Night World 1

by L. J. Smith

  Jade put down the suitcase and cat carrier and pulled at the gate. To her surprise, it moved easily.

  “See, it may not look good, but it still works—” She didn’t get to finish the sentence properly. The gate fell on her.

  “Well, it may not work, but it’s still ours,” she said as Rowan and Kestrel pulled it off her.

  “No, it’s Aunt Opal’s,” Kestrel said.

  Rowan just smoothed her hair back and said, “Come on.”

  There was a board missing from the porch steps, and several boards gone from the porch itself. Jade limped around them with dignity. The gate had given her a good whack in the shin, and since it was wood, it still hurt. In fact, everything seemed to be made of wood here, which gave Jade a pleasantly alarmed feeling. Back home, wood was revered—and kept out of the way.

  You have to be awfully careful to live in this kind of world, Jade thought. Or you’re going to get hurt.

  Rowan and Kestrel were knocking on the door, Rowan politely, with her knuckles, Kestrel loudly, with the side of her hand. There wasn’t any answer.

  “She doesn’t seem to be here,” Rowan said.

  “She’s decided she doesn’t want us,” Kestrel said, golden eyes gleaming.

  “Maybe she went to the wrong bus station,” Jade said.

  “Oh—that’s it. I bet that’s it,” Rowan said. “Poor old thing, she’s waiting for us somewhere, and she’s going to be thinking that we didn’t show up.”

  “Sometimes you’re not completely stupid,” Kestrel informed Jade. High praise from Kestrel.

  “Well, let’s go in,” Jade said, to conceal how pleased she was. “She’ll come back here sometime.”

  “Human houses have locks,” Rowan began, but this house wasn’t locked. The doorknob turned in Jade’s hand. The three of them stepped inside.

  It was dark, even darker than the moonless night outside, but Jade’s eyes adjusted in a few seconds.

  “Hey, it’s not bad,” she said. They were in a shabby but handsome living room filled with huge, ponderous furniture. Wood furniture, of course—dark and highly polished. The tables were topped with marble.

  Rowan found a light switch, and suddenly the room was too bright. Blinking, Jade saw that the walls were pale apple green, with fancy woodwork and moldings in a darker shade of the same green. It made Jade feel oddly peaceful. And anchored, somehow, as if she belonged here. Maybe it was all the heavy furniture.

  She looked at Rowan, who was looking around, tall graceful body slowly relaxing.

  Rowan smiled and met her eyes. She nodded, once. “Yes.”

  Jade basked for a moment in the glory of having been right twice in five minutes—and then she remembered her suitcase.

  “Let’s see what the rest of the place is like,” she said hastily. “I’ll take the upstairs; you guys look around here.”

  “You just want the best bedroom,” Kestrel said.

  Jade ignored her, hurrying up a wide, carpeted flight of stairs. There were lots of bedrooms, and each one had lots of room. She didn’t want the best, though, just the farthest away.

  At the very end of the hall was a room painted sea-blue. Jade slammed the door behind her and put her suitcase on the bed. Holding her breath, she opened the suitcase.

  Oh. Oh, no. Oh, no…

  Three minutes later she heard the click of the door behind her, but didn’t care enough to turn.

  “What are you doing?” Kestrel’s voice said.

  Jade looked up from her frantic efforts to resuscitate the two kittens she held. “They’re dead!” she wailed.

  “Well, what did you expect? They need to breathe, idiot. How did you expect them to make it through two days of traveling?”

  Jade sniffled.

  “Rowan told you that you could take only one.”

  Jade sniffled harder and glared. “I know. That’s why I put these two in the suitcase.” She hiccuped. “At least Tiggy’s all right.” She dropped to her knees and peered in the cat carrier to make sure he was all right. His ears were laid back, his golden eyes gleaming out of a mass of black fur. He hissed, and Jade sat up. He was fine.

  “For five dollars I’ll take care of the dead ones,” Kestrel said.

  “No!” Jade jumped up and moved protectively in front of them, fingers clawed.

