The Story Web

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  In the beginning, the worlds of animals and humans lived in harmony. They conversed freely, one neighbor to the next. Hardly ever did they quarrel. Strands of stories connected all the creatures of the earth. These strands were woven together into an intricate lace pattern. This web stretched through and around the earth and held it together.

  The spiders were the most honored in this world, for it was they who built the web of stories that held all the creatures together. When a section frayed, they could count on the creatures to come with new stories, new threads the spiders could use to fix the web.

  But time passed on and tensions arose. Was it a human who threw the first stone? A dog? A bear? A tiny fly? We shall never know. We know only that the creatures grew apart. Each animal found their own realm. The fish and whales and mermaids stayed in the sea and never sang up to the mammals on the land. The birds took to the trees and skies and rarely came to gossip with the rodents who lived underground. Those were dark days indeed!

  The spiders worked as hard as they could to maintain the web. Tensions grew faster than they could spin, and shared stories were scarce. The web grew more and more fragile.

  Then came Arachne. A weaver quite proud of her own work—too proud they say—and a bit of magic turned her into a spider, where she would be doomed to weave webs for the rest of eternity. But Arachne knew the tales of the Story Web and the once honored spiders. Perhaps she could not be the greatest human weaver, wrapping tales into tapestries, but she could bring honor back to the spiders by rebuilding the Story Web.

  And so, slowly, slowly she began to repair the web. Her magic made the strands stronger, the knots tighter. But here is the rub! It is not the spider who tells the story, it is the people. So she was dependent on the humans, gathering their tales. When the humans grow apart from one another and from the animals, when they stop listening to one another’s stories, the web frays and tears.

  Remember, it is the Story Web that holds the earth together. Without it, we shall splinter apart.

  So, dear reader, you must not only read these stories, you must share them. You must tell the stories, and you must listen. It is how we all survive.

  “Look!” Lewis whispers.

  An orb weaver is on the web. Argiope aurantia. Fat black body and bright yellow markings. As Melanie spoke, the spider began to weave in the corner of the web. It hasn’t gotten far. Two strands connecting three of the radius threads, but it is something.

  “The book says the spiders need our stories, right? So maybe we just tell stories?” Lewis asks.

  “Do you have a story?”

  Lewis shakes his head. “I don’t think so. Not yet.” He looks away from her. Ashamed? She isn’t sure why. “Do you still have that book?” he asks. “Maybe there’re more details in there. Or maybe we should just read the stories from the book to the web?”

  “Sure, I have it,” Melanie says. “It’s at my house.”

  “The Bird House?” Lewis asks.

  She sees the fear in his eyes.

  Melanie nods. “You want to come over?”

  It is a simple question, one kids have asked each other thousands of times. Millions probably. Lewis swallows hard. “Yes,” he says. And he means it, she thinks. Or, at least, he’s trying to.

  Lewis had been to the Bird House only one time before, with Alice. He still got a sick feeling when he thought about going up there with the chocolate milk. When it came to witch hunts, the hunters were never the good guys. They should have left Melanie’s aunt alone. He couldn’t deny, though, that the sick feeling also came from remembering what had happened that day, the way all the birds had lifted at once and blackened the sky.

  Now, years later, Lewis stepped back onto the lawn, this time with Melanie by his side. Cold air whipped over the hill and down toward them. He thought he heard coyote calls on that air, but it was too early in the evening for that. The roof ridge was lined with crows. Seventeen of them. On the second floor, in a window with a deep ledge, a starling nested. Little baby birds poked their heads up. A flock of turkeys walked around the edge of the house. If they noticed the two kids, they didn’t seem to care. They kept pecking at bugs on the ground. “We’re really high up,” Lewis said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he knew that, but he had to say something.

  “Yep,” Melanie said. “We have the best view of the town.”

  “So you can spy on everyone?” Lewis asked.

  Melanie looked back over her shoulder. “Not usually, no. Is that what you would do?”

  Lewis shook his head.

