The Night of the Solstice (17 page)

“I think he's gone to Weerien to get Thia Pendriel.”

“He has returned this night, or so said the careless witch from whom I took this staff. That reminds me: You must keep out of his way, for I cannot protect five at once.”

Claudia had something on her mind. “The vixen,”
she said. “She never came back. What happened to her?”

“I—do not know. I have not seen my faithful friend in this world. Perhaps … perhaps she has escaped to the woods.” Turning away, with slightly bowed head, she added in a low voice: “I fear for her.”

Then she straightened. “But that is my concern, children. As is Cadal Forge. You have listened to his counsels, and have given me much valuable information, and for that I thank you. I assure you it will not be forgotten. But your business here is ended, and you must escape before moonrise.”

“But Morgana—er, madam—my lady!” said Alys. “Can you really deal with Cadal Forge alone?”

The sorceress looked at her enigmatically with eyes like dark sapphires. “Have no fear,” she said, simply. “But I do not know how long it will take, and you must not come through the mirrors again until I return. Things may become a bit—frenetic—on this side for a while. Promise me.”

They promised as she escorted them to the conservatory. The sky was beginning to lighten with the first rays of dawn.

“Good-bye,” they all said, and Claudia added, “I hope we see you again.”

“Good-bye,” said the sorceress, “and you may rely upon it.”

When Dr. Hodges-Bradley saw Claudia, she screamed.

They had bicycled home in the pale gray stillness just before sunrise to find that the worst had happened: Their mother, hearing Claudia's shutter banging in the wind, had gone into her room and discovered the doll in her bed. Five minutes later, on finding that she had pillows for older children, she had called the police. And the police had remembered Alys.

“The thing with the banner was bad enough,” her mother said to Alys in a tremulous voice. “Climbing up on that clocktower where you could have fallen and broken your neck. But this! The police say that what happened at that house last week and Loara High School last night was real vandalism. And taking your little sister with you! How
could
you do it?”

It seemed that that very night person or persons
unknown had thrown buckets of blue and silver paint—the Villa Park High School colors—on the windows of classrooms at their rival school, Loara. And nothing Alys said would convince their parents they had not been involved.

Charles was the only one who persisted in trying to tell the truth. He stopped when Mr. Hodges-Bradley threw the amulet he'd been proffering as evidence into the wastebasket, with the comment that if Charles was trying to be funny he was failing with a vengeance, and that if he was trying to convince them he was crazy he was coming dangerously close to succeeding.

“It's just as well,” said Janie, when they had finally been sent to the bathroom to clean up, grounded indefinitely with no TV privileges and no allowance. “If we keep on explaining, sooner or later they're going to think about
drugs
, and then we'll be grounded forever.”

“Detentions,” Charles mused in funereal tones. Although there was no concrete evidence to link them with the vandalism, in the eyes of the school it was
sure to be an open-and-shut case. “Extra laps in gym. Hours of study hall.”

“But we did it,” said Alys. The transition from the very real terror and danger of the Wildworld to the hysteria in this world had made her a little dizzy. It was the Wildworld that was beginning to seem delusional. “We found Morgana and we helped her. How can you worry about detentions when life as we know it has just been saved?”

“You've never been in Wizinski's study hall,” said Charles quietly, and he disappeared into the bathroom.

Downstairs, Claudia secretly fished the discarded amulet out of the wastebasket. She wanted to keep it as a memento.

It was December 20, the day before the winter solstice, the second to the last day before Christmas vacation, and Claudia was waiting for school to start. In the four days since Sunday the Wildworld had faded to a sort of feverish dream, and all her thoughts now turned to Christmas. Last year she had been too old to believe in Santa Claus, but by this year she had seen enough to wonder if there wasn't something to the story after all.

Because of her age Claudia had gotten off easier than the other three, and she felt a twinge of guilt as she thought of them spending their afternoons scraping all that paint off the Loara windows. But she felt a worse twinge when she considered what she might find in her stocking on Christmas morning.
She was possessed by a deep and pervasive fear that it would be filled with ashes.