  “Not like that,” Kestrel said, offended. “I don’t eat carrion. Look, if you don’t get rid of them somehow, Rowan’s going to find out. For God’s sake, girl, you’re a vampire,” she added as Jade cradled the limp bodies to her chest. “Act like one.”

  “I want to bury them,” Jade said. “They should have a funeral.”

  Kestrel rolled her eyes and left. Jade wrapped the small corpses in her jacket and tiptoed out after her.

  A shovel, she thought. Now, where would that be?

  Keeping her ears open for Rowan, she sidled around the first floor. All the rooms looked like the living room: imposing and in a state of genteel decay. The kitchen was huge. It had an open fireplace and a shed off the back door for washing laundry. It also had a door to the cellar.

  Jade made her way down the steps cautiously. She couldn’t turn on a light because she needed both hands for the kittens. And, because of the kittens, she couldn’t see her feet. She had to feel with her toe for the next step.

  At the bottom of the stairs her toe found something yielding, slightly resilient. It was blocking her path.

  Slowly Jade craned her neck over the bundle of jacket and looked down.

  It was dim here. She herself was blocking the light that filtered down from the kitchen. But she could make out what looked like a pile of old clothes. A lumpy pile.

  Jade was getting a very, very bad feeling.

  She nudged the pile of clothes with one toe. It moved slightly. Jade took a deep breath and nudged it hard.

  It was all one piece. It rolled over. Jade looked down, breathed quickly for a moment, and screamed.

  A good, shrill, attention-getting scream. She added a non-verbal thought, the telepathic equivalent of a siren.

  Rowan! Kestrel! You guys get down here!

  Twenty seconds later the cellar light went on and Rowan and Kestrel came clattering down the stairs.

  “I have told you and told you,” Rowan was saying through her teeth. “We don’t use our—” She stopped, staring.

  “I think it’s Aunt Opal,” Jade said.

  CHAPTER 3

  “She’s not looking so good,” Kestrel said, peering over Rowan’s shoulder.

  Rowan said, “Oh, dear,” and sat down.

  Great-aunt Opal was a mummy. Her skin was like leather: yellow-brown, hard, and smooth. Almost shiny. And the skin was all there was to her, just a leathery frame stretched over bones. She didn’t have any hair. Her eye sockets were dark holes with dry tissue inside. Her nose was collapsed.

  “Poor auntie,” Rowan said. Her own brown eyes were wet.

  “We’re going to look like that when we die,” Kestrel said musingly.

  Jade stamped her foot. “No, look, you guys! You’re both missing it completely. Look at that!” She swung a wild toe at the mummy’s midsection. There, protruding from the blue-flowered housedress and the leathery skin, was a gigantic splinter of wood. It was almost as long as an arrow, thick at the base and tapered where it disappeared into Aunt Opal’s chest. Flakes of white paint still clung to one side.

  Several other pickets were lying on the cellar floor.

  “Poor old thing,” Rowan said. “She must have been carrying them when she fell.”

  Jade looked at Kestrel. Kestrel looked back with exasperated golden eyes. There were few things they agreed on, but Rowan was one of them.

  “Rowan,” Kestrel said distinctly, “she was staked.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes,” Jade said. “Somebody killed her. And somebody who knew she was a vampire.”

  Rowan was shaking her head. “But who would know that?”

  “Well…” Jade thought. “
Another vampire.”

  “Or a vampire hunter,” Kestrel said.

  Rowan looked up, shocked. “Those aren’t real. They’re just stories to frighten kids—aren’t they?”

  Kestrel shrugged, but her golden eyes were dark.

  Jade shifted uneasily. The freedom she’d felt on the road, the peace in the living room—and now this. Suddenly she felt empty and isolated.

  Rowan sat down on the stairs, looking too tired and preoccupied to push back the lock of hair plastered to her forehead. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you here,” she said softly. “Maybe it’s worse here.” She didn’t say it, but Jade could sense her next thought. Maybe we should go back.

  “Nothing could be worse,” Jade said fiercely. “And I’d die before I’d go back.” She meant it. Back to waiting on every man in sight? Back to arranged marriages and endless restrictions? Back to all those disapproving faces, so quick to condemn anything different, anything that wasn’t done the way it had been done four hundred years ago?

