The Midnight Gate

by Helen Stringer

  She hustled Belladonna out of the sitting room, helped her into her coat, and practically shoved her out the front door. Belladonna sighed and zipped up her coat. The rain might have stopped, but the wind was still icy cold and cut to the bone. She hoisted her backpack onto her shoulder and walked down the front steps just as the new client arrived.

  It was a woman. Belladonna could tell that from the shoes, but almost nothing else was visible behind the capacious black coat with its high collar and the wide plaid scarf that encircled her neck and the lower part of her face. The woman swept past Belladonna, and for a moment, as the fabric of the coat brushed against her hand, she shuddered, her feeling of February gloom somehow magnified. She glanced back and saw the woman reach up and ring the doorbell with a long leather-gloved hand. Grandma Johnson opened the door and ushered her in, all smiles and happy conversation, but Belladonna noticed that as she did so, something fell from beneath the woman’s coat and landed on the top step.

  She waited until the door had clicked shut and the orange “séance light” had come on in the front room, then she quickly scrambled up the steps to see what the mysterious new client had lost.

  It was still there, gleaming slightly in the sickly glow from the old streetlamps. Belladonna hesitated for a moment, then reached down and picked it up, a knot forming in her stomach.

  It was a large black feather.

  2

  The Black Feather

  THE WEEKEND SEEMED to go on forever. Belladonna kept the feather in her backpack at first, but on Saturday evening she decided to show it to her parents. Their response was not quite what she expected. Her mother just thought it was dirty and that she might catch something from it, while her father thought it was probably from a crow. When Belladonna pointed out that it was far too big to have come from a crow, he just shrugged and suggested that it might be from a raven.

  “A raven?” she said, images of dive-bombing Night Ravens leaping into her mind. She remembered them swooping out of the night sky in the Land of the Dead, minions of Dr. Ashe.

  “Yes,” said her Dad calmly, “a raven. Like they have at the Tower of London. Those things are huge.”

  Belladonna stared at him. Was it really possible that he had forgotten about the Night Ravens? But her Dad just turned his attention back to the television.

  “Have you seen this?” he said. “They’ve decided to widen Ellsmore Road.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked her mother. “It’s needed it for years. I mean, it’s all very well having motorways and bypasses, but if you can’t even get to the things without a half-hour wait in traffic, what on earth is the point?”

  “Yes, but now?” interrupted her father. “In the middle of winter? The days are so short, it’s going to take forever. And cars’ll be sitting there in rush hour, not moving, with their heaters on and—”

  Mrs. Johnson smiled indulgently as the ghost of her husband turned a peculiar shade of red.

  “You don’t have to do it anymore, dear,” she pointed out gently.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “Someone does.”

  Belladonna sighed and slowly twirled the feather, watching the glossy black surface shimmer from blue-black to ebony in the flickering light of the television.

  “Really, Belladonna,” said her mother, looking concerned, “throw it away. It’s probably got vermin.”

  Belladonna nodded and walked into the kitchen. She flipped open the top of the trash bin and was about to drop it inside when something stopped her. She had no idea what it was, but she just knew that this was important and it shouldn’t be consigned to a collection of potato peelings, crushed frozen-food containers, and yesterday’s tea leaves. She glanced back toward the living room. She could hear her parents talking softly, followed by the theme tune for Staunchly Springs. They wouldn’t be out for at least forty-five minutes once the saga of betrayal, death, and scandal set in a street of reasonably priced homes picked up where Thursday’s episode had left off—with Mrs. Carpenter bundling what she thought was her husband’s dead body into the deep freeze, except that (as her mother had pointed out) he almost certainly wasn’t actually dead.

  Belladonna crept down the hall and slipped the feather back into her backpack. She waited for a moment by the door in the chilly hall, listening to the sounds of home, and couldn’t help but wonder why she felt the way she did. When she was in the Land of the Dead, all she could think about was getting home and returning to a normal life, but now that she was back and everything had returned to the way it was before she had found the door marked seventy-three, she couldn’t shake a sense of apprehension and the feeling that something, somewhere wasn’t right.

  The next morning she raced through breakfast and told her parents that she was going to the park for a walk.

  “Wear your boots,” said her mother in that matter-of-fact tone that only people who don’t actually have to go outside on freezing cold days use.

  Belladonna pulled on her wellies and picked up her backpack.

  “Scarf!” yelled her mother from the kitchen.

  Belladonna sighed and looped the scarf around her neck. She hated the scarf. It was a kind of a dull greenish plaid and was far too long, but once she was outside, she was glad she had it. The morning air cut like a knife through all her careful preparations and she hadn’t gone two meters before her toes felt numb and her fingers tingled. She pulled the scarf up over her freezing nose and headed off down Lychgate Lane toward the town center.

  It was another typical February day, freezing and grim with a low gray sky that constantly threatened rain and would almost certainly deliver it before the day was out. Belladonna shoved her hands in her pockets and wished she’d remembered her gloves.

  The Christmas lights were still up in the High Street, but now that the holidays were over, they seemed more sad than cheerful, with grubby-looking snowflakes and reindeer that were missing more than a few lights and had clearly suffered in last week’s storms. They swayed slightly in the icy wind, still grinning above the street, but the shoppers were all oblivious. Life had moved on, Christmas was over, and the endless gloom of February was making everyone feel that spring would never come and the sun would never shine again.

