Spellbinder (17 page)

“It isn’t?”

Aunt Deirdre shook her head and began folding up the newspapers and stacking them neatly on one side of the table. “Next will be sleep,” she said.

Belladonna had no idea what her aunt was talking
about, but she felt a great desire to say something, anything, to make her feel better. She crossed the kitchen and put the kettle on, rinsed out the teapot, and made a decision. She would tell her aunt about the door and the Other Side and Dr. Ashe and everything. It was clear that this was all too serious to keep to herself.

“Aunt Deirdre . . .” she began, but never got any further.

There was a creak and a bang as the front door opened and closed, and her grandmother marched into the kitchen, pulling off her coat.

“Here, Belladonna, dear,” she said, “hang this up, there’s a love.”

Belladonna took the coat and went back out to the hall to hang it on the pegs near the door. As she walked back, she overheard hurried whispering.

“What did you tell her that for?” hissed her grandmother. “You’re going to scare the life out of the poor thing!”

“Well, I didn’t tell her about the dreams,” whispered Deirdre.

“I should think not! You—oh, there you are!”

Belladonna slid into the kitchen and pretended she hadn’t heard anything. She knew it would be pointless to ask—they were both so determined to keep her in the dark. Anyone would think it wasn’t
her
parents who had vanished.

“I thought I’d come over and make you a proper hot meal,” said her grandmother, in her best cuddly-grandma
voice, “so why don’t you get on and do your homework and I’ll get to it.”

“It’s Saturday,” said Belladonna.

“So it is,” said her grandmother, and only a slight tightening of her jaw revealed that she was the least bit irritated by her granddaughter’s tone. “Well, off you go and watch the telly, then. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Belladonna sighed, trudged into the sitting room, and turned on the television. It was the omnibus edition of
Staunchly Springs
. She watched for a moment, but it made her miss her parents even more, though she did agree with her father that the patio didn’t seem like the best place to dispose of a body. She changed the channel and settled for some poorly produced science fiction series instead, while the clock on the mantel ticked its dawdling way through the early evening. After about half an hour, she pulled out the piece of paper with the oracle on it and went back to trying to work it out, but by the time she was called in to dinner, she was no closer to finding the Draconite Amulet than she’d been when the Sibyl had first uttered the words.

Dinner was anything but fun. Her grandmother and Aunt Deirdre were barely speaking to each other, while trying to pretend that everything was perfectly alright. They chatted endlessly about the weather and the state of the economy and asked Belladonna how she was enjoying school. Belladonna became increasingly sullen at their refusal to tell her even a little bit about what was going on.

On the other hand, she thought, with more than a little satisfaction, she had found the door and they hadn’t.

She finished her ice cream and announced that she was going upstairs to read.

Of course, once she was in her room she didn’t want to read at all. She went and sat in the window, watching the comings and goings on the street below. Families who had been out for drives rolled home, children played in the street, and Jimmy Tucker fell off his bike. Belladonna wondered if he would have tumbled if there’d been a ghost to whisper in his ear and whether the accident at the crossing this afternoon had anything to do with it. And what had her aunt meant about sleep?

The moon came out and then the stars. She looked up at them and thought about the night they’d flickered out. Her parents had known why, she was sure of that, but now there wasn’t anyone who would tell her the answers to the questions that were burning in her mind. She wanted to believe that Aunt Deirdre and her grandmother knew what they were doing, but something told her that they knew even less than she did. She picked at the ragged hem of one of the curtains and wondered what they thought they were protecting her from. What could possibly be worse than losing her parents twice? Tears sprang to her eyes at the thought of never seeing them again, but she wiped them away
impatiently. There was no time for that. She had to be strong. She had to
think
.

And apart from the whole ghost thing, what about the nerve of Steve Evans dumping her in the groundskeeper’s shed like that!

She had just decided that she would never have anything to do with him again, when the volume of the conversation downstairs began to rise. She crept out onto the landing and strained to hear what they were saying. As unlikely as it seemed, it sounded like Aunt Deirdre was crying. She kept talking about someone called Richard, and Grandma Johnson seemed to veer from sympathy to impatience and back again. Then there was a great sob followed by a lengthy silence.

