deep into the thin vellum of the page. The monk shook off his exhaustion and focused his mind, and in a rush of color and light the griffin was once again gripping the G at the top of the page. Glancing behind him, the old monk spotted the bare feet of his young apprentice poking out from under the wooden frame that held the drying skins to make parchment. Something will have to be done, the monk thought. When he was sure the image was settled on the page, the old monk crouched to retrieve his quill. He was angry with himself. He would have to be punished for this terrible lapse in concentration and go without his evening meal. He patted his soft, round belly. He’d survive the loss. But the boy. What to do about the boy now, given what he’d witnessed? That loss would hurt. The old monk did not relish having to train another apprentice. He had neither the strength nor the inclination for such a task. Not only that, but this boy had already demonstrated a great deal of skill as a parchment maker, and was a natural at knowing how long to soak the skins in lime and how to carefully clean and scrape them. And, at such a young age, he was already an elegant calligrapher and a brilliant alchemist with inks. Between the two of them these past months, they’d almost completed the final pages for The Book of Beasts . The boy and his talents would be sorely missed. The boy sensed that the old monk was debating his future. He could hear the weight of the monk’s ideas in his head, like a drumming deep inside his mind. He associated the sound with the monk because at its loudest, when the monk was concentrating hardest, the drumming was deep and full and round, much like the monk himself. The boy’s mother was the only other person the boy could sense in his head: a feeling not unwanted, although often peculiar. Not because he missed her. Far from it. His mother and his brothers and sisters still lived in the village outside the monastery gates. But his mother’s echo in his head had helped him escape her wrath, warranted or not, many times. Quickly the boy lifted his pestle and mortar and finished crushing the iron salts and acorns for his next batch of ink.
