Tomorrow's Magic

by Pamela F. Service

  Heather stopped dramatically. Despite himself, Welly was caught up. “Then what happened?”

  “Well, unfortunately, the next part of the book is missing.”

  Welly groaned. “So, if this is the treasure you expect us to find, what makes you sure it's still there? Maybe this Moorgrave character found it.”

  “Ah.” Heather smiled triumphantly. “It's only the middle part of the book that's missing. The last few pages are here, and they say … Let me get it here.”

  She carefully flipped over the final pages. “Here it is. ‘Veronica turned again for a last look at Ravenscroft, its sinister battlements darkly silhouetted against a storm-wracked sky. She knew that she would never return there. Better to let its treasure and its painful memories remain untouched until time had cleansed them both. She would never speak of either again. Sighing, she nestled her head against Allen's’—I don't know where he came in—‘shoulder, and the two continued down the road toward their new life.’”

  “Hmm,” Welly said as Heather looked at him expectantly. Then he added, “So, if this story is for real, you think we can go out, find the ruins of this Ravenscroft place, poke around in an old brick fireplace, and find necklaces and a jeweled dagger?”

  “Right!”

  Skepticism fought with excitement. With this early thaw, it would be fine to get out, out beyond the school grounds and the town itself. And suppose they did find the treasure? That wouldn't be bad—especially the jeweled dagger.

  “All right. I'm with you. When do we start?”

  “Tomorrow's Sunday. If we leave early, we'll have the whole day to search.”

  They discussed plans until finally Heather slipped out the window again and headed back along valleys where the slate roofs came together. She could probably have used the corridors just as well. The movements of the night monitors were usually predictable. But that would have lacked excitement.

  Once he fastened the latch, Welly blew out the guttering candle and hurriedly undressed. Crawling into bed, he curled up in a tight ball until his body began warming the icy coverings.

  His ever drowsier thoughts dwelt on tomorrow's adventure and on his companion. Heather McKenna was his only real friend at the school. They had drifted together perhaps because they were both outcasts. She had been sent to Llandoylan, she claimed, to be gotten rid of when her mother remarried after the death of Heather's father. The aristocratic new husband had no love for this homely girl of Scottish refugee extraction, and her mother now needed to produce male heirs and remove visible reminders of her former lowly marriage. During three years at Llandoylan, Heather had never once been called home for holidays.

  But at school she didn't find herself needed any more than at home. Her fellow schoolgirls were there primarily to become refined mates for fellow aristocrats. They felt little need for pure learning, while for Heather, learning and fantasy were what made a parched life bearable. But the more she turned to it, the more the others drove her out of their world and into her own.

  When Welly put aside his own reserve and joined Heather, her adventurousness chipped away at his caution. Everything he did with her ran the knife-edge of trouble. She thrust an excitement into his life that he never would have added on his own.

  He drifted to sleep dreaming of leading Caesar's armies with a great jeweled dagger held aloft.

  In the dead of night, a sound chiseled its way into Welly's sleep. He tried withdrawing deeper into dreams, but it followed and pulled him out. Eyes closed, he lay listening, and despite the wool blankets, he shivered. He had heard that sound before.

  The keening wail was faint and seemingly very distant. He'd never heard other boys mention it, but maybe no one else heard it. His was the last tenanted room in this wing. Another older section abutted this one, but its upper floors were abandoned. The cry came again, unearthly and chillingly sad. He refused to imagine what it might be. He just wished it would stop.

  Eventually it did. But still he lay awake, nerves strung as taut as bowstrings. He tried to relax, but now something else kept him awake. He wished they allowed chamber pots here instead of stressing fortitude in all things. He tried to go to sleep but was too uncomfortable. He sighed. He'd have to make a trek to the latrine.

  Reluctantly Welly slipped from the blankets, slid his legs into icy trousers, and hastily tucked in his nightshirt. Ramming his feet into boots, he pulled on a coat and stepped quietly out the door of his room. The passage was hazily lit with widely spaced candle lamps. He hurried along, listening to the flap of his boots on the flagstones and hoping he'd hear nothing else, particularly that crying. At least he was moving toward the more populated part of the building.

  He descended a narrow set of stairs and took several corridors to a small back door. Outside, he hurried through the darkness toward the darker shapes of the outhouses.

  On his return, he felt better and was enjoying the relative mildness of the night when suddenly he stepped into a pocket of cold air. Its chill set him shivering—with cold and something else. Then a noise came from ahead, from the front of the darkened school building.

  The crashing of wood and glass, a man yelling, and a sound that could not have been a man. Welly stood rooted with fear. A dark shape hurtled toward him. It was large and low and showed the glint of eyes as it swept past. The cold in the air lapped around him like a wave, then flowed away.

  The fear that held him snapped. He ran toward the building. Several voices tumbled from the headmaster's office. He wanted to learn what had happened but knew they'd only send him away. And at present, curiosity was not nearly as strong as a wish to be safe in his warm bed.

