Falling In (3 page)

I’d like to stop here for a moment, if I could. I want you to think about how many times you’ve opened a door. What happened? You twisted the knob, pushed or pulled, walked inside or outside, or from one room to another.

You’ve imagined the alternatives, though, haven’t you? Or at least dreamed them? Of course you have. Everybody’s had the dream where you find a door inside your house you’d never noticed before. You open it and—
whoa!
—a room you never knew existed. Usually it’s filled with wondrous things, pinball machines and cakes, magnificent dollhouses, skateboard runs, a pony. There is the occasional vampire, of course, or a man in a brown
suit who lacks only a head. Those are the dreams where, when you turn around, you can’t find the door anymore. I hate those dreams.

If you have a little time to waste, go put your hand on the knob of the door to your room. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. What’s that noise you hear? Could it be your books reading themselves to one another? Is that your goldfish whistling Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
? That
thump
,
thud
,
crash!
—your pillows having a pillow fight? Do you smell the earthy, froggy smell of trolls? What exactly goes on in your room when you’re not around?

But I digress. Back to the story.

Isabelle could feel Charley Bender watching her as she pulled open the supply closet door. She could sense Charley taking a step backward, in case the residents of Mice swarmed out.

(Only later would it occur to her what a narrow escape she’d made. If Charley had stayed right where she was, if she hadn’t taken that fateful backward step, she would have been able to reach Isabelle in time. Instead Charley lunged forward, arms out, desperately trying to grab a sleeve or the toe of a red boot, but she was too late.)

—and Isabelle Bean opened the door—

—and Isabelle Bean fell in.

She’d been wrong about the mice.

There’d been the tunnel—or was it a shaft? A secret passageway? Just a great big hole?—the long fall down followed by the soft tumble onto what turned out to be a pile of coats, children-sized, not mouse-sized, tree bark brown, morning gray, and mossy green, big buttons for little fingers.

Isabelle closed her eyes. She smelled mothballs tinged with licorice. She smelled dust motes and gingersnaps. She could hear the thudding of feet, voices yelling out directions, the scratching of chalk against a slate board.

She could hear the buzz.

In Mrs. Sharpe’s classroom the buzz had been a
distant thing, felt more than heard. Here, wherever
here
was, the buzz flattened out into a low-pitched hum, the sound of tiny motorcycles, maybe, or an off-kilter ceiling fan endlessly running, issuing a quiet whine. Isabelle stood, determined to find its source.

A hallway stretched before her, the floor laid out in broad wooden planks, knotholes the size of fists. If this was the basement of Hangdale Middle School, it had a strange way of showing it. What sort of school basement had windows, for instance, the glass set in waves as though still vaguely liquid, the sun falling through and staining the hardwood floor with wide bars of yellow light?

Isabelle’s boots tap-tapped against the floor as she made her way down the hallway, a much more satisfying sound than the thud they made when she walked across the linoleum upstairs. Upstairs? Glancing at the ceiling, she saw thick beams and rough gray plaster. Definitely not Board of Education–approved building materials.

Which caused Isabelle to wonder: Was there still
an upstairs up there? Was Charley Bender still standing at the open mouth of the closet, her hands waving, fingers wriggling, wondering where on earth Isabelle had tumbled to? Or was Charley Bender no longer there? Maybe what was up there had disappeared and there was no
there
there at all.

Next question: Was there really a
here
, or had Isabelle conked her head and was now frolicking in the land of her dreams? Was this Fairyland? The Underworld? Or just a concussion? No, Isabelle decided quickly, feeling her head for bumps and not finding any. Wherever she was, it was real. But where was she?

Eager to find out, she quickened her pace. There—an open door. Isabelle’s cheeks and the tips of her fingers tingled. What if there were something fantastical inside, a dragon, say, or elves? If there were elves inside (and this is what Isabelle wished for, as she’d spent practically half her life immersed in fairy tales and fantasy books, all of them heavily populated by wonderful
creatures), she hoped at least a few of them were the truly magical sort that made up long poems and lived in the high branches of trees. She couldn’t stand those mealy-mouthed, cheerful elves that were always showing up in Christmas specials. Those weren’t really elves, Isabelle thought. They were more like short cheerleaders in funny caps.

Her head was so filled with the variety of elves that might possibly populate the room she was about to enter that it took her a moment to see the creature who had stepped out into the hallway and now stood before her. Isabelle was taken aback, for this particular creature wasn’t an elf, or an ogre, or anything fantastical whatsoever, just an ordinary girl, wearing what Isabelle supposed could be called a frock. It was made of some nubbly gray material, a plain white apron tied over it.

Isabelle stepped toward the girl, her hand raised in a half wave. “Hi, I’m—”

But before she could finish her greeting, the girl began to scream.

“It’s her! It’s her!” the girl caterwauled in a surprisingly loud voice for such a small child. She scurried back into the room she’d just come out of. “Run away, everyone! It’s the witch, and she’s come to eat us!”

You want me to tell you where Isabelle is, don’t you? You want me to spell it out for you, draw you a map, paint a picture.

Well, I’m not going to do it. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. The girl? Maybe she’s your long-lost sister, did you ever think of that? Remember all those nights you heard your mother whispering into the phone? Who did you think she was talking to? Grammy? Since when has your mother ever spoken to her mother in a whisper?

