Winter Door (3 page)

Opening and closing the farm gate behind her carefully, Rage picked her way cautiously down the steepest part of the road. The sky was just beginning to lighten to blue-black at the horizon when she reached the main road. Pushing her gloved hands inside her coat and under her armpits, she stomped back and forth, hoping that Mrs. Marren would be her usual punctual self.

A wolf howled.

Startled and incredulous, Rage stopped and listened until the sound faded. Everyone knew there were wolves in the high mountains of the range that ended in the hills above Hopeton, but they never came down so low. She squinted into the gritty dimness, trying to spot any movement. Wolves didn’t often attack humans, preferring to target sheep and goats and domestic pets, but who knew what this long, bitter winter might drive them to do?

The wolf howled again, and this time others answered. Rage felt the hair on her neck prickle. It sounded as if the wolves, if they really were wolves and not stray dogs, were some distance away, but snow could distort sound, making faraway things sound close and close things sound far.

“When in danger, have courage and do what you can,”
she remembered the stern, husky voice of the witch Mother from Valley saying. The voice didn’t summon up any courage, but it did provoke the stubborn part of herself that Rage had discovered in Valley. Floundering awkwardly through the deep snow to a small stand of trees, she hung her schoolbag on a knot alongside the lowest branch of the nearest tree, then turned to face the road. If Mrs. Marren came, she could quickly run back to the signpost marking the hill road, and if wolves did appear, she could climb the tree.

She heard the howling again, but all at once the arc of car headlights dipped over the curve of the road. With a yelp of relief, she grabbed her bag and hurried back to the gate. Until she climbed into the warm, messy interior of the Marrens’ Range Rover, she did not realize how cold she was. The warmth of the car made her feel slightly sick, though she was glad of it. She felt the bright, unfriendly gaze of Anabel Marren.

“What were you doing over by the trees?” she demanded.

“Sometimes I put crusts in a holder we hung on that tree for the birds and squirrels,” Rage said truthfully enough.

“Put your seat belt back on properly, Anabel dear,” Mrs. Marren admonished as they pulled away from the curb.

“You’re weird,” Hugh Marren announced, leaning forward to look past his twin brother at Rage. The twins’ faces were puffy and greenish in the dash light, and the fact that they were identical made Rage feel that she had stepped into a science fiction movie about cloning.

“And your uncle is weird,” Isaac added. The twins watched with interest to see how Rage would react to the jibes.

“Boys!” Mrs. Marren said, glancing backward. The car swerved dangerously.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Marren,” Rage said. “I guess anyone who explores jungles is bound to seem a bit strange to people.”

“Your whole family is strange, my dad says,” Hugh reiterated.

“Hugh-ey!”
Mrs. Marren shrieked and aimed a wild slap backward toward her son. It missed Hugh but got Isaac, who began to shriek as his mother fought to bring the car out of a fishtail skid. “Don’t mind them, Rebecca Jane,” Mrs. Marren added when she had the car back on the correct side of the road.

“Jesus, Mum, don’t call her Rebecca Jane,” Anabel said. “It’s so lame. It makes you sound like one of the Waltons. Good night, Rebecca Jane! Good night, Jim Bob!”

“Anabel, please don’t swear, darling,” Mrs. Marren said. “Rebecca Jane, you don’t mind me calling you that, do you? After all, it
is
your real name.”

Rage made an anonymous sound and tensed up, knowing that the next inevitable step in the conversation would be for Mrs. Marren to say something about her mother using such a horrible nickname instead of her real name. Then she would ask about Mam’s health. Rage felt that she truly could not bear to talk about her mother to Mrs. Marren just now. Help came from an unexpected quarter as Anabel said accusingly to her mother, “You don’t believe in God and neither do I, so how could it be swearing to say
Jesus
?”

“It’s disrespectful, darling,” Mrs. Marren said primly, diverted from her interrogation of Rage.

“Disrespectful to what? Someone’s imaginary friend?”

“Anabel! I hate to hear you talk in this dreadful, cynical way.”

