by Holly Grant
“There’s Princess Penelope!”
“Oh, just look at Princess Saskia’s gown! She’s so lovely. Pretty as a picture!”
“Is that a sheep or a wig on Princess Ludowiga’s head? Why, it’s marvelous!”
“The queen!”
Everyone collapsed into bows as Wiggy glided up the velveteen path spooling from the great arched doors of the theater.
“Come on.” Baldwin squeezed Anastasia’s hand and pulled her along.
An usher guided them up a staircase and down a narrow corridor, halting respectfully by a pair of curtains. “Your balcony, Your Majesties.” Anastasia darted to the edge and fumbled in her satchel for her binoculars. She scraped their magical gaze across the theater dome crowded with hanging bats, the limelights fizzing at the edges of the stage, and the gold-frocked musicians tuning their instruments in the orchestra pit below. “There’s Quentin!”
“Doesn’t he look fine!” Penny said.
“And there,” Ludowiga hissed from behind her opera glasses, “is Janet Dellacava. And look at her wig. It’s definitely taller than mine!”
“Calm down, Loodie,” Baldwin chuckled. “Why, it’s a splendid wig.”
“Shut it, Baldwin,” Ludowiga retorted. “Have you been twisting pretzels abovecaves so long that you’ve forgotten the Decree of Wig-Loft?”
“No one may wear a wig taller than a royal’s,” Saskia cited.
Music trembled from the orchestra pit.
“That impertinent creature is deliberately flouting the rules,” Ludowiga huffed. “Your Mommyness, aren’t you going to do something?”
“I’m preparing to enjoy the opera, Ludowiga, and I suggest you do the same.”
“But—”
“Hush, you ninny!” Baldwin said. “It’s starting!”
The stage curtains parted to reveal an artificial cavern of papier-mâché stalactites. Two women in fruit bat costumes dangled from trapezes, spreading their arms and screeching to the shrill of violins.
Baldwin leaned forward with a contented sigh, propping his elbows on the balcony’s lip.
Were all operas terrible? Or just Morfolk operas? Either way, The Flinging Fledermaus was pure torture. Pretending to fix the curls dangling from her wig, Anastasia poked her ears full of fluff. Better. Pippistrella, still roosting in her pompadour, let out a batty snore as one of the actors began catapulting pineapples into the audience.
“What wit!” Baldwin rejoiced. “What verve!”
Anastasia sneaked Miss Viola’s watch from her pocket. Quentin had said the Gorgon’s Aria started about an hour into the performance; that was—fifty-eight minutes away! Aisatsana’s ghostly mug stared at her from the clock’s crystal face, the silver arrows twitching around her nose like the whiskers of an angry cat. Anastasia’s jitters tripled and she crammed the timepiece back into her skirts.
The hour crawled by in a phantasmagoria of scene changes: from papier-mâché cavern to nighttime desert; from nighttime desert to Viking ship. Anastasia hoisted her binoculars and trained them on Quentin. He drew one last, wobbling note from his saw, and then he looked straight up at the queen’s opera box. He nodded, and Anastasia gulped. It’s go-time. She nudged Pippistrella awake.
“Get out your blindfold,” Penny murmured. “You mustn’t take it off until the aria is over.”
“It’s a doozy,” Baldwin said, slapping two pirate patches over his eyes. “Bellagorgon sings for almost twenty minutes straight. Tonsils like a Spartan!”
The theater sibilated with the silky sounds of operagoers cinching their blindfolds. Shh. Shh. Shhhh. Anastasia fidgeted in the dark, her muscles tensed like those of a runner poised before a race. She would have to dash from the opera box as soon as the music started.
LAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Mrs. Wata’s cry surged through the theater like a tsunami. It swirled amongst the stalactites, eddied in the audience, and flooded Anastasia’s soul with strangeness and beauty. She had never heard anything so wonderful in her life, and for one long, glory-drenched moment she remained transfixed in her seat. Then Pippistrella nipped her hand.
“Right,” Anastasia mumbled. She had less than twenty minutes for the round-trip scramble to Zero Cavern. Hurry! Twisting her face from the stage, she unknotted the bow on her blindfold and then, gaze riveted to the floor, she grabbed her satchel and crept from the balcony.
Gus and Ollie were already crouching in the corridor. “Ready?”
