by Mikki Lish
Hedy put a hand to Uncle Peter’s forehead. It felt like the brow of a marble statue standing out in the frosty garden. “I’m sure of it.” She quickly recounted to the others what had happened after she and Spencer had touched Simon, and how Mrs. Vilums had cured them of the deep chill by making them stand in sunlight.
Spencer thought back. “But we didn’t get that cold that fast.”
“Hedy said you only touched Simon with a finger or a hand at most,” Mrs. Pal said. “But, Mr. Sang, you said Simon took over the whole of Peter to oust Nobody. The effect would be stronger, and more immediate. That is why he is fading so fast. I suspect he needs sunlight now.”
“Sunrise isn’t for ages,” Jelly said anxiously.
Grandpa John stared at his brother, worry battling with hurt and bitterness on his face. Uncle Peter seemed to feel it. He raised his eyes, took in Grandpa John’s expression, and whispered, “Leave me.”
Grandpa John swallowed and brusquely said, “Soumitra, can you help me get him up the stairs? Hedy and Spencer, bring the painting, please. I don’t want it out of my sight.”
The flights of stairs proved too much for Uncle Peter, and at the second landing, he dropped to the floor. Soumitra gently heaved him over his shoulder, as if he were a sack of onions.
To their surprise, Grandpa John led them to the attic. At an ominous clank of metal from up the stairs, Grandpa John called, “Halt! I am thy master and my purpose is pure.”
The clank of Sir Roland fell silent. He was motionless as everyone picked their way behind Grandpa John through the clutter of the attic to the hidden room. Grandpa John reached out to clasp the golden hand in the door. Its burnished metal fingers curled around his, and they shook for a moment; then there was a snap, clunk, clack as a hefty mechanism buried deep inside the door unlocked. The golden hand released Grandpa John’s, and he pushed the door open to reveal the hushed wood clearing inside.
When Hedy and Spencer had last glimpsed the Kaleidos, it had been lit by moonlight and the torch flames. But now, although outside the house it was night, soft sunlight fell upon the Kaleidos, making it glimmer. Hedy and Spencer stared at the magic box, edging as close as they could without touching it.
Soumitra eased Uncle Peter to the floor, where sunlight could fall upon his body and face. The old man’s eyes fluttered, but he was too weak to open them.
“Now what?” Jelly asked, taking her grandfather’s limp hand.
Hedy found everyone looking to her for an answer. “We wait for the sunlight to warm him up.”
Mrs. Pal studied the trees around the clearing with an air of professional curiosity and bent down to touch the earth, finding a small animal bone—a curving rib—half-buried. “Have you ever explored these woods, Mr. Sang?” she asked.
“A few times,” Grandpa John said. “I tied a long rope to the banister of the stairs, tied the other end around my waist, and walked as far as I could go. It was always very quiet here. That’s why I chose it as the place for …” He trailed off, looking at the Kaleidos.
Mrs. Pal eyed the painting of the skunk Therie, an idea seeming to form in her mind. At last, she cleared her throat. “Mr. Sang, your exploration of the wood has given me a thought about the cube.” Everyone fell silent. “I propose a more direct approach. Rather than trying to convince the Therie to return it, someone”—she looked at Grandpa John—“enters the painting and takes it back.”
“What are we doing?” Hedy asked as the children and Grandpa John crunched through the dark to the garage. They had left Uncle Peter in the hidden room with Soumitra watching over him. Mrs. Pal was guarding the paintings inside.
“We need fishing line …” Grandpa John counted on his fingers. “… cord, rope, and chain.”
“Are you building a war machine?” Spencer sounded impressed.
“No. A leash. A line that will tether the bait and tether me.” He yanked open the garage doors and began directing the children to search this or that shelf.
“Who’s the bait?” Jelly added with a worried look. “Are you using Spencer ’cause he’s the smallest?”
Spencer had crouched down to dig around in the old bucket, but he now sprang to his feet. “I don’t want to be the bait!”