“But I am
not
a bad little girl,” she said to Kirsten Spiegel, and Kirsten nodded agreeably.

The subject of stockings was of much interest to second-graders. They sat at recess and compared them as to the size. Everyone felt sorry for Amanda Butler because in her family the stockings used had to be real socks, socks the children actually wore.

“And I'm the youngest, so I always get cheated,” she said this morning to Kirsten and Claudia. “Look.” She pulled off her small blue anklet to show them.

“My brother,” said Amanda as Claudia peered solemnly into the sock, “wears a size twelve E shoe. His socks are
enormous
.”

“Well, sure they are,” said Kirsten. “He's about eight feet tall, too. Bigger people have bigger feet.”

“But is that really
fair
? Is it my fault I'm little?”

Just then the bell rang, and Amanda snatched back her sock and hopped into class. Claudia trailed slowly behind. Something was bothering her; something at the back of her mind was trying to get forward.

Claudia's reading group, the Early Birds, always had a spelling test first thing on Thursdays. Today's was the last spelling test before Christmas. But Claudia found she could think of nothing but feet.

“Get,”
Mrs. McGiffen dictated from the front of the room. “Please
get
me a present.
Get.
”

Feet,
wrote Claudia on her paper. Then she erased the first letter and changed it so that it read
Geet.

“Bed,”
dictated Mrs. McGiffen. “Go to
bed
so Santa Claus will come.
Bed.
”

Beet,
wrote Claudia. No, that was wrong. She changed it to
Beedt
and felt better. Why couldn't she stop thinking about feet?

And then, all at once, she knew why, and the anxious tugging feeling became a feeling of disbelief, and then one of horror.

Claudia could not spell another single word on the test, but she hardly noticed. There was a knot in her stomach making her sick. As the spelling papers were handed in, she felt the knot draw tighter until it made her stiff all over. And then she knew what she had to do.

She looked at the clock. Eight o'clock plus five, ten, fifteen, twenty. It was eight-twenty.

She raised her hand to go to the bathroom.

“But you were just outside,” said Mrs. McGiffen.

Claudia said nothing, and Mrs. McGiffen sighed and gave her permission.

The corridor outside Room 5 was empty. Her footsteps echoed as she went down the hallway by the third graders' rooms. She reached the bath-room, passed it without a glance, and crossed in front of the principal's office. No one came out to stop her or say “Where are you going, little girl?” She walked past the kindergartners' playground. Behind the chain-link fence the swings moved slightly in the wind. Claudia walked out through the parking lot to the sidewalk, and then she had left school.

Ashes in my stocking, she thought, and her eyes blurred, but she kept walking.

Far away a dog barked, a horn honked. Up close the world was strange and quiet, like the times when her mother took her out of school for a dentist's
appointment. But this time she was not with her mother. She was a truant.

The junior high school was on the same street as her school. Some boys doing laps on the other side of the fence looked at her.

Janie and Charles were in that school somewhere, but this was far too serious to be fixed by Charles or Janie. She had to find Alys.

The two blocks to the high school were the longest blocks Claudia had ever walked. A man watering his lawn stared at her. A dog followed her. Everyone in the world knew she had left school in the middle of spelling.

Claudia knew where the high school gym was. She had taken swimming lessons in the pool there last summer. Still, it was hard to go inside now. High-school girls had to put on special clothes for PE. The locker room might be full of naked girls. But Mother had said, after looking at Alys's midterm report card, that Alys must be spending all day in the gym; so Alys
had
to be inside.

The gym smelled like old sneakers. Rows of metal
lockers stared menacingly at Claudia, but there was no one to be seen.

“Hey, who are you?”

A girl with long braids was poking her head out of an office door. The girl looked about Alys's age, but she wore a beautiful silver whistle around her neck.

