by Leah Day
“What was that about?” Mally whispered as the sound of the engine faded in the distance. Even though she knew the house was empty, she continued to speak quietly. She waited a full minute to see if he would come back.
The house remained still and silent. Mally slipped out and, tucking Patch under one arm padded down the stairs carefully. She hadn’t heard Dad reset the alarm. It always made an awful shriek you could hear through the entire house until it fully armed.
She slipped into the kitchen and checked the panel. A green light on the bottom told her it was disarmed. She breathed out a sigh of relief. Time to eat!
Grandma’s house had been empty for six months. After she’d been missing three weeks, Mama had cleaned out her refrigerator and emptied it of everything perishable. But since Mally and Rose still came by sometimes after school and Dad checked on the house every day, they’d left a lot of food in the cabinets.
Mally found peanut butter, graham crackers, and a half full honey bear. She quickly buttered a cracker to make a peanut butter sandwich and stuffed it into her mouth. She moaned with pleasure at the taste.
She poured herself a tall glass of water from the sink and drank it down, then poured another. She ate her way through the entire package of graham crackers and dug back into the cabinet for more.
“I think this gorge fest should be taken upstairs.” Patch said from where she’d set him on the kitchen table. “We have a job to do.”
“You mean I do. You can’t stitch anything right now.” Mally said, as she slathered another cracker with peanut butter, this time topping it with a squirt of honey.
“Yes, yes, you don’t need to remind me I can’t move. But if Daddy returns in a hurry, won’t it be easier to hide upstairs than right next to the door?”
“Good point.” Mally put the rest of the crackers on a plate and filled her glass again. She scooped up Patch under one arm and made to leave the room. She paused, glancing at the calendar next to the door.
“Patch… I’ve been gone five days.” Little black “x” marks scratched out each day.
“Maybe six. He might have forgotten to mark today,” Patch mused. “As you said, what does another day matter, when you’re already up to your neck in trouble?”
“Just so long as we don’t get caught before we finish fixing the quilt. I’m sure Mrs. Whittaker is watching the house too. We’ll have to be very careful.”
Mally walked slowly upstairs, trying not to slosh water on the carpet. She had a glass in one hand, her full plate of peanut butter, honey, and crackers in the other, and Patch tucked under one arm. She elbowed the sewing room door open and felt instantly at home. Even with the curtains closed, the room was filled with light and warmth. She set her food down on the window seat and returned to the cutting table to look at the quilt.
She frowned at the blocks arranged around the landscape. She’d fussed and debated over their placement for at least an hour last night, but now she couldn’t see what she’d been agonizing about. She fiddled with an Open Door block, lining it up against the right edge of the landscape. Who cared about the exact placement of these blocks if it got Grandma and Ms. Bunny home?
“Exactly what I was saying last night,” Patch said in her head. “Stitch it together and get the job done.”
Several hours of tedious hand stitching followed as Mally added a border of twelve quilt blocks and stitched a new sun in the middle. She considered using Grandma’s sewing machine, but since she had no idea how to even turn it on, she stuck with the hand stitching techniques Ms. Bunny taught her in Quilst.
Sitting in Grandma’s comfy green sewing chair, she cut the scrap of orange fabric she’d set aside the night before into a rough circle and placed it over the hole in the sky where the sun had been. She had no idea how to turn the edges under neatly the way she’d seen Grandma make the original sun. The edges frayed a bit as she stitched the scrap in place, but at least the world would have sunshine again. Her stitches were far from perfect and many times she had to stop to pick out knots when her thread became tangled.
Whenever she began to feel frustrated, she’d close her eyes and see Ms. Bunny and Sunshine disappearing inside the snarl or imagine what Menda was doing to them right now. Whatever they were going through had to be much worse than this.
Slowly she stitched the quilt blocks together one by one and then secured the pieced borders to the edges of the quilt, just as she’d seen Grandma do many times before. She also stitched on new buttons – doorknobs – to the three Open Door and two Closed Door blocks she was adding to the borders.
“Will these doors open underground?” Mally asked as she secured a red and white striped glass button to a hot pink door that was destined for the bottom edge of the quilt.
“Use your imagination, little Maker. I think a large cave would be convenient.”
“But caves are dirty and dark,” Mally protested. She’d visited Appalachian Caverns with her family when she was little and vividly remembered descending into the cold, dark cave.
“It can be as pretty or as ugly as you like. It’s your imagination so make it whatever you want.”
So Mally attached buttons to the doors and imagined a different sort of cave with white rock walls. She’d flipped through Dad’s countertop catalogs enough times to know many different types of rock by sight. Quartz and marble were her favorites.
This cave will always have light, Mally thought as she ran her fingers over the seams of a pale gold Sawtooth Star block pieced between the two doors. It was weird to put a star underground, but now it made sense. There would be long passageways leading to the surface of Quilst, but the patchwork doors would open into a massive cavern with the star shining in the center.
For the top border, Mally pieced a House on a Hill block in between the door blocks and stitched an extra thin strip of gray fabric on the bottom edge of all three. She imagined the gray fabric acting like a thin cloud layer, hiding the doors and house in the sky. It will feel squishy and soft to stand on, she thought as she secured the fabric strip in place. But it won’t be big like the cave. Just a narrow little space for the doors and house so we can easily fly up to it whenever we’re in trouble. Menda will never find it.