“No one is the bait!” Grandpa John said, throwing his hands into the air. “Mrs. Pal and I believe, or hope, that the painting is a sort of portal for the Therie. When it wants to—when no one is around, it seems—the Therie opens its portal and takes things from our world into its world. They’ve been scavenging for trinkets and knickknacks right under my nose for years. Well, we’ll set some tempting item in front of that skunk; that will be the bait. The bait will be tied to some fine fishing line, which we hope will go unnoticed. Mrs. Pal suspects that the fishing line will be like wedging a door. It will keep the portal open. The fishing line will connect to me, and the other end of the rope will be anchored to the house. All the heavy chain is just overcaution, I hope. With any luck, I’ll keep a hand on the rope, dart through the portal, snatch the cube, and away we go.”
Grandpa John took a deep breath while everyone tried to absorb all that he had said. After hours of frustrating, fruitless watching of the skunk Therie, he was now filled with purpose, moving quickly, the years dropping from him.
But still, Hedy frowned, thinking, That was a lot of suspect and hope and luck.
“Check what I’ve placed on the hallway table,” Mrs. Pal called softly as they returned inside.
A red-and-white decoration, speckled with glitter, had been pulled from the Christmas tree and set on the hallway table. “There’s our bait,” Grandpa John murmured.
Jelly nudged Spencer. “It looks a bit like you. Ginger on top, pale and freckly on the side … you are the bait!”
Spencer elbowed her.
Grandpa John began unreeling lengths of line and cord and tying them together as fast as he could. Finally, the whole length was linked to the chain that was wrapped around one of the brick pillars of the porch and secured with a large, solid padlock.
Beyond the porch, a very light swirling fall of snow had begun: It was pretty but couldn’t soothe the unease that was starting to rear up in Hedy’s mind. She closed the door as far as it would go and pulled her scarf up around her ears for comfort, even though she didn’t need it inside.
“I think we’re ready,” Grandpa John said to Mrs. Pal, slipping the leash through his belt buckle. He held out a hand to stop the children from entering the living room, where both the skunk and the magpie portraits had been propped on the floor. “Keep out of sight now.”
“Out of whose sight?” Spencer asked.
“The Therie’s.”
“Why?”
“So she takes the bait. She won’t if she knows we’re watching her.”
Grandpa John swiftly edged toward the portrait and placed the Christmas decoration on the floor in front of it. Then he retreated to huddle with the others in the doorway, where they hoped the skunk could not see them watching and waiting.
A minute stretched to two, and then five, but the Christmas decoration remained on the floor.
“Is she going to take it?” Spencer whispered.
There was a tense pause. “The Bermuda Triangle doesn’t usually take that long,” Jelly said. “Hedy, remember when they took Max’s jar? We’d only looked away for a few seconds.”
“And when they tried to take my phone, I hadn’t turned away very long,” Hedy recalled.
Grandpa John sighed. “Perhaps she hasn’t seen it. Maybe I need to move it closer.”
“Oh, she’s seen it.” It was Stan, placed on the seat of the sofa with his antlers tilting up and over the back of it. “She saw it. She took a look at it. I don’t think it’s to her taste.”
“Agreed,” Doug rumbled quietly. “She’s not interested. What do you think, Stan? Do they need to try different bait?”
“Yes, good idea,” Stan said. “Different bait.”
“Your turn,” Jelly teased Spencer.
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“Ladies first,” he retorted. Jelly ruffled his hair with a laugh.
“Well, what do we use?” Grandpa John asked. “I thought a Christmas decoration was a good idea myself. Sparkly. Pretty to look at.”
“Do we try something that’s not sparkly and pretty, then?” Spencer suggested.
Mrs. Pal pulled something from her pocket. “Here, try this.” It was the small, pale rib bone she had picked up from the hidden room upstairs. Hedy and Spencer tugged on the fishing line to reel the Christmas decoration toward them, then cut it from the fishing line with a small blade that Grandpa John had in his pocket.
When the bone was tied on, Hedy whispered, “Doug, Stan, is it okay to try again now?”
“Looks like it.”
Grandpa John tossed the bone into the room, and it landed neatly before the painting. Everyone held their breath.
“She’s looking,” Stan whispered.
Moments trickled by.
“She’s going for it!” Doug tried to contain his excitement.
A slim hand emerged from the frame. It was glossy and made of many, many brushstrokes, but otherwise looked like a normal woman’s hand, with a ruffled sleeve at the wrist. Lady Skunk’s hand quickly plucked the bone from the rug and withdrew into the painting, out of sight. Behind it, the fishing line slowly snaked into the portrait.
