Margaret and the Moth Tree (7 page)

As Margaret went mutely about her tasks, she soon discovered something else: she could control her talent. When she focused all her attention on her ears, she felt them
open
to the faintest and tiniest hints of sound.

At first it was only by closing her eyes and holding very still that she was able to do it perfectly. But late at night when everyone else was asleep, she practiced, and soon even with her eyes open or her hands busy at chores, she could focus her ears as easily as anything.

And the more she focused, the more she heard.

One evening, just as dusk was falling, Margaret was kneeling in the vegetable patch in the yard behind the orphanage. But rather than feeling lonesome and sad as she yanked spiky weeds from the rows of tomato plants, she was focusing her attention on her ears.

A hummingbird hovered nearby, and she heard each whir of its tiny wings.

A mole crawled by under the ground, and she heard its breath puff in and out.

A breeze blew across a clump of dandelions, and she heard each fluffy seed break off and float away on the wind.

“Wake up!” cried a very small voice.

Margaret looked up in surprise, wondering who had spoken, but no one was there.

“Come on, Pip, or we'll start without you!” cried the voice.

Margaret got to her feet and whirled around.

At the back of the vegetable patch was a trellis fence grown over with snap peas, and it was from this direction that the voice had come.

There was nothing behind the trellis, Margaret knew. Only a stretch of overgrown grass and the row of bushes that marked the end of the orphanage grounds. Unlike the front of the property, which was kept neatly trimmed and pruned to impress visitors, this part of the yard wasn't tended at all, since no one ever bothered to go there.

Margaret peered through a gap in the trellis, and sure enough, there wasn't a soul in sight.

“I'm coming!” called a new tiny voice.

“Hello?” cried Margaret. The voice sounded as though it must be right in front of her. “Who's there?”

But in that moment, Margaret had lost her focus, and her ears had closed up again as though someone had snapped a pair of earmuffs over them. Listen as she might, she didn't hear the mysterious voices again.

CHAPTER 14
The Thorny Brush

Later that night, after Margaret had finished her chores and collapsed in her chilly bed in the hallway, she could think of nothing but the two strange voices.

The only people who could hear voices from nowhere, she had been brought up to believe, were people who'd gone a bit dotty in the head. But Margaret didn't feel any more dotty than usual. And as she lay there, tossing and turning in the cold, she realized something.

Quite accidentally, Miss Switch had given her an opportunity.

Now that her bed was separate from the others, there was no one around to see her come and go. There was no creaking bedroom door to alert the Pets. And there was no reason she could think of not to return to the yard to seek out the voices once again.

As everyone else lay sleeping, Margaret threw off her covers and laced up her shoes. She tiptoed from her bed and crept down the hallway, past the Pets' door and down the stairs. She crept through the kitchen and, very quietly, let herself out through the back door. Then she waited, wondering if anyone would come chasing after her to snatch her back inside. When no one did, she ran out into the moonlit yard.

Margaret ran through the garden, passing patches of carrots and turnips, all the way to the trellis fence with its trailing pea vines. But this time, she went around it. When she came to the other side, she felt her heart beat a little faster.

She was standing on the overgrown lawn on the other side of the trellis. Before her, a cool wind was blowing through the tall grass, and at the far end of the lawn, a tangle of bushes rose up in shadow.

“Hello?” she called, walking slowly forward.

All she could hear was the wind in the grass.

The bushes were gray in the moonlight, twisted and thorny and rather frightening. They had been left to grow wild for so long that they had joined together into a brush, too thick to see through and too tall to see over, with sharp branches that swayed in the wind as if clawing at the air.

Margaret came to the center of the lawn and stopped. She shivered, gazing up at the looming brush, then closed her eyes to calm her nerves. And it was then, with the swaying grass tickling her legs and the wind rustling her hair, that she heard the strange voices for the second time.

“Is it still there?” said a small voice. “What's it doing?”

“Just standing around,” said another.

