The Witch's Glass

by Holly Grant

  “Mudpuddle Cavern!” Anastasia breathed. “We’ll be going right by the Cavepearl Theater!”

  “We have four more checkpoints to visit,” Gus protested. “We don’t have time to visit Calixto’s study. Not now.”

  “Besides…,” Ollie balked, “what if that polar bear is still stomping around?”

  “She isn’t,” Quentin assured them. “Frosty’s hibernating.”

  “Frosty?” Anastasia echoed.

  “The bear,” Quentin said. “That’s what the theater director named her. Signor Mezzaluna passed by a few minutes ago on his way to the dentist”—Quentin indicated a nearby cavern garnished with a molar-shaped sign—“and said Frosty finally settled down to hibernate.”

  “How long do polar bears hibernate?” Gus asked.

  “It could be months!” Quentin groaned. “The theater folk can’t move Frosty until she’s had her cubs, so they’re postponing all the repair construction till then.”

  “Cubs?” Ollie cried. “How do they even know Frosty’s a girl?”

  “Only pregnant polar bears hibernate.” Quentin heaved a sigh. “Signor Mezzaluna told me the Bureau of Better Safe Than Sorry plans to board up the theater tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Anastasia exclaimed. “To trap Frosty inside?”

  Quentin shook his head. “To keep people out. They’re shutting the whole place down as a magical hazard site for the foreseeable future. And if they can’t figure out how to drain that arctic lake, they might close the theater for good!”

  “For bad, you mean!” Anastasia turned worried eyes onto Gus and Ollie. “This is our last chance to visit Calixto’s study for who knows how long! When the Better Safe Than Sorry Bureau boards up the theater doors, we’ll lose our secret way into Sickle Alley!”

  “But the exam…,” Gus protested.

  “We’ll be quick,” Anastasia promised. “We’ll just pop in and grab a few more witch journals, and then we’ll be on our way. Ollie knows all kinds of shortcuts through the canals anyway—don’t you, Ollie?”

  Ollie nodded uneasily. “But what if Frosty wakes up?”

  “She saved my life, remember? She’s a nice bear,” Anastasia urged, even as doubt pickled her stomach. Perhaps Frosty was a nice bear, but she picnicked on seals and walruses. If the mood struck, Frosty probably wouldn’t scruple at munching two fifth graders and polishing off a third for dessert.

  However, Anastasia was prepared to take the Goldilocks path—venture into a bear’s bunker, that is—in the name of her great Fred-finding mission. “I have to go back to Calixto’s study! We still don’t know how to open the glass cabinet. We still have no idea where Stinking Crumpet is, and we’re all out of clues. I can go by myself. You can drop me off on your way to Mudpuddle Cavern and fetch me on the way back.”

  Gus set his jaw. “No. We’ll go with you.”

  “You will?” Anastasia cried.

  “We will ?” Ollie squeaked.

  “All for one, and one for all,” Gus reminded them softly. “Credo of the Beastly Dreadfuls.”

  “Righty-o. Our credo.” Ollie’s brow puckered. “Okay, I’ll come with you. But if Frosty mauls me, I’m going to be very upset.”

  Quentin looked worried. “I can’t join you now. I have to stay here and hand out ribbons and tell the other quads their checkpoints.”

  “That’s okay,” Anastasia said. “We just need the key to the musicians’ entrance.”

  The elder Drybread bit his lip but dredged the key from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. “Don’t get caught,” he warned. “And don’t get eaten by a bear.”

  IN THE GRIM event that you must one day sneak past a six-hundred-pound polar bear, here is a neat little piece of advice to help you along: let sleeping bears lie. As the Dreadfuls crept through the gloomy corridor leading from the theater’s side entry to the backstage, Anastasia was glad indeed for her tiptop tiptoeing skills, honed through months of snooping and gumshoeing.

  Squish-squidge-sploosh.

  Of course, tiptoeing through slush presents unique challenges. The thick drifts of witch snow had half-melted into chilly muck, and this muck sloshed and slopped beneath the Dreadfuls’ shoes.

  “Shhhh,” Ollie hissed.

  “You’re the one making all the noise!” Gus whispered back. “And hurry up—we’ll fail our entire Applied Navigation unit if we’re late getting back to Pettifog Academy!”

  “But if we wake up Frosty, we’ll be crunched like potato crisps!” Ollie argued.