Grandpa John let out a few breaths. “Here I go,” he said as he took a step. Hedy and Spencer scrambled to their feet and hugged him.
“Does this mean your ‘No magic’ rule is broken?” Spencer asked.
“This isn’t magic,” Grandpa John said. “It’s repossession.”
“We can help if you need us to,” Hedy added.
“Help? Don’t you dare,” he said with stern affection. Then he entwined his forearm in the cord. “You two stay out here. Stay safe.”
“We’ll look after the cubs for you, Master,” Doug called out.
Grandpa John shot Doug a doubtful look. “Hmm. Grand job you’ve been doing so far,” he said.
“They’re in one piece, aren’t they?” Stan said, sounding hurt.
Grandpa John approached the painting and dropped to one knee and then the other, grumbling under his breath about his age. Where the fishing line pierced through the surface of the paint, he poked a finger through.
“What is it like?” Mrs. Pal asked quietly.
“Feels squishy,” Grandpa John said. He nodded to them all, then put his head down and crawled into the painting, dragging the cord with him.
The others rushed from the doorway to watch. There stood Grandpa John, completely inside the picture, a fine painted version of himself.
“Why isn’t he moving?” Spencer asked.
But Grandpa John and the Therie were moving in there somehow. It was like watching a slow, jerky, silent stop-motion picture: First they were in one position, and then a few moments later their positions had changed, without the movements in between being seen. The skunk Therie seemed shocked to find an intruder in her painting. She backed away in fitful lurches from her table of stolen trinkets, the Kaleidos cube among them.
“Get it, Grandpa John!” whispered Hedy.
As she spoke, a tiny flicker of blue light winked along the rope that trailed into the painting. No one paid it any mind because the picture had changed again: Grandpa John was grasping the cube with two hands, a relieved smile upon his face. But in the next moment, the skunk had turned her back on him, her tail up, and Grandpa John had stumbled backward, his arm over his eyes.
Spencer looked aghast. “Did that thing just skunk-spray him?”
Grandpa John stretched out his hand along the cord, trying to feel his way back out of the painting. But as he pulled it taut, a large shape of black and white flew at him from above and knocked him down. The cord juddered.
“It’s the magpie!” exclaimed Spencer. “From the other painting!”
Hedy glanced at the magpie’s painting by the fireplace. Spencer was right; it was empty. The two paintings were somehow linked. The magpie’s splendid coat of black and cream had transformed into wings, and the magpie had swooped into that strange place where their grandfather was.
It jabbed at Grandpa John with its large beak. He narrowly ducked it before he tripped, entangled in the cord. In the next moment, he tugged something from his pocket; it was his small blade. He slashed through the cord to free himself, and the magpie soundlessly screeched—Grandpa John had nicked the creature across its thigh.
The magpie suddenly jerked, and for a second, blue light crackled over it from top to toe. Then it gazed at Grandpa John with a contemptuous tilt to its head that made it terrifyingly clear to Hedy what had just happened.
“Nobody’s gone into that magpie!” she shouted.
“What?” Mrs. Pal cried.
“I’m sure of it! Uncle Peter had that look about him when Nobody was controlling him.”
“Mr. Sang just cut the creature,” Mrs. Pal said, thinking aloud. “And Peter had an injured arm. I think a wound gives Nobody an opening.”
They watched, horrified, as the magpie engulfed Grandpa John in its dark wings and tossed him to and fro before hurling him to the ground. The Therie shook each foot into large black bird claws and seized Grandpa John by the belt of his trousers. Stretching out its great wings, it sprang into the air, surging away with Grandpa John, who desperately clutched the Kaleidos cube to his chest.
Hedy was vaguely aware that she was yelling as she dropped to her knees and drove her head through the surface of the painting.
It was like a fog clearing or lifting the pane of a dirty window. The world inside didn’t look painted; in fact it looked more than real, with deeply saturated colors: the umber of the earthy ground, the indigo thread of the rug unexpectedly lying under the skunk’s table, the intense emerald green of the tumbled potted fern nearby. An unpleasant pungent smell hung in the air, which must have been the skunk spray, but Hedy barely noticed it. All her attention was on Grandpa John’s faint cries in the distance. Far away she could see the magpie Therie, with Grandpa John dangling from its claws, flapping beyond a river to a vast tree rearing into the dark sky.