Claudia backed away. “I—I'm Claudia Hodges-Bradley,” she whispered. “I'm looking for Alys.”

“Alys Hodges-Bradley? But she's not here now. I think she has Blanchard for geometry this period.”

Claudia didn't know what Blanchard for geometry meant.

“Look, I'll show you. See that quonset hut? Well, that's where Blanchard teaches your sister geometry. Okay?”

The door of the quonset hut was open, and if she leaned over the steps Claudia could see the floor inside. She saw rows of desks filled with big students. Alys was one of them.

Claudia whispered, “Alys.”

The boy nearest the door looked at Claudia in surprise.

“Alys. Alys,” Claudia whispered more loudly.

The boy poked the girl next to him, who prodded the girl next to her, who whispered to Alys.

Alys looked around and saw Claudia.

Her mouth fell open and she dropped her pencil. She glared at Claudia and made a furious go-away motion.

Claudia whispered, “Alys!”

By this time all the students near the door were laughing. Alys sat very stiffly at her desk, eyes straight ahead, refusing to notice. But just then the teacher heard the commotion and came over and looked down at Claudia.

“I think, Ms. Hodges-Bradley,” he said, “that you had better step outside and see what this young lady wants.”

Flushing deep red, Alys picked up her backpack. Once outside she snatched Claudia out of sight under the stairs.

“Why aren't you in school?” she hissed.

Claudia swallowed miserably. “It's about the magic.”

“What? What magic?”

“You know. The vixen. The Wildworld.”

“Claudia, you left school to come talk to me about the Wildworld? Now?
Why?
”

“We've got to go back there.”

Alys's anger was turning to bewilderment. “But that's all over, Claude.”

Claudia shook her head.

“What do you mean? Stop shaking your head and talk!”

“We—we have to go find Morgana.”

“Claudia … Claudia, have you gone nuts? We
found
Morgana. We met her. She gave you breakfast, remember?”

Claudia shook her head.

“Stop doing that.”

“It wasn't Morgana.”

A pause.

“What makes you think it wasn't Morgana?”

“Her feet.”

Another pause.

“Claudia, I'm only going to ask you this one more time—”

“Alys,” said Claudia desperately, “her feet were too big. Remember when we saw the footprints in the secret room? And they were so little? But the lady we met was as tall as Daddy. How could she have feet that small?”

There was a long, long silence. Slowly Alys's expression changed and she sank down to sit on the ground. “No. Oh, no. This isn't possible.”

“Don't you believe me?”

Alys squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes,” she said at last, very softly. “Yes, I'm afraid I do believe you.” She opened her eyes and Claudia saw they were dark with despair. “But, oh, Claudia, what can we do? It's too
late
—”

She jumped to her feet and turned away. Then, very slowly, as if fighting against resistance, her hand moved to her pocket. Claudia saw it come out clenched around something in waxed paper, something small and silvery white. Just as slowly the hand unclenched and Alys stood with bent head, gazing down at what she held. She stood this way for several moments, and then she turned back.

“Alys …”

“It's all right,” said Alys briefly. Then: “Oh, Claude, don't look that way. It was just a shock, is all. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To get Charles and Janie out of school. Tomorrow is the solstice. We've got to do something fast.”

Charles and Janie were astonished and puzzled to see Alys appear in the seventh-grade art classroom with a note which said they both had an emergency orthodontist appointment. They were astonished and delighted to be taken out of school at this hour, and they were astonished and alarmed to see Claudia lurking by the gate when they got out.

“Leave your bikes here,” said Alys. “We have to talk.”

“So,” said Alys as they rounded the corner onto their street. “So. Any ideas as to who it actually was?”

“Yes,” said Janie. “Thia Pendriel. She would have known all about us from Cadal Forge and Aric.” Janie was amazingly calm about the whole thing. The others were numb.

“And you told her everything.”

“Yes, and so would you have. She saved our lives.”

“That's what I don't get,” mumbled Charles. “Why would she do that? And why let us come back here?”