Spellbinder (16 page)

“I wasn’t going to lie!” insisted Steve. “I just don’t see the reason for all the secrecy.”

“He has a point,” said Belladonna.

“No, he doesn’t,” snapped the Sibyl. “This is the way it is done, the way it has always been done. When I lived in the caves of Cumae, I would write my prophesies on leaves and lay them out in front of me. Sometimes the wind would catch them and blow them about, but I never rearranged them.”

Belladonna thought that was just about the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard, but unlike Steve, she managed to keep her opinion to herself. She turned toward the door.

“Yes, well, we’d better go. It must be nearly teatime and my aunt will be worried.”

“Your aunt has greater worries than whether you are home in time for tea,” intoned the Sibyl. “She reads the runes and knows the truth.”

“Oh, great, she’s at it again,” said Steve, exasperated.

Belladonna smiled back in what she hoped was the right direction, then they both walked toward the stairs.

“Wait!” cried the Sibyl suddenly. “There’s more. . . .”

Steve rolled his eyes and they both turned back.

“As were the nights at the great Well of Wyrd,

So were the dragons far Cathay feared,

Likewise the worthies renowned of the sages,

The thrones of the dark queen,

And the stones of the ages.”

Belladonna and Steve waited, hoping against hope that there’d be a bit more. Something that might make sense.

“That’s it,” said the Sibyl finally. “Yes, that’s definitely it. That one is separate, by the way, not part of the first one. So you got two.”

“Whoopee,” muttered Steve.

“Well, it’s more than any of the ancients got. You might show a bit of gratitude.”

“Oh, we are grateful,” said Belladonna, smiling. “We really are. Thank you very much. Umm . . .”

She hesitated a moment. She wanted to ask about Dr. Ashe. He had known about the Sibyl; perhaps the Sibyl knew something about him.

“Yes?” hissed the Sibyl at her ear.

“The man who told us about you . . . that you were here, I mean. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about him.”

“I have given you two oracles and still you ask for more?” The voice was beginning to sound distinctly irritated.

“It’s just that . . . well, he’s dead and so we don’t . . .”

“You speak with the Dead?”

Now she was impressed. Steve stepped forward, clearly feeling a lot more confident.

“Constantly,” he said. “Yakking away with them all the time. Get told off for it. Sent to the Head and everything.”

“His name is Ashe,” said Belladonna quickly, before things got out of hand, “Dr. Ashe. He lived here in town before he died. He was an alchemist.”

“He was a charlatan,” boomed the Sibyl.

“Told you so,” whispered Steve.

“But he told us you were here and he told us about the amulet and he was right about those. It’s just that he said he needed it to discover why the other ghosts had vanished and why the doors between our world and the Other Side were closing, and I just wondered . . .”

“I will not waste my oracles on a dead man,” humphed the Sibyl, now clearly back in her stone chair. “For him I will give you but one word:
phatês
. Now go.”

“Thank you,” said Belladonna. “Could you translate that? Um . . . we don’t study Greek here and—”

“Well, now would seem to be a good time to start.”

“Right. Well, thank you again.”

They turned toward the stairs again.

“Why don’t you take the lift?” said the Sibyl. “It’s faster.”

There was a muffled
ping
, and a piece of wall near the stone chair slid slowly open. Belladonna and Steve sidled suspiciously toward it. Inside, the floor was tiled in onyx and terra-cotta and the walls were honey-colored marble. They stepped inside and the door closed with a whoosh. Next to the door was a small obsidian panel with four buttons marked
O, G, U
, and
S
. They stared at them for a moment.

“Which do you suppose it is?” asked Steve.

“No idea,” said Belladonna. “
O
is probably for ‘Oracle.’ What about
G
?”

“For ‘Ground’?”

Belladonna nodded and Steve pushed the button. For a while nothing seemed to be happening, then they became aware of the distant sound of rushing water. This was followed by a jerk that sent them staggering and a slow grinding sound as the lift began its painfully slow ascent.

“The stairs would’ve been faster than this,” said Steve.

Belladonna had to agree, though sitting in the lift was a lot less hard on the knees. She slid down the wall and sat on the cold tile floor, allowing her black hair to fall in front of her face while she thought. The Sibyl’s
oracles were obtuse, but she had a feeling they should be able to figure them out. Perhaps the key was to break them down, line by line, like they did with poetry in English lit.

“We’re here.”

The sound of rushing water had dwindled to a steady drip and the lift had stopped moving. The doors showed no inclination to open, however. Belladonna looked up at the panel.

“There’s usually a button for opening the doors.”

Steve peered at the panel; there was nothing except the four buttons. He began to run his hands over the walls, searching for another hidden switch. Belladonna watched for a while, then stood up and turned toward the door.

“Hoige tas thuras,”
she said.

The doors slid slowly open.

Steve looked at her. “That was Greek, wasn’t it?”

“I think so,” said Belladonna uncertainly.

“Do you know what you said?”

“Not really. But I was thinking about telling it to open the door.”

She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach that the expression on Steve’s face did nothing to help. She tried to remember if she’d perhaps heard somebody say the same thing, on a travel show on television, perhaps. But she knew she hadn’t. She had simply thought of what she wanted to say and it had come out . . . just not in the language she’d expected.

She stepped out of the lift, anxious to be doing something else. But instead of the sunny library, she found herself in a small, dark room.

“Where are we now?”

Steve followed her out, and as soon as he was clear of the doors, the lift whisked shut and the whole thing vanished into the dirt floor of wherever they were. He jumped back and fell over something lying on the floor.

“Great,” he muttered.

He turned to look at what he’d tripped over. “Hang on . . .”

