Hamster Magic (7 page)

“We’ll have to carry her.” Abner said this with a sigh, for he was tired, too. He’d been awake all night, and hurt his shoulder and twisted his knee. But what was weighing him down most of all was the problem of how to tell their parents about Celia.

Their path back was all uphill. Stumbling, dirty, and still in their pajamas, the three children worked their way slowly through the
dunes and up the road, carrying Celia between them. She was pudgy, with short little legs, and hard to get a grip on. More than once she almost slipped.

They stopped over and over again to get a firmer hold, and staggered on. “Almost—there,” gasped Tate as they neared their front door. “Just a few—more feet.”

But they had forgotten about the stairs. Inside, they looked up the long flight of steps to the second-floor landing, and knew there was another flight beyond that.

They had decided to try to keep Celia a secret for one more day. Abner didn’t really believe that they would find a way to change her back. But he wanted to put off explanations for just a little while longer. He was too tired to face it all right now.

Bumping, slipping, grabbing for the banister, they dragged the dead weight of Celia up to the second-floor landing, but there they dropped to the floor.

“I can’t,” whispered Tate, almost crying. “Not one more step.”

Derek, collapsed in a heap, moaned in agreement.

Abner slumped against the wall, catching his breath. Down the hall, behind their parents’ bedroom door, there was a noise of bedsprings and then a shuffling of feet.

The sound gave the children a last spurt of energy. “We’ll roll her,” Abner said, low and urgent. The three got on their knees and began to push the big hamster up, step by step.

Halfway, the energy left them as suddenly as it had come. Derek had hardly pushed past the second step anyway, and Tate had petered out, too. Abner turned and braced himself against the limp and sleeping hamster, who seemed to grow heavier every moment. “Come on,” he said hoarsely. “Help me—I can’t hold her up alone.”

Feet jammed against wall and banister, Derek, Tate, and Abner pressed their backs against Celia’s warm, soft body to keep her from falling. They were in shadow, and it was possible that their parents might head straight to the kitchen for their coffee and never look up.

And at first it seemed that it might happen. Father headed straight downstairs, fumbling for the light switch and missing it. But Mother’s slippers made a gritty noise on the landing, and she looked down at the floor, and then up.

“What on earth?” Still in her robe, she stared up at her children. “How in the world did you get so filthy? Just look at your pajamas! And there’s sand all over the landing!”

Abner looked at the others. Faces smudged, pajamas torn, and with twigs in their hair,
Derek and Tate looked as if they had spent the night outside. Which they had.

The three children gazed silently down at their mother. There didn’t seem to be anything useful to say.

“We went out,” said Abner at last. He waited hopelessly for her to discover that her youngest child was a hamster of unusual size.

“Is that Celia behind you? Don’t tell me you took her outside in her pajamas, too?” Mother swept up the stairs and stopped in front of the children. “Move aside, you three. I’ll speak to you later.”

Wordlessly, Abner, Tate, and Derek moved. Their mother gasped.

“She’s even filthier than the rest of you!” Bending down, Mother lifted Celia in her arms and stamped up the stairs. “I suppose I should be grateful that she’s still in her play clothes from yesterday, but does this mean that she never put on pajamas at all? Into the tub with you, one after the other. And you’ll put on clean clothes and sweep up all the sand before any of you have breakfast!”

The three children stood looking up at Celia, who hung over her mother’s shoulder—blond-haired, blue-eyed, fully human, and as dirty as they had ever seen her.

“She changed!” cried Tate. “You changed, Celia!”

Derek whooped. “The Great Hamster was right—it just took time!”

Abner thumped up the stairs behind Mother, in unbelieving joy. He took hold of Celia’s hand, which dangled over her mother’s arm—skin, not fur! It was real!—and gave it a shake.

Celia smiled at her big brother. “Don’t be mad, Mom,” she said. “They took good care of me. And I had a
lot
of fun playing hamster.”

The children were busy all morning.

They swept up the sand and suffered their scolding. They took baths, one after the other. And they even did extra chores, to show they were sorry. So after lunch, Mrs. Willow said that they had done enough and could play.

But all they wanted to do was sleep.

“Let’s take a nap,” said Tate when Mother had gone.

Derek put his head down on the table. “I vote we nap right here.”

“I’m not
that
sleepy,” said Celia.

“Easy for you to say,” mumbled Derek. “You slept the whole time we carried you.”

Abner yawned so widely, his eyes watered. “We’d better go to our rooms so the parents won’t see us sleeping. They would wonder what we had been doing all night.”

“That would be hard to explain,” Tate said. She pulled Derek to his feet and herded him up the stairs.

But when they got to the third floor, they did not go straight to their beds. Instead, they stood at the window, looking out. Over the large and scrubby yard, past the line of trees, they could see the gleam of the river. Near it was a curving, pale line that might have been the top of a sand dune.

“We’ll have to keep the promise I made, now,” said Abner.

Tate nodded. “The burrowers
did
turn Celia back into a girl again. It’s the least we can do.”

“It’s too bad, though,” said Derek wistfully. “I wanted to make a wish for myself.”

“What did you promise?” asked Celia. She had been sleeping for that part.

Abner breathed on a smudged pane of glass and polished it with his shirttail. “We all promised—that means you, too, Celia—never to ask another burrower for a wish.”

“Never?” Celia asked. “Not even a little wish?”

Abner shook his head. “We’re just lucky it all turned out the way it did.” His eyes strayed to the empty hamster cage. They would never get a dog now, for their parents thought they had lost another hamster. But still, Abner felt lucky.

Derek gazed out the window. “With all
that magic coming up from the ground, though, don’t you think there might be more out there, on Hollowstone Hill?”

“Maybe,” said Tate.

“I hope so,” said Celia.

“I wonder what kind?” said Abner.

The End

Lynne Jonell is the author of the popular
Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat
, a
Booklist
Editors’ Choice and one of
School Library Journal’s
Best Books of the Year, as well as
The Secret of Zoom
and seven picture books. Although she doesn’t really care for rats, hamsters, or any kind of rodent at all, she still keeps writing about them. Please don’t ask her why. She doesn’t understand it herself.