Bronze Pen (9781439156650) (8 page)

I
T WASN'T THE FIRST TIME SHE'D STUDIED
the pen carefully, wondering about the significance of its metallic red-gold color and the letterlike markings that circled down its length. The strange way it felt in her hand—heavy without being clumsy or hard to use—and the way its narrow pointed tip produced such a smooth, wide line. Opening her notebook to a fresh page, she wrote…nothing, for quite a long time, while she tried to decide just how to begin. At last, just to see how the letters and numbers flowed out in that wide, smooth way, she wrote the date:

The idea she'd started to fool around with was that writing with the pen might have had something to do with some of the unusual things that had been happening. It
was almost as if all she had to do was write about something with the pen and it would come true, or at least some part of it would. But if that was so, and if there really was something very special about the pen, maybe even magical, why had it been given to her?

There was only one person who might be able to answer all those questions, and she had gone away. At least she had not been in the cave when the police went there to look for her. But then again, wasn't it possible that she had returned in the same mysterious way she had made herself disappear? And if Audrey could visit the cave just one more time, wasn't it possible that the old woman might be able to explain some of it? Or even all of it?

Of course, the problem—and it was a big one—was the visiting part. She had been forbidden to go there again, and she had, more or less, promised that she wouldn't. But if she could somehow make a very short visit, without going there in the ordinary slow and difficult way, wouldn't that make it okay? Suddenly letting the point of the pen drop down onto the paper Audrey wrote in very large letters:

She got that far before she stopped writing and, with the pen still in her hand, got up and went to the window.
It was a sinister night. Thick clouds hung heavy in the sky, and beyond the glass the night was deadly dark, alive only with the sound of wind. The kind of wind that blinded your eyes and deafened your ears with its angry roar. She stood there for a long time looking out into the flowing, moaning darkness. Not a good time to go anywhere, and yet…She went on arguing with herself until she suddenly remembered a fact that helped her come to a decision. She would put the pen away and wait for daylight before she wrote anything more.

The fact that Audrey had remembered was that tomorrow morning her parents would be going to Dr. Richards's office. Usually Audrey went with them on those Saturday-morning appointments, and she either sat in the car and read or went to the library, until it was time to have lunch with her parents at the clinic's cafeteria. But if she could convince them to let her stay home, it would be a good time to try to find out if…If what? If there was any truth to the crazy idea she had begun to fool around with.

Her plan worked. Oh, her mother objected at first, as Audrey had known she would. “You know I don't like to leave you alone in the house for such a long time,” she said.

“Oh, I'll be fine,” Audrey told her, and then grinned as she added, “Beowulf will protect me.” That was a laugh, and they all did, even Audrey's mom. Anyone who had ever met Beowulf knew that he would probably greet an
armed robber with his usual sloppy enthusiasm. But when the laughter stopped, both of Audrey's parents were still doubtful. But then Audrey said, “I was thinking I might call Lizzie and see if she could come over.”

That helped. “Oh, that would be nice,” Audrey's mom said. “You might even ask her to have lunch with you. There's plenty of tuna for sandwiches.”

Hannah Abbott hadn't yet met Lizzie, but she'd heard a lot about her from both Audrey and John. Particularly from John, who was still raving about Lizzie and her amazing artistic talent.

And what Audrey said about calling Lizzie wasn't really a lie. Not exactly. She
was
thinking about it. After she did her little experiment with the pen, which was almost certain not to take very long, or lead to anything, she
would
call, and who knows? Maybe Lizzie would be able to come over.

So after John Abbott very slowly and carefully wheeled himself out the door and down to Hannah's beat-up old Toyota, Audrey closed and locked the front door, then stood for a moment with her back against it, looking and listening.

The house was very quiet and empty. Beowulf, as soon as he had finished seeing John and Hannah off, had gone back to collapse on his pad, and no cockatiel sounds of any sort were coming from the kitchen. Taking a deep breath, Audrey headed for her room.

Once there, she immediately went to the window and, pushing the curtains aside, looked out toward the hill. Toward the steep hillside that rose up in a series of terraces behind the house to where, just beyond the highest terrace, the secret path began. From there, it wound its way up through groves of bay and oak trees and across slippery barren slopes to the bottom of an even steeper cliff. A cliff overgrown with vines and, behind the curtain of vines, the cave. Going back to her desk, Audrey sat down, pulled out the bronze pen and her secret novel notebook, and opened to the page where she had started to write about going to the cave.

