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Authors: Helen Stringer

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BOOK: Spellbinder
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“Stop!”

“What?” he said, not stopping.

“It’s the Hound!”

Steve glanced at Belladonna, then slowed down slightly and peered down the road ahead. In the distance he saw a tabby cat creep under a parked car, but there was definitely no dog.

“You’re losing your marbles, Johnson,” he said. “I mean, Elsie is one thing, but—”

He never got any further; Belladonna had slid one hand back along the handlebars and grabbed his left hand. The moment she made contact, he saw it.

A large black dog, teeth bared, stood in the road about six car-lengths in front of them. Now that she saw it again, Belladonna realized that it was the biggest
dog she had ever seen. Not tall like a wolfhound or a Great Dane, but massive and powerful; its head was muscular and flat, with small ears pressed against its skull. The strangest thing of all, though, was the fur, which didn’t seem like fur at all, but like a piece of the blackest starless night. A snarling hole into a place of nightmares.

Steve hit the brake and clamped his feet to the ground. The bike skidded to a halt, but as it did so, Belladonna lost her grip on the handlebars and shot off, hitting the ground with a thud and rolling forward along the road. For a moment, after she let go of his hand, Steve couldn’t see the dog any more, but as he watched her skidding along the tarmac, the giant animal again shimmered into view.

Belladonna slid to a halt about a meter from the dog. Even in the dark, she could see the fog of its breath and the homicidal glint in its eye. To her horror, she discovered she couldn’t move: She just lay there in the street, watching, as it crept closer and closer.

Just as she had decided that this really was it, something white flew past her face and landed at the dog’s feet. The animal glanced down, then eagerly gobbled up the projectile before turning its attention back to the bigger prize. As it did so, it got what Belladonna could only describe as a funny expression on its face. Then, in the deepness of its fur, a sort of wrinkle appeared. No, more like a ripple, as if a stone had been thrown into a very deep, dark well.

And like a ripple, the waves seemed to spread outward, across and through the slavering beast, leaving . . . nothing. The dog simply vanished from the middle out. When the last vestige of beady yellow eye had disappeared, Belladonna turned and looked at Steve.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he stammered, still in shock, “I just threw it my leftover lunch. A ham sandwich . . . with mustard.”

 

 

The Door

 

 

T
HE NEXT DAY
was Saturday. On normal weekends, Belladonna would lie in bed late and look at the sky through the narrow slit where her bedroom curtains didn’t quite meet. Her mother had made the curtains and miscalculated by the merest scad, so a strip of daylight always streaked into the room at dawn.

On this particular Saturday, as she blinked into the late autumn sunlight, for a moment Belladonna imagined everything was as it used to be. She was curled up in bed, her father had nipped out to get the paper, and her mother was pottering away in the kitchen inventing new and wonderful (and occasionally not so wonderful) things to have for breakfast.

She lay very still, as if not moving would make it true. But no amount of wishing could conjure up the aroma of frying bacon, or the comfortable sounds of to-ing and fro-ing with doors banging, pans dropping, and her mother yelling after her father not to forget the
extra pint of milk. There weren’t even any of the new sounds—the sounds that even the best-intentioned ghosts make: the creaking of floorboards, the sudden cold drafts, the dull thumps in the walls. Today, all was silent.

Outside, the Night Ravens cawed and squabbled in the trees. Belladonna got up and drew the curtains all the way back. The day was sunny, but there was a thinness to the air that told of cold and fast-approaching winter. She shivered, pulled on her dressing gown, and went down to the kitchen. Aunt Deirdre was already up, dressed, and finishing her breakfast. She looked up at Belladonna.

“The tea’s just made,” she began, then her eyes widened. “What on
earth
has happened to you?”

Belladonna was puzzled for a moment, then remembered the tumble from the bike. She had a scratch on one side of her face and a rather impressive scratch-bruise combo on her right arm.

“Oh, I fell off a bike,” she said, in what she hoped was a nonchalant manner.

“You don’t have a bike.”

“I was riding on the handlebars of someone else’s.”

“Oh, very clever,” said Aunt Deirdre. “I suppose you know how dangerous that is.”

Belladonna shrugged and helped herself to cereal. Aunt Deirdre seemed to be having a maternal moment, however, and wouldn’t let the subject drop.

“You could die doing that,” she insisted, “roll under
the wheels of a car or something. Do you have any idea how inconvenient it would be if you ended up in the hospital?”

This didn’t seem to require a response, so Belladonna just carried on getting her breakfast.

“No, I didn’t think so,” continued Aunt Deirdre. “Well, see if you can stay out of trouble for one day. I have a few errands to do.”

She glanced at Belladonna and her face softened for a moment.

“I know it’s hard,” she said, “and we will talk, I promise. But there are things I have to do. Perhaps we’ll go to the park tomorrow.”

And with that, she was on her feet. She pulled on an exquisitely tailored yellow-brown jacket and grabbed her bag, her keys, and a map of the town and surrounding countryside. She ruffled Belladonna’s hair with one of her long white hands and headed for the front door.

“Be good!” she called over her shoulder. “I’ll be back by teatime!”

Before Belladonna could say anything, the door slammed, the car roared to life, and Deirdre Nightshade sped away up the road.

Belladonna knew where she was going, of course. She was going to look for red doors with the number seventy-three on them. But Aunt Deirdre was from London and Belladonna had lived her whole life here; she knew the roads, the parks, the back alleys (well, not as many as Steve), and the best shortcuts. If there
was a red door with a number seventy-three on it somewhere in town, she ought to be able to find it.

She ran upstairs and emerged wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and an old fleece-lined jacket. It had been blue at one time, but had long since faded to a kind of nondescript gray. Still, it was warm and inconspicuous—two definite assets considering the day and what she was planning to do.

