Dandelion Fire (2 page)

“Careful, Henry,” he said. “Place like this can get in your bones. Even if you don't care for it, leaving can hurt more than it needs to.”

Henry looked into his uncle's face, lean and leathery, with his eyes hooded toward the horizon like a sailor looking for land he knows he'll never find. His face didn't really explain his words. It never did. His uncle had tumbled into Kansas as a teenager, another victim of the cupboards. Henry wondered how long it would be before he looked like Frank, until he looked like something borrowed and never returned, out of place but settled in and dusty. At least Uncle Frank had memories. He knew what he'd lost, though he didn't talk about it. Henry didn't even have that.

Frank popped his knuckles and leaned back. “You can smell when the fields go green. And gold. Sound different, too. Green field rustles. Gold rattles.”

“When's the harvest?” Henry asked.

“Soon,” Frank said. “When the gold aims for white. You'll see the combines roll even if you don't see ‘em finish.”

Henry watched the wind work. “I have to leave, don't I?”

“Yep.”

“I wish I didn't.”

“Well,” Frank said. “If wishes were horses.”

Henry looked at him. “Then what?” he asked.

“Then I'd have a horse.”

Henry almost smiled. He'd expected something like that. Beside him, the raggant snored. Still sitting up, its jaw hung open; its head sagged, nose no longer in the air. Henry eased it onto its side. “I wish I knew how long I have,” Henry said. “I don't even like being in the house. Every time the phone rings, I think someone's on their way to pick me up.”

“July third,” Frank said. “Two weeks. Got a letter today.”

“What?” Henry asked. “Why the third? Who sent the letter?”

Frank straightened his leg and dug his hand into the pocket of his jeans. He dropped an envelope, warm and wrinkled, onto Henry's lap. “Came up here to tell you. It's from a lawyer. Phil and Urs are parting ways. They've got some sort of custody arranging to handle next week. They'll figure out which one gets you, and then you'll leave.”

Henry opened the letter and stared at it. It was addressed to his aunt and uncle, and there wasn't anything more to it than Uncle Frank had already told him.

“Two weeks,” Henry said. “I'll miss the fireworks.”

“Could be shorter,” Frank said. “Moon goes halfway round the world in two weeks.”

The two of them sat, and the raggant snored. After a while, Frank stood and stretched.

“Anastasia will call for you when supper's set,” he said, and stepped toward the ladder.

Henry nodded. He didn't watch his uncle leave.

When Anastasia's voice reached him, Henry's legs still hung out the doorway, but he was on his back. He sat up and looked at the letter in his hand. He folded it up and slid it into the envelope.

“Henry!” Anastasia yelled again.

“Coming!” he said, and then flicked the envelope out onto the wind. He watched it spin as it dropped to the swaying tall grass beside the barn. “Go where you want,” he said, and he stood up.

He left the raggant sleeping and climbed down the ladder. Anastasia had already gone back inside.

The table was crowded, but only Anastasia seemed to want to talk. Henry and Richard sat on one side, facing Henry's three cousins. Richard was wearing a tight yellow sweatshirt with a cantering pony on the front, forcibly borrowed from Anastasia. He was picking at the blue cast on his wrist. Uncle Frank sat with eyes unfocused and fork frozen in his hand while Aunt Dotty spread a smile, scooped buttered noodles, and passed plates. Henry looked at Penelope. She pushed her long black hair out of her face and smiled at him with lips clamped tight. Beside her sat Henrietta, curls loose and chin on her hand. She was staring at Henry again, but when their eyes met, she looked down to where her plate
would be as soon as her mother gave it back. Beside her, Anastasia, shortest in her chair, chattered cheerfully.

“When Henry leaves, we'll have to keep the raggant, won't we? You should have named him a long time ago, Henry. I'll write you a letter and tell you what we name him. Do you want me to do that?”

Henry looked at her and shrugged. She looked at Richard.