While she stitched as fast as her small fingers could manage, Patch rested in the window seat. But he was far from idle. Almost immediately he began questioning exactly how they were going to return to Quilst and achieve their goals. At first, Mally had no answers, but soon she could see the value of having a plan, and a backup plan, and a third plan because Patch insisted she think through all the worst possibilities.
While they talked, Mally occasionally stopped to pull out materials or tools from nearby cabinets and add them to the yellow bag at her feet. She’d lost her backpack and sewing box during the snarl attack, so she’d rummaged through Grandma’s drawers and found a small yellow shoulder bag to hold supplies when they returned. She was just adding a spool of white thread when she thought of Menda and the spider web on the mountain path.
“I need to ask you something, Patch.”
“I’m listening.”
“The day we got trapped, you led us up to Menda’s spider web. You led us there. Now we’re planning to go back and take her on together and I just need to know. Can I trust you?”
He was silent for a long minute, then sighed.
“I am very sorry for my earlier actions. I thought… well I thought I could fix a wrong with another wrong, but that never works out, does it? But I swear on every thread that holds my orange hide together that it won’t happen again. You can trust me.”
“But how do I know that for sure?” Mally said softly, rolling the spool through her fingers. She shivered at the memory of the spider web locking her in place and the horrible threads worming their way through her hair.
Patch didn’t answer directly, “Did you see any other animals in Quilst, ot
her than me?”
“No. I only met you on the first day. I haven’t met anyone else except Menda”
“There were lots of animals before the Ripping Witch came. Sheep, skunks, deer, racoons and dogs. My best friends were a horse and an owl.” He chuckled and Mally could hear wistfulness in his voice. “She took them all. Some she would push into those pits in the landscape. I have no idea what happened to them. But their fate was probably better than what happened to the rest.”
“What did she do to them?”
“The worst was turning them into snarls. She’d rip them down to pure fiber, then command it, and they had to do whatever she asked, but you can still hear them inside. That’s the whispering. You heard it in the woods when you were fixing me. That’s the animals inside calling for help. It drives her crazy she can’t shut them up. She can rip us apart thread by thread, but she can’t erase us completely.”
“But why? Why did she rip them apart? Why is she so determined to find my Grandma and destroy Quilst?”
“I have no idea. Maybe it makes her feel good,” Mally knew if Patch could move he’d be shrugging. “All I know is it’s the crown that does it. I’ve never seen anyone else be able to control things like her, but she has to rip living things apart first. She can’t make new things. Like you, making Sunshine – she can’t do that. Whatever she is, she’s not a Maker.”
“But how did she get into the quilt? She’s a doll, right? Like you and Ms. Bunny. But who made her? Who would make something like that?”
“Time’s a wasting and you have a lot more seams to stitch. How about you focus on your needle and I’ll worry about the Ripping Witch.”
His tone closed the subject completely, but Mally had a feeling there was a lot more he wasn’t telling her.
Sometime later Mally stood and stretched. She bent her fingers back and groaned as her knuckles popped. She’d attached rows of blocks to the top and right edge of the quilt. She only had one more long line of stitching to go along the bottom of the landscape.
“What do you think?” she asked, holding up the quilt to show Patch.
“You’re doing great, little Maker. I’m sure it’s already making a difference in Quilst.”
“Because of the new Open Door blocks?” Mally asked, stroking her fingers over the delicate door frame pieced in brown fabric.
“And the, what? Three suns? You’d notice it if there were suddenly three new suns in the sky, wouldn’t you?”
“Good point. Do you think I should change it?”
“No, definitely not. The more you add, the better off we’ll be. Are there any other blocks that might be useful in these stacks?” Quilt blocks surrounded Patch on the window seat and he sounded supremely annoyed he couldn’t move to look through them himself.
Mally joined him at the window. It was a relief to not be stitching, even if it was only for a short break. She scooped up a stack of blocks and sneezed as a cloud of dust filled the air. Sitting down next to the cat, she slid her hand across the top blue block. It was composed of four large squares surrounded with tiny triangles. Bears Claw was written on bit of paper pinned to one corner. Mally flipped through the stack and found four more Bears Claw blocks, then a slew of Turkey Tracks, which were pieced almost identically.
“Do you think this could become a turkey?” she asked Patch, thinking of Sunshine. She had been a patchwork unit with a special name. What had Ms. Bunny called it? Flying bird? Flying goose? She began separating the blocks into stacks organized by their types. She grabbed another pile from the floor and the name suddenly came back to her.
“Flying geese! Sunshine was a flying geese unit and she started flying. Do you think these might turn into bears and turkeys and birds?”
“I would suppose so. I was hoping you’d find something along the lines of a battle ax or sword block. I don’t suppose we’d be so lucky as to have a traditional Evil Witch Instant Death quilt block?”
“But what if they could help us?” Mally said, ignoring his sarcasm. “There’s dozens and dozens here! Look – Cats and Mice!” She held up a red and green quilt block with a square surrounded by twelve small triangles. “The mice could help us find Menda and you wouldn’t mind another cat to hang out with, would you?”