“Of course,” Anastasia fudged.
She followed them through a maze of tunnels to a door marked CREW ONLY! Mrs. Wata’s voice thrilled around them, pricking Anastasia’s arms with goose bumps. Pippistrella peeped nervously and latched onto the back of her lady’s wig.
The door cracked open and Quentin ushered them through. “Good luck,” he whispered. “I’ve got to get down to the pit.” He clambered down a staircase, leaving the Dreadfuls to gape at the whirl of backstage activity: actors struggling with costumes, theater bats zinging to and fro, and stagehands barging hither and thither, lugging props and ladders and tugging on ropes that controlled the stage scenery. Makeup artists huddled around candle-ringed mirrors, teasing wigs and slathering performers with creams and rouge.
“Three of my beauty marks fell off in the second act,” grumped a puffy singer. “I told you to use airplane glue.”
“Come on,” Gus urged. The Dreadfuls slunk behind a rack of frothy dresses to huddle behind a jumble of downed chandeliers, and from there they burrowed beneath a heap of fake clouds and then tiptoed behind a painted screen. Dodging and ducking, pussyfooting and prowling, they made their way to a papier-mâché tree propped in a neglected corner.
Behind the tree, squidged between two mounds of cave bacon, gaped the hole leading to Sickle Alley.
“How did you ever find this?” Anastasia marveled.
Gus shrugged. “I’ve spent a lot of time hanging around the theater. Mom used to bring me to rehearsals. Careful—watch your head.” He slipped out.
Anastasia’s crinolines wheezed as she wriggled through the chink, but with Gus yanking her arms and Ollie pushing from behind, she finally squished through to Sickle Alley. She blinked. Sooty lanterns trickled muted puddles of light down the tunnel’s gloomy gullet, and bits of broken glass barbed the shadows. The Dreadfuls pressed against the slimy cave wall as a man in a flapping black coat slouched past, face hidden behind his pushed-up collar.
“This place is sinister,” Ollie said.
“Well, we won’t be here long.” Gus started running.
The zzzzzither of violins licked their heels as they raced down the crumbling cobblestones, each note winding the Gorgon’s Aria closer to its end. A dozen grimy shop windows flashed by before Gus stopped at a narrow gap in the wall.
“It’s that way,” he panted.
They stared at each other.
“We don’t all have to go in,” Anastasia said. “Just me, so Aisatsana can visit Mrs. Honeysop’s house.” She shuffled sideways into the crevice.
“I want to go,” Gus said. “It looked fun.”
“I’m not staying in this awful alley by myself,” Ollie said, mashing in behind them.
“I see light ahead,” Anastasia reported. “I think we’re almost there—” A gasp sucked the words from her throat as an unseen power yanked her up into the unknown. She was floating! She kicked her legs amidst her billowed petticoats, surprised delight burbling her tonsils. “Whee!” She arced her arms and swanned through a cloud of twinkle beetles.
“Whoopee!” Ollie and Gus blurted into the cavern.
“Incredible! It’s like we’re in outer space!” Gus said.
“This is ground control to Major Gus,” Anastasia called. “Major Gus: your pants have ripped up the back.”
Gus clutched the seat of his trousers. “Darn it! Mom’s going to have a fit!”
“How do your bones feel?” Ollie asked, examining his hands. “I don’t feel like I’m crinkling up.”
“Me neither.” Anast
asia checked Miss Viola’s watch. “We have eleven minutes.”
“Which means we need to leave Zero Cavern in four,” Gus said.
Anastasia rocketed off a tall stalagmite and sailed across the parlor. It hadn’t been a witch’s home for centuries, but a few relics of its long-gone lodger still wandered the cavern: a broken rocking chair, a raggedy cookbook, a woebegone cuckoo clock trailing two pinecone-shaped weights. One tattered sock clung to the grille caging the parlor’s abandoned fireplace. Anastasia’s attention hiccupped to the blank spot above the mantel. Had a looking glass lacquered the chimneypiece in days of yore, perhaps reflecting Mrs. Honeysop dozing in her chair? Aisatsana had mentioned a stolen mirror.
Even though Mrs. Honeysop had been a witch, and witches were magic-hoarding, silver-mining murderers, the lonely parlor saddened Anastasia. She snared a roaming candelabrum and lit its tapers with a match from her pocket.