“I just can’t go through this again,” said Aunt Deirdre finally.

Belladonna went back into her room and sat on the bed. She decided she had to talk to Aunt Deirdre. She’d just wait until her grandmother left and she heard her aunt come upstairs. Then they’d talk.

She didn’t know what time it was when she woke up. All she knew was that it was pitch-dark and something was coming. Outside, in the distance, she could hear the baying of hounds. Not one hound this time, but dozens, and they were getting closer. As the baying and howling got louder, a furious wind whipped up and the clang and clatter of a hundred hooves shook
the small house to its very foundations. Belladonna sprang out of bed and pulled the curtains back, and suddenly all was silence. The street looked its usual suburban self; there was even a small bird sitting on the telephone wire singing softly to itself.

As she stared, she heard the click of Aunt Deirdre’s bedroom door as it opened. She ran out to the landing to find her aunt, fully dressed and ashen-faced.

“Did you hear that?” said Belladonna. “What was it?”

“It was the Hunt,” said her aunt quietly.

“But there’s no one—”

“I’m going out,” said Aunt Deirdre abruptly. “Lock the door after me.”

And with that, she marched down the stairs and out of the front door.

Belladonna stood, stunned, for a moment, then ran down the stairs and locked the door as the guttural roar of her aunt’s sports car faded into the night.

She returned to her room, but spent most of the night straining to hear the baying hounds or her aunt’s car. Anything but the silence of the empty house. She finally dropped off at about four in the morning, only to wake up two hours later as the car pulled up. She listened as Aunt Deirdre walked into the house, took off her coat, ran upstairs, and closed her bedroom door. Then all was silence again.

Belladonna sighed. She sat for a while in bed, thinking about how different things used to be, even after
her parents died. The house was full of noise and the smell of cooking, her Mum and Dad shouted to each other from different ends of the house, and everything proceeded with a general air of happy chaos. Now, for the first time since the accident, she felt truly alone.

She rolled over and looked at the curtains that her mother had made before she died. What could they be doing now? She supposed she should have thought of it before, but they’d always been here—making breakfast, watching television, talking, laughing. What did they do in the Land of the Dead? The same things? Different ones? She should have asked. She couldn’t believe she’d never asked!

Still, she thought, as she jumped down from the bed and made her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth, moping wasn’t any use at all. So what if her aunt was falling apart, her grandmother was being mysterious, and Steve preferred to spend his time with his footballing friends, she still had her brains—she could find the amulet by herself.

Half an hour later she was in the kitchen, shoving a packet of biscuits and a can of Tizer into her backpack, and heading out toward the graveyard to think. The day was cold but sunny and she happily clambered up onto the great table tomb, opened the biscuits, and began to puzzle over the oracle again.

“Peering proudly through the welkin way,

The radiant raptor rends the ruddy day,

Protecting the paragon in plain sight

Under arches and angles in motley light.”

She was pretty sure that “radiant raptor” meant a dragon and that “paragon” meant the stone, but the “arches and angles” part made no sense. There weren’t any arches in town, unless you counted the arches in churches, and she thought it highly unlikely that a thing like the Draconite Amulet would be hidden in a church. Or what about the old market? No, they’d knocked that down last year after the big storm brought down most of the fake crenellation around the top. She helped herself to another biscuit and decided that her best option was probably to just wander around and see if anything presented itself.

“I’ve got it!”

Belladonna nearly had a heart attack as Steve leapt out from behind the gate. She stared at him coldly.

“Got what,” she said icily, “the black death? That’d be nice.”

“What? Oh, yeah, sorry about yesterday, but, I mean, you wouldn’t want to get skitted by that lot. They’d make your life miserable. Listen—”

“I like being miserable,” muttered Belladonna, putting her biscuits away and climbing off the tomb. “It keeps me warm.”