  “We can’t go back,” she said.

  “No, we can’t,” Kestrel said dryly. “Literally. Unless we want to end up like Great-aunt Opal. Or”—she paused significantly—“like Great-uncle Hodge.”

  Rowan looked up. “Don’t even say that!”

  Jade’s stomach felt like a clenched fist. “They wouldn’t,” she said, shoving back at the memory that was trying to emerge. “Not to their own grandkids. Not to us.”

  “The point,” Kestrel said, “is that we can’t go back, so we have to go forward. We’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do here without Aunt Opal to help us—especially if there’s a vampire hunter around. But first, what are we going to do with that?” She nodded toward the body.

  Rowan just shook her head helplessly. She looked around the cellar as if she might find an answer in a corner. Her gaze fell on Jade. It stopped there, and Jade could see the sisterly radar system turn on.

  “Jade. What’s that in your jacket?”

  Jade was too wrung-out to lie. She opened the jacket and showed Rowan the kittens. “I didn’t know my suitcase would kill them.”

  Rowan looked too wrung-out to be angry. She glanced heavenward, sighing. Then, looking back at Jade sharply: “But why were you bringing them down here?”

  “I wasn’t. I was just looking for a shovel. I was going to bury them in the backyard.”

  There was a pause. Jade looked at her sisters and they looked at each other. Then all three of them looked at the kittens.

  Then they looked at Great-aunt Opal.

  Mary-Lynnette was crying.

  It was a beautiful night, a perfect night. An inversion layer was keeping the air overhead still and warm, and the seeing was excellent. There was very little light pollution and no direct light. The Victorian farmhouse just below Mary-Lynnette’s hill was mostly dark. Mrs. Burdock was always very considerate about that.

  Above, the Milky Way cut diagonally across the sky like a river. To the south, where Mary-Lynnette had just directed her telescope, was the constellation Sagittarius, which always looked more like a teapot than like an archer to her. And just above the spout of the teapot was a faintly pink patch of what looked like steam.

  It wasn’t steam. It was clouds of stars. A star factory called the Lagoon Nebula. The dust and gas of dead stars was being recycled into hot young stars, just being born.

  It was four thousand and five hundred light-years away. And she was looking at it, right this minute. A seventeen-year-old kid with a second-hand Newtonian reflector telescope was watching the light of stars being born.

  Sometimes she was filled with so much awe and—and—and—and longing—that she thought she might break to pieces.

  Since there was nobody else around, she could let the tears roll down her cheeks without pretending it was an allergy. After a while she had to sit back and wipe her nose and eyes on the shoulder of her T-shirt.

  Oh, come on, give it a rest now, she told herself. You’re crazy, you know.

  She wished she hadn’t thought of Jeremy earlier. Because now, for some reason, she kept picturing him the way he’d looked that night when he came to watch the eclipse with her. His level brown eyes had held a spark of excitement, as if he really cared about what he was seeing. As if, for that moment, anyway, he understood.

  I have been one acquainted with the night, a maudlin little voice inside her chanted romantically, trying to get her to cry again.

  Yeah, right, Mary-Lynnette told the voice cynically. She reached for the bag of Cheetos she kept under her lawn chair. It was impossible to feel romantic and overwhelmed by grandeur while eating Cheetos.

  Saturn next, she thought, and wiped sticky orange crumbs off her fingers. It was a good night for Saturn because its rings were just passing through their edgewise position.

  She had to hurry because the moon was rising at 11:16. But before she turned her telescope toward Saturn, she took one last look at the Lagoon. Actually just to the east of the Lagoon, trying to make out the open cluster of fainter stars she knew was there.

  She couldn’t see it. Her eyes just weren’t good enough. If she had a bigger telescope—if she lived in Chile where the air was dry—if she could get above the earth’s atmosphere…then she might have a chance. But for now…she was limited by the human eye. Human pupils just didn’t open farther than 9 millimeters.

  Nothing to be done about that.