“Look!” she said. “The flames are round.”
Gus paddled to her side. “Hot air rises,” he mused. “That’s why flames are long and pointy. But without gravity, it isn’t going to rise. So the fire fans out in a ball.”
Anastasia bore the strangely flamed candelabrum deeper into the cavern, frogging down the hallway to a dark little cavity. A bed hovered in its center, quilts still tucked firmly beneath the mattress. Why didn’t the pallet stray from the frame? She released the candlestick and swam toward the bed, plunging her hands between the mattress and wrought-iron skeleton. Ah! The clever witch had devised a system of ties to secure the feather cushion to the bed slats. As Anastasia wrestled her arms free from the mattress, her fingers brushed against something hard and flat and thin. She pulled it free.
“Anastasia!” Gus called from the parlor.
“Just a minute!” She frowned at the peculiar object plundered from the witch’s bunk: some kind of oversized paper doll, trimmed of black paper, shiny and stiff with varnish. Tiny perforations dotted the dark maiden’s dress and hair, creating a filigreed design delicate as a shadow cast by lace. Silver rivets gleamed at her joints. Anastasia gingerly plucked one paper wrist between her thumb and forefinger and pivoted the arm, marveling. Why had the old witch kept a paper doll hidden under her bed? Was it some kind of talisman?
Anastasia bit her lip, wondering whether she held a snippet of bad magic. But it was so dainty; a doll hewn from midnight. The artist in Anastasia itched for scissors and paper so she could fashion her own paper doll.
“Anastasia!” Ollie hollered.
She carefully swiveled the paper arms over the paper torso and slid the doll into her satchel. “Coming!”
“Watch!” Ollie cried, twisting upside down and launching from a stalactite to kick-start a crazy spin. “I’m a helicopter!”
“Octuple somersault!” Gus yelled.
“I can do a no-hands handstand!” Anastasia said.
“I see London, I see France; I see Anastasia’s pantaloons!”
“Shut up, Ollie!”
“Peeps!” Ollie said. “Your mouth is glowing green!”
Pippistrella hiccupped.
“She’s been eating twinkle beetles!” Gus cried.
“Or maybe she got into Ollie’s éclairs!” Anastasia giggled.
“Shhhh!” Gus stiffened and cupped his hand around his ear. “Listen!”
The Dreadfuls hushed. Faint singing echoed down Sickle Alley and into Mrs. Honeysop’s cave.
“Mom’s almost at the end of her aria,” Gus said hoarsely. “We’ve got to go!”
“Wait!” Anastasia dredged the mirror from her satchel and made a horrible face at Aisatsana, and then she let it float away. “Mission accomplished.”
“Wait till we get back to the theater to say that.” Gus pushed her toward the door.
Anastasia yelped as gravity lassoed her back into the vestibule. Ollie wheezed in after her, Gus clinging to his coattails. They hotfooted through the narrow shaft and retraced their steps down Sickle Alley, running pell-mell to the hole leading to the theater backstage. From screen to clouds, from chandelier jumble to gowns, the Dreadfuls darted until finally they burst through the CREW ONLY! door.
“If anyone noticed you were gone, just tell them you were in the loo,” Ollie advised.
But Anastasia’s family was still blindfolded in the opera box. She collapsed into her seat just as Mrs. Wata belted out the final, triumphant note of her aria. LAAAAAA! They had done it! The League of Beastly Dreadfuls had infiltrated Zero Cavern!
The audience burst into ecstatic applause.
22
Donut Moon
“MIRROR, MIRROR, ON the wall,” Ollie intoned, “where-oh-where is the Cavern of Dreams?”
Aisatsana crossed her arms over her chest and scowled. “I hate fairy tales.”
“Of course you do,” Anastasia muttered.
“Aisatsana, did you go to Zero Cavern?” Gus called from behind the chain-mail canopy. He was being careful not to let his reflection glide over the looking glass, just in case Sugna’s snakes were, indeed, venomous. “Because we did.”
Aisatsana yawned. “I know. I saw you there, remember?”
“Wasn’t it fun?” Ollie enthused.
“I wasn’t impressed,” Aisatsana said. “It’s just a dingy hole overrun with bugs and floating junk. I’ve already canceled my party.”