Isaac’s yowls were tapering off, now that his mother was ignoring him. Suddenly he gave his twin a look of spiteful inspiration and reached out to drag savagely on his tow-colored hair. Hugh screamed and the pair began to kick and pummel one another. Laying her cheek against the freezing glass, Rage watched her pale image run unevenly across the undulating ice blue of the snowy, deserted fields and half-obscured stands of trees they passed, wondering again why the winter should be so long and savage this year. Could it really have something to do with the world’s weather changing, as the geography teacher claimed?

“If this keeps up, there will be
no
videos tonight,” Mrs. Marren threatened. “So tell me, Rebecca Jane, how is your uncle’s book coming along?”

“Fine, I guess,” Rage said, not liking this subject, either. Why did adults think it was their right to ask you about everything? Except Uncle Samuel, who didn’t ask her anything at all. On their first night together at Winnoway, her uncle had begun to open mysterious-looking crates and sewn-up packages. He had shown her a whole pile of stained and battered leather-bound notepads held together by rubber bands, saying they were notes for a book about rare plants. But Uncle Samuel had barely touched Mam’s battered portable typewriter since his return. After the doctor had told him it would be better if he did not see Mam yet, he had thrown himself into the farm maintenance. “Catching up” he called it. But somehow he had never got to his own work, and that seemed a bad sign to Rage.

“Rage?”

There was an irritated note in Mrs. Marren’s voice. To Rage’s relief, the twins began to exchange crude words before she could be reproached for her inattention. The lecture on bad language lasted noisily all the way to the outskirts of town, where she and Anabel got out.

“She won’t punish them,” Anabel sneered, twisting up a black lipstick and smoothing it onto her lips. “Not getting videos would mean she’d have to entertain them. She’d rather have two little television zombies.”

Rage felt acutely uncomfortable. When she had first started getting rides with the Marrens, she and Anabel had not spoken to one another at all. But lately Anabel had taken to talking whenever they were alone. Like her mother, Anabel made conversation consisting of questions, and Rage’s every instinct was to say as little as she could.

On impulse, when she heard Anabel draw breath to speak again, Rage suddenly launched into a long and intentionally dull retelling of a story told by a girl at school. She went on as long as she could, praying that someone else would turn up, but she couldn’t see even one soul in either direction in the street. It would have been easy to imagine that they were the only two people in all the world. Finally, she came to an abrupt halt, aware that she did not even know what her last words had been.

Anabel was staring at her. “Your uncle is not the only weird one,” she said, but in a less nasty voice than usual.

“Weird,” Rage echoed, having lately discovered that saying the other girl’s words back to her was the quickest way to end a conversation.

“You wouldn’t see it because you’re weird, too,” Anabel continued, the edge back in her voice.

Without thinking it through, Rage turned to the older girl. “What do you want from me, Anabel?”

The older girl actually looked comically startled, her mouth making a black, moist O. Her tongue looked very red inside that black circle. Then her eyes narrowed to slits. “What makes you think
I
want anything from
you,
Miss think-yourself-better-than-everyone-else? You’re not, you know. Being weird is
not
being better. My mother takes you to town because she pities you!”

“I don’t think I’m better than anyone,” Rage said indignantly.

“Yes you do. You act so perfect, but everyone knows you did something to those dogs of yours that disappeared,” Anabel accused.

Rage said nothing. This was not the first time Anabel had made sinister references to the disappearance of Bear, Elle, and Mr. Walker. Rage knew that there were horrible rumors at the school, and she suspected that Anabel had begun them. Several times the older girl had gotten other school kids to offer suggestions about what Rage might have done with the dogs.

The bus groaned around the corner, and instead of standing back to let Anabel enter first as she usually did, Rage climbed into the warmth and took the seat right behind the bus driver. It was against Anabel’s cool creed to sit anywhere near the front of the bus. Usually Rage sat three or four rows back, but she felt too tired to care where she sat.

