by Неизвестный
“She'll find her way. Give her time,” he said, pouring a shot of something from an unmarked bottle for himself. “Not like some, who came over too grownup, like me, with too many ideas about how wrong things are, rather than how right they oughta be.”
“To how things oughta be,” she said, clinking their glasses together. “You weren't that old.”
After his drink, he sucked some air in through his teeth. “You believe any of this daemon nonsense?”
“I talked to Patty, at the bank. Didn't even consider believing the nonsense, not at all. Why? Should I?”
“Heard from one of my suppliers this morning, they figure somethin' done crawled up outta the earth, all hot and bothered about black magic and retribution.”
“Daemons are for fairy tales,” she said. “Half of which are told to make the children behave. The other half are told to make the adults behave. Like the Ice Man and all that old folklore.”
Khet raised his hoary white eyebrows. “You don't believe in the Ice Man neither? Wally, you are some kinda tough old owl pellet, aren't you?”
“Takes one to know one.”
Chapter Fifteen
Opal and Peter fell and fell and fell until they were neither falling nor landing. Peter took Opal's other hand, so now they were holding both hands, and they seemed to be nowhere. Her hair wasn't touching her shoulders, but rising straight up, or so it felt. She tilted her head up, and around, squinting and blinking, but found only blackness.
“Where are we?” she asked Peter. Her voice sounded flatter than she'd ever heard it—flatter than she'd ever heard anything.
“I thought you knew. Describe what you see.”
“Blackness. And more blackness. Can you feel anything?”
“Your hands,” he said. “They're soft.”
“I thought we'd be going somewhere, but we're nowhere. Are we inside the wall of the cave? Stuck?”
“I've been thinking about that,” Peter said. “You know how everything's made of molecules, and then atoms?”
“Yes. I remember that from science class.”
“The atoms are made of smaller parts that zoom around, I forget what they're called, but in between is all this space. What if we're in that space?”
“You think we've been shrunk down?”
“More like compressed.”
Opal wiggled her toes inside her shoes. “I don't think so. Except for the troubling lack of gravity, I feel completely normal.”
“What you're feeling might be an illusion. Maybe we're dead, and the daemon ate us and we're on our way to the afterlife.”
“Peter, I think I'd remember being eaten by a daemon.” She tried to see his expression in the darkness, but couldn't see anything, much less his face. “Maybe we need to let go of each other and spread out, looking for an exit, or an entrance, or anything.”
“Did you feel that?”
“No,” she said, but then the world shifted.
Opal's hair fell back down, landing softly on her shoulders, just as her toes touched a surface. Her knees crumpled and the rest of her followed. She landed on her butt, releasing Peter's hands in surprise.
“We're alive,” he said. “And we're not in the void. What do you see? Tell me, tell me.”
She described the new place, which had some light, but probably wasn't another cave, not unless caves in some parts of the island were made of square stones.
Peter grumbled about the dank smell as he got to his feet, apparently over the miracle of them being alive and moving on to petty complaints.
They were in either a tunnel or a hallway, and, by the sound of some voices nearby, they were about to be discovered.
Opal jumped at Peter and put her hand across his grumbling mouth, hushing him. The hall was lit by glowing green stuff on the walls, some type of phosphorescent moss, but there were darker regions. Opal spotted an alcove nearby with no moss and quickly pulled Peter in. They huddled there, waiting for whoever was talking to appear.
He whispered in her ear, “Are we on the mainland? Your home?”
She elbowed him in the ribs to shut up. The mainland? That had to be very far away, and surely the magic chalk doors didn't lead to places off the island. If they did, how would she get back again? Chalk magic couldn't work on the mainland, or every kid in the world would be drawing chalk lines on walls and jumping through, constantly getting into trouble and being late for dinner.
The people coming down the hallway were speaking in rushed, anxious voices.
One, a woman, said, “The presence of the daemon is a fact nobody can dispute. We can't cover this up, not once the daemon tears some person apart. It'll be a public relations nightmare.”
Another person, female by the sound, but with a raspy voice, said, “We can't go to Council until we've had our private inquiry, or they'll burn us all.”
“Don't be ridiculous. They don't do that anymore.”
“Something like a daemon ripping arms and legs off people may be visceral enough to change public policy.”
They approached the alcove where Opal and Peter were hiding, and one stopped the group, sniffing the air. Opal saw four people, in long robes, all with white hair. She held her breath and prayed the shadows were hiding her and Peter. They could be perfectly within their rights to be there, but without knowing where there was, they had to be careful.
One of the old women said, “Do you smell something? Smells like goat.”
“Makes me hungry for stew,” another said with a wicked laugh.
They all sniffed the air.
Opal was about to step out of the shadows and spout off a story about being lost, while trying to appear innocent, when somewhere down the hallway, a horn blew.
The four women resumed their course and disappeared around a corner.
Peter whispered, his mouth close to Opal's ear, “At least we know where we are.”
“We do?”
“We're at West Shore, as in, the West Shore Castle.”
“Where the witches live? Ah! That's not so bad. We'll find Carly, Zara, and Delilah, and they'll get us on our way, after they fix your eyes up. We'll be home in time for a late dinner.”
