Spellbinder (21 page)

She opened her eyes. It was where the cardboard boxes were! She began moving them across the room, clearing the space. She closed her eyes again and visualized the bench, with its experiments and papers . . . and his stool was . . . right here! She stood in the spot and looked around.

In the Land of the Dead he had kept his notebooks
on a shelf near the desk, but she suspected that when he was alive he had been far more cautious. Still, she knew that he would have kept even his most secret books close at hand and from what he’d said, the only books he could have in the Land of the Dead were the ones that were here in his shop when he died. The Eidolon Council had four of them, so the other one just had to be here. She looked around and sighed: It had been so many years since the alchemist had been here, nothing was the same.

She stood for a moment, discouraged and wishing she had gone back to bed like her grandmother told her to. Then she thought about Steve trapped on the Other Side with Dr. Ashe and who knew what else, and her parents, who really might be gone for good this time. She closed her eyes once more, pictured the workshop, and stretched her arms out as wide as she could. Her left arm almost touched the wall. She opened her eyes and peered at the rotting plaster to her left. She might not be able to reach it, but she knew that Dr. Ashe’s long arms and languorous hands would have easily accessed anything there.

She stepped over and looked at the wall more closely: The plaster was riddled with hairline cracks and every so often there was a small black gash where a piece had fallen away. She began to work at one of these, pulling the surrounding plaster down. It crumbled easily, but only revealed old wallpaper, beneath which was more old wallpaper. This wasn’t working.
She looked back again to where Ashe had sat and realized that she hadn’t factored in the height of the stool or his lanky stature. If he reached out from where he had actually been, his hand would brush the wall nearly a foot higher than where she’d been working.

She dragged the broken chair over and stood on it, swaying slightly as she tried to maintain her balance on its three remaining legs. None of the plaster was broken here, but she hit at it a few times with her fist, pausing between each strike to make sure no one was coming. Eventually a small piece of plaster fell to the floor.

She worked her fingers into the hole and began pulling the rotting stucco away. Once again there were layers of aging wallpaper, but her fingers began to detect something else. Something lumpy. She continued working until the last yellowed layer of wallpaper came away from the wall and she could make out what was there—a small door! She excitedly removed the rest of the crumbling plaster and paper, ignoring the sound it made as it cascaded to the floor. By the time she was through, she was covered in white dust and the tips of her fingers were red and raw from working her nails under the brittle old wallpaper, but she had exposed what seemed to be a small wooden cupboard. The handle was long gone, but the iron hinges were still there, black and shining like new.

Belladonna flinched slightly as she worked her sore fingers under the door and slowly pulled it open. The
feeble glow of the streetlight outside didn’t reach inside the cupboard: It was just a black, rectangular hole cut into the white plaster wall, like a missing tooth in a mouthful of gleaming ivories. Belladonna took a deep breath. She was reasonably sure that there would be spiders in there, or at the very least things with wings and articulated segments. She steadied herself with one hand against the wall and extended the other toward the hole.

The first thing she felt was a shelf bisecting the cupboard. There was nothing on the top of it except some small things that broke up at her touch. She shuddered slightly and wiped her hand on the front of her jacket before reaching into the lower shelf.

Her hand immediately touched something cold and hard—a box! She steadied herself on the broken chair and removed her left hand from the wall, then she carefully removed the box, jumped down, and placed her prize on the floor near the window where the light was best.

It was black and glistening, though the hinges were rusted and all but one of the rivets holding the ornate clasp in place were gone. The last one gave way easily and Belladonna slowly lifted the lid, revealing two dark leather pouches. She removed the largest and opened it. Inside was a silver bell, about twelve centimeters high, covered with flowing ornate decoration. It seemed to shine with its own light, but was mercifully
silent. She turned it upside down and saw that it didn’t have a clapper.

“What’s the point of a bell that doesn’t ring?” she whispered to herself.

She placed the bell on the floor and moved on to the second pouch. She reached inside and felt the soft touch of leather—it was a book! She pulled it out slowly and, holding her breath, opened it at a random page, then another and another. The whole thing was full of notes and drawings in the spidery hand she recognized from the apothecary shop on the Other Side. It was the missing fifth book of Dr. Ashe.

She was about to settle down for a read when there was the unmistakable sound of a car driving slowly down the alley. She froze until the crunch of tires faded away, then shoved the book and the bell into her backpack, opened the window, and scrambled out into the alley. She made her way quickly to the churchyard and made herself comfortable on her favorite table tomb. The security lights that shone from the church at night (much to the irritation of the people who lived nearby) provided just enough illumination as she opened the book and began to leaf through.

Much of it was in Latin, with a few notes in Greek, but there was enough written in English for her to be able to understand that this was actually a book of spells. As the book progressed, the initially neat handwriting became more and more difficult to read. He
was obviously becoming more excited about what he was writing, as if he had discovered something he had spent half a lifetime searching for. Or perhaps someone else was telling him what to write—the hurried penmanship and frequent abbreviations looked like the kind of thing she did when Mr. Watson dictated notes in History. But if he was just taking dictation, who was telling him what to write?

Belladonna began to feel a chill in the pit of her stomach that had nothing to do with the freezing weather. She had thought Dr. Ashe was daunting, but there was something manageable about him, with his apothecary shop, overly complex “experiments,” and bad temper. Even finding out that he was lying about the amulet was good in a way—at least she was sure he couldn’t be trusted. But now it looked like someone else might actually be in charge. It was just like the old man in the gangster movie she shouldn’t have been watching this evening, and there was something much more frightening about that.

