Griffin of Darkwood (2 page)

Clutching the envelope, he raced along the cold deserted streets to the office of Barnaby Book Publishers Inc. and banged on the narrow black door. Mr. Barnaby wasn't there. He waited for ten minutes and then pushed the envelope through the brass post slot.

He ran the rest of the way to school.

< • >

When Will got home
from school, Mrs. Ginny, who lived in the flat below them, was waiting on the walk. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “She’s gone, Will. Your mother’s gone.”

“Gone where?” asked Will.

“Oh, Will…she’s dead, luv.”

“She…she…can’t be!” Will stammered. “She wasn’t even sick.” He thought about his mother struggling up the stairs. “Well, maybe a little sick. But she was getting better. She told me so!”

“My poor wee lad.” Mrs. Ginny folded Will in her arms.

She tucked Will into the bed in her spare room with a hot water bottle and a cup of hot tea, because he was freezing all over.

That night, Will cried himself to sleep.

< • >

On a cold wet
morning in early April, a handful of mourners huddled under huge black umbrellas at the cemetery – Aunt Mauve, looking like a crow in her black coat, Father Jim from the church, a very pale Mr. Barnaby, Mrs. Ginny and Mr. Manley from the corner shop.

Will stood beside Aunt Mauve. “I hope you’re not going to blubber,” she hissed. “You’re twelve years old. Not a baby!”

That was only the second thing Aunt Mauve had said to him at the cemetery. The first was, “Did your mother finish the book?”

Will held his eyes wide open and forced back his tears. He had already cried so hard he felt like a scraped out pumpkin.
And he had no intention of giving his aunt the satisfaction of seeing him cry now. He glanced around and spotted a woman wearing a long white dress and a wreath of green leaves and a knight in shiny armour, standing beside a tree. The Muses! He had never seen his mother’s Muse before, but he knew right away that it was her. He stared hard and then, when he blinked, they were gone.

By the time Father Jim had finished reading from the book of services, the drizzle had turned to steady rain. Aunt Mauve’s lips turned blue as she looked up the street.

A black taxi pulled over to the side of the road and Aunt Mauve grabbed Will’s arm. “Pick up your feet! No dawdling! You’re coming with me!”

Will tried to twist out of her grasp. He had felt numb throughout the whole service and he hadn’t said a word to anyone. “I have to talk to Mr. Barnaby!” he cried.

Aunt Mauve’s nails tightened like claws.

“But Mr. Barnaby said –” The next thing Will knew, he was inside the taxi with the door slammed shut.

He stared dully out the rain-streaked window while the taxi glided over the dark wet streets. He thought about Mr. Barnaby and
The Magical Night
. Had he read the last chapter? Would he still publish the book, now that Adrienna had died? Mr. Barnaby was his last link to his mother and he desperately needed to talk to him.

The taxi dropped them in front of Will’s building. He had a sudden terrifying vision of being dumped in a foster home. He’d stayed with Mrs. Ginny for the past week. She’d been so kind, not forcing him to talk about his mother like the social worker who’d come to visit, but he was sure she wouldn’t want a kid around all the time.

“You’re an orphan now,” said Aunt Mauve. “The social worker and I discussed the situation. You belong to me. You and your mon...”

Aunt Mauve snapped her mouth shut.

“What?” said Will. “Me and my what?”

But Aunt Mauve had sealed her lips.

An orphan! Will had read lots of books with orphans in them, but he didn’t think that was a word people still used in real life.

“You can wash dishes and scrub floors,” said Aunt Mauve.

She ordered Will to pack his trunk. He put in his most prized possessions first – his stack of writing books filled with the beginnings to his novels, his mother’s empty pencil box, a thesaurus full of amazing words and a brand-new writing book with an emerald cover. His mother had bought it for him at
Abracadabra
, and he had been saving it.

He opened the thesaurus and looked up the word
orphan
. He read the words that followed:
foundling, urchin, gamin, waif, stray
. They jumped around like ping-pong balls in his stomach.