Backing out of the painting, Hedy ignored Spencer’s and Jelly’s questions. “Massive tree. Watch them!” she barked. “I have an idea.” And she raced up the stairs toward Doug and Stan’s room, scarf flying, her mind trained on the only thing she could imagine helping right now.
The silver-and-brass wings were even heavier than she remembered. Her hands shook with nerves, and her fingers traitorously refused to disentangle the leather straps. She could feel precious moments ticking by. As she fumbled, Jelly hurried into the room.
“Muddy bells, Spencer said this is what you were thinking!” She grabbed Hedy by the shoulders. “Hedy, no. You couldn’t get them to work last time!”
Hedy swallowed uncomfortably. “Max managed it. So I must be able to somehow. It’s the only thing I can think of to get to Grandpa John.”
Jelly chewed her lip unhappily but then, after a deep breath, huffed, “Here, let me help you.” She turned Hedy around to wrangle the leather straps across her back and then over the chest. When all was tightly fastened, Hedy rocked back and forth on her feet to gain her balance.
“Ready to channel Max?” Jelly asked her.
“I guess so.”
When they returned to the living room, Mrs. Pal’s face fell. “Sebastian Sello’s wings,” she breathed. “No, Hedy, I cannot allow it. We must regroup. An adult must go and find him.”
Hedy shook her head. “What if the skunk sneaks back and throws out the cord and the portal closes forever? I can’t lose Grandpa John too. If I don’t go in now, we may never find him again. That place is so big, he might end up anywhere.”
“Then I will go,” Mrs. Pal said.
Hedy gave the tiny woman her most stubborn look. “Mrs. Pal, no offense, but I’m already taller than you. Just tell me, how do I get the wings to work?”
Mrs. Pal bu
ried her face in her hands but finally looked at Hedy, defeated. “Belief. You must believe you can fly.”
“Belief.” Hedy breathed deeply. “Okay.”
At that moment, Spencer sprinted into the room and thrust Grandma Rose’s motorcycle helmet into Hedy’s hands. “Just in case,” he panted.
“Did you get this from the garage by yourself?” Hedy asked, surprised. When he nodded, she said softly, “Thanks, Spence. I know you hate the dark.”
“Yeah. But you’re going in there by yourself, so …” He gave a little shrug.
For a split second, Hedy couldn’t help imagining herself falling out of the dim sky of the painted world and crashing to the earth. With that frightening image, the wings on her back suddenly weighed down, cripplingly heavy. She fully grasped then the secret to Sebastian Sello’s wings and obstinately blinked the vision away. “Do you believe I can do it?”
“Yeah,” Spencer said, “you can do anything. It’s kind of annoying.”
Hedy pulled him into a hug, and then Jelly was crushing both of them, saying, “I believe in you too, Hedy.”
Spencer lifted his face gravely. “Be careful of Nobody,” he said. “He’s the worst sort of tricky.”
“Well, then I’ll just have to be trickier,” Hedy said. She patted a small item she had stowed in her pocket all afternoon. “Keep safe.”
“We’ll keep ’em safe, young Hedy, you just look out for yourself,” Doug called out from the couch. “The Lord of the Queen’s Wood over here is just spoiling for a fight.”
Stan cleared his throat as though preparing to recite verse. “Valiant friends, craven foes …” he began in a deep tone.
Hedy didn’t wait around to hear the rest of it. As she knelt to crawl through the frame, Mrs. Pal crouched beside her. “If you fly far, look for the glow of your brother and cousin on this side of the portal. It’s called family fire. Look for them to lead you back.”
Hedy crawled through the painting, awkwardly shuffling with the weight of the wings on her back. She quickly glanced backward. From this side, the living room looked fuzzy, as though she was staring through the surface of a frozen lake, and sound was muffled. But Hedy was most astonished to see what Mrs. Pal had just told her: the glowing forms of Spencer and Jelly beyond the painting portal. Family fire, she thought, feeling a sliver of reassurance.