She continued leafing through the pages but it was clear to her now that she really ought to take it to her grandmother and the Eidolon Council. They had the other books, after all, and Mrs. Kostopoulos spoke Ancient Greek, so they’d be able to read all the bits she couldn’t make out. She quickly riffled through the remaining pages and was just closing it when she saw something she recognized. There, on a page near the end of the book, was a drawing of a bell—the same
bell she had found in the box. She leaned over and examined the text more closely. It was in English, and appeared to be instructions for summoning the Dead.

Belladonna closed the book for a moment and sat back. Should she try it? Maybe she could get Steve back. Okay, so he wasn’t actually
dead
(at least she hoped not), but he was in the Land of the Dead, which might amount to the same thing so far as spells were concerned, and if she could get him back, then she wouldn’t need to find another door, then she could take the book to the Council and they could figure out how to get the ghosts back. She wanted to see her parents again. She wanted the world—both worlds, or all nine, if there really were nine—to return to normal. She wanted to come home from school and smell the dinner cooking and hear her Mum and Dad bickering. But right now she was wracked with guilt. It was her fault that Steve was trapped on the Other Side and she somehow felt that she ought to at least try to set that one thing right herself. And even if this spell didn’t get him back, maybe she could summon Elsie. She’d at least know if he was okay. Belladonna looked at the leather cover of the book. On the other hand, it was also possible that she might get Dr. Ashe. It was his book, after all. She opened it again and reviewed the spell more closely. Apparently, you had to draw a magic circle and so long as you stayed within the circle you would be safe. She tucked her hair behind her ears. It was worth a try.

She jumped off the tomb and read the first instruction. You had to find a graveyard (check!) and then locate the exact center. She walked to one corner of the old cemetery and crossed to the other, dragging her feet so that they left a clear line in the wet grass. Then she went to the third corner and walked to the fourth—where the two lines crossed was the center of the graveyard. She opened the book again. Now she needed a stick made of yew. Belladonna remembered being told that yews were always grown in graveyards. She looked at the various trees around her; there was a willow, a couple of scraggly pines, and a large, gnarled tree with dark green foliage that she recognized from the tour of Arkbath Hall. She ran over and struggled to remove a spindly cane that was shooting up from one of the roots. The tree was reluctant to let go, but eventually she tore it free and returned, panting, to the center of the graveyard.

Following the instructions in the book, she drew a wide circle around herself and placed the bell in the center. She looked at the book again and turned the page. There was a brief note instructing the alchemist to strike the bell three times with the stick of yew and repeat the sacred text.

Belladonna scanned the page, looked at the next page, then flicked back to see if she’d missed anything on the first page.

“What sacred text?” she said to no one in particular. “Where’s the stupid sacred text?”

She stood there for a few moments, feeling increasingly like a total banana and hoping that no one would wander by and see the strange girl from school standing in the middle of the graveyard at night with a bell and a stick. Then she thought about what her mother would say (once she had stopped laughing) and shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh, well,” she said, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”

She leaned forward and hit the bell with the stick.

Instead of the dull thunk she had expected to hear, the bell tolled with a mighty sound that seemed to reverberate from deep within the earth itself. She held her breath for a moment, then hit it twice more. Each time, the bell rang with a deep sepulchral roar that echoed around the graveyard until it seemed that the air itself was vibrating. Belladonna stepped backward and put her hands over her ears. It didn’t help: The ringing was in her bones and inside her head; it made all coherent thought impossible and seemed to fill her brain with rusty nails. Slowly the ringing died down and she lowered her hands and sighed with relief. All was silence once more.

She looked around, but everything seemed the same: The graveyard was just as it had been, the circle was unchanged, and the bell was sitting in the wet grass right where she’d put it. She had just decided that maybe she’d better try hitting it again, when the bell began to emit a new sound—a sibilant rasp like rain hitting a fire. As she watched, it started to glow with a
greenish light and the elaborate decorations around its rim began to shift and move.

Belladonna stepped closer as the ancient engravings slid around the rim of the bell, winding sinuously together, splitting off and then recombining. She stared, almost hypnotized by the serpentine movement, but even as she marveled at the beauty of the undulating silver, she realized that it wasn’t just random—it was forming words.

She stood close to the bell, and whispered the words as they appeared. The language was strange and the script unfamiliar, but she knew what it meant. She knew she was summoning something old. Older than Ashe, older than the dragons in the amulet, and far, far older than anything her grandmother knew existed. Yet it had a familiar ring, as if she knew the language, knew the words, and knew who it was she was calling and had just forgotten. Like she sometimes forgot the name of the postman, or what that stuff is that you put in a cake along with the baking soda to make it rise. But how could she have ever known this?

“Lamashtu of the seven names, daughter of heaven, keeper of the seal and the dark hounds, send to me one from your own realm to answer my call and obey my command.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a wind began to whip around the tops of the trees. The weather vane on the top of the church spire began
to spin, twirling faster and faster as the speed of the wind picked up. Dark clouds and fog descended with the wind, picking up leaves, branches, and paper as it whirled. Inside the circle, however, all was calm and Belladonna watched with fascination as a tornado seemed to form around her as if she were at the very eye of its fury. Now, this was a spell! It was all very well saying Words of Power in front of a plywood door, but winds and fog and glowing bells . . .

But as the wind continued to scream around the circle, she began to have second thoughts. She looked at the bell and chewed on her lower lip. Lamashtu. The name seemed familiar but she didn’t really know who or what Lamashtu was. Though apparently she had dark hounds, which, based on her recent experience, probably wasn’t a good thing. “Send to me one from your own realm.” That wasn’t good—she probably should have been more specific.

And then, as quickly as it started, the wind stopped. Belladonna gasped and took a step back—Slackett was standing about four feet away from the edge of the circle.

He had his back to her and turned around slowly. He was holding a small jug in one hand, as if he’d been caught in the middle of doing something. When his eyes met Belladonna’s, he smiled slowly.