She threw one more filthy look in his direction and stalked off, but he wasn’t about to be put off so easily.

“No, seriously,” he gushed, “stop messing. I think I know where the stone is.”

This presented a problem. She really wanted to give him quite a bit more grief before giving in and letting him rejoin the search, but she also really wanted to know what he’d figured out. She stalked on a bit further.

“Ah, c’mon,” he moaned, “don’t be such a girl!”

Belladonna froze, then spun around.

“I
am
a girl,” she said quietly. “But at least I’m not afraid of my friends. And I don’t need anybody’s help. I can do it on my own!”

And with that, she marched out of the graveyard and off toward the High Street.

Her intention was to go to where the old market building had been. There was still a sort of covered walkway left from the old buildings. Maybe that had arches. She hadn’t gone very far before Steve was back at her side.

“Okay,” he muttered, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t very nice. I don’t know why I did it.”

They walked on in silence until they reached the old covered walkway. There were no arches or anything that looked even slightly like an arch. Belladonna sighed. There was nothing for it.

“Alright,” she said, “what’s your idea?”

“A video arcade,” he announced proudly.

“A video arcade?”

“Yes,” he said eagerly, the words tumbling out. “I was thinking, you know, about arches and I just kept saying the word over and over to myself. Arches, arches, arches—arches—arches. And it just came to me—arcade!”

Belladonna looked at him. For a boy who was considered a dunce by almost everyone and spent more time in Miss Parker’s office than he did in actual lessons, he was really pretty bright.

“That’s a good idea” was all she said, however.

Steve grinned from ear to ear. “Come on, then, there’s one just down here.”

He led the way down the street to a large, brightly lit arcade that spewed tinkling music and ringing chimes out into the street. Inside, brand-new machines were arranged in a maze of steel and video screens, disgorging muscle-bound avatars and thermonuclear explosions to anyone with a few coins and nothing else to do. Most were occupied by glaze-eyed gamers and a few scruffy adults. None of them had anything to do with dragons, though, and Steve and Belladonna were back on the street in a matter of minutes.

“Don’t worry,” he said, undaunted, “there’s another one ’round the corner.”

Belladonna started to follow him, then stopped as they passed Moorpark’s Books.

“Hang on,” she said.

“What?”

“A bookshop. Let’s go in.”

“Why?”

“
Phatês
. The word that the Sibyl said when we asked her about Dr. Ashe. Maybe they’ll have a dictionary.”

Steve nodded, heaved open the door, and led the way in.

Moorpark’s was one of those bright new bookshops, full of carefully constructed displays and racks of calendars, notepads, and stuffed toys. They made their way past pyramids of bestsellers toward the history section, but there was nothing remotely like a dictionary.

“Excuse me,” said Belladonna to a lackluster teenager who was stocking a shelf more slowly than seemed humanly possible, “where would we find an Ancient Greek dictionary?”

The boy stared at her for a few moments, then reached up and removed a set of earphones that Belladonna hadn’t noticed. He stared at her quizzically, so she smiled and repeated the question.

“Reference,” he said, sticking the earbuds back in his ears and turning back to the shelf.

Steve opened his mouth to say something that Belladonna was fairly sure wasn’t going to be complimentary, so she grabbed his sleeve and pulled him away.

“Dictionary,” she said, “remember?”

“What a twit,” muttered Steve, glancing back, but
allowing himself to be propelled to the back of the shop where several shelves groaned under the weight of dictionaries and phrase books.

“What are phrase books doing here?” he asked. “Shouldn’t they be in travel?”

“Just look for a Greek/English one,” said Belladonna, refusing to be sidetracked. “Ancient Greek.”

They pored over the shelves, which were packed with dictionaries of every shape and size, from massive tomes to tiny pocket versions. There were several versions of ordinary English dictionaries and at least three for each of the most popular holiday destinations, but Belladonna began to despair of finding any in languages that anyone actually spoke any more.

“Oh, well,” she said, straightening up after going through the bottom shelf for the second time, “it doesn’t look like they have—”