  She was just centering Saturn in the field of view when a light went on behind the farmhouse below. Not a little porch light. A barnyard vapor lamp. It illuminated the back property of the house like a searchlight.

  Mary-Lynnette sat back, annoyed. It didn’t really matter—she could see Saturn anyway, see the rings that tonight were just a delicate silver line cutting across the center of the planet. But it was strange. Mrs. Burdock never turned the back light on at night.

  The girls, Mary-Lynnette thought. The nieces. They must have gotten there and she must be giving them a tour. Absently she reached for her binoculars. She was curious.

  They were good binoculars, Celestron Ultimas, sleek and lightweight. She used them for looking at everything from deep sky objects to the craters on the moon. Right now, they magnified the back of Mrs. Burdock’s house ten times.

  She didn’t see Mrs. Burdock, though. She could see the garden. She could see the shed and the fenced-in area where Mrs. Burdock kept her goats. And she could see three girls, all well illuminated by the vapor lamp. One had brown hair, one had golden hair, and one had hair the color of Jupiter’s rings. That silvery. Like starlight. They were carrying something wrapped in plastic between them. Black plastic. Hefty garbage bags, if Mary-Lynnette wasn’t mistaken.

  Now, what on earth were they doing with that?

  Burying it.

  The short one with the silvery hair had a shovel. She was a good little digger, too. In a few minutes she had rooted up most of Mrs. Burdock’s irises. Then the medium-sized one with the golden hair took a turn, and last of all the tall one with the brown hair.

  Then they picked up the garbage-bagged object—even though it was probably over five feet long, it seemed very light—and put it in the hole they’d just made.

  They began to shovel dirt back into the hole.

  No, Mary-Lynnette told herself. No, don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be insane. There’s some mundane, perfectly commonplace explanation for this.

  The problem was, she couldn’t think of any.

  No, no, no. This is not Rear Window, we are not in the Twilight Zone. They’re just burying—something. Some sort of…ordinary…

  What else besides a dead body was five-feet-and-some-odd-inches long, rigid, and needed to be wrapped in garbage bags before burial?

  And, Mary-Lynnette thought, feeling a rush of adrenaline that made her heart beat hard. And. And…

  Where was Mrs. Burdock?

  The adrenaline was tingling painfully in her palms and feet. It made her feel out of control, which she hated. Her hands w
ere shaking so badly she had to lower the binoculars.

  Mrs. B.’s okay. She’s all right. Things like this don’t happen in real life.

  What would Nancy Drew do?

  Suddenly, in the middle of her panic, Mary-Lynnette felt a tiny giggle try to escape like a burp. Nancy Drew, of course, would hike right down there and investigate. She’d eavesdrop on the girls from behind a bush and then dig up the garden once they went back inside the house.

  But things like that didn’t happen. Mary-Lynnette couldn’t even imagine trying to dig up a neighbor’s garden in the dead of night. She would get caught and it would be a humiliating farce. Mrs. Burdock would walk out of the house alive and alarmed, and Mary-Lynnette would die of embarrassment trying to explain.

  In a book that might be amusing. In real life—she didn’t even want to think about it.

  One good thing, it made her realize how absurd her paranoia was. Deep down, she obviously knew Mrs. B. was just fine. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be sitting here; she’d be calling the police, like any sensible person.

  Somehow, though, she suddenly felt tired. Not up to more starwatching. She checked her watch by the ruby glow of a red-filtered flashlight. Almost eleven—well, it was all over in sixteen minutes anyway. When the moon rose it would bleach out the sky.

  But before she broke down her telescope for the trip back, she picked up the binoculars again. Just one last look.

  The garden was empty. A rectangle of fresh dark soil showed where it had been violated. Even as Mary-Lynnette watched, the vapor lamp went out.

  It wouldn’t do any harm to go over there tomorrow, Mary-Lynnette thought. Actually, I was going to, anyway. I should welcome those girls to the neighborhood. I should return those pruning shears Dad borrowed and the knife Mrs. B. gave me to get my gas cap off. And of course I’ll see Mrs. B. there, and then I’ll know everything’s okay.