Spellbinder (11 page)

“It’s beautiful!”

He grinned. Then suddenly reached forward, grabbed her arm, hauled her back into the wings, and turned the light off. As he did so, there was the sound of a door opening and a light in the main theatre came on.

“Quiet!” he hissed. “Don’t move!”

“What is it again?” Steve’s mother stood in the narrow doorway and called back to the shop in the front lobby.

“The CF-976X!” yelled his Dad from the shop. “Left side! There should be three!”

His mother strode down what was once the center aisle, muttering to herself. Belladonna peeked through the folds of what remained of the red velvet curtain and watched as the small, bullet-shaped woman examined the stacks. She had too-black hair, dragged back into a ponytail that seemed to be chiefly made of artificial hair. Ebony curls notwithstanding, there was something steely about her, and Belladonna could understand Steve’s desire to stay under her radar. She finally
found the box, or Belladonna assumed she had, because she had just begun to make her way back up the aisle when Steve grabbed Belladonna’s arm again and yanked her back into the wings. The light in the theatre went out and the door clicked shut.

Belladonna wrenched herself free, “You didn’t have to grab me! She couldn’t see!”

“Shhh!”
Steve was still whispering and genuinely worried. “She doesn’t have to. If I’m doing something wrong, she just knows it. Why couldn’t you just do what I said?”

They stared at each other angrily. Belladonna knew he was regretting ever showing her the theatre. She took a deep breath.

“So,” she said, trying to sound calm, “where is it?”

Steve just stared at her.

“I know you want me to go, so the sooner you show me the door, the sooner I will.”

He nodded, flicked the light back on, made his way to the back of the stage, and yanked a large tarpaulin to the floor. Underneath was what looked like a stack of boards of various sizes.

“What’s that?”

“Scenery,” said Steve, still irritated, “it’s scenery. There are bound to be some doors.”

He was right. Belladonna couldn’t help smiling—it seemed so obvious now. She ran over and the two of them began pulling the stack apart as quietly as they
could, leaning each flat back until they could see what it was and then resting it on the floor. It was dirty work, and the further they got into the stack, the more cobwebs, spiders, and unidentifiable multilegged creatures there were. Belladonna was gritting her teeth: She wasn’t going to squeal (even though every cell in her body wanted nothing more) and she wasn’t going to be the first one to drop anything.

There were doors in the stack, of course. Blue ones, Victorian ones, green ones, inside doors, outside doors, hotel doors, even some stable doors, but it was beginning to look increasingly unlikely that there was a red door at all, let alone one with the number seventy-three on it.

By the time they reached the last three flats in the pile, Belladonna’s face was streaked with dust and dirt, and her long black hair looked worse than ever. Her lips were pressed close together as she strained to lift the heavy flats, her concentration entirely focused on the job at hand. How could it not be here? It had seemed like the perfect place. She glanced up and caught Steve staring at her sympathetically. That was worse than anything—if there was one thing that raised her hackles and made her temper flare it was the thought that other people were feeling sorry for her.

She glared at him and leaned on the stack, even ignoring the enormous spider that promptly ran across her fingers.

“You know,” he said finally, “they repainted these things all the time. The door could be here, it could just be a different color.”

“But I’d know,” she said, her voice giving away her disappointment. “I’d know. I just thought it would be here. I was sure.”

She stopped trying to pretend to be tough and looked around the ruined theatre.

“It just seemed like the place.”

“It is!”

“It just felt right, I don’t know. Looking around, it looks so—”

“No,” Steve was pulling on her arm again. “I mean it really is!”

She turned around. There, lying faceup, was the door: a red door with the number seventy-three painted in gold on it. It was set into a piece of “wall” painted to look like it was pasted with flowered wallpaper. The whole thing was covered in years of spiderwebs, mold, and dust. Belladonna stared at it.

“That’s it,” she whispered. “Stand it up! Can we stand it? Will it stand?”

“Shhhh!”
hissed Steve. “It should stand. Help me get it out.”

They dragged the door to the middle of the stage and heaved it upright, then Belladonna held it while Steve went around the back and pulled out two hinged legs that allowed it to stay up on its own.

“How do you know this stuff?” she asked.

“Dunno,” he shrugged. “My Dad watches a lot of documentaries.”

He walked around to the front. “Not much to look at,” he said, and pushed the door open.

Belladonna wasn’t sure what she was expecting when the door opened, but it certainly wasn’t what she saw—nothing. The door just swung stiffly ajar and revealed the back wall. She walked around it. It was just an old piece of scenery: cheap wood and struts at the back and paint and plaster at the front. The door swung shut behind her as she walked through it to the front.

She stood looking at it and tried not to feel disappointed, but the feeling welled up anyway, along with the realization that she had been foolish to believe that she could find something that her Aunt Deirdre, Miss Parker, and her grandmother had all failed to locate. So what if the ghosts were gone; for most people they didn’t exist anyway. She’d been lucky to have her parents around for so long after they were dead.

Somewhere inside she’d known that one day they would go. She should leave this sort of thing to the grown-ups.

“Well,” she said, trying to sound cheery, “we tried. I’d better get home and get cleaned up before Aunt Deirdre gets back.”

“Belladonna . . .” Steve was standing behind her, and his voice sounded strange. “I saw the dog.”

“Of course you saw the dog,” she said flatly. “I was touching you.”

“No,” he seemed hesitant to admit it. “I saw the dog. After you fell. It vanished, and then it came back.”

She turned slowly and looked at him.

“And this morning, there were black birds. Big ones. In the trees at the end of the football pitch. They’re like the dog, aren’t they?”

She nodded slowly.