“What?” said Belladonna, her eyes slowly getting accustomed to the light.

Steve held up a small sack. Belladonna peered at it and could just make out the words “Grass Seed” on the side. As she did so, she became aware of slivers of light piercing the walls. They were in a wooden building.

At that moment the whole structure trembled as something hit the side of it hard, sending showers of dust from the roof. Steve turned, spotted the door, and flung it open, then he hesitated and glanced back at Belladonna.

“Wait here a moment,” he said.

Belladonna watched him go, then stepped back and peered through one of the cracks in the wall. The lift had brought them to the groundskeeper’s shed near the football field and she could see the pitch extending away past the goalposts to the clump of scrawny trees
at the end. Three boys were playing football and Steve was walking lazily toward them. One kicked the ball over and he expertly checked it in midair with his right foot and fired it back before joining them in kicking it about. Belladonna quickly got bored and began hunting through the shed for a piece of paper and something to write with. She found a scrap near the back where there was an old chair and a small table with the remains of a cup of tea, several old lottery tickets, a notepad, and a pencil. She sat down and wrote out the Sibyl’s prophecies. She stared at them for a few moments. It was pretty clear that the first one was the one that was about the Draconian Amulet, so she decided to concentrate on that for the moment. It did make sense, in a way. It was just that it didn’t seem to reveal anything much about the location of the amulet. It didn’t even mention it.

“
Phatês
,” she whispered the word, then closed her eyes and whispered it again, “
Phatês
.”

She had asked the doors to open in Greek. Perhaps if she said this word out loud, then the meaning would come to her.

“
Phatês
.”

Nothing. It was just another strange word.

After a while she started doodling on the notepad and wondering when Steve was coming back and whether it was alright for her to go out now. That was when she realized that she could no longer hear the
game outside. She crept up to the door and peeked out. There was no one there except the black birds in the trees.

She sighed, closed the door to the shed behind her, and trudged across the field. She was used to being forgotten about, but she had thought that, what with the Land of the Dead, the giant beetles, and the Sibyl, Steve might have remembered where she was.

Dusk was beginning to draw in by the time she got home. At first she thought Aunt Deirdre was still out—the house was dark and the central heating hadn’t been turned on—but then she noticed the sliver of light beneath the kitchen door. She walked back and pushed the door open, in full expectation of a telling off for being out so late, but the Aunt Deirdre who looked up from the kitchen table wasn’t the matter-of-fact woman who had sped off this morning.

Her face was pale and her eyes ringed with shadow. The table in front of her was littered with newspapers, from the local three-sheeter to every national paper and all the international news magazines.

“Aunt Deirdre . . .” Belladonna’s voice faded away.

Her aunt waved a thin hand over the papers. “It has begun.”

“W
HAT DO YOU
mean?” Belladonna tried to keep the fear out of her voice, but the idea of Aunt Deirdre falling apart scared her more than she had imagined.

She needed to be able to rely on someone having their feet firmly on the ground and brooking no nonsense, and until this moment, Deirdre had seemed just the sort of person who would be unfazed by huge black hounds, alchemists, or doors to the Other Side. Right now, though, she looked as though she hadn’t slept for days: Dark rings circled her eyes and some of her mascara had smudged where she’d been rubbing them.

“Aunt Deirdre . . .” She thought her aunt hadn’t heard her, but Deirdre’s eyes flashed with irritation as she gestured at the papers and magazines.

“This!” she snapped. “This! Can’t you see?”

Belladonna looked down at the papers. At first they just seemed like a random collection of newspapers and
magazines, but as she looked at them she noticed that they were all open at pages that reported accidents, from last week’s train crash to minor traffic incidents.

“Accidents,” she said hastily, not wanting to upset Aunt Deirdre further, “they’re all accidents. But what does it mean?”

Aunt Deirdre sighed heavily, hauled herself up, and poured herself a glass of wine. “It’s the ghosts,” she said.

“The ghosts?” said Belladonna, not understanding at all. “What do they have to do with accidents?”

“Didn’t Elspeth teach you anything?” demanded Deirdre. “It’s not like it’s new information. The Greeks knew all about it.”

Belladonna stared at her blankly.

“The Ancient Greeks,” said Deirdre irritably. “Honestly, what on earth do they teach you at that school? The Ancient Greeks took ghosts seriously; some of their greatest philosophers wrote extensively on the subject. Plato? Aristotle? I take it you have heard of them?”

“Yes, but—”

“Well, they believed that ghosts prevented accidents. And, as it happens, they were right.”

Belladonna considered this. “How?” she asked skeptically.

Aunt Deirdre shrugged and sat down at the table again. “Sometimes they’re actually seen,” she said, “but usually it’s just a feeling. You know, a feeling that you
should sit up, pay attention, a feeling that something’s about to happen.”

“I didn’t know they did anything,” muttered Belladonna.

“Of course they do something,” snapped Deirdre. “What would be the point of them otherwise?”

Belladonna bit her lower lip and stared at Aunt Deirdre. She’d had just about all she could take of people treating her like she was an idiot just because she didn’t know some arcane fact or ancient language that, in the normal run of things, she would never need.

“Well, if that’s the case,” she said finally, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice and not really succeeding, “why did Mum and Dad die? I mean there are loads of accidents every day. Do they pick and choose?”

“Don’t be obtuse,” snapped Aunt Deirdre, finishing her glass of wine and pouring herself another. “Ghosts don’t prevent
all
accidents, any more than doctors can prevent
all
diseases. They reduce them. Prevent epidemics, if you like. But now they’ve gone, and the number of accidents is skyrocketing. And that’s not the worst thing.”