Spellbinder (7 page)

“Well, she is your aunt. Maybe it’s just something to do with school. My parents are always being hauled in for one thing or another.”

“Why aren’t I surprised?” smiled Belladonna.

They walked on toward the lunch room in silence.
Belladonna’s mind was far away, thinking about her parents’ disappearance, the black dog, and Aunt Deirdre’s take-charge manner. It was becoming obvious that her aunt was going to be even less communicative about what was going on than her parents. And they were
her
parents, after all. If anyone had a right to know what had happened to them, it seemed like it should be her. Belladonna decided she had to find out more herself. Starting now.

As they passed the girls’ toilets, she suddenly darted for the door.

“I’ll see you later!” she said cheerily, and left Steve standing alone in the hall.

“Great,” he muttered, “girls!” and shambled off for his lunch.

Belladonna waited in the toilets until she thought he’d gone. Two other girls were in there, primping in front of the mirrors, exchanging lip gloss, whispering, and giggling. Belladonna glanced at her own reflection; her long, pale face, lank dark hair, and dark blue eyes stared back. She never came into the bathroom to primp; she usually stayed as far away from mirrors as she could. And even though her mother had always assured her that she was “striking” and that being striking was much better than being merely pretty, there was a little corner of her soul that longed to have cascading curls and clear blue eyes.

After about five minutes, she poked her head out
of the toilets and looked up and down the corridor. A few stragglers dawdled along, but almost everyone was having lunch. She eased out and walked quickly along toward the stairs to the science labs and Miss Parker’s office.

Once there, she ran up the stairs as quietly as she could until she reached the top floor and the door to the attic. It took a couple of tries, but she managed to heave it open, and crept up the dark stairs to the room at the top. The old posters and trunks of papers were still there, but she wasn’t interested in them today. If this was the attic, she reasoned, there must be more of it. And if there was more, maybe she could find the part that was above Miss Parker’s office.

She made her way to the darkest end of the room and, sure enough, next to a long-discarded wooden filing cabinet there was a narrow doorway. She stepped through and almost immediately heard the muffled buzz of voices.

She started to tiptoe across the room, when one of the boards suddenly let loose with an agonizing creak. Belladonna became a statue. Did the voices stop? Did they hear? She had no idea. No, the low hum of conversation was still there.

She started across the room again, but this time she tested each board before she put her full weight on it; if it creaked, she tried another one. Her progress was slow, but she finally reached a part of the dark,
cobwebby attic where she could almost hear what they were saying. There was only one thing for it.

She looked around carefully to make sure there were no spiders in the immediate vicinity, and then carefully lay down on her stomach. A pinprick of light snuck through a tiny knothole in one of the aged gray floorboards. Belladonna put her eye up against it and was amazed to find herself looking down into Miss Parker’s office! Beneath her she could see the thick carpet, the weirdly foreshortened Picasso print, the gleaming desk, and the tops of two heads bobbing in conversation. The sleek blond one was unmistakably Aunt Deirdre; the other was dark, with streaks of gray.

“It’s all very well,” said Miss Parker, with a twang of irritation in her voice, “but we don’t know where it is. And even if we did—”

“Let me worry about that part,” interrupted Aunt Deirdre. “It’s here somewhere. We’ve always known it was here. And that’s not all.”

Miss Parker didn’t seem to move but Belladonna knew she was probably fixing her aunt with that “get-on-with-it” stare that terrified the socks off most of her pupils.

“The Hound was out last night,” said Aunt Deirdre, “not two hours after the event.”

There was a long pause. Belladonna held her breath.

“I would guess that it was probably here much earlier,” whispered Miss Parker, so quietly that Belladonna could hardly hear.

“What?” now it was Aunt Deirdre’s turn to sound irritated.

“Didn’t you see the sky two nights ago?” asked Miss Parker.

“No. Why?”

There was a pause, then Aunt Deirdre leaned forward, a new note of tension in her voice.

“Are you saying there was an intrusion? Are you sure?”

“Quite sure,” said Miss Parker, as if she were describing the morning’s milk delivery. “Someone is using Old Magic.”

“Surely you don’t think . . .”

“I don’t know.” Now Miss Parker was sounding impatient. “It shouldn’t be possible, but it’s difficult for me to find out from here. You should go to see the old woman tonight, maybe she’ll have an idea.”

“An idea? For heaven’s sake, woman, she hosts
séances
,” Aunt Deirdre’s voice dripped contempt.

Miss Parker stood up. “She’s not as foolish as she may seem,” she said. “Besides, you shouldn’t let your personal feelings affect your judgment.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll check the library. We’ll speak tomorrow.”

Belladonna couldn’t believe that Miss Parker was ordering her indomitable aunt about as if she were an uncooperative shop assistant. As she looked at the tops of their heads, she saw Miss Parker’s tilt slightly to the side.

Aunt Deirdre sniffed and picked up her ludicrously expensive patent leather designer bag. “Until tomorrow, then.”

She turned on her heel and marched out. Belladonna heard the door click shut and watched as Miss Parker slumped in her chair.

The door buzzer sounded.

“Oh, go away,” she muttered.

Belladonna waited until she felt Aunt Deirdre must have left the building and then made her way carefully back downstairs. She walked quickly to the lunch room and stood in line with her tray. The dinner ladies doled out a dollop of shepherd’s pie and some gray-looking peas. Belladonna helped herself to a carton of fruit juice and meandered over to a table.

The room was sparsely populated by this time. Most people had eaten lunch and dashed outside to take advantage of the late autumn sunshine. The chess club was there, of course, in a far corner with their boards and their endless games. They never went outside, but spent all their spare time huddled indoors, pale and bog-eyed like cave-dwelling fish.