For the next several seconds she stared at the words she had written and asked herself what she was planning to do and what she thought it might accomplish. What she had already written was:

She stared at the smooth, darkly flowing letters for a long time before she began to flip back through the pages, stopping to look for all the other places where she had used the pen.

But the first time, when she had been writing to warn the old woman about the police, she had been writing in her school binder—if she had written at all. When she'd
looked afterward she hadn't been able to find it. Somehow she had managed to lose it, or else she'd only thought about writing it and never really did. So that didn't prove anything, one way or another.

The next time she'd used the pen she had written in her novel notebook when she was still working on her story about the girl detective. She flipped through the pages until she came to the one titled:

And then…Audrey paused, nodding thoughtfully. It had been that very night that Beowulf, and Sputnik, too, had begun to talk. They had talked, and then they had stopped talking. It was important to remember that she hadn't written that she herself, Audrey Abbott, could talk to animals, or even that she wanted to. So being able to talk to animals wasn't something she'd asked for. Not exactly.

Next came the page where she had started the picture book for young readers. The only entry there was the title written in pencil:

But after that, when she wrote the short story about the baby dragon in the little picture book, she
had
used the
pen, of course. And it had been that night when she'd seen, or dreamt she'd seen, the dragon.

It was a fascinating thing to think about. But it didn't seem to prove that if she wrote something with the pen, it would come true. It was more as if when she wrote about something, maybe some part of what she had written would happen, but not necessarily what you might expect.

It was a very exciting idea, but also very confusing. After some more thought she decided that the safest thing might be to begin by writing about the cave itself as it actually existed before she went on to try to put the rest of it into words—the part about the old woman and what she had, or had not, said and done.

So she would start with a kind of history of how she happened to know about the cave. And then she'd hope that whatever might follow would be like the newest chapter to the story that might be called
Audrey and the Cave on Wild Oaks Hill.
A chapter that might possibly include a duck, some owls, and a strange, shadowy creature who knew what you were thinking and probably knew exactly what might happen when you wrote with a magic pen and how you might be able to control it.

Turning to the next blank page and picking up the bronze pen, Audrey began to write:

She could remember it so clearly. Thinking back over what had happened and how she had felt about it made it seem so close and real. James, who read many books about pirates, was the one who contributed most of the important facts. Things like which of the pirates was the most famous and all the awful things they did to their victims. He and Patricia had even made pirate costumes. She could picture the whole scene so clearly. The twins in their pirate costumes—bandanas around their heads and skulls and crossbones skillfully drawn in black crayon on the chests of their T-shirts. And she could also see the pirate furniture that the twins had made themselves—the old splintery table and the chairs made of wooden crates.

Blinking her eyes to shut out the distracting pictures, she went on writing.

She stopped writing then. She could bring back exactly how it had been to be a pirates' victim. Putting the pen down on the notebook, she closed her eyes and reached back in her memory, remembering exactly what it was like to sit on one of the boxes playing the part of a prisoner. Her legs had been too short for her feet to touch the ground, and the rough wood of the box scratched the backs of her legs. And her wrists had been tied tightly behind her.

And then suddenly, so suddenly that she could do nothing to stop it from happening, they really were. There had been the briefest moment of some kind of movement, a feeling of lifting and floating, and then her wrists really were tied behind her back, her eyes were blindfolded, and the air was full of the damp, musty scent of the cave.

A
UDREY SQUIRMED, TWISTING HER HANDS
so hard that the rope scratched her wrists painfully. She tried again, pulling and twisting even harder, but still without the least success. There had been a time, she couldn't help remembering, when she and the twins were being pirate victims and James Mayberry had tied her up too tightly, making her angry and a little bit frightened. She'd told them so.

“Okay, you guys,” she'd said to the twins. “Untie me right now. I don't want to play anymore.” Then Patricia told James to say he was sorry and untie the rope, and he did. But this time when Audrey said it again, just the way she had before—“Untie me right now. I don't want to play anymore.”—there was no answer. No answer and no sound at all.

When she blinked her eyes, she could feel her eyelashes brushing against the heavy material of the blindfold, but
she couldn't see even the smallest glint of light. Except for the scratchy pain around her wrists and the familiar earthy scent of the cave, there was nothing her senses could tell her about where she was and what was happening.