She tucked her house keys and a few pounds into one of the inside pockets and zipped it closed, then she brushed her hair in the hall mirror and headed out to hunt for mysterious doors.

Of course, that was easier said than done. Common sense dictated that street numbers progressed in order, with odd numbers on one side and even on the other. But it didn’t really work that way. Some houses had A’s or B’s after their numbers, some numbers were skipped, and some houses had no numbers at all, just names like “Rose Gables.” (Sophie Warren lived there. She had a pony and entered gymkhanas. In her spare time she and her friends would smirk at Belladonna with her pale face and old clothes. Then they’d exchange makeup tips, hide in the toilets, and sneak out of school in the afternoon to go to the pictures.) Belladonna would have liked nothing better than to discover that Sophie actually lived at the gate to the Other Side, but she knew that things rarely worked out with that kind of poetic precision.

She trudged on up and down every street that
seemed hopeful—she even tried knocking on a couple of number seventy-threes that were green or blue. After all, the door might have started out red, but that didn’t mean that it mightn’t have been painted somewhere along the line. Each time she knocked, she half expected the door to swing open to reveal a gaping chasm, or a river with a blind boatman, or maybe a three-headed dog. But nothing like that happened. The first two times no one answered at all, and the third time the door was opened by a rather nice-looking lady in curlers. Belladonna asked if the lady knew the way to the High Street, as she was lost. It was the kind of desperate tactic she’d seen Steve use dozens of times when cornered in one class or another and she’d never found it convincing, but the lady in curlers smiled and pointed out the way, her eyes flickering with puzzled amusement.

Belladonna wandered on in ever-widening circles, up and down tree-lined streets, past the well-manicured lawns of houses where even the garages seemed to have received the television-interior-designer treatment, past rows of semidetacheds where proud gardens competed for attention, and past terraces with no gardens but really impressive shiny front steps and stained-glass panels hanging in the windows.

And then she found herself at the gate of St. Abelard’s. It seemed so green and peaceful, and she really wanted a sit-down after meandering all over town.
She hesitated for a moment before pushing the gate open and going inside. She walked past the old church and on into the graveyard. The gravestones lurched, shoulder to shoulder, across the grass; there were simple stones, enormous carved angels, and stark stone sarcophagi. Some of them dated back to the seventeenth century, others seemed older, but the inscriptions had worn away after centuries of rain, wind, and sun. Belladonna could remember coming here, full of curiosity, to read the names, dates, and causes of death. Old gravestones were so detailed . . . they seemed to explain everything: when people were born, who they married, when they died, and what of.

Her own curiosity had melted away after the accident. Her parents were buried on the far side, near the trees. It was very pretty, but she couldn’t go there.

Of course, she had always known that these were the final resting places of the once living, but it had never really registered until her own parents had joined their ranks.

She sniffed, tucked her hair behind her ears, and strode out toward the trees. She hadn’t walked across this grass since the funeral. Today, it was wet and the long blades brushed against her trainers. She stopped near a moss-covered angel and listened, straining to hear the telltale rustle of grass. Back when she used to come here every day, she had been convinced that something else was here too. Not ghosts, not the spirits
of the dead, but something alive and small. It was as if she was always just missing something out of the corner of her eye.

The last time, at the funeral, she had almost seen them, but not quite. She had felt them, though, the way you know when you’re being stared at, as if they were peeking through bushes and down from the trees. But today there was nothing but silence.

She sat down on one of the great table tombs and looked at her parents’ stones. They had seemed so stark and new and wrong at the funeral, but now they seemed to belong. There was a mist of green moss over them, and grass and dandelions clustered around their bases. Belladonna knew that her parents were there, but also that they weren’t. The important part of them, the part that really mattered, was in the Land of the Dead. And at home, of course, when they wanted to be. But now they couldn’t visit her at home any more, and if Elsie was right, they had vanished from the Other Side as well.

She could feel herself starting to drift into sadness, which wouldn’t do any good at all, so she sat up a bit, pushed her hair off her face, and reached into her pocket for the remains of yesterday’s packet of Parma Violets.

“They’re gone. They left me behind.”

Belladonna jumped. A small creature was suddenly sitting next to her. It looked like a tiny human: two feet tall, slightly built, with a tangled mass of golden curls,
and an iridescent purple sheen to its pale skin that made her think of wrapping paper. It was wearing a loose gray tunic and one arm was in a homemade sling. It certainly wasn’t the least bit threatening.

“Who’s gone,” she said finally, “the ghosts?”

“No, my family,” the creature looked up at her. “There were never any ghosts here.”

That was true. Graveyards were the one place where Belladonna never saw ghosts. They were always just quiet stone gardens, inhabited by rabbits, birds, and the quick-moving creatures she’d never quite been able to see until now.

“I’m Belladonna,” she said, hoping that the creature would introduce itself, “Belladonna Johnson. My Mum and Dad are over there.”

“Really?” The creature sounded genuinely interested. “I remember them! They didn’t need any help at all—just took off right away.”

“Took off?”

The creature nodded and rubbed its nose. Belladonna noticed faint dirty streaks on its face, as if it had been crying. It saw her concern and immediately drew back.

“Anyway,” it said, somewhat sulkily, “my name’s Aya.”

“That’s a pretty name,” said Belladonna encouragingly. “Are you . . . an elf?”

Aya snorted at the suggestion, “An elf! Don’t be ridiculous. Elves are imaginary creatures, like fairies
and goblins. Do I look imaginary to you? Aren’t you a bit old to be believing in that sort of nonsense?”

Belladonna stared at her. Aya was still shaking her head, a sarcastic sideways smile on her face. “An
elf
!”

BOOK: Spellbinder
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