“Dinner,” he said with a sigh.
She stepped out of the alcove and started up the hallway, in the direction from which the four witches had come. Peter stumbled behind her, patting the stony walls with both hands.
“I shouldn't be here,” he said. “If we'd gotten to the bluebees, I could have had the honey, and I'd be fine by now. But then you had to go and yank me through that doorway.”
“To avoid being eaten or crushed by whatever was in the forest. You heard those women. There's an actual daemon on the loose. And it almost got to us.”
Peter continued to blindly inch along the stone wall. “I don't feel so good.”
Opal looked left and right down the dim hallway. Were they underground, or was this part of the castle merely lacking the architectural details, such as windows or doors, that would make it homey? She longed for home, and for her cell phone, and the ability to call 911. Peter was barely moving now, let alone coming up with ideas. Opal had to make what her grandfather would call “an executive decision.”
“Peter, you stay here,” she said, pushing him back into the alcove they'd just come from. “I'm going to find Carly and the others, and get you treatment for the snake bite, and then we'll get you home to your mom for dinner. Sound good?”
He nodded mutely.
She set off again in the direction the witches had come from, then changed her mind and went the opposite way.
She walked for a while.
Why were there no doors? The hallway seemed to go on forever, turning left then right for no apparent reason. Was she traveling in a circle? Oh, what she would give for some mainland technology, such as a phone and a handy map application.
Thinking fondly of her cell phone, she put her hands in her pockets and found the chalk.
She stopped and drew a door on t
he stone wall, and then, careful to keep her feet planted firmly where they were, she attempted to lean through the doorway and see what was on the other side. Her head cracked against the stone wall.
Opal rubbed the lump on her forehead. The chalk line wasn't glowing, as it had before, in the cave.
Apparently, the magical chalk doors didn't work everywhere. She was learning! Next time, she'd test her theory with less vigor.
She used her fingertips to rub off the chalk lines, erasing the evidence of her attempted door.
As she buffed away the dust, one of the square stones squished under her fingers, as though made of wet clay. She pressed her whole hand into it, leaving a hand-shaped impression. The wall made a muffled beep, and part of the nearby wall swung in, like a door.
“Oh, I see what you did there,” she muttered to the door.
Beyond the door was a bright, cheery room, so full of plants and light that Opal thought for a moment the door led outside. She was three steps into the room before she realized she wasn't actually outdoors, but in a bright conservatory.
The wall opposite the door was made of paned glass that rose high up, at least twenty feet, to a vaulted ceiling. The sky outside was blue, and the interior walls of the room were also shades of blue. Flowering plants of incredible variety hung from metal bars suspended from the ceiling, arranged to take advantage of the sunlight.
Unlike the musty hallway, this room smelled of orange blossoms and life. An object the size of a pixie caught her eye and she quickly covered her hair with her hands, but laughed when she saw the red shape was just a flower. She stepped closer to take a look, and was stunned by the blossom's resemblance to the pixies. Did pixies grow on plants? Was it even remotely possible? She poked at a blossom, expecting the flower to bite her or clamp onto her hair, but nothing happened.
Nevertheless, as she explored the room, she kept a safe distance from the pixie-shaped blossoms.
In addition to the hanging plants, the room was filled with three-tiered shelves, holding even more plants, with leaves of every hue of green, yellow, and even purple. One yellow-leafed plant had flowers that resembled bird skulls. Another plant, with broad, speckled leaves, burgeoned with little growths that looked exactly like potatoes. Opal scratched the surface of one with her thumb. She'd swear it was a potato, even though every potato she'd ever seen had grown under the dirt, as an edible root, or tuber.
But she couldn't be distracted by pixie-shaped blossoms or unusual potatoes. She was still alone, and she needed to get help for Peter, or at least find a way out of the castle. An intercom system would make sense in a place this large, but she didn't see anything on the walls except light switches.
She pictured the three girls in her mind. This was a trick her grandfather had taught her, to help locate keys and other lost objects. It worked, sometimes.
If she were Carly or Zara or Delilah, where would she be? She imagined herself in a blue tutu, out riding her bicycle, or at ballet practice, and not even inside the castle. Opal sighed. Her imagination wasn't being very helpful.
Opal took another look around for anything in the conservatory that might be of use to her. Of all the things to find in a garden room, a weathered-looking stand-up piano lurked in the corner. A watering can sat near some trays of young plants, and she took a good, long drink from it, assuming that even if the water held plant fertilizer, surely it wouldn't kill her.
Movement caught her attention, but when she turned, all she saw were some robust ferns, and a vine that resembled Morning Glory, but with purple flowers instead of white. The vine moved. She rubbed her eyes and watched carefully. Indeed, the plant was actually growing, visibly moving, as she watched, coiling up a trellis while opening deep purple blossoms. Transfixed, she reached out to touch one of the flowers. The blossom closed on her finger, clamping down hard.
She couldn't shake the purple bud-shaped flower off her finger, and more blossoms sought the other fingers on that hand, snaking around and mouthing her thumb and other fingers. Another vine moved along the ground like a snake, coming for her foot. She stomped on the vine, as another one snaked up her other leg. The vines were fast, and getting faster.