That night, with an aching heart, he moved into Aunt Mauve’s cramped dark house on the other side of the city.

Chapter Two

Aunt Mauve

“There’ll be no writing in this house!”
said Aunt Mauve. She stood in the doorway of Will’s tiny bedroom, her eyes flashing.

Will stared at the top of the dresser where he had stacked his writing books and the royal blue pencil box. The books were gone. His stomach lurched. “My novels!” he cried.

“You’re too late,” crowed Aunt Mauve. “I tossed them in the rubbish while you were at school.”

Will shoved his way past Aunt Mauve and raced down the narrow hallway and through the kitchen. He yanked the lid off the trash bin that stood on the back step and stared, horrified, at a lone banana peel.

“No use looking in there!” screeched Aunt Mauve. “The trash was picked up at noon. Your books are gone. Every last one.”

She disappeared into the living room and turned on the TV. Will stormed back to his bedroom and flung himself on the bed. He felt sick at the thought of losing all those words. “Witch!” he muttered under his breath.

He rolled onto his side and studied the pencil box. At least Aunt Mauve hadn’t thrown that away. Suddenly, a pale golden light seeped out from under the lid of the box, as if there were a tiny sun trapped inside. His mouth dropped open. He sat up and reached for the box. Holding his breath, he opened the lid. The light had disappeared. There was nothing inside.

It was crazy! There
had
been a light, but now it had vanished. The box came from the
Abracadabra
shop. Was it a magic box? Even the possibility sent a chill through him.

He closed the lid, waited and then opened it one more time. Nothing.

For a second, he thought about telling Aunt Mauve about the box, but she would accuse him of lying. Mr. Barnaby would be interested, but Will didn’t know if he would ever see Mr. Barnaby again.

After a long time, he knelt on the floor and reached into his trunk. He took out the brand-new writing book. He sat on the bed and opened the cover. A clean lined page stared back at him. He waited for the usual thrill of excitement, but instead he felt afraid. He hugged his cold arms. When his mother had died, something died inside Will too.

“I can’t write any more,” he whispered. “I just can’t!”

< • >

It took Will
two hours and four bus transfers to get all the way across the city to his school. One afternoon, when school was finished, he walked the eight blocks to the brick building where he had lived all his life. He lingered on the street, shivering in his thin jacket, and watched lights blink on in their old window. A small boy’s face appeared, pressed against the glass. He waved. Then someone pushed him away and pulled the curtains, shutting out the empty street and Will.

Something tingled inside Will. The plot for a new novel? What if the boy was one of those kids you heard about on the news who had been abducted? He’d make the kidnapper an insane wizard who… A sickening feeling of despair welled up in him again. He heard a clanking sound and spun around. The knight in shiny armour and the woman with the wreath were standing beside a lamppost.

“Leave me alone!” shouted Will. “I don’t
write any more!”

He ran, away from the Muses and away from his old flat, all the way to the office of Barnaby Book Publishers Inc. He banged hard on the narrow black door, but no one came. He peered through the post slot. Piles of letters were scattered across the floor, but not the large brown envelope containing Adrienna’s last chapter. It looked like Mr. Barnaby had gone away. He had deserted Will.

Will waited a long time for a bus and it was dark before he got back to Aunt Mauve’s house. He carried his cold supper of fried eggs into the living room, where his aunt sat glued in front of the television. He had given up looking through the TV Guide, because they always watched Aunt Mauve’s favourite game shows. Aunt Mauve was supposed to be looking for a job, but in the three weeks that he had lived in her house, she had only ventured out once, to buy their meagre groceries.

The next day, two things arrived in the post that changed his life forever.

Chapter Three

Magic!

Hunched over his greasy sausages,
Will heard the doorbell ring. Aunt Mauve stopped slurping her cup of tea and said, “That’ll be the postman.”

