Spellbinder (32 page)

“All of them,” she repeated to herself, “every ghost who ever was.”

“Except me. I’m the only one left.” All Elsie’s efforts to remain calm deserted her and she suddenly sobbed, “What is he doing, Belladonna? What’s going to happen to us?”

Belladonna opened her mouth to speak. She thought she ought to try and say something comforting, but then she noticed something else.

“What are the wires for?”

She examined the jars more closely. A wire had been placed in each bottle or jar and held in place by a cork. They then ran along the shelves to the far end of the room where there was some sort of workbench. Belladonna froze. She’d seen that bench before, and she instinctively tipped her head upward to look at the distant ceiling. It was so high that it faded into darkness, in spite of the chandeliers, but something was moving up there and she knew exactly what it was—ember beetles.

Belladonna took a deep breath and followed the wires down the room.

“I can’t open them!” cried Elsie, tears springing to her eyes. “I can’t . . . I’m so sorry. . . .”

She ran further down the hall to another shelf and began struggling with the jars there.

“Elsie,” said Belladonna gently, “come and look at this.”

Elsie put the jar down and joined Belladonna at the far end of the room near the workbench, where all the wires had been neatly gathered together and inserted into a roughly drilled hole in the back of a large marble chair.

“That’s the Seat,” said Elsie, “from the Room of Dreams. But where’s the Door?”

“The Door?”

“The alabaster door. The Dream Door. We sit in the chair and send dreams to the Living through it.”

Belladonna chewed her lip and examined the wires going into the chair. “One at a time?” she asked finally.

“What?”

“D’you do it one at a time?”

“Well, of course . . .”

“So what would happen if all the ghosts . . . all the ghosts of all the people who had ever lived . . .”

“I don’t know,” said Elsie, a note of desperation creeping into her voice. “It would be very powerful, I suppose. Maybe . . . maybe instead of sending dreams we could send something else. Something real. But why? And who would sit in the chair? Someone has to sit in the chair.”

Then Belladonna heard it. A sigh. It was so faint that it could have been mistaken for a draft, or the sound that the wind might make through a tiny crack in one of the tall windows. But there was another element to it, a low shuddering groan, hopeless and longing.

Belladonna forgot about the chair, about the ghosts,
about Ashe, about everything. She just ran toward the sound. It seemed to come from the darkest corner of the room.

She ran so fast that she almost crashed into it, a huge cage, crouching in the corner, lurking like a bad dream. She raised her hands to stop herself and created yet another noise that echoed through the empty rooms of the House of Mists. And then, for a moment, her heart sank. It was empty.

She scanned the interior. There was nothing there! But there had been . . . she was sure of it.

“Belladonna?” The voice was barely a murmur, but there is something in us that always hears our name, no matter how quietly it is spoken.

She peered into the cage again. And then she saw him, huddled into the farthest corner, curled tight, as if that would protect him from anything in the Land of the Dead. His face was white without color, almost translucent, and there were dark rings around his eyes. The cracked lips had a tinge of blue about them, and a fresh rivulet of black liquid was spilling from the corner of his mouth, over the dried remains of many more.

“Steve?” she whispered.

“Please . . .” he said.

“Yes?”

“Kill me.”

She looked at him, and the black despair in his eyes brought hot tears to hers.

“How did you get here? What has he done to you?”

“I don’t know . . . I was there, with you, by the fire . . . and then I was sinking into the ground . . . I couldn’t breathe. And then I was here. He brought me. He’s keeping me alive,” said Steve, his voice pained and dry. “He gives me enough of the antidote so that I can’t die . . . I can’t die.”

The sentence seemed to exhaust him and he fell back into the shadows for a moment, then wrenched himself up slightly.

“Please . . .” he breathed. “I want to die.”

“No . . . no, I can’t.”

“Belladonna, he needs me alive. . . . I don’t know why, but he does. If you kill me, it will be over.”

Belladonna felt her way around the cage to the far corner and threaded her fingers through the bars to touch his hand. He was cold and clammy, and there was something not quite alive about his skin. Her instinct was to let go, to recoil and shrink away, but she couldn’t leave him here like this and she knew, in the moment that she touched him, that she must either save him or kill him.

