by Неизвестный
“Magic chalk door. From inside a cave in that horrible forest. What's it called? The Wetlands. Blech.”
“Chalk door,” Zara said to Delilah.
Delilah shook her head. “Shouldn't work like that.”
“Girls,” Opal said. “Peter's waiting out in the hallway. I promised I'd get him help.”
“Sure,” Zara said, then she explained they'd have to be sneaky, and get Opal and Peter back out of the castle before anyone found them, or they'd all be in deep trouble.
“How deep?”
Zara said, “You can kiss your dreams of being a witch goodbye.”
“You mean I might be able to be a witch?”
“Not if we don't get you out of here. Now.”
Opal looked for confirmation from Delilah, who looked like she was about to throw up. The girl nodded.
* * *
The three girls went to check on Peter first, but he wasn't where Opal had left him.
Zara tried to reassure Opal that if the other witches had found him, they would have given him medical treatment before anything else happened, but the tone of Zara's voice didn't exactly set Opal at ease.
“I'll keep looking for him,” Opal said. “You two go get the anti-venom, and I'll wait here. He's probably just crawled off somewhere to have a nap.” She tried to smile, and appear upbeat, but she didn't believe herself.
“We'll be back in less than an hour,” Zara said.
“I don't have a watch, so that doesn't do me much good. Besides, what if you don't come back? What am I supposed to do? Is there a fire alarm or something I can pull to call for help?”
The two witches looked at each other again.
Zara said, “Don't wander too far, don't open any doors, and don't get into any trouble.”
As the two walked away, Opal muttered, “It's a bit late for that now.”
* * *
Opal wandered along the hall looking for Peter. A few smaller hallways fed from the main one, so she stuck to the right-hand rule of labyrinths to make sure she didn't cross over the same areas in circles. Every time she encountered a fork, she took the right-hand option. It was a fool-proof method, provided the walls weren't shifting around on her.
She stopped in her tracks and listened.
What was that scraping sound? Were the walls shifting around on her? She shook her head and carried on, because she had nothing else to do.
She turned a corner and noted the glowing moss wasn't just on the walls, but along the edges of the floor as well. As she walked along, the moss moved.
She jumped back against the stone wall and stared, her mouth open, as green-glowing creatures, the size and shape of rats, scurried by. They seemed as frightened of her as she was of them.
More movement caught her eye, on the wall she was pressed against. From the glowing moss, crawling things were emerging. The glowing caterpillar-shaped things weren't moving fast enough to cause her emotional distress, but the spiders were quick on their long, spindly legs. Some of them had bodies as fat as thumbs.
Opal clenched her jaw to keep from screaming and pulled away from the wall, then brushed her back and arms with her hands and shook her hair out repeatedly. The creepy-crawly feeling persisted, though, so finally, she stripped all her clothes off and shook them out, then inspected the grimy blue shorts, tank top, and hoodie jacket.
As she stood there in her underwear, she thought about how now would be the funniest time for Peter to show up again.
But he didn't.
She shook out her hair one more time and put the clothes back on.
To her relief, the bugs seemed to stick to the walls, and weren't on the floors. She knelt down and took a good look at the scuffed floors, noting the wear patterns, from years of people traveling through the halls. She continued exploring, taking some more right turns, and noted how some halls had more wear than others, forming grooves in the stone floors. How many years and pairs of feet would it take to wear grooves in stone? She couldn't even take a wild guess at how old the castle might be.
She turned another corner and found another wooden door. It appeared to be the same one she'd found the girls behind, which would support her theory that the hallway was a loop. They'd told her not to go in any rooms, but she'd already been in this room once before, so what would be the harm? Beyond the door had been a library, full of books, and who knew what information and magic those books contained?
How could she not go in, just for a little look?
