Enter Three Witches (5 page)

Alone at last in his room, Bren sprawled on his bed with the book while Shadow, curled by the radiator, snoozed and steamed a miasma of wet dogginess. Bren gazed dubiously at sepia prints of Russian ballerinas improbably poised on the tips of their toes. They wore white tutus and had abundant dark hair twisted severely at the napes of their incredibly long necks. They resembled Erika about as much as a troupe of ladies from Mars. Bren took a crack at the French, a language he had now studied for exactly ten days. To his surprise, some of it yielded to common sense, but large gaps remained.

“After all that trouble,” he grumbled to his sleeping dog, “after having to be hugged and drink that foul stuff. I should have gone to the library and gotten out some idiot’s delight—’Everything you always wanted to know about ballet but were afraid to ask.’ Now I’ll still have to go to the library and take this stupid thing back besides.”

Far away in the depths of the big house the phone rang, rang again, and was silent, followed by Miranda’s voice calling. Bren slammed the book shut and galloped down the stairs. The phone was in the kitchen, but it had a long cord. When Bren heard the voice on the other end, he started backing toward the door to the hall, shaking and disentangling the cord as he went. The voice was husky and had a background suggestion of laughter. “Hey, Bren,” it said. “I just had a thought.”

“Does this happen often?” he countered, hoping he sounded reasonably cool and that she couldn’t hear the pounding of his heart over the telephone. The cord was caught around the corner of a table. He gave it a savage wrench, which happily did not break the connection, and backed out the door.

“What about black light?” Erika said.

Bren thought fast but without coming up with an answer. “What about it?” he asked. “Elaborate, please. Throw just a few more words around.”

“For the witches, Bren. We could wear body paint that only shows in black light, and you could turn black light on us, and we would look really weird. I saw it in a disco once, and it was absolutely awesome.”

“What a neat idea,” Bren said. “I can see it now.” He could, too, including a vision of Erika in body paint.

“The only problem is,” she went on, “what about the other people?”

“What other people?”

“Macbeth and Banquo and whoever else actually sees the witches,” Erika answered with just a trace of impatience. “They would have to be standing around in the dark. I can just see the great Brian Rushmore’s face when he finds that we have all that lovely light and he has none. But of course it wouldn’t work,” she added regretfully. “They have to be lit.”

“Is Brian Macbeth?” Bren asked.

“My dear, he is not only Macbeth. He is every single important role that has been played at the Perkins School in the last three years, or so I’ve been told. Where have you been?”

“In the park, mostly,” Bren said, and Erika gave her enticing chuckle. She thinks I’m kidding, he thought.

“Anyway, brood about it,” she said. “See if you can think of a way to get around that little problem of the other actors wanting to be seen.”

“I will,” Bren promised, “and I’ll ask Eli. He’s much more technical than I am.”

“Terrific. See you tomorrow, Bren,” she said, and hung up before he had a chance to think of a good last line.

The evening had taken a definite turn for the better, Bren felt, as he put the phone back in its niche. He started for the door again, ignoring the feverish gleam of curiosity in his mother’s eyes, but stopped in his tracks as she remarked, seemingly at random, “What a pity it’s going to rain all weekend. The extended forecast is really grisly, and pushing back a major front is much more work than I have time for at the moment.”

Bren had never been confident of his mother’s ability to change the weather, and he was also reasonably sure that she was teasing him. Now, however, was no time to take chances with the supernatural. He turned and fixed Miranda with a look that was scarcely less penetrating than her own. “That will be awful,” he said, “but I think there’s a rain date for the dance program, and it will be fine weather for frogs. Maybe you can catch some in the park as they come out to enjoy the downpour.”

“What a mean thing to say!” Miranda cried, apparently forgetting that she was responsible for this unkindness.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Bren said. “I didn’t say you had to chase frogs through the rain, dear old Mom. I only said if you did, it would probably be a good time for it. Good night, all.” And he left for his room feeling reasonably pleased with the exchange.