Okay, I’ll tell you one thing: The girl’s name is Fiona. She’s five. She has very little to do with this story.

And, oh yes. She’s not from here.

“What do you mean, she’s the witch? This girl don’t look nothing like a witch. Besides, the witch is old and haggard, and this girl’s no older than I am.”

A rough-hewn boy of thirteen or so stood in front of Isabelle, examining her. “I’ll admit, I’ve not seen a village girl dressed as such, but you can’t predict with a runaway, can you? They show up dressed every which way. I seen one in a priest’s clothes once, and he weren’t nothing but a lad, ten years at the very most.”

“But Samuel, look at her shoes,” the little girl, the screamer, who now spoke quite calmly, insisted. “Red boots are witch’s shoes, I’ve heard Mam say it a hundred times.”

A few of the other children in the circle around Isabelle murmured in agreement. Isabelle peered down at her feet. Witch’s shoes? Well, yes, she had to admit, she could see that.

The boy named Samuel ran a hand through his flame red hair. “The shoes are troublesome. But let’s be sensible now.” He grabbed Isabelle roughly by the shoulder and turned her in a slow circle, as though he were exhibiting her. “Does she really look a witch to you? Too young, and no bloat. A child eater always has a bit of bloat around the gut, they say, for the children’s souls do not digest in the way of other food.”

Another boy stepped forward, this one taller, thin in the face, with a nose as sharp and pointed as a rat’s. “A minion then, if not the witch, which still makes her a danger.”

Isabelle stood silently. Should she defend herself? Against what? The children obviously didn’t know what to make of her, and Isabelle didn’t know how to explain. She could give them the long version of her life story, beginning with her birth in the backseat
of the family’s dented and battered Toyota Corolla, an event so traumatizing that her mother swore at the door of the emergency room that this baby would be her last. She could treat them to fun family lore. Did you know, she might ask the children, that both of my parents are orphans? That I have no grandparents, no cousins, no aunts, not one single uncle? That I am the only child of the loneliest family in the universe?

But maybe the short version of her life story would be more appropriate: Five minutes ago I fell through a closet in the nurse’s office, and here I am!

Isabelle suspected that telling the children about falling through the closet wouldn’t help her case. Looking around the room, with its heavy wooden tables, the black cast-iron stove hunched in the corner, the wind rasping through its small window (could that be where the buzzing hum came from?), she doubted anything about her world would make sense to these kids. There were a dozen or so of them, the youngest maybe five, the oldest one the
redheaded boy named Samuel. They were clearly not of her century. Isabelle didn’t keep up with fashion, cared not one whit for designer labels, but she could tell at ten paces a shirt made out of homespun cloth from one bought at a discount store. Anyone could.

And the children’s faces—Isabelle found them softer than the faces of Hangdale Middle School, more open, more like flowers in the first light of day. Clearly—to Isabelle, at least—these were not faces that had spent hundreds of hours in front of television screens absorbing stories of murder and mayhem, nor were they faces that knew one gaming system from another, an Xbox from a Ybox from a Zbox.

She thought if she could get Samuel away from the other children and explain to him what had happened to her, he might understand. He looked like a pretty smart guy. There were only two problems with this plan: One, Isabelle figured it would be nearly impossible to speak to Samuel in private, and two, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to explain herself. It would be nice to be a mystery for a little while longer, as long as it didn’t get her beat up.

Samuel’s voice broke into her thoughts. “A minion? What would a minion be doing here?” He stepped away from Isabelle, as if to get a better angle on her. “The witch is done with us for now and won’t be back this way any time soon. We’re out of season. Surely she’d send no minions here.”

The rat-faced boy shrugged. “Better not to take a chance. Da says the crops were bad in Corrin this year; maybe the littlest ones there have grown thin. She likes ’em fat, I hear. They go down better with a little meat on ’em.”

A small girl, five at most, began to cry. Isabelle’s eyes widened. Was this kid afraid of her? She turned away from Samuel and toward the others.

“Good people,” she said, holding out her hands as if to prove she carried no weapons. “Listen to me. I am not a witch.”

She stopped. Her voice sounded strange, like she was doing a bad imitation of herself or acting in a play written by tin-eared third graders. And since when had she ever used the phrase “good people”? If a rewind button had been available to her, she
would have held it down for twenty seconds and started over.

Instead she continued, “I can’t prove to you I’m not a witch. I also can’t prove to you I’m not a genie or a werewolf or the starting pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.”

“Eh?” Samuel looked at her quizzically.

Deep breath. Start again.

“I’m a girl. I’m not sure where I am. But I am sure who I am, and who I am not is a witch.”

Now all the kids looked at her like she was crazy. Of course, Isabelle was used to this, so she didn’t take it personally. She noticed Samuel and Rat Face exchanging glances, sending each other secret messages across the room, making a plan. Suddenly Samuel’s hand was clamped around her wrist.

“I think you best be off, then,” he said, pulling her toward the doorway. “Though I don’t believe you to be a witch, we’ll not take any chances. If you’re a runaway, well, there’s no more room in the village for runaways. Now that the witch is outside of Corrin, we’re packed to the brim with all the
children trying to escape. I suggest you make for the woods; there’ll be camps out there, closer to Drumanoo and such places.”