Bronze Pen (9781439156650)

by Snyder, Zilpha Keatley

  “The Sons of Champlin?” Audrey asked.

  “Yeah, you know. The rock band. Mindy thinks they’re the greatest. I was just thinking maybe you’d like to go too.”

  Audrey thought maybe she would, depending on…“When are you going?” she asked.

  “Well, Tammy and Julie and their families are coming to my house about four o’clock. My folks are having a barbecue bash on our patio. And after the barbecue Mindy’s mom is taking all of us kids to the J.C. Tell your mom that Mindy’s mom is going to be there the whole time, so she doesn’t have to worry about you running off to be a rock band groupie.” She giggled and then gave Audrey a long look with her head cocked to one side. “You do want to go, don’t you?”

  Audrey nodded. “Sure, I want to,” she said. “I’ll ask.” She did want to go, and that moment she was thinking she’d ask her father as soon as she got home. Then she could walk over to the Feltons’ for the barbecue and go to the rock concert.

  She thought about it all the way home—and by the time she got there, she’d changed her mind. She wasn’t going to ask her father because she was pretty sure he’d say yes. He would say yes, and she would go to hear the Sons of Champlin. And while he was alone all afternoon, her father might…

  So that day, like every other, she was home by one o’clock to play chess with her father, and do some homework while he read the papers. Then there was feeding Sputnik and cleaning his cage and a brief backyard trip with Beowulf before her mother came home. And, like always, it was almost eight by the time dinner was over and the kitchen cleaned up and Audrey was free to do—whatever she wanted. Whatever she wanted, that is, as long as it wasn’t something that started before eight o’clock. So that pretty much narrowed down her free-time activities to going to her room to read. Or most likely to write, but not in her journal. Not tonight.

  Audrey had found that journal writing could be useful. Not the deadly everyday kind where you wound up writing what you had for breakfast, but the kind where you only wrote about special times or feelings, good ones as well as bad. That kind of writing sometimes made good feelings last longer and bad ones seem less important. But for Audrey, the kind of writing that simply shoved everything else out of your mind—everything from a bad grade in math to not getting to go to the Sons of Champlin concert—was writing novels.

  Digging down under a lot of old essays and math papers in the bottom drawer of her desk, she pulled out the secret notebook where she kept all of the things she was still working on. One of the first manuscripts in the notebook was part of a fantasy she had started more than a year ago. A fantasy in which a strange, lily-shaped flower could turn anyone who touched it into an animal. Not any animal, but one who had some kind of relationship to the personality of the person who touched the flower. In some earlier chapters, she’d written about one character being changed into an elegant white swan. And most recently she’d gotten to where another character in the story, a really mean seventh-grade boy, had been transformed into a wild boar with a long, ugly snout and a curly tail.

  For a while it had been a fun story to work on, but when she couldn’t get it to head toward some more or less sensible ending, she had started a different one. Another mystery, but this time a more realistic one. But that had sputtered out too a few weeks ago, and she had gone on to the one about the girl detective who could solve mysteries by talking to animals.

  That story had been going pretty well lately, and it had been during algebra that same morning that she’d just happened to come up with a new idea about how to get Heather out of the dangerous mess she had just gotten herself into.

  Reaching into her pencil tray in her top drawer Audrey pulled out…the bronze pen.

  CHAPTER 9

  FOR A MOMENT AUDREY TURNED THE PEN this way and that, admiring its odd shape and color. She liked the look and feel of it, but what she’d really been looking for was a pencil. She never wrote her novels in ink because she’d found that being really original and creative meant doing a lot of erasing. She looked through the top drawer again, but all her pencils seemed to have disappeared. She sighed impatiently as she pawed through another drawer, and when Beowulf appeared in the doorway, she blamed it on him, even though he’d pretty much quit chewing on pencils when he’d lost his puppy teeth.