“She doesn’t like Zero Cavern because you do,” Ollie whispered to Anastasia.
“Well, whether you like it or not, I held up my end of the deal,” Anastasia informed her reflection. “So show us the door to the Cavern of Dreams. Please.”
“I’m not a servant,” Aisatsana snapped. “I’m not some maid you can order around.”
“I don’t order people around!” Anastasia retorted. A comment about bossy mirror-twins hovered at the tip of her tongue, but she clamped her mouth shut. She had to focus on finding the Moonsilk Canopy. Tracking down her father took priority over zinging her snooty reflection.
This, dear Reader, is called keeping your eyes on the prize.
Aisatsana plucked a necklace from the mirror image of Wiggy’s jewelry box and examined the gems. “I’ve been thinking about it, and maybe I shouldn’t tell you. I could get into big trouble.”
Anastasia’s jaw dropped, and Pippistrella let out a tiny squeak of rage.
“You could get into trouble?” Gus cried. “We had to sneak out of the opera, for Pete’s sake!”
“Our bones could have warped!” Ollie added.
Aisatsana buckled the necklace to her freckled throat. “Oh boohoo.”
“You promised, Aisatsana,” Anastasia said. “And remember, I’ll be watching you for the rest of my life, too. It would be very unwise for you to break your promise.”
Aisatsana trilled with silvery laughter and pinned a brooch to the lapel of her school uniform. “There isn’t anything you could do to me.”
“Really?” Anastasia challenged. “I can embarrass you in front of your mirror friends. I’ll make faces like this.” She flared her nostrils and puffed her cheeks.
“And,” Ollie piped up, “she could shave her head. Your head.”
“You wouldn’t like to go around bald, would you?” Gus asked.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Aisatsana hissed.
“Sure I would,” Anastasia lied cheerfully. “It would show off our ears.”
“Fine!” Aisatsana unclasped the necklace and flung it onto the reflected vanity. “Not that you do much with our hair anyway.” She sidled three steps to the left. “The Cavern of Dreams is right through here.”
Glimmering, shimmering, glinting in the far depths of the reflection, a pointed silver door nested between crags of crystal.
Anastasia and Ollie whirled around.
“Where did it go?” Ollie exclaimed, darting to run his hands over the wall.
Anastasia turned back to the looking glass. “There isn’t a door here. Why is there a door in your room?”
Aisatsana rolled her eyes. “In case you haven’t noticed, th
is is a magical mirror. It reflects magical things—things that are usually hidden.” She huffed. “Didn’t you wonder why I’ve never spoken to you before? You can shout all you like into the mirror in your loo, but I won’t respond. I can’t. It’s just a piece of shiny glass—not a Glimmerglass, like this one. Now, keep looking at the door and walk backward. Shadowboy, get out of the way.”
Grumbling, Ollie stepped aside.
Anastasia slowly stepped back, eyes glued to the mirror. Her silver twin mimicked her movements, retreating from the surface of the Glimmerglass and treading into the depths of the reflected room.
“Okay,” Aisatsana called, “reach back and grab the knob.”
Anastasia stretched her arm toward the wall, gasping as her fingers closed around a smooth metal ball.
“Don’t turn around!” Aisatsana warned, also twisting her arm behind her back. “You’ll break the spell. Now open it.”
Anastasia turned the knob. The hinges sang, and backward she tumbled through the silver door and into, of all things, a wintry forest. Trees hemmed this pocket of magic, and the air smelt of pine and earth and snow and freshness, and the night sky vaulted up, up, up, all the way to the stars.
“Look at the moon!” Ollie breathed.
High in the black yonder, the moon floated like a huge, silvery, beautiful Berliner, which is a sort of holeless donut, and twinkly bits snowed down from it like magical powdered sugar.
“Did we—did we somehow get outside?” Anastasia staggered to her feet.
“It must be some kind of illusion,” Gus whispered, joining them. “There’s no way that door could lead abovecaves. The palace is miles underground.”
“That moon is real,” Ollie argued. “I can feel its sizzle!” He closed his eyes and tilted his face to sop up the moonlight.
“It can’t be real,” Gus countered. “It’s some kind of magic.” But his eyes were brimful of wonder and the sparkles of far-flung stars.