Bren woke to an ambiguous dawn and walked to school under a brightening sky, but across the Hudson the shore of New Jersey still crouched under a line of black clouds. Off there in the west, where New York weather was made, the battle was still undecided. This being Thursday, only two days before the dance program (for which there was no rain date), it seemed late to adopt a wait-and-see policy. Bren stopped before the entrance to the Perkins School and considered the kidnapping of a small but lively animal from one of its overcrowded rooms. After a bit he shrugged and went on in. He had all day to worry and reconnoiter.

At lunchtime he climbed to the fourth floor and peered through the glass panel of the door to the biology lab. Mrs. Packard was seated at her desk before a mountain of exam papers. She was the only teacher who had even thought of giving a test during the first week of school. Now she would probably stay late to grade them. Bren craned his neck trying to see the frog tank, which was just out of his line of vision. Suppose it was empty; then all this mental anguish would have been for nothing. Bren squared his shoulders and opened the door. He walked briskly to the frog tank, observed that it was teeming with life, and turned to meet the gimlet eye of Mrs. Packard.

“Young man, were you looking for something?” she said.

“A friend,” Bren answered hurriedly. “I was looking for a friend in your class, but he’s not here.”

“Not among the frogs?” Mrs. Packard asked. From any other teacher this would have been a joke, but Bren felt that levity was not intended and would be ill advised in return.

“Not anywhere that I can see,” he said. “But thank you anyway, Mrs. Packard. Goodbye.”

He closed the door to the biology room and wandered down the stairs, pondering his problem. So much depended, finally, on the presence or absence of Mrs. Packard after school that he decided to put it out of his mind and look for Erika. The school, though small, was full of odd corners where students at noon were eating sandwiches, reading books, or talking. An exhaustive search of the high school building, however, failed to turn up Erika and used the remainder of Bren’s lunch hour, nor was she in physics, which was the only class they had in common.

Hungry and discouraged, Bren tried to apply himself to the laws of acceleration. This was a subject dear to the heart of Edward Bear, who, in the interest of making the abstract concrete, had set up a sloping wooden chute running the entire length of the classroom. The extreme gentleness of the incline permitted Mr. Behrens to run to the bottom and catch the rapidly accelerating little ball that he had started at the top. This he did several times to the delight (if not, perhaps, the enlightenment) of his class. Bren felt more cheerful as he watched—frogs and the inexplicable absence of Erika forgotten during his favorite teacher’s enthusiastic performance.

Erika got back to school only in time for the last two classes of the day and would not have bothered to come at all but for the hope of seeing the brown-haired boy with the meltingly open smile. “Relentlessly normal” was the way she described Bren to herself, wondering at the same time why this should appeal to her usually more exotic tastes. She also wanted sympathy and had not yet made any close friends to listen to her complaints. For Erika had not only missed a diverting physics class, she had acquired a large, prickly mouthful of braces on her nearly perfect teeth. “Nobody’s going to want to kiss me for a few years, that’s for sure,” she muttered to herself as she climbed the steps to the school. “Might as well cuddle up with a barbed wire fence.”

The last two classes were boring, like the day itself, which continued to be overcast, and Erika felt her spirits sink slowly through the plodding lectures like a waterlogged leaf in a stagnant pond. Finally the last hour dragged to an end, and she was free to search for Bren. A more patient person would have waited by the door, but Erika was not patient. She thought his last class was on the top floor next to the biology lab, so she began to climb against the descending stream of students, pausing at each floor to look up and down the hall. On three she was stopped by Mr. Behrens, who wanted to deplore the fact that she had missed his performance. “And now you’ll never understand acceleration, poor girl,” he finished. “There’s no return engagement or even an encore.”

“This is devastating,” Erika said. “Whatever shall I do?” It was hard to be sprightly without opening her mouth more than an eighth of an inch, and this she had resolved not to do.

“You could read the book,” Mr. Behrens countered, “but the movie’s more exciting. What’s the matter with your mouth?”

Erika bared her teeth for the first time in a ferocious smile.

“Blindingly beautiful,” said Edward Bear. “I hope you don’t bite.”

Fond as she was of her physics teacher, Erika was beginning to worry that Bren might escape by some means other than the only stairway. “Just people who stand between me and the girls’ room,” she said and, squeezing past him, ran up the last flight of stairs to the fourth floor.