  “Hey, monster dog,” she said. “Did you take my pencils?” But Beowulf only nudged her with his nose, inviting her to wrestle. When she went back to looking through her desk drawers, he flopped down on the floor and went to sleep.

  But Audrey was in a hurry. Right then—just when she was going through her desk—she’d begun to come up with an even better way to solve the treacherous cat episode. The one in which the cat had talked Heather, the girl detective, into going down the alley where the murderer was lying in wait.

  In this new version a large dog, perhaps an Irish wolfhound named…not Beowulf, but something just as brave and impressive sounding, like Hero, perhaps. Yes, Hero was going to come along and chase the cat up on top of a shed. And then the dog and the cat would start talking to each other, and with Heather’s amazing ability to understand what animals were saying, she would learn the truth about the cat’s evil plan and would be able to escape. To just barely escape, right when the murderer was emerging from his hiding place and was reaching out to grab her. It should be a very suspenseful episode.

  It would be fun to write, too. She was good at dialogue, and a dialogue between a dog and a cat should be interesting. So she wouldn’t waste any more time searching for pencils—the pen would have to do. She would simply scratch out any errors and plan on writing the whole thing over later to neaten it up.

  Audrey began by rewriting the chapter title:

  Heather’s Alley Adventure

  Once again, for the first few lines using the pen was a little distracting. The smooth flow of wide, dark lines was surprising and a bit intimidating. But as she went on writing, the look of the penned lines began to seem more natural.

  Just as Heather started down the dark, sinister alley, she was suddenly aware of something cold and wet touching her elbow. It was a dog’s nose. Not a dog she had ever seen before, but a large shaggy animal with friendly brown eyes.

  “Hello, dog,” Heather said. “Where did you come from, and who are you?”

  “My name is Hero,” the dog said, “and I’m here because I know that you can talk to animals. I want to talk to you. But please excuse me for a moment. There is something I must do first. Do you see that cat sitting on top of that shed?”

  “Yes,” Heather said. “That’s the nice, friendly cat who said it would help me find my way home. He said I should follow him.”

  “Aha,” the dog named Hero said. “That cat is lying to you. He belongs to a very evil man. That treacherous cat is leading you into deadly danger.”

  It turned out to be one of the best writing sessions that Audrey had had for a long time. The ideas just kept coming, and there were some scary parts and a few that were a little bit funny. It was really true that writing fiction was one of the best ways to cheer yourself up. Or, if not to actually make you cheerful, to at least make you forget the things that were worrying you.

  The writing went on until she got to the place where Heather was about to be grabbed by the murderer, but because the dog called out a warning, she was able to escape by using a kick that she had learned from a chimpanzee who had studied karate.

  It was an exciting climax, and Audrey was just finishing the chapter by describing how Heather called for the police to come pick up the unconscious murderer when she happened to glance at her watch and saw that it was after ten o’clock. Her mother would probably be coming in soon to take Beowulf out and say good night before locking up the house. And so, because she needed to be extra organized and responsible in order to reassure her parents about her mental condition, Audrey quickly got ready to be helpful.

  Hurriedly stuffing her secret notebook back into its hiding place, she headed for the door, stopping o
nly long enough to poke Beowulf with her toe to wake him up. He grunted and sighed, and then just as Audrey was turning the doorknob, he said, “What did you do that for?”

  At least a rather gruff voice saying exactly that had come from someplace very nearby, and there was no one else in the room. Or maybe from right outside the door, although it didn’t seem to come from that direction. Audrey carefully and quietly opened the door and peeked out into the hall. No one. Nothing in sight. Turning back, she stared at Beowulf, who was looking at her from under his shaggy eyebrows while he slowly rearranged himself so that his big paws were under him.

  “Urff,” he said as he struggled sleepily to his feet. A comment that had a reassuringly doggy sound. But then as Audrey turned back to reopen the door, he said clearly, “You didn’t have to kick me.”