  “We mostly watch the birds coming and going. We look out toward the ocean.”

  As if on cue, a large bird emerged from the woods and bobbed its way toward them.

  “Is that the emu?” Lewis asked with surprise.

  “Her name is Elspeth.”

  “The emu’s name is Elspeth?”

  “Yes. I named her when I was younger. On one of our visits.”

  “The emu lives with you?”

  “It’s a rescue emu,” Melanie explained. “My aunt takes in rare birds that can’t survive on their own.”

  Lewis glanced at Melanie. She was tall, probably the tallest girl in fifth grade, and she moved more slowly, carefully, like the world had bumped up against her a few too many times.

  Lewis took a deep breath and continued his walk across the patchy grass. Melanie led him around to the front of the house onto a large circular driveway dotted with white splotches, like someone had splattered paint all over the blacktop.

  A flock of seagulls sat along a fence at the top of the driveway and regarded them with some confusion. A large oak tree by the house was full of small, twittering birds. Pigeons strutted across the edge of the driveway and chickens pecked at the grass.

  “Wait,” Lewis said. “Is this white stuff—Is it bird poop?”

  “Of course it is,” Melanie said. “Birds have to poop somewhere.”

  Lewis blushed. He shouldn’t have said anything, even though the old Victorian was drizzled in white the same as the driveway. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Melanie said. “I suppose it is a little odd if you aren’t used to it. But the birds don’t come inside. Except for Nocturne, that is. And the rare birds in the solarium. But really, our house is perfectly clean.” She stepped onto a walkway flanked by two birdbaths and led them to the front door. “I’m sure the book is in the library. We’ll just hurry in and find it. No one will even know we’re here.” She took a key from around her neck and unlocked the massive bolt. No one in Independence locked their doors. Lewis felt his heart rev up. What if Melanie’s aunt truly was a witch, and he was being led to her lair?

  The door swung in, and standing in the doorway, as if she had been expecting them, was Anastasia Seersie, the witch of Independence, Maine.

  The first thing Lewis noticed about Melanie’s aunt was her startling gray eyes. They were almost green gray, like a paler version of the ocean in winter. She was also the tallest woman Lewis had ever met. She stood in the doorway of the Bird House, and the top of her head nearly reached the doorframe.

  “Having a friend over?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to show him one of my books,” Melanie began to explain.

  Melanie’s aunt held up a hand. Her fingers were as long and slim as she was. “Let’s invite our guest inside first, please.”

  “Of course, Anastasia,” Melanie replied.

  Melanie’s aunt stepped back and, to his never-ending surprise, Lewis found himself stepping into the Bird House. A sleepy-eyed owl watched as they entered an enormous foyer with a black-and-white checkerboard floor, and an iron chandelier hung by an impossibly thin chain above their heads. A sweeping staircase curved away from them to the upstairs rooms, bracketed by pillars of pure white marble. The house had the buzzing quiet of a museum.

  Melanie fidgeted with her hands. Lewis wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, but her aunt ushered them into a huge living room filled with pink brocade f
urniture. There were two small couches with backs curved like violins and six armchairs—the seats of which were so high Lewis wasn’t sure he would be able to get into one.

  Melanie’s aunt lowered herself into one of the chairs. The owl from the front room swooped in and perched itself on the back. Scant light came in from cracks between the blinds. “Sit, sit,” Melanie’s aunt ordered. “Go get the cookies, Melanie!”

  Lewis sat on one of the couches so at least his feet would touch the floor, and so Melanie could sit beside him. Melanie’s aunt regarded Lewis without speaking until Melanie came back carrying a silver tray full of butter cookies in all sorts of fantastic animal shapes. She placed the tray on a table in front of Lewis and was about to sit down herself when her aunt said, “The curtains!”

  With effort, Melanie pulled back the heavy drapes and let in what was left of the daylight.