  But once back there, sleep did not come easily. Welly was sure that in the morning, there'd be some reasonable explanation for the disturbance in the school office. But if there was any explanation for what had passed him in the night, he suspected he wouldn't want to hear it.

  BEYOND THE WALLS

  Next morning, the school was alive with stories about the break-in. As the students ate Sunday breakfast of porridge and stewed turnips, rumors flew up and down the tables. It seemed that in the middle of the night, Headmaster Greenhow had been disturbed by sounds from the office adjacent to his rooms. He'd entered and found a dark someone or something (versions differed) tearing through a cabinet of school records. Greenhow had thrown a stool at the intruder, who then leaped back through the broken window.

  Several masters had answered the alarm and had immediately checked the records strewn over the floor, but none appeared to be missing. Nor was anything else gone from the room. So the motive for the break-in remained a mystery.

  Welly heard no mention of any animal with the burglar and tried to conclude that he'd seen only a man in a heavy coat running low to avoid detection. That explanation did seem more reasonable than anything else, particularly after breakfast when he stepped through the school's doorway into the daylight.

  It was a day to banish fears. He looked at the sky with a thrill of excitement. He'd scarcely believed it when he'd squinted through his windowpane before breakfast. But it was true. The sky was blue.

  Not the impossible bright blue of ancient paintings, of course. But nonetheless, the sky, which most days was gray or dirty white, today was definitely tinged with blue. His father said that as a boy, he had never seen that. And here he, Wellington Jones, had not only experienced two June thaws but also had seen several blue skies in one year. He hurried down the stone steps, glad that today was Sunday and adventure beckoned.

  Heather waited not far from the main gate of the school grounds, offering crumbs to a squirrel. The fluffy black creature stuffed its cheeks as fast as crumbs were dropped in front of it. But at the sight of Welly, the animal scurried onto the high stone wall and chattered down at him.

  “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare him,” Welly said.

  “Oh, that's all right. This one's Sigmund, and he's always skittish. His mate, Rapunzel, is friendlier, but she has some new babies now.”


  “It's wonderful how they come right up to you,” Welly said admiringly. “I've never known anyone whom animals liked so much.”

  “Well, animals are less difficult than people. Maybe they don't exactly need you, but they're willing to let you be friends as long as you're patient enough.”

  Scattering the last of her crumbs at the base of the wall, Heather patted a bulge in the pocket of her heavy coat. “I've got a surprise for us, too. I talked to Cook before breakfast. You know, she really is a good soul. She gives me scraps for my friends like Sigmund here and likes me to tell her stories. Says they jolly her up. Anyway, I told her we were bound for high adventure today and would miss Sunday lunch, so she gave me some bread and even a bit of cheese. It was left from Master Greenhow's supper, but he had a headache and didn't eat it.”

  “I don't imagine that ruckus last night helped his headache,” Welly said, then immediately regretted bringing up the subject when he saw a gleam kindle in Heather's eyes.

  “Now, that's a real mystery, isn't it?”

  “Yes, but just let the masters and the constable deal with it. The Holmes Detective Agency is permanently disbanded, remember?”

  He decided that, for the moment, he wouldn't even mention what he had seen in the night. He'd much rather spend the day looking for fictitious jewels than tracking down something whose memory still chilled him.

  Heather laughed. “All right, one mystery at a time. Anyway, I'm more in the mood for hunting treasure than burglars who don't take anything.”

  She started for the gate, then stopped as a group of older students came toward it. Nigel was among them, with Melanie Witlow, his latest favorite, draped over his arm.

  Seeing Welly, Heather, and the squirrel, Nigel called out, “Do be careful of the vermin, children. They might bite and turn you into muties—but it looks like they have already.” The others laughed at this witticism and passed on out the gate.

  “As for vermin,” Heather snapped, angrily twisting the tip of a braid, “that's Nigel. Sigmund here would make a better duke than that arrogant bully.”

  Welly shrugged, heading for the gate. “Well, never mind him. We've got a whole day away from his kind.”

  Once outside the school grounds, they walked along narrow graveled streets that wound among the varied buildings. A few were old pre-Devastation structures, while others were new, although built largely of scavenged materials.

  Since this was Sunday, the streets were full of people from both town and countryside. Most were heading for one of the places of worship. There had been several in Welly's hometown, but he was always impressed with the variety here. There were Holy Catholics and several old Protestant sects, as well as Armageddonites, Druids, Israelites, and New Zoroastrians.

  Most weeks he went to one or another, always avoiding the New Zoroastrians, the church Nigel's group was flirting with at the moment. But Sunday was a free day as long as students were within the school walls by curfew. Even going outside the town wall was not forbidden, though few would have wanted to.

  The two adventurers soon passed through the north gate, the one rebuilt ten years earlier after a Gwent raid. Then, leaving the road, they struck north toward the hills.

  Most of the ground was still frozen solid, but the thaw was softening the snow cover. Scattered around the white were darker patches where springy gray-green grass curled close to the ground like coarse wool. There, their snow-packed boots left inverted prints, compressed white tracks on the dark earth.