Bren was not in the economics room, and there was only one more place to look. Erika peered through the glass door of the biology lab. An arresting scene met her eyes.

The big, bare room appeared to teem with frogs, and through the frogs strode Bren in desperate haste, stooping and snatching at the elusive throng. Erika stared and then began to laugh. She opened the door, and Bren turned, a gleam of manic fury in his eye.

“Shut that door, idiot!” he shouted, then stopped, one hand clutching a struggling frog, the other his already disordered hair, as he saw who it was. “Oh, my God. You of all people,” he said. “What have I done to deserve this?”

“What have you done, period?” Erika asked. “Do you need, maybe, some sort of help?”

“Do I need help? What does it look like I need? Help me put these unspeakable creatures back where they came from. I had no idea they could move so fast.” Bren waded cautiously over to the frog tank with his victim.

Erika had managed to grasp the situation, if not the reason for it. She held the lid of the tank while Bren popped the first frog in and hastily closed it again.

“That’s good,” he said. “This is definitely a two-man job. I could be here all night, and if Mrs. Packard comes back…” He rolled his eyes to heaven and went back to catching frogs. Between the two of them, the work went fairly fast. Erika, having less to do, watched with fascination. Nor did she miss the final act when Bren, turning his back to her at the farthest corner of the room, stuffed the last frog down the front of his shirt and buttoned it up to his throat. Wisely, she decided to say nothing about this curious sight.

“Whew! What a relief. Thanks a million, Erika. I couldn’t have done it by myself.” Bren’s smile was almost back to normal, and the small, wiggling bulge just above his belt would not have been noticed by the casual observer.

“Now are you going to tell me what this was all in aid of?” Erika asked.

“Not until we get out of here,” Bren said. “Come on, let’s split before the dragon lady comes back. I’ll walk you home,” he added. It seemed the least he could do, though what he was going to say once they were safely out of the biology lab was at the moment beyond even his powers of invention.

“Great, let’s go,” she said, and giving one last glance at the tank of hysterical frogs, they left. Mrs. Packard was toiling up the stairs as they came down, a stack of exam papers clutched to her bony chest, a look of generalized suspicion in her cold, blue eyes. “She’s going to wonder why her charges are so upset,” Bren said, “but what the hey, she’ll never guess.”

Erika giggled. “Unless we forgot one,” she said. “I could swear I saw one last frog hopping away toward the corner of the room.”

“You were seeing things,” Bren said firmly.

“Let’s hope so,” Erika said, and treated him to the full splendor of her smile.

They had now reached the sidewalk, and Bren stopped to look at her carefully for the first time. He saw a wonderful diversion from the subject of frogs—the spectacular mouthful of hardware that Erika had forgotten she had.

“That’s an amazing set of braces,” he said. “When did you get those? I mean, you can’t have had them all along.”

Erika clamped her mouth shut. “Thishafternoon,” she mumbled.

“What? Today? That’s why I couldn’t find you at lunchtime.” She nodded mutely. “But you’ve got to talk,” he went on. “You can’t go through life with your mouth shut.”

“Wanna bet?” Erika said, only a little more distinctly.

“You were talking in the bio room,” Bren said. “Come on. Open up. Lots of beautiful women have braces, though I didn’t think there was anything wrong with your teeth before.”

This comment was enough to pry open Erika’s jaws. “You’re damn right there was nothing wrong with my teeth,” she cried. “But everybody’s got to have an expensive orthodontist, didn’t you know? So I’ve got to have one too. Daddy ran out of nice things to give me, so he gave me these.”

This was news from another world to Bren, who stood at a loss for words, looking at the furious girl. Suddenly the front of his shirt gave a convulsive jump and Erika’s eyes widened. She had forgotten for the moment a subject of even more absorbing interest than her teeth.

“But let’s not talk about me,” she said, her eyes fixed on Bren’s middle. “I think frogs are a much more interesting topic of conversation, and I want to know
all
about them.”

“Of course you do,” Bren said. He was playing for time while his mind scrambled after explanations, each one more improbable than the last, for the ridiculous scene in the bio lab. “I mean, naturally, after finding me like that, more or less knee-deep in frogs. Anyone would wonder.”