  Melanie’s aunt sat with her hands folded on her lap and did not make a move toward the cookies. Lewis knew it was polite to wait for your host to eat, but the cookies were so tempting, with their swirls for tails and shining sugar eyes. He shifted back and forth on the couch, jostling Melanie.

  “Please, help yourself. I’m not much for sweets.”

  Lewis lurched forward and chose a cookie shaped like a squirrel. Melanie chose a bird whose wings were made of opaque candy. They tasted like butter and sugar melting in his mouth, and Lewis was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop eating them. “These are delicious, Mrs.—” he mumbled through the crumbs.

  “Call me Anastasia. Now,” Anastasia said, “it’s time to get to know you better. I understand, Lewis, that you excel at the game called hockey?”

  Lewis swallowed the sweet buttery cookie in his mouth. “Yes,” he said. “I’m on the bantam team this year. I started last year with them. Usually you need to be a year older, but the coach—”

  “Alice Dingwell’s father,” Melanie’s aunt interjected.

  “Yeah, last year. But now it’s her uncle. Donny. Anyway, they put me up onto bantams. I’m going to go to the Olympics someday. Hopefully twice. And also play in the Frozen Four and the NHL.”

  “The Olympics?” she asked. “Now there’s a worthy goal.”

  “Hockey was in the summer Olympics at first. Isn’t that weird? That was in 1920. Canada won, of course.”

  “Of course,” Anastasia agreed.

  “It is Canada’s game,” Lewis said. “Then in 1924 they switched it to the winter games. Canada won the first four, then they got silver in 1936. There weren’t any Olympics for a while because of wars and stuff. But in 1948 they had them again, and Canada won.” Lewis could recite the winners of every Olympic matchup since that first one in 1920. He cleared his throat. “The United States women’s team won the first time they could play. That was 1998. The American men won their first gold in 1960. And then twenty years later—” Lewis clapped his hands and made whooping crowd noises. “Do you believe in miracles?”

  “Yes. Why?” Anastasia replied.

  “No, it was from the game—what the announcer said?” He took a deep breath. “The US wasn’t supposed to win. The Russians—the USSR, technically—they were a much better team. Way better. But the US had heart, you know, and they worked hard. And that one game against the Russians, that one special time, they won.” Lewis didn’t know why he was babbling on about this, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself.

  “It was a miracle?” Anastasia asked. “A true miracle?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Lewis said. “But Al Michaels—he was calling the game on TV, and just as time was running out he was like, ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ Because that’s what it felt like. Coach Buzz—”

  “Alice’s father?”

  “Yeah. He always had us watch the movie before big games.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a true miracle to me,” Anastasia said.

  “What makes a true miracle?” Lewis asked.

  “It’s when the supernatural world comes into the human world and helps out,” Melanie told him.

  “Well, I guess it wasn’t a true miracle, then,” Lewis said. “But it was still amazing. That’s why it lives on from generation to generation.”

  “The best stories do,” Anastasia said. Then she closed her eyes and stretched her arms above her head. “It’s time for my evening walk.” She looked at Melanie. “You may get your book. Stay downstairs. Have him on his way quickly.”

  With that, she strode across the room, her sandals making a slapping noise with each step that echoed off the walls.

  4

  The door to the library was under the stairs that twisted upward. As Melanie pulled it open, Lewis said, “Like Harry Potter at the Dursleys’.” But as soon as he stepped into the room, he realized how wrong he was. It was no cramped cupboard. Instead, the bookshelves spiraled along the inside of the staircase, book after book after book going up, up, up. A window at the far side of the room let in faint light. There were two purple velvet chairs with high backs and fluffy footrests. It looked about a million times more comfortable than Lewis’s clubhouse!

  The books on the shelves were all big and thick with spines in dusty red or deep green. Some were leather and had gold lettering and filigree. Lewis could read and read and read for the rest of his life and still never get through them all.

  “This is the most amazing place I have ever been in my entire life.”

  “It’s a waste,” Melanie said. She crouched next to the door where the spiral of shelving began. “All these books and only two of us to read them.”

