The clouds seemed to be gathering, and in fact the air was much greener than it had been a moment ago.
Well, I was tired of being scared. How bad could this be? I felt that little quease between my legs, but really, what next? I could go my whole life like this, constantly being weak and scared.
Or I could go ahead and face up to the strange.
“Who’s there?” I called.
The air got greener and denser. You couldn’t even see the black velvet chairs I’d first noticed at the top of the staircase.
“Is anybody there?”
Out of the thin air, except it couldn’t have been, a middle-aged man appeared. He was elegant in a dovegray suit with tails, a dovegray shirt, and charcoal gloves with mother-of-pearl buttons. His skin was the color of pecans, and his eyes were chips of ice.
Sammy!
“And who’s here?” he asked nastily.
“Only me.”
“Precisely.”
I leaned down and pulled up my anklets, then brushed off the toes of my Keds. All that dust.
“Are you ready to deal?”
I straightened up, making every effort to be calm and cool. Poodle toys and the magic book: power sources. “What about that danger you said? What about my family?”
“You have something I want. I have something you need. It’s as simple as that.” He smoothed down his gloves. His eyes looked like Stripey’s. He was June’s pet snake, until Linwood found him curled up in one of her slippers. The worst part was she found him with her foot.
“But Deane’s my sister!”
“Do say.”
“And what’s hers should be mine. More than yours.”
He straightened his impeccable tie before an imaginary mirror. “Very well. If you must be greedy. And if you want the safety of your family to be your responsibility, of course.”
Globes of light seemed to spin in the sparkly air before my eyes. “How do I know you aren’t making this all up, just because you’re greedy too?”
“That’s a chance you could take. You are the one who will have to live with your conscience.”
Pang straight to the heart.
Sammy made an about-face and strolled away a couple of paces.
“Wait a minute!”
He turned back, his face a study in boredom.
“If you’re so smart—”
He cocked an eyebrow.
“—why didn’t you just get the book yourself?”
When he smiled, you wished he wouldn’t. “You saw the hex signs in her room. Whom do you think they were meant to keep out? You? That oaf of a boyfriend?”
“Pet!” Stan called. Wherever he was, it was farther away than a dream.
“Are you ready to deal?”
I felt utterly paralyzed. On the one hand, how could I risk my mother, my father, maybe both sisters? On the other hand, what would Sammy do with the book? Deane must have had a good reason for keeping him away.
On the third hand, she was the person who had stuffed my sweet Marmalade.
“Pet!”
Sammy stared. In fact, Stripey had more expression on his face. “You have one more chance.”
“Pet!”
“When we meet again, you had better be ready to deal.”
So I ran. There was only one way to go: the stairway was behind me, Sammy was straight ahead, a stained glass window of the Last Supper was to my left. I ran to the closed door on my right, past the statue of Artemis-Diana, her bow and arrow poised, and flung open the heavy door.
Running into the room was like running on one of those cartoon treadmills, where you keep going and going but arrive nowhere at all. The white sofa I could barely see in the distance seemed to be moving farther and farther away. Of course, that could have been the “crazy” part of the house. And I was the water flowing uphill.
The effect is not so amusing if you are the water.
“Pet!” Stan’s voice was so far away, the bottom of a well.
I wasn’t ready to go back yet. I ran and ran, sticky in the same spot, and then I was suddenly through. The room stopped twirling, the greeny air cleared away.
Wherever I was, it wasn’t what you’d expect. This huge space was filled with bright, clear illumination. But not like I’d died and gone to heaven or The Twilight Zone or anything. Even though the light was strangely sharp and there wasn’t any furniture, you could tell this was a real room—it smelled musty, and there were dust devils in the near corner.
After a moment my eyes adjusted to the light, and I began to feel very calm and very, well, powerful. As if something about the room itself were recharging something inside me, completing a circuit, like Christmas tree lights, the tricky way you have to test each bulb to make them all go on. I had this literal feeling of “a load off my chest,” an image like heartache that really is what it says. But I guess everyone knows that. Every time I come up with this stuff, it’s already old-hat. Like the time last year when I had the dream about the angels in the trash can, and they told me, “To err is human, to forgive divine.” I thought I was really on to something! When I told Linwood, she acted impressed, said it was a lovely phrase, and the thought, too. Then I ran across the same sentence in Bartlett’s Quotations.
The only thing worse than being a dope is being humored when you’re being one.
Anyway, the room was working on me. Or maybe it was the light. I fingered the poodle toys in my coat pocket. My chest and shoulders felt free, even when I thought about how we might never go home again and about Deane’s room and that night and Deane herself. And the strangeness that had been following me ever since, more closely than Tommy ever could. Even when I thought about all that stuff, I felt okay. This voice—not out loud, exactly—told me that what was past was past. Standing alone in the large, airy room, I knew this was true. Whatever had happened to me, it wasn’t here anymore. Maybe it had happened. Maybe it had all been a dream, like the angels in the garbage.
Except I still had the book.
Or did I?
Maybe tonight when I opened my cigar box, it wouldn’t be there anymore. Maybe it had never been there.
I began to pace in small circles, spiraling out from the center of the room.
Maybe I should trade the book to Sammy. If I didn’t have it anymore, then the past could roll up and disappear, my imagination the richest fruit. You woke up from terrible nightmares all the time, relieved, you had been so convinced of the power of the other.
I stopped pacing.
I turned around and opened the door, and this time I was simply back at the top of the stairs.
“Sammy?” I called.
“Pet, goddammit, you have until the count of ten to get down here!”
“Sammy!” I cried, louder.
“One! Two!—”
I had to believe that things come in threes. Sammy had said I had one more chance. And this time I’d be ready.
“—Seven! Eight!—”
I scampered down the stairs.
All Stan said was, “Forget the gift shop.”
Outside, the sky was dark, dead-dark. Linwood and June were already in the car, and they ignored me as I climbed into my spot.
We sped away from Madame Miraculo’s. June gnawed on her fudge. Idly, I fingered the poodle toys in my pocket.
Chapter Six
“Wake up!” June shoved me hard.
I opened my eyes. My cheek hurt—I must have been sleeping against the window. All I could see was a tall pale pink like shells, but you could tell they used to be magenta. The twin beds were high and lumpy, chenille spreads with more roses. Scattered about the room were dainty little watercolors, sandpipers and still-lifes, and a lot of old lamps with yellowed silk shades.