Spellbinder (6 page)

On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t. She strained to see it further along the street, but there was no sign of it. She bit her lip for a moment, then turned and raced through the house, turning on every available light. Finally, she took the phone into the sitting room, turned the television up loud, and sat in front of it, her back against the fireplace, waiting.

Three hours isn’t really very long. Unless, of course, your parents have just vanished and you’re sitting alone in an empty house with a large, slavering, black doglike creature outside somewhere.

If that’s the case, then three hours can seem more like three weeks.

Belladonna sat and waited. She turned the television down, in case the sound masked something more sinister, like scratching at the doors. She didn’t turn it off because the bright movement made things seem more normal. She looked at the toppled chair and felt the tears welling up in her eyes again. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. This was no time to cry, she knew that, but the knot in her stomach had turned into a deep, dark pit. What if her parents never came back? What if this time they were gone for good?

It would be worse than the first time. At least then,
there had been the hospital and the crash and things sort of made sense. But to get them back and then just have them vanish—to be left alone again . . .

Belladonna stood up and straightened her mother’s chair.

Time crept slowly by.

Gradually, she became less scared and more irritated. She wanted to do something. Sitting, cowering, and waiting for someone to come and save her seemed so spineless. If she were a character in a TV show, she thought, she’d turn it off in disgust.

She stood up and turned off the living room lights, then she went to the window and opened the curtains. Outside, everything seemed normal. The stars were out, there was no black dog, and she could see Mr. Loftus from across the road, arriving home. He always worked late. She watched him get out of his car. No evil creatures waylaid him before he got to his front door, and nothing crept from bush to bush. He just walked to the front door as he always did, turned his key in the latch, and went inside.

Belladonna pulled a chair up to the window. This was much better than sitting by the television; she didn’t feel at all worried when she could see that everything was normal.

She was still watching when Aunt Deirdre arrived. She careened around the corner in a small green sports car that hugged the road and made a noise like the
rumbling of the earth. She parked it outside the house and unfolded herself from the driver’s seat.

Aunt Deirdre was stick-thin and very tall. She had blond hair and an imperious manner that dared anyone to get in her way. She wore impeccable suits that showed quite a bit of leg when she sat down but might as well have been trimmed with barbed wire for all the encouragement they offered the opposite sex. Belladonna had always been fascinated by her aunt and more than a little afraid. She went to the front door and opened it.

Deirdre Nightshade strode in. “Lock that.”

Belladonna did as she was told and followed Aunt Deirdre into the sitting room. Her aunt marched straight to the window and drew the curtains, then she turned the lights on and the television off. She poured herself a whiskey and soda from the cabinet, sat down, and looked at Belladonna.

“Tell me what happened.”

Belladonna related the events of the evening again. She also mentioned the incident with the dishwasher the night before, Elsie’s concern that something was wrong, and, as an afterthought, Lady Mary’s vanishing baby. Aunt Deirdre nodded.

“Well,” she said, “we can’t do anything tonight. Help me make up the bed in the spare room.” She led the way upstairs.

“Will I be going to school tomorrow?”

“Of course. Why ever not?”

“Well, you made it sound—”

Deirdre opened the linen cupboard and whisked some sheets, blankets, and a pillow out. She marched into the chilly spare room. “Just make sure you’re home before dark.”

The next morning, Belladonna drifted downstairs. She hadn’t slept much, tossing from one side of her bed to the other and replaying the disappearance of her father in her head. On the brief occasions when she did manage to get to sleep, her dreams were almost instantly interrupted by the yellow eyes of the black dog, looking up at her and
knowing
. She ended up spending most of the night staring at the strip of sky between her bedroom curtains and waiting for the stars to flicker off again. It seemed that they ought to, that the disappearance of her parents and the arrival of the monstrous black dog should have some reflection in the natural world. But the stars stayed where they were and everything seemed the same, even though it wasn’t.