A few gardening tools lay nearby, so Opal grabbed one that resembled a tiny shovel, the hand spade, and began to bash away at the flowered vine pulled taut between her ensnared hand and the trellis. Her violence only seemed to encourage the thing to send out more shoots and tendrils—new ones that sought her hair and tangled their way to her scalp.
She tossed the hand spade and reached for the wood-handled garden shears instead. The plant had her mostly pinned and tied up against the trellis, as tight as a Christmas tree on the roof of a car, but she was able to breathe, for now, and to grasp the shears with her fingertips.
She threatened the vine, saying, “You want a piece of me? Huh? Want some of this?”
The vine did not respond to her taunts, except to squeeze her tighter and send wiry little shoots up her nostrils. She bared her teeth and bit the vines that sought to cover her face. Oh, those vines were really going to get it, now that she had the shears.
Opal realized one small, rather upsetting detail.
The shears were the big variety, that you needed two hands to operate, and she only had one hand free. She kept breathing and considered her options while biting the vine.
The door to the garden room was still open, and if she screamed loud enough, before her mouth was completely covered, Peter might hear, or a witch. She drew in a deep breath to let out a scream, and the plant seemed to hesitate, stopping its growth and constriction.
She held still to see if the lack of struggling was what caused the plant to stop fighting her, but that wasn't it, she noted as the impolite vine tried, again, to creep up her nostrils.
She took another deep breath, and some helpful-yet-slow-acting part of her brain served up a forgotten detail of a story, from the Broken Shell Island books. Artie and his friends had spent countless happy afternoons singing to plants, getting them to produce sweet juice for the kids. The plants loved to be talked to, but they were overjoyed to be sung to.
That would explain the piano, she thought, drawing another deep breath.
The first song that came to mind was not a folk song, or a contemporary tune, nor was it even something she liked the sound of. The song was the jingle for the Big Mac, from McDonalds. The commercial had been off the air for years, but it had made a mark on Opal's grandfather, who sang it frequently, and thus the jingle had made its mark on her as well.
She began to sing, shaky at first, but gaining confidence when the words all came to her. The first time through the jingle, the vines clutching her merely loosened.
By the third time through, the vines had disentangled themselves somewhat.
By the twentieth time through the same jingle about all-beef patties and special sauce, the plant was fully in the groove, bobbing and swaying happily, and Opal was able to cautiously step away.
When she was a safe distance from the plant, she set down the shears, raised her hands in the air, and finally stopped singing. The vine seemed satiated and calm.
To the empty room, Opal said, “So, that happened.”
A yellow butterfly the size of a dinner plate leaped into the air from a dim corner. Opal may have peed a little.
She backed cautiously out of the garden room. In the hall, she pressed her hand into the soft stone once more. As the door was slowly creaking closed, she spotted something familiar. She darted inside the conservatory to pluck a handful of purple grass from a plant pot, then jumped back out to the safety of the hallway before the door clicked shut.
She didn't know everything about the island, or much about magic, but she had learned how to make bubbles, and that wasn't nothing. She tucked the blades of grass into the pocket of her hoodie, along with the stick of chalk.
As she thought about potentially useful items, she decided a bag would be handy, especially if she found more things to add to a sort o
f Adventurer's Kit. Unfortunately, the backpack Aunt Waleah had given her remained back in the cave, as they'd left in a hurry.
Opal continued down the hallway.
She really wanted a Big Mac.
The dank smell seemed to be getting worse, as though that part of the castle wasn't even used.
Opal turned a corner, and to her surprise, encountered a regular doorway, with a wooden door. She stood at the door for several minutes, arguing with herself about whether or not she should knock. She decided to crack the door open and peer in, so that if she found something dangerous, like, say, a dragon, she'd close the door and get a head start running away. Nobody had told her dragons weren't real, so until she had all the facts, she had to assume a dragon, or a daemon, or something much scarier could be lurking behind any door.
The door, however, was not nearly as heavy as it looked, and when she put her shoulder to it, the darn thing flew open and banged against some furniture inside the room.
Two familiar faces looked up from a book on a table. The paler one, Delilah, screamed.
Opal quickly checked behind her for monsters, but there were none. She plucked some bits of straw from her hair, looked over her mud-covered clothes, and said, “I guess I do look that scary.”
Zara smiled and said, “Opal! Did Carly sneak you in here? That naughty girl. Where is she?”
“Not Carly. I sorta accidentally snuck in by myself.”
The two witches looked at each other, seeming to communicate without words.
Opal looked around at the bookshelves that went all the way up to the very high ceiling. “I may be a Newface from the mainland, but I'm guessing this is some sort of library. Is this a public library? Or is it for witches only?”
Zara laughed. “Public library! You're funny.”
The other girls weren't getting up from their chairs, so Opal joined them at the table. “I'm in a bit of a jam, you guys. Peter's here with me, but he's been bitten by a snake in the Drylands and needs something for the venom. Do you have medicine here at the castle? Like a First Aid Kit, or an infirmary?”
Delilah scowled. “How did you get in here? And with a boy!”