  The two walked in silence, enjoying the faint blue of the sky. The sun could actually be seen as a silvery disk obscured by only a thin dust layer. The air seemed mild, and soon they unfastened their coats, throwing back the hoods. A breeze ruffled their hair, but except for its rustling, a vast silence lay over the world.

  In low-lying spots, trickles of melted snow ran together. Heather in the lead, the two hopped through a network of streamlets, their boots making satisfying squelchings whenever they missed.

  Suddenly Heather halted and slapped a restraining hand on Welly's chest. “Stop! Do you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “Over there. It's a bird!”

  Welly looked in the direction of her gesture. Birds were rare sights any time of year. He squinted, then shook his head in frustration.

  “There.” Heather pointed. “Over by that rock, in the pool of meltwater.”

  Then he saw it, a large silver-gray shape with a pointed beak and long neck. At their next step, it spread its wings, rattling its scalelike feathers, and with a scolding cry, beat into the air. They watched as it circled slowly overhead, then drifted out of sight toward the northern mountains.

  Heather sighed contentedly. “Maybe that's what I really want to be, a naturalist.”

  As they continued walking, Welly asked, “Do you think there's enough today for a naturalist to study?”

  “Oh, I'm certain there is. Wouldn't it be marvelous to study a bird like that? Off on your own, away from people, tracking it for weeks over wild hills until you found its den or whatever. And besides, Master Foxworthy says that with all the mutations, many creatures have never even been named. Maybe that bird could be Birdus heatherus or something! That could give you a place in things. It wouldn't matter what people thought of you.”

  Welly wished she hadn't mentioned mutations. As they drew closer to the hills, he remembered stories about the muties said to roam them, both the animal and the human variety. Unsettling visions from the night before returned as well.

  He cleared his throat. “Heather, how much farther do we have to go? Into the hills, I mean.”

  “Oh, not too much, I should think. In a bit, we should be high enough for that view on the book. Then probably we ought to head west.”

  Welly was getting hungry. This at least let him turn his thoughts from muties to the food in Heather's pocket. Sunday was the one day the school served lunch, and he was glad they needn't miss it altogether. The thought of the lump of cheese was particularly enticing, and Welly forged doggedly after it up the slope.

  He was puffing and panting by the time they reached a level patch. But Heather seemed undaunted. “Ah, this exercise is great! Helps work off the winter fat.”

  Welly sighed. He knew that exercise wasn't likely to do anything about his fat. He was born fat. He was convinced that when he died, they would cut him open and find that even his bones were fat.

  “Think it's about lunchtime yet?” he ventured.

  “Yeah, just about. But let's check over there first. Looks like some ruins.”

  The level patch proved to be the bed of an ancient road. They followed it up the hill toward a cluster of ruined buildings made of the gray artificial stone that was popular, they'd been told, before the Devastation.

  “Well, these aren't the ruins we're looking for,” Heather announced. “Ravenscroft was real stone, and big. But it's a good place for lunch.”

  Welly agreed heartily.

  They sat down on a dusty slab. Fishing the cloth bag from her pocket, Heather reverently brought out a small chunk of cheese and generous slices of dark gray-brown bread.

  “I wish I had a friend who was a cook,” Welly said indistinctly through a mouthful of bread and cheese.

  Suddenly they heard a soft thump behind them. A rustling noise prickled the hairs along Welly's spine. Slowly he turned his head.

  Something hideous crouched in a broken section of wall. A mutie, the closest he'd ever seen one. Heather, too, was staring at it, her large eyes looking even larger in her thin face.

  Another mutie joined the first, and Welly thought for a minute he would be sick. They were both very short, moving with a hunched gait on bowed and twisted legs. Their skin was a mottled purple, and they had no noses, only a damp hole covered by a meager flap of skin. Though one was female, both were nearly bald, with only a fringe of white hair, which on the male spread down into a wispy beard.

  It was the male (Welly had trouble thinking of it as
a “man”) that moved forward, growling in its throat and brandishing a lump of concrete in one hand. Both children jumped up and stepped backward. The female mutie nimbly hopped through the opening in the wall, followed by a child. Heather found the youngster equally hideous, but its eyes were intelligent and wide with curiosity.

  “I guess this spot's theirs,” she whispered to Welly. “Shall we go?”

  “Let's!” he whispered, then raised a tremulous voice. “We're sorry to have disturbed you. We'll be going now.”

  Both adults growled and said something that sounded like words, but the children couldn't catch them. The mu-ties continued their slow advance.

  “The food,” Heather said. “Let's leave them the rest. Maybe that'll satisfy them.”

  Welly didn't argue as Heather placed the remaining bread and cheese on a section of wall. “Just wanted to thank you for the use of your place,” she said loudly while backing away.

  After the two children were several yards from the ruins, the muties scuttled over to the food. Welly and Heather turned quickly and hurried off. When Heather looked back, the young mutie was sitting on the wall stuffing bread into its mouth and watching her with liquid eyes. Tentatively she waved at it, and it waved back before somersaulting off and diving for more food.