  Melanie pointed to a small triangular cabinet. With a sharp yank, she pulled open the door and began removing books. They were all old and dusty looking, with yellowing pages and worn covers. Anne of Green Gables, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, A Wrinkle in Time, Bridge to Terabithia, M.C. Higgins, the Great. “Most of these were my mom’s,” she said. She pulled out a beat-up copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the British version of the book, and a stack of Tintins in French. She kept pulling out books until the cupboard was empty.

  “Maybe it got mixed in with the other books,” he said.

  They both looked at the spiraled shelves of books.

  “I’ll start at that end,” he said.

  The books were beautiful. Leather-bound with their titles printed on the spines in gold letters, fluttery ribbon bookmarks that spilled over the top. He recognized some titles. Grimms’ Fairy Tales and Works of Hans Christian Andersen. Other books were unfamiliar. He pulled out one by Huang Zhing that had a golden tiger on the front. He slid it back in next to a book with a title in French, Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Lewis’s grandmother was French-Canadian, and now he wished he’d heeded her attempts to teach him some of the language. There was lots of nonfiction, too, mostly about animals. Many of the books he longed to pick up and page through, but they were on a mission. They had to find that book and fix the web or—or what? He wasn’t really sure.

  “So what exactly happens if we don’t fix the web? What do you mean by ‘the Freezing’?” he asked, using the word she had said out by the web.

  “The earth freezes and breaks apart,” Melanie replied from the opposite side of the room. “At least I think so. I’m not entirely sure. It was my parents who told me about it. It was their book. I’m sure I packed it up when I moved here.”

  “Wait, it might not even be in this house?” He spun so he was looking at her.

  She shrugged. “It can’t be anywhere else.”

  Her cheeks were pink, and her shiny eyes looked even shinier, like she might cry.

  “Okay,” he said. “Frozen, fractured earth. Sometimes it feels like that already.”

  “What do you mean?” Melanie asked.

  “Oh, you know,” he said. “Like when you turn on the television news and people are just arguing, arguing, arguing. Or at school, how cold people can be.” He shrugged.

  “Like the boys who climbed the wall here. Or like the man w
ho doesn’t want the park,” Melanie said.

  “What man?” Lewis asked.

  “I don’t know. Anastasia said that there were some people who don’t want the park. They think it isn’t good for the town. She disagrees. She thinks it’s going to get heated.”

  Lewis thought of the postcard that had come to his house. So that arrow hadn’t been a mistake? Someone wanted to build a store instead of a park. “That’s just stupid,” he said.

  “If it’s already beginning,” she said, “then it’s even more urgent that we find the book.”

  “It will tell us what to do?” he asked.

  “I hope so.”

  They each turned back to the shelves and kept searching. Another thirty minutes and they were side by side. They had checked all the books. The Story Web was nowhere to be found.

  Melanie sunk onto one of the purple chairs. Her eyes were definitely crying now.

  “It’s okay, Melanie. We’ll find it. We can ask Ms. Engle if she has a copy at school.”

  Melanie shook her head. “I don’t think—It’s just such an old book. My parents got theirs at a flea market. I remember it had the price written in pencil on the inside cover. Three dollars and forty-seven cents. Such a strange number, right?”

  Lewis wasn’t thinking about the price, though. He was thinking about the flea market. “I think I know someone who can help us,” he said.

  “Taco Tuesday!” Alice’s mom sang with her head inside the refrigerator. It was Wednesday. She wore her scrubs, even though it was her day off. Alice’s mom pretty much only wore scrubs. She emerged from the refrigerator with sour cream, a jar of salsa, a bag of shredded cheese, and a package of guacamole balanced in a precarious fashion. While Alice went to the pantry to get the taco shells, her mom pulled a bag of ground turkey out of the freezer.

  Taco Tuesday was Alice’s favorite dinner because it was the closest to cooking that they did. She took the shells out of the package and put them into the toaster oven so they’d get good and crispy.