It took just over an hour to get to school in normal weather by bus, but today it had taken almost two hours and they were yet to arrive. It felt to Rage as if she had already lived through a long, hard day, and it had not even properly begun. “And there’ll probably be another storm tonight,” she muttered to herself. Recognizing Goaty’s doom-mongering voice, she grinned and corrected herself. Not
Goaty. Gilbert.
Elle had given Goaty his longed-for real name shortly before they had all parted. How Rage missed them: Elle’s bright, strong courage, Mr. Walker’s odd combination of sharpness and dreaminess, Gilbert’s exaggerated gloominess, Bear’s powerful presence. She wondered if they had stayed the same or if Valley had further changed them. Except for Bear, who had already changed beyond belief.

Sighing, Rage pushed Valley from her mind yet again as the bus lurched to a stop in front of the school.

Despite everything, the morning went quickly with classes she liked, then there was lunchtime, and she spent it in the library reading
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
For once, it neither snowed nor rained, but she overheard one of the teachers saying the worst so far was coming on the weekend.

When she went to her final class of the day, English, she was relieved to find Logan Ryder was absent. Mrs. Gosford told them to take out their copies of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and led them swiftly into a discussion. The kids were soon complaining about the language.

“It’s too hard,” one of the boys said.

Another boy said, “It’s how they talk. By the time you figure out what they’re saying, you forget what the last person said. Why can’t they just say things straight out?”

Mrs. Gosford sighed. “Look, let’s just read a little aloud, and I’m sure you’ll find it less complex than you think. I assume you all read through at least some of the play as I asked?” Her brown eyes passed skeptically around the roomful of nodding kids, and Rage tried to hide a smile. Unfortunately, the teacher caught it. “Rage? Perhaps you would start? Don’t worry too much about meaning at this point. Just try to savor the words. See how they feel in your mouth.”

Feeling hot with embarrassment, Rage flicked through the pages. The book fell open at some of Puck’s lines, which she had been reading at lunchtime. She thought she had a reasonable grasp of what they meant, and so she said softly, “This is from one of Puck’s speeches.”

“Stand up and read,” Mrs. Gosford suggested with an encouraging smile. “Remember, Puck is a powerful though comic figure. He is one of the fairy folk, but he aligns with humans. He is
touched
by them. Go on, Rage.” She was one of the few teachers who had liked Rage’s mother and hence called Rage by the name Mam had used.

Rage stood, and at that moment the door banged open and Logan Ryder entered.

“Sit down, Logan,” the teacher said.

“Don’t you want to hear my excuse?” Logan asked insolently. He towered over the teacher, and he was close enough that she had to look up at him.

“No, Logan. Not now. I will hear anything you want to say after the class. We are looking at
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
”

“Sure, ma’am, but I dunno ’bout this fairy book you got us reading,” Logan said loudly in a mock southern accent as he slouched into his seat.

Rage was relieved to be waved down.

Mrs. Gosford said, “Look, perhaps some of you feel that Shakespeare has nothing to offer because it was written and is set in another age and because there are, at least in this play, elements of fantasy. But the reason Shakespeare’s writing is classic is precisely because it rises above the time for which and in which it was written. It transcends.
Transcends!
” she repeated exultantly. “It speaks so deeply about its subjects that it goes beyond the present and the past and even the future to speak to all ages. Shakespeare wrote about love and jealousy and fear and anger and worship and betrayal. Those are universal human concerns, things we will all have to face in our lifetime, and entering these plays and words gives us ways to think about them as issues.”

“But what about the fairies?” Logan asked very seriously.

That made a lot of the kids laugh, and even Mrs. Gosford smiled a bit, but she didn’t let it go too far. “I can see you have a problem with fairies, Logan, and maybe you and I can discuss that after class. All I will say is that fairy tales and myths in certain works represent deep philosophical truths, or they are at least an attempt to grapple with such truths. They represent things that we can think and talk about, but not see and touch and hear and smell. Puck and the other fairy folk represent another way of seeing the world and how it works.”

Rage crossed her fingers, but the teacher’s eyes only turned back to her. “One of Puck’s speeches, you said, Rage?” Mrs. Gosford prompted.

Rage stood again slowly and prayed that the bell would go, or that there would be some announcements that would take them through to the end of the period. Or that there would be a fire drill. Or a bomb scare. Or maybe she could just have a heart attack.