After a while she stopped struggling and sat still, trying to clear her mind so that she could think more rationally. There had to be some kind of an explanation as to what was happening, if only she could calm down and concentrate. She had been in her own room, writing at her desk, and then, without any warning, she was tied and blindfolded and perhaps, judging by the smell, back in the pirate cave. The one thing she felt quite certain of was that this time there was no chance that this was just a dream. No dream could be so real and immediate, with no hint of any way to stop or rethink it. She was definitely and completely tied up and blindfolded, and there was no way to find out how or why it had happened or who had done it. Where was she? Was anyone else there?

She wanted to ask aloud. To call out,
Who did this? Who tied me up? Is somebody there?
She took a deep breath and opened her mouth, but she couldn't make the words come out. Either her vocal cords had been paralyzed by fright or she had forgotten how to speak.

But she could still listen. Holding her breath to silence even the sound of air moving through her nose and mouth, she strained her ears, but there was nothing to hear. Nothing except…

It was very faint at first, but then, gradually, it began to be a little more clear. She was hearing voices. The sound of one voice and then others. Not the voices of the Mayberry twins. Not at all. What Audrey seemed to be hearing now was quite different. Men's voices, deeper and older. Speaking in some other language. Definitely not English and not any language that sounded at all familiar.

The voices went on. The deepest, gruffest one, followed by others. One talking and then another answering. And then two of them talking at once, angrily. Perhaps arguing about her? About what to do with her?

What was it that James used to say about the kinds of things the pirates did to their captives? She could bring to mind easily enough, if she wanted to, distinct memories of James's stories about walking the plank and terrible beatings with whips called cat-o'-nine-tails.

The voices grew louder and then faded, and other sounds started—heavy thuds like axes chopping and the raspy slish-slash of a saw. And then, after another spell of silence, there was the smell of smoke—the woodsy, spicy smoke of a bonfire. And the angry voices again.

James had never said that pirates were cannibals, but for some obscure reason the fire was the last straw to complete a convulsion of absolute terror. All at once Audrey was struggling violently, pulling with all her strength at the ropes that bound her wrists and scooting forward on the box on which she was sitting. Wiggling
forward until the box tipped and she fell, landing with a painful thud on her side and right arm. A thud, a sharp pain, and then silence. Silence but no longer complete blindness.

It seemed that the fall had partly dislodged the blindfold, and Audrey now found that she was able to see. Still lying helplessly on her side, she could see at least dimly with one partly uncovered eye. And what she saw was…
Pirates
? Three shadowy figures were moving slowly toward her. Vague, unrecognizable figures, only dimly seen, except that the nearest one's narrow face was almost completely covered by a thick black beard.

She was starting to scream, opening her mouth and taking a deep breath, when suddenly the silence was broken by other noises. A flowing river of sound, like wind-ruffled leaves or feathers. With her one uncovered eye, Audrey could see only a dense feathery cloud. A moment later something was touching the ropes that bound her wrists, and then they were free. Her hands were free, the blindfold was gone, and she was flying through the air. Moving easily and swiftly, with no effort at all on her part, she felt herself surrounded and lifted up by a rushing, whispering cloud of wings. A cloud so dense that its feathery touch forced her to close her eyes as she was carried higher and higher and then began to glide downward until she was gently deposited on…

Audrey blinked her eyes, looked around, and realized
that she was sitting on the floor of her own room. As she started to struggle to her feet, she was once again aware of a last feathery rush of air and a high, creaky voice saying, “Wisely, my dear. And to good purpose.”

Standing now, Audrey turned slowly in a circle. No one was there and nothing had changed. On her desk was the notebook in which she had been writing, and there, on top of the page, was the bronze pen. She picked up the pen and held it briefly before quickly putting it down and going to the window. Nothing there. Nothing out of the ordinary. Only the terraced hillside and, farther up, the sun, still high in the midday sky.

It couldn't be true, could it? She couldn't have been transported to the cave and back again. And in between she hadn't been tied and blindfolded while some unknown people nearby talked in a strange foreign language, right? Turning away, she went to the mirror above her dresser and stared long and hard at her own face. It looked normal. No sign of a blindfold. Her pale brown hair was a tousled mess, but it often was, so that didn't prove anything.

She had gone back to her desk and was starting to pick up the pen when she suddenly noticed something that made her catch her breath in a sharp gasp. Right there, clearly visible around both of her wrists, were circles of rough, reddened skin. And that wasn't all. On her right arm, halfway between the shoulder and elbow,
there was a large red scratch. A scratch that definitely hadn't been there until…until, struggling to free her hands, she had fallen painfully on her right side. Still rubbing the tender place on her arm, Audrey sat down at her desk and reached out slowly and uncertainly to pick up the bronze pen.