Aunt Deirdre was already downstairs by the time Belladonna got there. She had put out a bowl and a spoon with a paper napkin to one side, but most of the kitchen table was taken up with her laptop and stacks of paper, which she riffled through with one hand while holding her mobile to her ear with the other and giving some poor underling hell for presuming not to
be at work at seven o’clock in the morning. Belladonna sighed and fetched the cereal out of the cupboard. She pushed it around the bowl for a while, but Aunt Deirdre showed very little sign of getting off the phone. One call followed another and they all seemed to involve the person at the other end getting shouted at for not doing something that she told them to do yesterday. Belladonna reflected that working in big business in London sounded worse than school; at least they got breaks and Miss Parker didn’t call them at home at the crack of dawn to see if they’d done their homework.

She emptied the cereal into the bin, stuck the bowl in the dishwasher, and grabbed her bag. As she pulled on her coat, Deirdre covered the phone with her hand.

“I’ll see you this evening,” she said. “Remember, get home before dark. What?! Well, what’s it doing there? I told you to handle it three days ago!”

Belladonna slipped out of the front door and marched off to school, quite cheerful, under the circumstances. Things might look grim—she had lost her parents for a second time, she hadn’t done her homework, and a huge black hound seemed to be watching the house—but at least she didn’t have to go to work in an office.

The morning was cold, one of those crisp, clear days when you can see your breath and the frost sparkles on the grass. A few optimistic leaves still clung to the
branches of the trees that shaded Lychgate Lane, confident of a few more days of sunshine before the long winter nights and gloomy winter days condemned them to months of suspended animation. Belladonna was surprised, and a little ashamed, to realize that she was swinging her bag and listening to the birds, instead of trudging gloomily and giving in to the foreboding she was fairly sure she ought to be feeling right about now.

She pushed her hair away from her face and tipped her head up to drink in the sunshine. She’d hardly ever missed school (except for a few colds and that time she’d had the flu and been off for a week), but on days like this she could understand why some kids skived off and spent the day in the park.

Unfortunately, the walk to school wasn’t a long one and, as if to bring her back down to earth, Math was the first class of the day, forcing Belladonna to make up some less-than-convincing reason why she hadn’t done her homework. Mr. Fredericks hardly seemed to listen, moving right on to the next exercise. So far as he was concerned, if students couldn’t be bothered to do their homework, then he couldn’t be bothered to teach them. Belladonna sighed. She had only managed to keep up with Math by slogging away and making sure she did every single piece of homework. Now she’d missed one exercise and suddenly everything was a mystery. She had the sinking feeling that she would never again know what was going on in this class.

She looked over to the window. The morning light had turned thin and gray, and she could see large black birds fighting in the bare branches of the trees at the end of the football pitch. As she watched, she became aware that she was being stared at too. She turned her head. Steve quickly looked down at his book and pretended to be working. She knew he was pretending because he always sat right at the back and spent most of his time whispering with his friends. He wasn’t whispering today, though.

After an interminable forty minutes, the bell sounded and everyone packed their bags and headed for French. Belladonna trudged along the corridor, wishing she’d called in sick and wondering what Aunt Deirdre was doing. Would her parents be back when she got home? Would everything be back to normal? Or was this going to be “normal” now? As she moped, lost in dismal thought, Steve caught up with her.

“Hey.”

She glanced at him and managed a nod.

“Does that . . . what happened yesterday,” he seemed to be trying to avoid saying the word. “Does that happen to you all the time?”

“Ghosts, you mean?”

Steve nodded quickly, glancing around to make sure none of his friends was nearby.

“Yes,” said Belladonna, “all the time.”

They walked on. He glanced around again.

“Are there any here now?”

Belladonna stopped. She didn’t have the patience for this. She opened her mouth to speak and then realized that there weren’t any. Not a single one. She looked back the way they’d come, half expecting to see Elsie loitering near the girls’ toilets, or those two little boys who sometimes raced down the corridors, or that daunting old teacher with the black academic gown and the haggard expression who lurked near the stairs to the science labs. Nothing.