Margaret's eyes snapped open. Just as before, there was no one in sight, but she was sure this time — the voices had come from the enormous brush.

She took a step closer. As she did, she saw that in the bottom branches in the very center of the tangled brush, there was a gap.

The gap wasn't very large or very noticeable, but when she crouched down, she saw that it was just big enough for a raccoon or a fox or, perhaps, a very small girl. She pushed aside one thorny branch, then another, and soon the gap had widened enough for her to squeeze through it.

Slowly, Margaret reached her hand inside. Her hand was shortly followed by her wrist. Then her elbow, her shoulder, and finally her head. Carefully clearing a way through the brush, Margaret crawled deeper in. Then, quite suddenly, the branches gave way to open space, and Margaret looked up with a gasp.

The dense brush had been hiding something. At the heart of the growth of bushes, there was a tree.

The tree had a wrinkly, moss-covered trunk and a thick net of intertwined branches that fell all the way down to the ground. Margaret blinked several times, getting used to the dimness, and saw that she was in a sort of hollow that had formed between the branches and the trunk. When she breathed in, she inhaled a rich, mossy smell.

It was so lovely that she forgot to be puzzled. She forgot all about being dotty in the head. Gazing around at the beautiful, hidden chamber in the tree, Margaret listened.

She heard the call of a distant bird, and the soft breathing of the sleeping children in the orphanage.

She heard the parting of two clouds far overhead, and the dust blowing out on the road.

And when she concentrated very hard, she could even hear the leaves growing on the tree.

“Stay very still, Pipperflit,” said a small voice. “Maybe it'll leave.”

“No, Pip, fly away!” said another tiny voice. “It looks like a gobbler!”

Margaret looked down and saw a small shadowy creature sitting on a low branch near her right hand.

It was a moth.

CHAPTER 15
The Moth Tree

“What's it doing, do you think?” said the moth.

“Maybe it's lost?” said the first voice.

“Maybe it's sleepwalking?” said the second.

Margaret thought about this. But when she rubbed her eyes and gave her arm a good pinch, she seemed to be very much awake. She bent down to get a closer look at the moth, and the moth flattened its wings against the tree branch and held perfectly still.

For several moments, neither of them moved.

“Do you think …” the moth said at last, “do you think maybe it's
listening
to us?”

“Of course I am,” Margaret said.

The moth gave a shout of surprise, fluttering into the air.

“Quick, Pip!” cried the second voice from up above. “It's probably planning to gobble you up!”

“No I'm not!” said Margaret.

“Get away from it, Pip!” said the first voice. “If we leave it alone, it'll have to go away.”

But the moth called Pip had landed on the tree trunk just above Margaret's head and was looking down at her curiously.

“I don't know,” said the moth. “It doesn't look so bad to me. Why don't we try talking to it?”

“We can't do that!”

“I'm not going to hurt you,” said Margaret.

“You keep away from him!” cried the first voice. “See, Pip, you're encouraging it. Don't say another word!”

But as Margaret watched, the small moth fluttered lower down, settling in a sliver of moonlight near her face.

She could see now that he had two glittering, unblinking eyes, a pair of waving feelers that were reaching out toward her, three pairs of legs and two beautiful dusty gray wings. His head was cocked on one side, and he seemed to be studying Margaret's features just as she was studying his.

“I'm Margaret,” said Margaret, remembering her manners.

“Pipperflit,” said the moth, with a flit of his wings. “But you can call me Pip. You're not going to gobble me up, are you?”

“No, of course not!” said Margaret.

“Good,” said Pip. “You know, I didn't think humans could hear us.”

“I didn't think moths could talk,” said Margaret.

“Didn't you? How funny!” The moth crawled along a branch until he was perched right in front of Margaret's nose. “Where did you come from?” he said.

“From the orphanage.”

“Oh,” said Pip. He was silent for a moment, and then nodded quickly. “Oh, yes, the orfallidge. I see. What's that?”