She stared at her plate, but all she could think about was Aunt Deirdre and Miss Parker. They knew each other, that much was obvious. And from what they said, it sounded like they had been expecting something like this. But why were they so worried? After all, she didn’t want the ghosts to vanish, because it would mean never seeing her parents again, and perhaps Deirdre
was bothered that she might not see her sister. But why would Miss Parker or anyone else care at all?

Belladonna looked at her lunch. The shepherd’s pie had bits of diced carrot in it. She sighed and pushed the plate away. If there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was stealth vegetables.

At least she’d been right about one thing: The Hound
had
appeared when the stars blinked off, so it must all be connected. She wanted to ask someone, but she knew that Aunt Deirdre would say that she didn’t have time and that her Gran would pretend that she didn’t know anything about it.

Assuming that her Gran was the “old lady” that they’d been talking about, which she was pretty sure she was. And that was weird too, because Belladonna had never seen a single ghost in Grandma Johnson’s house and had just assumed that the séance thing was all made up.

She opened the carton of juice and began to drink, then put it down and rummaged about in her bag, eventually coming up with three chocolate biscuits wrapped in plastic and two lonely Parma Violets. She was just unwrapping the biscuits when she noticed something—a kind of shimmering on the other side of the table. She watched with interest as Elsie slowly materialized.

This wasn’t the Elsie of the day before, however. For one thing, she just wasn’t as corporeal; Belladonna could see the door on the other side of the room quite
clearly through her. And the confident swagger that had made Belladonna so envious upstairs in the attic had been replaced with a nervous watchfulness.

Belladonna opened her mouth to speak, but Elsie held up her hand.

“Don’t say anything,” she hissed. “Pretend you can’t see me.”

“Why?”

“They’re watching. Pretend you can’t see me.”

Belladonna pulled her dinner plate back and began pushing the shepherd’s pie around with her fork.

“Actually, I
can’t
see you very well. You’re transparent, you know.”

“Sorry,” whispered Elsie, “it’s the best I can do right now.”

Belladonna sneaked a look up at her while pretending to glance at the clock above the door. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “I feel like . . . it seems like everyone has gone.”

“I know. They have,” her hand went to her chest, just below the knot of her school tie, as if she was checking that something was still there. “I’m safe . . . I think. But . . . I just managed to get through for a moment.” Elsie glanced over at the window and stifled a gasp, “They’re here!”

“Who? You’re not making any sense.”

“Look over at the window,” said Elsie, whispering impatiently. “What do you see?”

Belladonna turned around and looked. The window
was long and narrow and extended the length of the lunch room. It was set high in the wall on the side nearest the grounds, so usually all you could see was sky. Today, though, the view of the sky was partially obscured by a row of five large black birds perched on the windowsill.

“Birds,” said Belladonna, “really big ones. Crows, I think.”

“They’re ravens.”

“I saw them earlier, fighting and flying around the trees at the far end of the football pitch.”

Elsie shuddered. “They’re Night Ravens,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“They’re what?”

“Oh, no! They’ve seen me!”

Belladonna turned to the window again. All five birds had turned around and were staring into the lunchroom. She turned back to Elsie with every intention of asking all about the birds, but the look on the ghost’s face froze the words on her tongue.

“I have to go,” said Elsie, slowly dematerializing. “I just wanted to tell you: Everyone is gone. Not just from here. There’s no one. You have to find the door. It’s here. It’s red.”

“What? Wait! I know that! But where . . . ?”

“You have to help us. Look for the red door.”

And with that, she was gone. Belladonna stared at the space where she had been, and as she did, Elsie slowly reappeared.

“I almost forgot,” she said, “the number is seventy-three.”

She vanished again. For a moment the air shimmered, but Belladonna knew she wouldn’t be back. She turned and looked at the birds. They were still there, only now they seemed to be staring at her.

She stood up, picked up her tray, threw away her lunch, and left the tray and her plate with the stacks of other dirty dishes. She glanced at the window again. They were still there. Staring. She stared back at them defiantly. She had no intention of being afraid of a bunch of scraggy black birds, no matter how big they were.

After a few moments of this, one of the birds spread its glistening blue-black wings and took off. The others followed, and for a moment Belladonna could see them sweeping through the autumn air. She went back to her table and picked up her bag.

Why on earth would Elsie be afraid of a bunch of birds? She trailed out of the lunch room and dawdled along to the library. And if Elsie was safe, why was she still afraid?

She sat down at a long table and pulled some homework out of her bag, but it was no use. All she could think of was red doors, ravens, and what on earth Aunt Deirdre and Miss Parker had been talking about. She took out her French exercise book and opened it with every intention of getting a head start on the next day’s work, but something made her turn back the pages
and look at her doodles. The endless sketches of doors marched across the pages. She had known that they were red, even though she’d only drawn them in pencil, but now she knew what the squiggle in the middle of each tall paneled door was.

It was the number seventy-three.

T
HE AFTERNOON SEEMED
to drag on forever. Belladonna kept glancing at the clock above the classroom door and sneaking peeks at her watch, but each time it seemed that only five minutes had passed. How was that possible? How could things go quite so slowly? She sighed and fidgeted and didn’t hear a word that anyone said all afternoon.

As soon as the final bell sounded, she grabbed her bag, raced to the cloakroom, snatched her coat, and headed out into the cold afternoon.

The black birds were still in the trees at the end of the football pitch, but she paid no attention to them. She just wanted to get home and talk to Aunt Deirdre. She had spent enough time wondering what was going on and knew that until she could get her aunt to talk to her about what was happening, she’d continue to have this lost-at-sea feeling.