“Maybe it’s a job offer,” said Will. He’d given up on Mr. Barnaby and his talk about money, and he was worried that soon there would be nothing to eat in the house. He raced to the door.

Aunt Mauve got there first. “Don’t give me any of your sass!” she cried. She scooped up a long white envelope lying on the carpet and stuffed it in the pocket of her dressing gown. She disappeared into her bedroom. Will abandoned the sausages and got his backpack.

“I’m leaving for school,” he called from the dingy hallway. He opened the door and almost stepped on a package wrapped in brown paper that the postman had left on the step. The words Master William Poppy leapt out at him. He picked up the package and tucked it into his backpack.

Aunt Mauve appeared suddenly in her purple boots and squirrel cape. The top of the white envelope peeked out of her big black purse.

“Where are you going?” asked Will.

“Places. Not that it's any of your business."

Something’s happened, thought Will. He twisted his head to see the envelope. In the corner there was a very large colourful stamp with a kangaroo on it and the word Australia. Who would write a letter to Aunt Mauve from Australia? He followed his aunt up the road to the bus stop, sloshing around puddles.

Will’s bus arrived first. He sat on the back seat, squeezed between two men with drippy umbrellas. He twisted around, keeping his aunt in sight through the foggy window until the bus rumbled around the corner.

What was Aunt Mauve up to? What was in that big white envelope?

< • >

The two men got off
three stops later and Will had the seat to himself. He took the package out of his backpack and tore off the brown wrapping. Inside was something hard wrapped in tissue paper with a note taped to the top. The note said,

Will, dear,

The new tenant in your flat found this at the back of a cupboard. I meant to send it to you weeks ago. I hope this finds you, if not happy, at least well.

Your friend, Mrs. Ginny.

He pulled back the tissue paper and unwrapped a photograph in a gold frame. It was a picture of a man, a woman and a little girl, sitting on a blanket under a tree beside a picnic basket. At first, he thought the woman was his mother. He turned the frame over. On the back someone had written Adrienna, Carmelita and Sterling. Adrienna’s sixth birthday.

The little girl was his mother, and the man and the woman were his grandparents! He had never seen a picture of them before. He studied their faces. His grandfather, Sterling, had a determined square chin and haunting black eyes. Carmelita had been a dancer and was very glamorous. She had died the Christmas after Adrienna turned eight, and Sterling had left Adrienna in the care of a housekeeper.

“Your grandfather passed away the year before you were born,” Adrienna had said once. “You have my blue eyes and brown hair, but you have your grandfather’s chin. He was a writer like you.”

Will started to wrap the photograph back in the tissue paper when he spotted a piece of cloth, rolled up tightly and buried in the rustling paper. He unrolled a long narrow strip of woven material. It had jagged edges as if it had been cut roughly out of a larger piece. Silver stars glittered against a royal blue sky. Woven into the design in gold thread as delicate as spiderwebs were the words:

The Griffin of Darkwood

The Griffin of Darkwood? What did it mean? A griffin was Will’s favourite mythological creature. He’d seen a painting of one in a library book. He’d been in awe of its powerful lion’s body, outstretched wings and magnificent eagle’s head with snow-white feathers, curved beak and piercing eyes.

Where had the scrap of cloth come from? One word popped into Will’s head – Magic!

The bus driver announced his stop. Hastily he rolled up the cloth, wrapped it and the photograph in the brown paper, put the package in his backpack and scrambled off the bus.

< • >

When Will got back
to Aunt Mauve’s house that evening, it was empty. He shut his bedroom door, unzipped his backpack and took out the photograph of Adrienna and his grandparents. He lay on his bed and stared at it. Then he unrolled the cloth and examined it.

The magical feeling on the bus had disappeared. The cloth had probably slipped into the tissue paper by mistake. It might be a piece of an old tablecloth or part of a curtain belonging to Mrs. Ginny. He rolled it up again and put it in the pencil box, with the photograph on top. The pencil box was acting very ordinary now, but Will knew he hadn’t imagined the mysterious light.