She pushed open the door, and a bright light flashed, blinding her temporarily. From what she glimpsed of the walls, there were no books, and this wasn't a library after all. Her eyes adjusted. The only other person in the room was a shadowy figure, the absolute absence of light, like the thing she'd seen in the Wetlands. Terror gripped her.
Daemon.
The shadow moved, still human sized, but coming closer.
The daemon would grab her and tear her limbs off, she was sure of it. She wondered, though, why it was so silent. No roar, or growl, or that horrible metallic grinding they'd heard outside the cave.
Stumbling backward, she tried to get the door shut between the shadowy thing and her, but as she reached for the door, she got a face full of water.
Her reflexes closed off her throat and snapped shut her mouth.
Opal was underwater.
Again.
Chapter Sixteen
Opal struggled and kicked until her head surfaced, above the water. Why was she in water?
She paddled with her arms and legs as she gasped to catch her breath. She looked around for an explanation, but saw nothing but blue sky and green-tinged ocean.
How could she possibly be where she was, out in the ocean? Peter said teleporting wasn't possible. Then again, they'd gone through the door in the cave, which disproved that, and now she'd been zapped out to the ocean.
At least it's not night time, she told herself, but the thought brought her little cheer. This time, there was no boat sailing away, but also, no suitcase to warm her and bring her to safety.
She squinted to make her vision sharper. Maybe she wasn't nowhere after all, because in one direction was a speck of something that could be a tree, or a mountain—part of an island. The speck was small, but at least she had a direction to swim, some purpose to give her hope.
As she flipped onto her back and began to swim the backstroke, she reviewed recent events once more. She'd been at the witches' castle, walked into a room that was not, as it turned out, the library, and a shadowy creature had made something explode, and then she was here.
She'd been looking for a way out of the castle, and she'd found it!
This is probably what happened to Svetlana, she thought. It gave her no comfort to know the answer to that mystery, for it meant the next thing that would happen to her—or to her body, at least—would be to turn up limp and drowned, in the forest.
She kicked harder, as it would be better to find out how far she could swim than to not even try. Her clothes dragged at the water, so she paused to tread water for a moment. She unzipped and removed her hoodie to decrease resistance. Before she left the blue jacket to sink to the bottom of the ocean, she checked the pockets, perhaps out of habit and muscle memory from doing her own laundry for years.
She pulled out the blades of purple grass she'd taken from the conservatory, and the chalk.
The hot sun beat down on the top of her head.
She used to love days like this, at her apartment building's pool, which was a non-chlorinated, saltwater pool. Of course, at the pool, she'd had a flotation device to relax on, a nice plastic raft. My kingdom for some water wings, she thought.
Water wings?
She tucked the chalk into the pocket of her shorts, then singled out one blade of the purple grass. She held it above the water, then twisted the grass into a mobius strip with nervous hands. She could create bubbles, if she could remember the melody. The tune had to be in her brain, for she'd practiced it for an hour
that first night.
She put her lips to one side of the circle of grass and willed herself to sing the melody, even if it wasn't quite right. She'd keep trying until it worked, or she drowned. On the fourth try, one perfect, shimmering bubble appeared.
Opal carefully reached for the bubble, palming it, as the girls had shown her, instead of poking it with a fingertip. The bubble was pliant, more like soft plastic than glass. She cupped the precious bubble in her hand and brought it under the water. The shape held, so she pulled her hoodie jacket back on, tucked the bubble inside, and pulled up the zipper. The bubble in her jacket held while she used the blades of grass and melody to blow another, and then another.
Each purple blade of grass worked for about a dozen bubbles, and with the tiny handful of grass, Opal was able to fill her jacket like a life preserver. The blue jacket fit snugly at the waist and neck, and puffed out in the middle—a perfect makeshift flotation device.
She laughed with joy, but not too hard, because she was afraid of bursting the bubbles.
She rolled onto her back and kicked, beginning the long journey back to the speck on the horizon she hoped was the island.