  “No, we won’t,” Anastasia said, but her heart lolloped like a jittery jackrabbit as they ventured into the backstage wreckage of smashed sets and capsized costume racks.

  “It looks like a tornado went through here!” Gus said, kicking through a flotilla of soggy tutus.

  GRRRR…GRRRR…GRRRRR…

  Ollie gasped. “Do you hear that?”

  GRRRR…GRRRRR…GRRRRR…

  The growls sent Anastasia’s jackrabbity heart hopscotching straight into her stomach.

  “Frosty’s awake.” Ollie’s eyes bugged, and he swiveled his gaze around the darkened backstage. “Where is she, anyway?”

  “Should we play dead?” Gus gulped. “Or do we run?”

  “I vote run,” Ollie quavered.

  “Wait.” Anastasia grasped his sleeve. “Listen.”

  GRRRRR…GRRRRR…GRRRRR…

  Anastasia grinned. “She isn’t growling at us. She’s just snoring.”

  GRRRRR…GRRRR…

  Grumbly snorts rumbled from the farthermost corner of the cavern. Anastasia edged forth and popped her head through the tatters of a shredded canvas painted with a fairy tale forest, peering into the realm beyond.

  “Oh, crumbs,” she said. “Look.”

  There, beneath the branches of the artificial tree masking the Dreadfuls’ secret crawlway to Sickle Alley, sprawled a good quarter ton of polar bear. Frosty lolled on her back, fuzzy tummy exposed, her great furry paws sticking up in the air.

  Gus groaned. “We’ll have to squeeze right by her!”

  For your edification, curious Reader, here is a list of fun facts about polar bears:

  Polar bears do not have eyelashes, because they would freeze and break off!

  Polar bear claws can grow over three inches long!

  Polar bears have blue tongues!

  The Dreadfuls got a splendid glimpse of Frosty’s tongue right as they sidled betwixt bear and wall, because she stretched her jaws into an enormous blue yawn. Ollie stared into the toothy maw, hypnotized. “It looks like she’s been eating blueberry pie.”

  Anastasia pulled the Shadowboy’s hand. “Just a few more steps—”

  GRRRR…GRRRR…GRRUFF? One of Frosty’s eyelashless eyelids twitched, and she twisted her damp nose toward the Dreadfuls. Then, with a great heave and groan, the bear rolled onto her stomach and rocked back onto her haunches. Even sitting, Frosty was nearly as tall as the fifth graders. She leaned forward and applied her enormous nostrils to Ollie’s face. Anastasia and Gus watched in frozen horror as the bear’s great whiffer whuffled down the Shadowboy’s neck to his collar, and thence to his lapels. Anastasia wanted to shout at Ollie to umbrate and flit away to safety, but she was too frightened even to peep.

  Frosty nuzzled Ollie’s side, grumbling. She shook her head. She snorted. Her nostrils convulsed, and a pale cloud puffed from her snoot.

  “Was that frost?” Anastasia asked.

  “N-no,” Ollie stammered. “It’s powdered sugar.” He pulled half a squished Berliner from his pocket. “Is this what you want, Frosty? Go get it!” He flung the donut back toward the downed costume racks, and the bear lumbered after it.

  “Go,” Gus hissed, shoving Anastasia and Ollie past the tree and through the crawlway. They emerged in Sickle Alley, goose-bumpy and trembling.

  “Oh,” Ollie moaned. “That was terrifying.”

  “Why didn’t you umbrate, Ollie?” Anastasia asked.

  “I was too scared to do anything,” Ollie said
. “Thank goodness I always keep a donut handy—otherwise, Frosty might have eaten us for breakfast!”

  “Frosty only woke up because she smelled your donut,” Gus pointed out.

  “No,” Ollie quibbled. “That donut saved our lives!”

  “We don’t have time to stand around arguing,” Anastasia pressed. “Come on!”

  Once they were floating in Calixto Swift’s office, the Dreadfuls riffled madly through the various books, trying to intuit which volume might contain an inkling about Stinking Crumpet or glass-cabinet-cracking spells. Anastasia’s thinker, however, lingered on Frosty’s epic sneeze. The sight of sugar blizzarding from the bear’s nostrils had nudged Anastasia’s neurons, jiggling loose memories of the frosty plumes she had panted within St. Agony’s Asylum. She blinked, trying to scour the twinkly images from her mind’s eye. Hallucinations! Mirages! Flights of fancy! Just like Penny and Baldwin said, Morfolk didn’t breathe frost. Ridiculous, imagining her lungs piped full of miniature blizzards, like two oversize snow globes nestled within her chest. Witches were the ones who huffed and puffed magic.