“No,” she said again, “I can’t.”

Now that she was close, she could see that he was barely there. Even the effort of turning his head was almost too much.

“Please . . .” he said, his voice disappearing into a whisper, “please . . .”

“No.” She suddenly felt stronger; she would not permit this to happen. “Where’s the antidote?”

“I can’t . . .”

“Where?” she repeated, her voice betraying the desperation she felt but didn’t want him to see.

His eyes flickered open, “On the desk . . . blue bottle . . .”

And then he was gone again. Elsie crept over to the desk and started going through the collection of bottles and vials that littered the desk.

“Here it is!” she yelled.

“Shh!”
said Belladonna, joining her at the desk. “Is there anything we can put it in?”

“What?” said Elsie. “Why don’t we just give him the bottle?”

“Because Ashe might come back and if he sees the bottle is gone, he’ll know someone is here.”

She quickly looked at the other bottles. Every one had something in it.

She swung down her backpack and rifled through it, knowing there was nothing. If only she’d kept the Tizer can!

“Hang on,” said Elsie. “I’ve got something.”

She unzipped a small purse that was built into her belt and removed a pen.

“A pen?” said Belladonna. “What use is that?”

Elsie smiled, unscrewed it, pulled a lever in the side, and expelled the ink into one of the other bottles.

“It’s a fountain pen,” she said.

Belladonna grinned and held the bottle while Elsie siphoned out as much of the antidote as the pen would hold, but as she turned to go to the cage, there was a loud bang outside the door. They both dived under the desk.

“It’s him!” said Elsie, her voice trembling with an unfamiliar fear.

Belladonna bit her lip; she looked from the jars to the cage.
He has the Dead
, she thought,
and he has the Living
. It made sense that he’d need more of the Dead—they would have far less energy than a living person. But what was he trying to do?

At that moment there was another bang and the door at the far end of the gallery flew open.

“Be careful, you idiot! You’ll damage it!”

Belladonna and Elsie crept further under the desk at the familiar sound of Dr. Ashe’s voice.

The reprimand was followed by a crunching, grinding sound, as if something large was being dragged across the floor. Belladonna crept to the edge of the desk and peeked out.

It was something large. Something huge, in fact, and carefully wrapped in blankets tied into place with ropes. Ashe was pushing on one side, but there was someone else there too. Belladonna waited, then gasped—it was Slackett!

The two men carefully positioned their package
about three meters away from the chair. Then Ashe stepped back, satisfied.

“Unwrap it,” he said to Slackett, “and check the connections.”

He spun on his heel and stalked to the door, then stopped suddenly and turned back for a moment. Belladonna held her breath and darted back under the desk. But it was alright. A second later, they heard the door close and footsteps receding down the hall outside.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Elsie.

Belladonna shrugged and peeked out again. Slackett had undone the ropes and the collection of blankets fell to the floor, revealing a plain white doorway.

“It’s the Door!” gasped Elsie.

“Why would he want the Dream Door?” said Belladonna quietly.

“It can only send dreams,” shrugged Elsie. “Nothing else.”

“Unless it has some other powers,” said Belladonna, looking at the jars and the cage. “Powers no one else has thought of.”

She heard Steve make a muffled sound. She glanced at Slackett, waited until his back was turned, and then crept over to the far side of the cage. Steve looked at her, his eyes fever-bright.

“I’m supposed to sit in the chair,” he whispered. “The chair is meant for the Dead. I was thinking . . . if the Dead send dreams . . . things . . . through the
Door to the other worlds . . . then maybe the Living can . . .”

“Maybe the Living can bring things from other worlds here!” said Belladonna, her eyes opening wide. “He’s combining the power of the Dead and the Living! He’s reversing the Door and bringing something here!”

“Very good,” said a voice behind them, “but what are you going to do about it?”

Belladonna spun around, her heart in her throat. Slackett was standing behind her, clutching a handful of wires, a familiar smirk on his face.

“Do about it?” she said.

“That’s what I said.”

She looked at him carefully; there was something in his eyes. . . .

“Why are you here?” she asked. “I thought he’d . . .”