“What are we going to do with Richard?” Anastasia asked. “He can't live here forever, wearing my clothes.”

“Don't be rude,” Penelope said.

Anastasia looked shocked. “I'm not being. Mom?”

Dotty nodded. “Be polite.” Passing the last plate, she sat back in her chair and puffed stray, frizzing hairs off her forehead.

“I'm not being rude,” Anastasia said. “I'm just being honest. We should send him back through the cupboards.”

“Anastasia!” Dotty said.

Richard looked up, his thin, blotchy face even blotchier above the yellow shirt. “If I am going to be discussed,” he said with eyebrows raised, “I would rather not be present.”

“No,” Dotty said quickly.

“I want my clothes back,” Anastasia muttered.

“Frank?” Dotty asked. “Could you be here, please? In this world, with us. Just for now.”

Frank took a deep breath, coming awake. “We couldn't send him back if we wanted. Not without the big cupboard in Grandfather's room, and that bedroom
door is magicked right back to unbudgeable, isn't it? I'm not trying the chain saw again, and the attic cupboards are too small even if we folded him in thirds.”

“I can't believe we're talking about this,” Dotty said. “Frank Willis, you promised to plaster over those cupboards, and no one was to even think about traveling through them. Do you
want
something to happen?”

For a moment, Frank sat perfectly still, his jaw no longer chewing, his hand in the air above his plate. Then he spoke. “Doesn't matter. Don't have Grandfather's key.” And he spun himself another forkful of noodles.

Henry was thinking the same thing. He had a wall of doors in his attic bedroom, none of them leading to Boston, one of them leading back to his birth-world and the world the raggant had come from. But it didn't matter. The cupboards up in his attic were like little windows, linking other places to this one, but they were no good to him unless they channeled through the cupboard in Grandfather's room, the one big enough for him to crawl through. He had Grandfather's journal with the combinations to connect each of his little doors to the bigger cupboard, but without Grandfather's key, there was no point.

“Henrietta's got the key,” Anastasia said. “I've told you a hundred times, but you won't listen.”

Henrietta banged her fork down onto the table and rolled her eyes. “I don't have anything.”

“It's not in any of her normal hiding places,” Anastasia continued. “But I'll find it.”

Henry stood up. “Do you mind if I go up to my room?” he asked his aunt. “I'm not real hungry.”

Dotty looked in his face, her eyebrows lifted. “What are you going to do?”

Henry halfway smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “I don't have Grandfather's key.”

When he reached the big second-story landing, Henry stopped. Anastasia's voice was mixing with Henrietta's, but he pushed the noise out of his head. He was looking at Grandfather's knobless door. Chopped and chewed and even cursed, it was still shut tight, impossible to reopen without the key. Any hope of finding where he'd come from was behind that door.

Henry walked around the railing and stood directly in front of the mutilated wood panels. With his toe, he prodded the tangled mess of carpet where Frank had dipped the chain saw. He'd lain right there with the hands of Nimiane of Endor around his neck. Her blood had burned his face like acid. His throat constricted at the memory, and his stomach queezed. Shivering, he hurried back around the landing to the steep attic stairs.

There were worse things than going back to Boston.

In the long, coved attic, Richard's sleeping bag and a small stack of borrowed clothes were piled against the wall beside Henry's closet room. Richard had wanted to sleep on the floor at the end of Henry's bed, but this arrangement was as close to room-sharing as Henry was willing to go.

Once inside his room, Henry went through what had become his entrance ritual. He turned on his light and stood back to examine the wall of cupboard doors. Ninety-nine doors of all shapes and sizes looked back at him. His eyes were first drawn to the center, where the door with the two compass knobs ruled the wall. It wasn't the most ornate of the doors, but, with the right combination, it could channel any of the others through the larger cupboard downstairs in Grandfather's room. And it had been the raggant's entrance into Kansas.