“I think you should open the door,” he said.

“But you—”

“I think it has to be you.”

She turned back to the door, stepped toward it, and reached forward to push the handle. The next second it was suddenly open, though she could not recall touching it; her hand was still extended forward and her mouth was wide open, the last syllable of an unknown word dying in the air. Steve was staring at her.

“What . . . what did you say?” he stammered.

“I didn’t say anything,” she said, knowing it wasn’t true. “What happened?”

“As soon as you touched the door, your head flew back and you said . . . you whispered something. It wasn’t English . . . or any other language I’ve ever heard of.”

Belladonna looked at him, then turned to the door and stepped through. It was no good. The other side was just the same—the back wall of the theatre and the rest of the scenery flats. She stepped back.

“Well, whatever I said, it didn’t work. It’s just the same.”

Now Steve looked like he had that day when he’d seen Elsie, his first ghost.

“What?” she asked.

He walked past her and stepped through the door. Belladonna watched, unbelieving. She ran around the back of the flat. Then back to the front.

He stepped back through the door.

“You . . . you . . .” She couldn’t get it out.

“I vanished.”

“But it looks just the same on . . . on . . .”

“It isn’t, though, is it?”

“No,” Belladonna’s voice fell away as she realized that she must have spoken the Words of Power without ever knowing what they were.

“It’s the Other Side.”

T
HEY LOOKED AT
each other for a moment, then took a deep breath and stepped through the door together. Belladonna glanced back. Everything really did seem the same. It was all rather disappointing. For some reason she had expected . . . well,
something
when you crossed over. A flash of light, perhaps, or maybe some fog. Were they really in the Land of the Dead?

“Belladonna!” Steve was still whispering, but there was an urgency to his voice. “Come here! Look at this!”

He was standing at the front of the stage. Belladonna joined him and peered into the darkness. At first she didn’t see anything different, just the dark empty theatre, but then she realized that it was different. Very different.

Where boxes of electronics had been stacked, there was now row upon row of red velvet seats. The balcony looked freshly painted and the cherubs and garlands were gleaming with fresh gilding. She looked up and
saw that the ragged remains of the stage curtains had vanished and been replaced with billowing swathes of heavy gold-fringed velvet. It seemed that at any moment the audience would arrive and the play begin.

They stood in silence for a while, then Steve stepped back and glanced toward the dressing rooms.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s see what it’s like outside.”

Belladonna followed as he led the way through the theatre to the back door. He hesitated for a second, then pushed it slowly open.

Sunshine streamed into the dark corridor as they stepped outside. Belladonna didn’t know exactly what she had expected the Land of the Dead to look like, but it certainly wasn’t this. It was just . . . ordinary. The back alley behind the theatre seemed to be the same back alley as the one in the real world, and as they strolled around the side of the building to the High Street, it certainly seemed as if the only difference was the sunshine. When they reached the High Street, however, another change became apparent.

“There’s no one here,” whispered Belladonna.

“No,” said Steve, “and what’s with that tree?”

Belladonna followed his gaze. Sure enough, up at the far end of the High Street, where there should have been a statue of Nelson with a rather run-down flower stall, a newspaper stand, and several moth-eaten pigeons clustered around its base, there was instead an enormous tree.

Without really knowing why, they began walking
toward it. There was something noble about it, something that Belladonna felt she should know but couldn’t quite recall. She glanced at Steve, but all his attention was on the tree as it slowly loomed higher and higher above their heads. It had seemed large from a distance, but as they got closer, the sheer bulk of the thing became apparent. The massive, knotted trunk was easily the width of a small car and the colossal gnarled roots seemed to plunge into the earth like giant fingers into clay. Above their heads, sinuous branches stretched and curled upward and out, spreading over the street in every direction, while bright green leaves rustled in the gentle breeze, filtering the sunlight and cooling the air beneath.

“I thought you’d never get here!”

Belladonna looked around. She recognized the voice, but there was no one to be seen.

“Up here!”

Belladonna and Steve looked up, and there, perched on one of the lower branches, was Elsie. She looked just as she had before, the long skirt, neat button boots, and big bow holding her long curls back, but this time she was a lot more solid. She smiled at Belladonna, but her bravado couldn’t conceal the worry in her eyes.

“Hello!”

“Elsie!” said Belladonna. “What on earth are you doing up there?”

“Sitting,” said Elsie, not very helpfully.

“Is that . . .” Steve lowered his voice suddenly. “Is
that the girl from the photograph? The one who died on the tennis court?”

“Yes,” said Elsie proudly, “though that article didn’t mention that I’d just won.”

Steve looked at her for a moment. It was a bit like having the television answer back.

“Well, of course you won,” he said eventually. “Why else would you have tried to jump over the net?”

“What’s your name?”

“Steve.”

“You seem to have sense.”

“I have more sense than to try to jump over a tennis net,” said Steve.

Elsie’s smile faded.

“Darwin at work,” he grinned.

Belladonna smiled, then tried to pretend she wasn’t. Elsie stood up on her branch and yanked off a bunch of leaves in irritation. A squirrel raced down from the topmost branches and chattered at her in an unmistakably angry fashion.

“Oh, shut up,” said Elsie.

“What’s that?” asked Belladonna.

“It’s a squirrel, obviously,” said Elsie sulkily. “There are usually three women here. And a snake. The squirrel is all that’s left. Everyone else is gone.”

She jumped down onto the ground with that kind of graceful ease that naturally sporty people always seem to have. The squirrel waited for a moment, as if it wanted to be sure that all arboreal violence was at
an end, then darted back up to the top of the tree. Belladonna and Steve glanced at each other.