* * *
Opal swam and swam, her jacket still as puffy as a life preserver, and the sun beating down on her. Glinting globes of light appeared above her. The dots got brighter and closer, revealing themselves as pixies.
“Hi, pixies,” she said, and when they didn't answer, she decided she was hallucinating. She'd been swimming for ages and though her face was hot from the sun, her hands were numb with cold, and she was exhausted.
Her eyes were tired, so she closed them, and kept swimming on her back.
* * *
When Opal's legs stopped kicking, the pixies seized her by the hair and towed her toward the rocky shore. She mumbled and waved at them, but she didn't make any sense at all.
The pixies admired the bubbles inside her jacket and commented to each other that she was not nearly as stupid as she had seemed at first, screaming like a monkey at the chapel that day.
When they pulled her up onto the rocky shore, she moaned and babbled more nonsense about someone named Peter, then succumbed to sleep and exhaustion.
The pixies danced around her sleeping head and gave her hair some touch-ups, fixing the spots they hadn't been able to straighten before, when the silly girl had run screaming from the dressing room.
Humans were so silly, they agreed, and then they all peed on her hair, since the handsome guy, Edwin, had paid for the deluxe pixie treatment.
* * *
Hours later, Opal cracked open one crusty eyelid. Her lips were cracked and split, and everything hurt.
She was blind.
No, no, false alarm. She wasn't blind, but night had fallen. She was cold, and her shivering had woken her up. Her clothes were mostly dry, and there was enough moonlight for her to see she was on a rocky shoreline—not unlike the one she'd landed on four days earlier. The tide was out, a few yards from her feet.
“This is where we came in,” she said to herself, referencing something she'd learned at school about the early days of cinema, when movies didn't play at set times, but repeated over and over, along with newsreels, in loops. She laughed, because she was alive, after being tossed in the ocean for the second time in less than a week.
She sat up and ran one hand through her surprisingly smooth and knot-free hair. “That's odd,” she said. Despite having spent hours in the ocean, her hair smelled pretty, like vanilla and flowers, and maybe a hint of lemon.
She pulled a strand into her mouth. It didn't even taste like ocean water.
Was she still asleep, and dreaming?
The ocean's lapping on the shoreline didn't sound the way it ought to, but like the slaps of a hundred wet feet on a tile floor.
She looked down at her front and let out a little shriek, for she had one giant lump on the side of her chest. The bubbles. She unzipped her jacket and took out the bubbles that hadn't expired. Curious, she pushed them together until they merged into one, giant bubble. She caught the big bubble with both hands, rather roughly, and squeezed the bubble into different shapes, but as soon as she poked it with one fingertip, it popped, making a sound like breaking glass, but leaving nothing behind.
The foot-slapping noise stopped.
She wasn't alone on the moonlit rocky shore. Opal froze and looked left and right without moving her head.
The foot-slapping started again, slowly, and she wondered if she might be dizzy from dehydration, for the entire shore seemed to be moving around her in the wan moonlight. Moving and squelching.
Something crawled, slip-slop, over her hand and began to move up her arm.
Remembering how the scary vine had fought harder when she struggled, she kept her breathing calm as she slowly turned her head to see what soft, squishy thing was crawling up her arm.
It looked back at her, or so she assumed, for she couldn't identify the part of the creature that might be eyes.
Unless she was mistaken, Opal was surrounded by a thousand kitten-sized… land squid?
Her first thought was, Cute!
Her second thought was, What do they eat?
Opal gently shook her arm to loosen the land squid, just in case they ate humans or had stingers. Was it just jellyfish that stung? What about squid? (Besides the fact that squid didn't leave the ocean and therefore these things couldn't possibly be squid.)
The squid did not let go of her arm, but gripped tighter, wrapping its many tentacles around her elbow. The squeeze was not painful, but she didn't want to collect any more squid jewelry, so she stood and made her way further from the shore's edge, careful not to step on any of them. Her orange and pink running shoes had survived the ocean swim, to her relief.