After letting his eyes run over the deep grains and bright inlay, flaking varnish and rusted hinges, the different colors, textures, and shapes, Henry next stepped to his bed. He pulled it away from the wall, where it hid half of the bottom two rows. He held his breath, forced himself to crouch at the foot, and looked directly at the black door on the bottom row with the gold knob in the center. Door number 8. The door to Endor.

Henry finger-checked the four screws Uncle Frank had used to seal it, stood up quickly, and pushed his bed leg back against it. Then he breathed. He knew that Nimiane wasn't behind that door anymore. She was behind whichever door his cousins had randomly selected while he and the witch had been unconscious. He'd heard the story, the description of the bat hitting her head, her cold skin. Anastasia still insisted that they should have stabbed her in the neck. But they hadn't. Afraid she would wake up, they'd fished her through the big cupboard and into some unlucky world. She wasn't
in Endor anymore, but Henry still found the screws reassuring.

When Henry was breathing again, he found door number 56, the door to the place called Badon Hill, and opened it. He sat on his bed and waited for the air from that other place to drift in. It always did, and when the smell of moss and rain and a wind that had toppled breakers and poured through trees surrounded him, then Henry considered himself to actually
be
in his room.

Henry lay back on his bed and sighed. The doors frightened him, but they drew him as well. Behind one was the world where he'd been born, where he had siblings. At least six older brothers, if he believed what the old wizard had said in the cold throne room when he'd first gone through the cupboards. He looked up the wall at door number 12. Richard had crawled into that world behind him, and the wizard had known who Henry was. He would be able to tell Henry where he was really from. But he'd been horrible. Henry shifted his thoughts away from the memory and back to the doors in front of him. There was no reason to think that he'd come from a nice place, that the bent old man eating grubs on his dark throne had told the truth, or that his family was alive, and if they were, that they even wanted him. Wanted babies weren't usually shoved into cupboards.

But there was still the raggant. Raggants were for finding things. Someone had wanted to find him.

Henry took a deep breath and puffed out his cheeks.
Why had Uncle Frank stopped trying to get back? Was he afraid, too? But Frank had Dotty and his daughters. No one was going to put him on a bus back to Boston in two weeks.

“Two weeks,” Henry said out loud. He looked over to the corner of his room, where one week ago, Frank had left a small roll of chicken wire and a five-gallon bucket of plaster. The wire was to cover the cupboards and strengthen the plaster. Frank hadn't touched it since he'd put it there. He'd mixed the plaster, but then left it. Now the bucket was as solid as a boulder.

“I could come back when I'm eighteen,” Henry said. But he didn't think Frank could put Dotty off that long. A couple years, maybe, but not more than five.

Someone was coming up the attic stairs. Henry sat up on his bed and quietly shut the open cupboard.

His bedroom doors swung open, and Henrietta stepped into his room. She had the raggant tucked under one arm. It dropped quickly to the floor and jumped onto Henry's bed.

Henrietta sniffed the air, and her eyes drifted to the cupboard to Badon Hill. They hadn't talked in a while, and for a moment, they were both silent.

“Henrietta,” Henry said. “I need Grandfather's key.”

She met Henry's eyes and stared right through.

“There's no point in lying to me,” Henry continued. “Things got really crazy at the end, but I know I didn't keep it, and you were the only other one who could have.”

Henrietta crossed her arms and looked at the wall of
doors. Henry rambled on. “I'd be happy to stay here, but I can't. Two weeks, Henrietta, and then I go back to Boston and then back to school, and over the summers they'll store me somewhere, and I won't be able to come back until I'm old enough to move out or go to college.” Henry took a breath. “I can't be here when they come for me. I have to go through the cupboards. And you have the key, Henrietta. You have to give it to me.”

Henrietta sat down on the bed beside him.

“I know,” she said. “I buried it behind the barn.”

was supposed to be watching for Anastasia and Richard, but he didn't think there was too much risk of being found. He had followed Henrietta silently out of the house while the others were watching television. If they did start looking for him, they wouldn't start behind the barn.