  Once again Audrey froze. She turned slowly back to where Beowulf was on his feet and moving toward her. Moving toward her and saying, “Okay, okay. It didn’t hurt that much. Just don’t do it again. Nice people don’t kick their dogs.”

  Audrey shook her head and swallowed hard and stammered, “I—I didn’t mean to kick you. I just gave you a poke with my toe.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s go. It’s late. Let’s get me outside before I make a big mistake.”

  They went down the hall side by side, a sleepy, floppy Beowulf and a stunned and staring Audrey. After crossing the kitchen, Beowulf stopped long enough to take a few laps from his water dish before he quietly, except for his padding feet and clicking toenails, headed for the back door. At that moment he was looking and acting normally doglike again, but Audrey watched him intently as she opened the door and stepped back out of the way. As he passed her he gave her wrist a sloppy kiss and, without saying another word, disappeared into the dark yard.

  Audrey was still standing just inside the door—holding it slightly open, waiting for Beowulf to return, and desperately trying to make some sense out of what had just happened—when, from only a few feet away, someone said, “Will you shut that door! I’m freezing.” It had to be Sputnik, but he was talking in a different way than usual. Instead of being high-pitched and squawky, his voice now sounded almost human.

  Audrey was beginning to get the picture—or maybe a couple of equally confusing pictures. Either she really was flipping out or something exceptionally magical was happening. Something magical that was slowly becoming a little less shocking than it had seemed at first.

  She seemed to be talking to animals. Doing something, really doing something, that she had imagined and even played at doing when she was a little kid. It was an idea that she’d fooled around with for a long time and had been using in the novel about the girl detective. And now it was, or at least it seemed to be, actually happening.

  Leaving the door almost shut, she went closer to Sputnik’s cage. The little gray and white parrot with bright orange circles on his cheeks was scrunched up against the far side of the perch, with his feathers fluffed up. Audrey spread her fingers out on the wires of the cage and leaned close.

  “What a fussbudget,” she said. “It’s not that cold.”

  “You’re wrong. You don’t know anything,” Sputnik said. “I’m a tropical bird. If you were tropical, you’d be freezing too.”

  Just then Beowulf shoved the door open, trotted in, and without making any other comments, headed for his crib mattress in the living room. Audrey quickly closed and locked the door and came back to Sputnik’s cage. “There,” she said. “Does that feel better?”

  Sputnik made a snorting noise, flapped his wings, and sidled along his perch to where he could dip his beak into his food dish and flip seeds out onto the floor of his cage. There wasn’t anything new or surprising about that. It had been a favorite activity of his ever since Audrey’s father had saved him from the cruel reporter. But this time he stopped after five or six flips and, looking right at Audrey, said, “Look at that. All the good stuff is gone. All finished.” Squinching his head down on his chest, he looked at Audrey out of the top of one eye and said, “And there wasn’t that much of it to begin with.”

  Audrey inspected the contents of the feed dish. It did look as if the sunflower seeds, which he’d always seemed to prefer, had been eaten up.

  “All right, I’ll get you some more sunflower seeds,” she said, “if you promise not to peck me when I put them in your dish. Okay?”

  Sputnik flapped his wings and screeched something in his usual cockatiel voice that sounded vaguely like “okay.” Or maybe not. But whatever it was, he said it over and over again—“oke, oke, oke”—while Audrey got down the bag of sunflower seeds, took out a cupful, and proceeded to carefully open the door of the cage. While she filled the dish Sputnik went on screeching and bobbing his head up and down, but for once he didn’t try to bite or to escape before she could close the door. So maybe he had been saying “okay” or something similar in cockatiel language.

  When the door was safely shut and Sputnik was busy eating, Audrey went on standing in front of the cage, watching and wondering. She wondered about what she had heard or had seemed to hear. And after a while it occurred to her to wonder about something she hadn’t heard. Leaning closer to the cage, she whispered, “Hey, Sputnik. How come no cussing?”