“Another kitty to compete with your affections? I suppose I could deal with that. We’ll need some bigger animals too.”
Mally quickly sorted the blocks around the window, stacking them up by the animals they corresponded with. Frogs, monkeys, dozens of different bird blocks, game cocks, hawks, turkeys, ducks and ducklings, and hens and chicks. She ran around the room scooping up more piles from the floor.
Unfortunately, most of the quilt blocks Grandma had pieced weren’t animal blocks. “I don’t need more Churn Dash!” Mally shouted as she found yet another stack of the iconic block.
“Unless you plan to butter the Ripping Witch to death, no, those won’t be helpful.”
“If only they were named Throwing Star or something like that, they would be a lot more useful. I wish she’d made more Bears Claw blocks, and we only have one elephant.” Mally said, placing a large stack of blocks they couldn’t use on Grandma’s sewing machine table. “I have no idea what a Toad in a Puddle or Honeycomb could help us with, but I think we should bring them just in case.”
“Anyone or anything that can come alive has my vote,” Patch said.
Mally surveyed the stacks spread over the window seat. “We have about a hundred blocks here, Patch, and who knows how many birds this Birds in the Air block will make.” She ran her fingers over a complicated block that had thirty-six smaller triangles pieced between four larger triangles. “We may end up with a lot more animals than quilt blocks.”
“I agree. If they become real, we’d have quite an army at our backs.”
“An army?” Mally asked.
“You are going into battle, little Maker, are you not? We have to destroy the Ripping Witch,” he said sharply. “I’ve tried to ignore it. I’ve tried to run from it. But there is no other way.”
“But does it have to be a war?” Mally’s heart raced as she picked up the quilt to resume her stitching. “I just want to save Ms. Bunny and Sunshine and find my grandma.”
“And hang everyone else?” Patch growled. “This isn’t just your family and friends on the line here, little Maker. The Ripping Witch has destroyed the sun once and she will do it again. She’s taken more lives than you can know and she’s a danger to everyone and everything in Quilst.”
“I know! I hate her for taking them! She’s horrible and crazy, but I don’t see what I can do against her. She’s armed with twelve – no – thirteen pairs of scissors and she’s so strong!” Mally’s hand shook. “What can I possibly do against her? I’m only ten!”
“Your age has nothing to do with it!” the cat roared in her head. “Can you think? Then you can plan. Can you breathe? Then you can fight! I told you this would be the hardest thing you’ve ever done, and you thought I meant fixing that quilt, didn’t you? I meant the battle to come. The Ripping Witch will never give up and you’d better be ready to wage war against her because that is what it’s going to take.”
Mally’s vision blurred and she struggled to thread her needle. She was silent for a long moment. “I’m scared.”
“I know,” Patch sighed. “You don’t have to do this alone. See all those animals? You’ll have plenty of help and you’ve also got me. And I promise you, little Maker, come stitch or rip, I will always have your back.”
Mally dried her eyes and returned to her stitching, and together they plotted their return to Quilst. There was much more on the line now, and the weight on her shoulders felt heavier than ever.
But all she could do was take one stitch at a time.
One stitch led to the next until all the blocks were pieced together and the quilt was whole once more.
By the end, all the fingertips on her left hand were bleeding, her thumb thimble was very worn in, and the light shining against the curtains had begun to fade. Mally had eaten all the food she’d brought up from the kitchen and was wondering if she could sneak back downstairs for some more.
She went to the bathroom to refill her water glass. When she glanced into the mirror, she was startled to see her reflection. Her face was flushed and her hair was a tangled mess around her head, but something had changed in her eyes and the set of her mouth. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it until she smiled at herself. Then she realized for the first time in ages, she felt happy.
She was going to save Grandma and Ms. Bunny and Sunshine and with luck she’d be back home by this time tomorrow. Menda would never haunt her dreams again and the world of Quilst would be safe. “We will win,” she said to her reflection with a determined smile. She skipped back to the sewing room, and found Patch waiting for her by the window.
“Ready to save the world, Patch?”
“Look who stitched herself up a notch,” Patch said. “Ready and waiting, your majesty.”
“We’re going to save them today,” Mally scooped the cat up into her arms and spun around, hugging him tight. “We’re going to save everyone! Then I’ll come home and everything will be perfect again!”
Mally set the patchwork cat on the edge of the cutting table, then danced over to the window seat and quickly stacked up all the animal quilt blocks. She pulled open the bottom drawer of a nearby cabinet and found Grandma’s huge green and purple vegetable sack.
It was big enough to hold a bushel of tomatoes and had thick purple handles to sling over her shoulder. Mally slipped the stack of quilt blocks inside, then she pulled the handles over one shoulder and tested the weight. The blocks were bulky, but thankfully they weren’t too heavy.
She’d already packed the yellow shoulder bag with needles, over a dozen spools of thread, and three metal seam rippers. She’d considered bringing the rotary cutter and a small pair of scissors she’d found in a drawer but thought better of it. Menda didn’t need any more blades to play with.