She slipped on some pebbles and accidentally stepped on the arm or leg of one of the creatures. She froze. A mouth opened and the thing began to wail, like a human infant.
Within seconds, all of them were wailing and bawling, up and down the shoreline. Opal clapped her hands to her ears, which only succeeded in bringing the wailing land squid on her elbow closer to her ear.
“What a bunch of crybabies,” she said to the creatures, who were now making snuffling noises in addition to wailing.
“Do you want me to sing something? Not the Big Mac song, but a lullaby? Is that it? More singing? Does every weird thing on this island love singing?”
As she backed away, even more careful not to tread on any of them, she began to sing,
Hushabye land squids,
On the sea shore.
I might be crazy,
Can't take much more.
When the tide comes,
You'll all wash away.
But I'll still have this one!
Stuck to my arm.
The singing, as good as it was, given her lack of rehearsal time, did not soothe the savage beasts at all. Perhaps the problem was the final line, which didn't rhyme. The critter on her arm did not care for the ending, at all, and seemed to be biting her, albeit with a toothless mouth.
Something moved, something in the ocean. At first, the something appeared as a large wave, but grew and grew, rising up and taking form.
The little ones squealed with excitement.
A massive creature, ten feet wide if it was an inch, heaved itself onto the shoreline. Despite not having anything recognizable as eyeballs, Opal knew, she just knew, the creature was the mother, and Momma Land Squid was looking right at her.
Opal tripped and went sprawling on the stones, painfully slicing and bruising her knees. The squid on her elbow squealed, but hung on.
With the cliff on one side and the giant momma squid and the ocean on the other, climbing the cliff stairs seemed to be her best bet, so she scoured the ground for glints of white, bits of broken shells. This area of the shore held very few shells, and she cried out in desperation.
She remembered the chalk.
There it was, still in her pocket. Opal had never be
en so happy to see a piece of chalk—in fact, no human being, ever, had been so happy to see a piece of chalk.
She quickly drew the first set of steps on the face of the cliff, then checked behind her to see where Momma Land Squid was. Massive slaps rang out now, as the behemoth squid closed the distance between them. Opal checked the ground for something like a sharp stick to fight with, if it came down to that, and she spotted the thing she'd tripped over earlier. It looked like a suitcase. Her suitcase.
She picked up the suitcase, got her bearings for the last time, then clamped shut her eyes and started up the magic staircase, drawing more steps as she went.
She didn't know if Momma Land Squid breathed, or even if she had lungs, but a stench like garbage soup enveloped Opal as she climbed, drawing chalk stairs as she went.
Something grabbed at her shoe, pulling her hard enough that she fell to her knees on the stony-feeling steps that would disappear if she opened her eyes. “Don't eat me,” she cried out, fighting the urge to look. She was nearly at the top of the cliff now, and a fall would surely injure her badly, if the creature did not. She dropped the chalk.
The giant creature pulled her leg again, but twisting this time, as though trying to flip her over rather than yank her down.
“You want this?” She turned and held out one arm, the one with the squid wrapped tightly around her elbow. “I'm not trying to steal your baby. It crawled up on my arm of its own accord, and… I don't want your baby. Seriously. Please, just take the squid and don't kill me or eat me or push me to my death, because even though this island is very strange and frequently terrifying, I like it here. I really like it here. I feel like maybe this is the place I was always meant to be, and maybe I felt like such an oddball back home because that wasn't where I was meant to be, you know?”
When Opal finished her speech, she realized her arm felt lighter, squid-less.
The foot-slapping noises continued, but the wailing and bawling had stopped, replaced by happy-sounding chirps.
She reached around for the dropped chalk, praying it was still on the steps. The nearly-used-up stick hung half off the edge. She snagged the short piece before it fell, and she quickly drew the last dozen steps and made her way up and over, rolling onto the grass at the top of the cliff.