  The cockatiel went on eating sunflower seeds. So she asked again. “What happened to all the cussing?”

  Sputnik rolled a black eye in the direction of the feed dish, ate another sunflower seed, looked again, and then said, “I don’t know. Maybe I ate it.”

  Audrey couldn’t help laughing. “Cussing isn’t something you eat. Cussing is all those bad words you always say.” She whispered a couple of his favorites through the bars of his cage. “You know. Words like that.”

  Sputnik squawked and threw up his head in a threatening manner. “Those are yelling words. Anderson yelled them, so I yelled them back. That’s just angry squawk-talk. Angry squawk-talk.”

  After Audrey thought about that for a minute, she began to feel really indignant. She’d never liked Andy Anderson much because when she used to visit her dad’s office at the newspaper, he would always start to tell a joke and then think up a reason to send her out of the room before he got to the funny part. And now she was discovering that he himself had cussed at Sputnik, and when Sputnik cussed back, he named him Bleep and threatened to throw him out where the chicken hawks would get him.

  “Well,” she told Sputnik, “that’s despicable. Anderson swore at you and then got mad at you for saying the same words. That’s really despicable.”

  Sputnik did his aggressive strut, the way he always did when he was daring Beowulf to bite him. “Despicable,” he said. “Despicable Anderson.” But now he was using his cockatiel voice again, high-pitched and raspy.

  He was still saying “despicable” several minutes later when Audrey left the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 10

  ON THE WAY BACK TO HER ROOM AUDREY was in a trancelike daze when she met her mother in the hall. “Oh, Audrey.” Hannah looked tired and pale. “Did you take the dog out?”

  Audrey must have said yes or at least nodded because her mother said, “Good for you. I almost forgot about him.” She patted Audrey on the shoulder and turned away. Watching her go, it occurred to Audrey to think, She didn’t notice anything. So I must not look any different. The only difference is that now I can talk to animals. She kept whispering it as she arrived at her room, got into her pajamas, and climbed into bed. Over and over again. “I can talk to animals. I can talk to animals.” But after a while it sometimes came out, “I guess I can talk to animals. I guess I can, or else…” Or else what? Or else she really was going crazy.

  Lying flat on her back with the covers pulled up to her chin, she kept on saying one version and then the other. The “I can talk to animals” thing and then the “or else” version. But finally the words began to get slower and more muddled, and then it was morning and Audrey was waking up and asking herself if her talking-to-animals experience had really happened or if it had
all been a particularly lifelike dream.

  She couldn’t help wishing that it would turn out to be a dream. Not that she wouldn’t love to be able to talk to animals, but under the present circumstances all she needed was to go out and sit down to breakfast and, right there in front of her parents, start chatting up the family pets. That was all it would take for both of them, both her father and her mother, to be absolutely certain she was headed for the loony bin.

  So a few minutes later it was with a great deal of nervous tension that Audrey entered the kitchen and sat down at her place at the breakfast table. Her parents were already there, and after they said hello, they went right on with their conversation about the new Doonesbury comic strip that had just started running in the Greendale Times. It was a topic that would have interested Audrey ordinarily, but this wasn’t an ordinary morning.

  As Audrey helped herself to the milk and cornflakes, she looked around quickly, checking on Sputnik and Beowulf. Beowulf was right there under the table, and Sputnik was admiring himself in his mirror. Neither of them was saying anything or paying any attention to what her parents were saying. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that it was a good thing they weren’t listening. Or at least that Beowulf wasn’t, because the next topic of conversation turned out to be a newspaper article about some scientists who had been trying to repair damaged human hearts by using parts cut out of animals.

  Audrey was shocked. As the conversation went on, it became clear that some of the hearts had been taken from pigs, but some others were from…dogs. Rearranging her chair so she could see Beowulf ’s face, she watched him closely for any sign of shock or alarm. Nothing. He was, Audrey decided, either too sound asleep to hear what her parents were saying or simply unable to understand.