She looked at Steve and shook her head. “No.”

“Oh,” he seemed almost disappointed.

“It’s really strange,” she muttered as they trudged on toward their French class.

Steve grinned. “Only you would think it was strange
not
to see a ghost.”

Belladonna didn’t reply. She suddenly realized that something was seriously wrong. It wasn’t just that her parents had vanished or that she couldn’t see any ghosts in school. It was more than that. It was as if there were no ghosts anywhere. None. The whole world seemed suddenly empty.

She endured French, but her mind was elsewhere. Outside, the big black birds were still screaming at one another in the trees at the end of the football pitch. Belladonna found herself doodling page after page of doors.

“The doors are closing.”

That’s what her father had said. She looked at her drawings, then stopped. She turned the pages of her exercise book back. The doors were all the same, but there was something odd about them. For some reason she knew they were supposed to be red, and she knew that the squiggle in the middle was a number. But what number? It was important, she knew it was important, but even though she’d drawn the doors herself, she had no idea what the number was supposed to be.

She had just decided to draw another door and this time try to think about the number, when she realized that the room was unnaturally quiet. She looked up. Madame Huggins was looking at her, and so was everyone else. Obviously Madame had asked a question and equally obviously, Belladonna did not have a clue what it was.

She looked at the blank faces around her and the questioning yet rather smug face of Madame. Teachers only got that face when they thought they’d got you dead to rights. Belladonna thought about this for a moment, and thought about all the times she’d seen various teachers looking at Steve in exactly this way, and she decided she knew what the question had been.

“Je dessine des portes, Madame,”
she said.

Madame looked crestfallen.

Steve’s mouth dropped open in amazement.

After class he scurried to catch up with her in the corridor.

“How did you know?” he asked.

“How did I know what?” asked Belladonna innocently.

“What she’d asked. You were a million miles away. There’s no way you heard a word she said.”

“Because that’s what they always ask.”

Steve looked at her blankly.

“They notice someone isn’t paying attention. Usually you,” explained Belladonna with a smile. “Then they get this smug expression like they’ve just aced their category on
Mastermind
and they say, ‘Well, Mr. Evans, if what you’re doing is so much more interesting than this class, why don’t you share it with us?’ Or something like that. I just guessed that, being Madame, she’d probably gone one step further and said it in French.”

Steve shoved his hands into his pockets and grinned.

“Brilliant,” he said. “Her face was a picture! Did you see—”

He never got any further. Belladonna had grabbed him by the blazer lapels and yanked him back into an alcove near the stairs to the science labs.

“Ow! What on earth d’you—”

“
Shhhhhh!
” hissed Belladonna.

Steve was about to push her away and dart back out into the corridor, when he noticed the expression on Belladonna’s face. “What is it?” he whispered.

Belladonna peered out into the corridor. Steve followed her gaze. A tall, thin, and imposingly beautiful
woman was walking toward them with Mrs. Jay, the school secretary.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s my Aunt Deirdre.”

The two women passed close enough for them to get an unwelcome whiff of Aunt Deirdre’s very expensive perfume. Belladonna glanced at Steve nervously, suddenly aware that what she had done was the kind of thing that would probably only add to her “weird girl” image. He clearly had no idea why they were hiding, but his expression made it all too obvious that there was something about Belladonna’s aunt that made hiding in a corner seem like a really good idea. Mrs. Jay started up the stairs toward Miss Parker’s office.

“This way, Miss Nightshade,” she simpered.

Belladonna waited until they had reached the first landing and started up the second flight before she stepped out into the corridor.

“Why were we hiding?” asked Steve.

“I don’t know,” Belladonna frowned. “It’s just that . . . I mean, why would she come here?”

She gazed up the stairs, then sighed and walked away down the hall. Steve glanced around and then scurried after her.