“It's a place for orphans. Children with no parents.”

Pip looked up at her in amazement. “No parents!” he cried. “But where in the world did you come from?”

“No, no!” Margaret said. “We
had
parents once, just not anymore. Now we only have the Switch.”

“Oh, yes, the Switch. I understand,” said Pip, nodding. Then a few moments later, “What's a Switch?”

“She's horrible,” Margaret said.

Just then, two more moths came fluttering down from the upper branches of the tree.

“Now you've done it!” one of them said, fluttering its wings in agitation. “Now that you've talked to it, it will probably stay here forever!”

“Don't be such a stinkbeetle!” said Pip. “I'm only being friendly. Anyway, it's called
Margaret
. This is Rimblewisp, and that's Flitterwing,” said Pip to Margaret. “Rimb and Flit for short.”

The two new moths landed on the branch, then tilted their heads to one side just as Pip had done.

“Whatsit?” said Flit.

“Hmph,” said Rimb. “Why's it so big?”

“Hello,” said Margaret, feeling rather silly. “I won't stay forever. I promise.”

“There, you see!” said Pip. “It's only visiting.”

“Well, it still seems very odd. Where did it come from?”

“The orfallidge,” Pip said.

“Oh,” said Rimb. The moth named Flit nodded.

Margaret only smiled. And as she sat there in the tree, talking with the moths in the dark of night, Margaret Grey became one of the few people in the world ever to discover the truth about moths.

CHAPTER 16
The Truth about Moths

While the sight of a butterfly sets people to skipping around with nets, the sight of a moth most often inspires shrieks and fainting fits. Indeed, you may think that moths are nothing more than unfashionable butterflies — drab, ugly creatures to be ignored or run away from. But the truth about moths is much more wonderful.

If you were to sit and watch a moth for a whole day, it might look as if it were doing nothing at all. But the
night
is a different matter entirely. Nighttime is when the moths come alive.

As soon as the sun has set and the moths emerge from their nooks and corners, they have only one purpose until the next day's sunrise: to have as much fun as they possibly can.

They will play and fly and flutter in the moonlight until they are nearly breathless, stopping only for a sip of nectar or a drop of dew, then they will loop and spin and whirl until they're ready to collapse with happiness. So you can't blame them, really, for being quite tired out by morning, content to rest up quietly until the next night's festivities.

The other thing that moths are doing in the daytime is thinking up clever new games to impress their friends. Moths are very competitive, you see, and love nothing more than to show off.

You may have seen them at a game called Light-Hopping, which is one of the oldest and most popular moth games. Every time a moth spots a light or a lamppost, he will race to it as fast as possible. The last one to hop on the light is It, and that moth has to tag one of his friends, do three quick loop-de-loops and touch the light again before his friend can tag him back. This game is so popular that moths will even practice at it all alone, just to be ready when the time comes for a real match. And it is so popular that even the rumors of great danger posed by mysterious lights known as
candles
cannot stop them from playing it.

They have other games, too. There is Hoverpik, where moths fly in formation to make shapes that the others guess at, and Billabump, which is a flying form of leapfrog. In fact, Margaret had interrupted a game of Billabump between Pip, Rimb and Flit that was taking place on the lawn. When the three moths had heard Margaret's footsteps approaching, they'd abandoned their game and fled into the tree.

There are very few events that can cause moths to abandon a game before it's finished. On rare occasions, a silently swooping owl or a sudden hailstorm might cause moths to take cover inside their tree.

On one infamous night many years before, a barefoot dreg named Sally Winkleson had shuffled through the yard in her nightgown, fast asleep. She had walked straight through a game of Hoverpik, stopped in her tracks, and then turned around and marched back to the orphanage, pausing once to ask, “Which way to the cheese factory?” But the appearance of Margaret, wide-awake and curious, was the first of its kind.

These were some of the marvelous things she discovered listening to Pip, Rimb and Flit, as she took in the sights and sounds of the moth tree for the first time.