“No,” he said, “he thought I was weak and pulled by your spell. He doesn’t know about the Rod of Gram.”

“The what?”

“The ruler. Not that it did any good. Looks like your Paladin will be dead before the night is through.”

“No, he won’t!” said Belladonna, standing up. “Tell me what Ashe is doing. What does he want to bring here?”

“So, you’ve worked out that much,” said Slackett, clearly impressed. “With a living person in the chair and the dream-power of the Dead, the Door no longer sends mere dreams, it can bring solid corporeal creatures
from any of the nine worlds and any of the spaces in between.”

“The spaces in between?”

“The Darkness,” snapped Slackett. “Didn’t they teach you anything?”

“No . . . no one’s explained anything.” Belladonna could feel tears of frustration burning in her eyes. “Tell me. I need to know.”

“The Darkness is the Void,” said Slackett, after taking a deep breath. “It’s the spaces where the worlds are not; it’s minuscule and infinite at the same time. To be banished to the Darkness is to become nothing, neither Living nor Dead for all eternity. Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, at any rate.”

“What happened?”

“They thought when they banished her there that it was over, that she would be lost to the nine worlds. It took her a while, but she has become stronger than ever she was before. Consuming knowledge from the other drifting souls, she grew in strength, and in time became ruler of them all, the Empress of the Dark Spaces.”

“Good name, isn’t it?” said Elsie.

“And Ashe wants to use the ghosts to get her out?” asked Belladonna. “How did he work out how to do it? And . . . and . . . why would he want to? Who is she?”

Slackett laughed. “Ashe didn’t work it out!”

“Then who—”

“Ashe was nothing but a bitter failure until his
scrying ball suddenly started working. He thinks it was his years of study and devotion that finally gave him some ability, but it wasn’t . . . it was her. He is to prepare the way for her return, and it begins tonight.”

“But . . .” Belladonna struggled to understand. “Why close all the doors to the Land of the Living if that’s what he’s going to do?”

“He doesn’t want to take any chances,” said Slackett, lowering his voice. “And he hasn’t just closed the doors to the Land of the Living. All doors to all other worlds are closed; the people of the nine worlds are deaf and blind, vulnerable as baby birds as the hawk circles the nest. He has to be sure that the Dream Door brings the right person, that it opens into the Darkness. For that, he needed there to be only one possible route; he needed all the Dead, a living creature, and the Draconite Amulet to amplify his spell and carry it into the Void.”

“And you’ve just been spying on him? Why didn’t you try to stop him?”

“I was sent to watch, not to act.”

“Wait,” said Belladonna, “sent? Sent by who?”

“The Queen of the Abyss, of course,” said Elsie.

“Who?”

“She is one of the Old Ones,” said Slackett. “She rules the Land of the Dead.”

“Well, she’s not doing a very good job!”

“I was to warn her when he began to get close,” explained Slackett, “but it all happened much faster
than I’d anticipated. The doors closed and she was trapped on the Other Side.”

“In the Land of the Living? The ruler of the Land of the Dead is in the Land of the Living? What on earth is she doing there?”

“I am not at liberty to say,” said Slackett, suddenly getting all huffy and sounding a little like a politician on the television, “but all will be well now that you are here.”

“Me? What can I do?”

“You must close the Dream Door and reopen the doors to the nine worlds.”

Belladonna stared at him like he was certifiable. “Did you get knocked on the head? I’m twelve! I’m just trying to get my Mum and Dad back! I can’t take on empresses! I can’t even take on Sophie Warren at school and she’s just an ordinary girl!”

“You are the Spellbinder,” said Slackett confidently.

“No . . .” began Belladonna, but before she could protest any further there was a rattling gasp from the cage.

She spun around. Steve’s eyes were no longer bright, but dull and dry. They closed slowly. Belladonna fell to her knees next to the cage where his head lay against the bars.

“What is it?” she cried.

“He’s dying,” said Slackett. “I told you. If Ashe doesn’t hurry up, he’ll have to find a new live one. Hmmm . . . wonder who that could be?”

“No.” Belladonna ignored him. All her attention was on Steve. “No, no, no. You won’t give up. I won’t let you.”