  Her thoughts snagged on this notion; stumbled; somersaulted down to her satchel.

  She rummaged its jumbled belly, spilling a flotsam of pens and candy wrappers and other oddments out into the office until, finally, she clutched the Cavepearl Palace snow globe.

  She peered at it. The snow looked so real. A new thought sent a shiver right down Anastasia’s spine: what if the twinkles inside Calixto’s snow globes were real snowflakes—snowflakes that had come not from the sky but from within the warlock’s lungs?

  A witch’s breath carries its own special power.

  Calixto descended from the Lapland wizards; his witchy blood brimmed with snow-magic. Had snow-magic sparkled deep inside his chest, too? Along with spells and secrets, had Calixto Swift breathed frost?

  I’ll never breathe that secret, Celestina, except to the cabinet itself.

  Anastasia’s eyes shifted to the cabinet, and to the warlock’s Hammer stowed within. She swallowed. She sucked in an enormous, wheezing, two-lung-rattler gulp of musty cave air. She pursed her lips, and she puffed.

  A twinkling corona materialized on the glass. Anastasia stared, mouth ajar, as the frosty patch swelled, sprouting before her astonished gaze into a mushroomy bulb of ice. Silvery rime radiated outward from the root of this oddball toadstool, spreading to tinsel the cabinet’s breast in wintry filigree.

  “Good Bundt cake!” Ollie yelped, dropping a battered weather log. “Look at the chest!”

  “What’s happening to it?” Gus cried.

  The boys swanned across the office, joining Anastasia to gawp as the silvery rime crystallized into a distinct rectangle, buckled on one side with ornate hinges, studded in the center with the mushroomlike knob.

  “It’s a door,” Gus gasped. “Why did this door suddenly appear?”

  A lump formed in Anastasia’s throat. Morfolk didn’t breathe frost. Had she simply awakened magic hibernating in the witch glass? But then—what about the windows and picture frames at St. Agony’s? Questions flurried her noggin: Was the asylum glass enchanted? Were Prim and Prude witches? But didn’t CRUD lump witches into the category of Unnatural Dreadfuls? Besides, the Snodgrass sisters hadn’t seemed particularly magical. They hadn’t walloped Anastasia or the Drybread boys with hocus-pocus, even in the mad chase and rumpus of the Dreadfuls’ great escape. They had yelled nasty words and blasted the air with silver buckshot, which had, of course, been rather unpleasant, but not in the least magical.

  But if Prim and Prude weren’t witches, and the glass in the asylum wasn’t ensorcelled, what explanation could possibly exist?

  Anastasia could only think of one. The lump in her throat crawled down to clutch at her heart, as though a big swallow of ice cream had gone down the wrong way.

  “Anastasia!” Gus touched her arm. “Did you see what happened?”

  She balked. “I don’t know—”

  Ollie grabbed the Cavepearl Palace globe from her sweaty clasp. “Open the door before it melts, for gosh sake!”

  Anastasia pushed aside her questions and twisted the chilly knob. Creeeee—eak. The frost hatch swung open. She stretched her arm into the cabinet, brushing aside a few branches of coral, and closed her fingers around the Silver Hammer.

  A THRILL COURSED from Anastasia’s palm and into her body, jozzling each of her hair follicles with a fizzy tingle of magic and triumph and fate.

  “Sweet mother of biscuit,” she whispered.

  “We have it!” Ollie cheered. “We’ve got the Silver Hammer!”

  “Don’t touch it too long, Anastasia,” Gus warned. “You’ll get blisters!”

  However, no blisters sizzled up upon Anastasia’s hand. She stared at the slender silver instrument, envisioning its claw uprooting the nails binding the Silver Chest. Tinkle. Jingle. Clunk. She could almost hear Calixto’s spellbound spikes clinking harmlessly to the ground: eight little chinkles announcing Nicodemus’s freedom. A metallic drumroll proclaiming that the Dreadfuls’ mission was almost at its end, that Fred was practically good as found.

  “Hey!” Gus said. “Where did this come from?” He snared Wiggy’s ring from the floating hodgepodge of Anastasia’s junk and turned it over, examining its golden underbelly. “S…C…Stinking Crumpet!”

  “No,” Anastasia said, carefully stashing the Hammer in her satchel. “It’s CS, for Calixto Swift. And…it’s my grandmother’s ring now.”

  The Dreadfuls bent their heads close, scrutinizing.

  “The letters sort of swirl together,” Ollie said. “It might be SC.”

  Gus narrowed his eyes, tapping the opal’s dainty golden girdle. “Remember that Francie Dewdrop mystery Miss Ramachandra read us—The Clue in the Lapis Lazuli?”

  “Sure,” Anastasia said slowly. “The murderer hid a pinch of cyanide in a poison ring.”

  A poison ring, as any Francie Dewdrop fan will know, features a hidden compartment for smuggling arsenic, or cyanide, or whatever other deadly venom its wearer might fancy. Poison rings were all the rage with la-di-da assassins of yore, and they still pop up in the odd murder nowadays.

  “You think Calixto kept poison in that ring?” Ollie squeaked.

  “No,” Gus said. “I think Calixto Swift hid things in clever places.” He applied his thumbnail to the golden girdle, and—hey, presto!—with one knuckle-flick, the opal’s top hemisphere hinged back to expose the secret, glassy, twinkling core within.

  A snow globe.

  “Gus!” Anastasia jubilated. “You’re a genius!”

  The trio squinted at the bubble of glass.

  “I can’t see through the flakes,” Ollie said.

  “It’s like an entire blizzard compressed into a marble,” Gus agreed. “But this must be the magic door to Stinking Crumpet, mustn’t it? Calixto didn’t bother to hide any of his other snow globes.”

  “If it is, then we have everything we need.” Anastasia plucked the ring from Gus and slid it onto her forefinger. “We have the Hammer and we have the way to Stinking Crumpet!”

  Gus goggled. “You want to go now? But what about our Applied Navigation exam?”

  “And we don’t have any provisions,” Ollie hedged. “Shouldn’t we pack sandwiches? What if there aren’t any sandwiches in Stinking Crumpet?”

  “We can wait for a time when no one will notice we’re missing,” Gus said. “Just like that Saturday when we went to Penzance.”

  Anastasia shook her head. “I can’t wait a minute longer. My father has been missing for over five months, and he’s scared. He’s a helpless guinea pig—if he’s still alive. And my grandfather’s been cramped up in the Silver Chest for centuries!”

  Ollie gulped. So did Gus.

  “You don’t have to come with me,” Anastasia murmured. “It’s my family, not yours.”

  “I’m not a Merrymoon,” Gus said softly, “but you’re practically my sister.” And he pressed the pad of his index finger to the ti
ny snow globe.

  “Well, I’m not going back to face Frosty alone!” Ollie buttoned the Cavepearl Palace snow globe into Anastasia’s satchel, and then he squished his pointer down alongside Gus’s. “Okay! Ready.”

  Anastasia cleared her throat.

  “Through this doorway clear and crystal

  Whisk me on a whirlwind trip!

  Take me where your whirlwind twinkles

  Make me a globe-trotting—”

  “Witch!” The world became a dazzlement of snowflakes and pressure and then darkness.

  “Where are we?” Gus asked.

  Anastasia reached out cautiously, her fingers bumbling first into folds of damp, slick plastic (raincoats?) and then a jumble of curving wooden sticks (umbrella handles?). Her eyelids stuttered. Pinpricks of light, like faraway fireflies, brightened into candle flames, and the glow from these flames traced shrouded silhouettes. Gus grabbed her arm. She blinked again. They were in a roomful of stools and tall little tables. Green and golden bottles cluttered a wooden bar at the far end of the snug. The buzzing in Anastasia’s ears subsided, and the whispers pitched into chatter. The silhouettes were people, Anastasia now saw, and they were sitting and drinking from mugs of amber liquid—apple cider? The place smelt of apples and pine and something slightly sour. Beer.

  They were in a pub.

  At that moment, two elderly women huddled at the nearest table swiveled their heads in tandem toward the Dreadfuls.

  “Who’s that?” shrilled one.

  “How did you get in here?” asked the second. “No children allowed in the pub!”

  The first peered over her spectacles. “I don’t recognize you. You aren’t from here.” Her voice pitched into a shout. “You aren’t from here!”

  The pub chatter halted, and now everyone looked up from their conversations and mugs of cider and beer and stared at the Dreadfuls.

  “By the stars and the moon,” murmured the barkeeper, “those are Morflings.”