  Belladonna shivered on the wet pavement and darted into Gimball’s to warm up. Gimball’s was a rather old-fashioned department store, with a giant circular staircase where most shops had escalators. It still had long counters where gloves were sold even in the summer, and the ladies’ toilets had a sitting room with couches and elegant occasional tables. Belladonna drifted among the glass-topped counters until the feeling returned to her fingers, then made her way back outside and up the street.

  Evans Electronics was at the far end. Her mother always referred to it as the “shabby end” with a sort of sneer in her voice that Belladonna suspected had more to do with her failed efforts to save the old theatre than anything else. Though, as she walked up the street on this cold February day, Belladonna did have to admit that the further she went, the more dismal things got. The fresh, bright windows of the shops near Gimball’s gave way to grubby panes of glass shielding displays that hadn’t changed since the summer. Sad travel agents showed peeling posters of faded Spanish beaches and washed-out cruise ships on barely blue oceans; shoe shops crowded their windows with rank upon rank of high-heeled shoes, near enough to the fashionable styles to make people pause and look, but not enough to make anyone actually go inside; while small boutiques promoting perpetual sales crowded against grubby newsagents and the sort of small would-be department stores that always seemed to be announcing that “Everything must go!”

  A cold misty rain began to fall as Belladonna approached the electronics shop in the old theatre. She heard it before she saw it, of course: the raucous clatter and clang of DVD players, stereos, and televisions spewing out of the shop and across the pavement like a barbarian army. The window was circled with flashing colored Christmas lights, and little arcs of white h
ad been painted in the corners in a vain imitation of snow.

  She stepped inside and blinked for a moment in the bright fluorescent glare. Mr. Evans was helping a customer and smiled thinly at her as she walked toward him. He had always been skinny, but since his wife had left him, he seemed to have almost faded away. His face was gaunt, with shadows under the eyes, and his body seemed to strain against some unseen weight.

  Mrs. Evans had taken off soon after she and Steve had returned from the Other Side, leaving only the briefest of notes on the kitchen table. When she’d first heard about it, Belladonna had wanted to tell Steve that his mother had seemed to know more than she really ought to when she’d tried to stop them going through to the Other Side, but somehow the moment never seemed right.

  Steve’s Dad was devastated and initially spent his days standing at the front of his shop staring into space. After a few weeks of that, he pulled himself together and decided that Steve would have to take up the slack in the family business, which meant that apart from school and football practice, Steve had to spend every spare moment helping in the shop.

  “He’s in the back, love,” he said as she approached. “He’s supposed to be bringing up some of them new MP-whatsits, but he’s been gone long enough to make the things by hand.”

  Belladonna smiled and made her way past the crowded ranks of screaming machinery to a small door at the back of what had once been the town’s only theatre. She pushed it open and stepped into the cool semidarkness. Around her, where the seats had been, ranks of boxed electronics were stacked like the hedges in a maze. Other than the boxes, the theatre was frozen in time—even the gilded cupids on the front of the dress balcony looked like they were waiting for the evening performance. Belladonna glanced up at the stage. The old scenery was piled at the back where she and Steve had left it, and the doorway “flat” that had been their first entry into the Land of the Dead lay on the stage where it had fallen when Belladonna had struggled with Steve’s mother. She could still make out the marks on the dusty stage floor where they had fought, though since October, new dust had settled over them like a drift of fresh snow. Soon any sign of their skirmish would be gone.

  Belladonna turned away from the stage, pushed her hair behind her ears, and walked slowly past the rows of boxes, peering down each narrow canyon, looking for Steve.

  All was silent.

  She strained to hear anything that would indicate someone was in here looking for something, which was, after all, what he was supposed to be doing.

  Nothing. She took another step forward and something cracked under her foot. It was only an old piece of plastic packing, but in the empty theatre, it sounded like a gunshot. Steve’s head shot up like a meerkat on the savannah.

  “I’m just getting them!” he said. “Oh, it’s you.”

  He disappeared once more behind the bastion of boxes. Belladonna sighed and made her way between the narrow rows to where Steve sat surrounded by the garish colors and detailed specs of DVD boxes and televisions, reading a comic and eating a packet of chips. He barely glanced up.

  “What do you want?” he said grimly.

  “What are you doing back here?” said Belladonna, ignoring his surly tone. “It’s freezing.”

  “Taking a break,” he muttered.

  “Your Dad said you were supposed to be bringing some stuff up to the shop.”

  Steve looked up darkly and Belladonna decided against pursuing the subject. This wasn’t going at all as she’d imagined, and it seemed like the best option was to forget about what Steve’s Dad wanted or had said or anything to do with the shop. She let her hair drop down from behind her ears, curtaining off her face until all that was visible were her dark eyes.

  “I found something,” she said finally. “Mum and Dad said it wasn’t anything, but…”

  Her voice trailed off. She suddenly felt really stupid standing there among all the boxes, talking about feathers.

  “Never mind,” she muttered. “Sorry.”

  She turned on her heel and started making her way back down the narrow canyon of boxes.

  “Wait!” said Steve.

  Belladonna ignored him. She wished she’d never come. She should have thrown the feather away like her mother said. She squeezed past some particularly large projection TV boxes and was just about to step out into what had been the theatre aisle when her way was suddenly blocked.

  “I’m … I’m sorry, okay?” said Steve, shoving his hands into his pockets. “It’s just…”

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Belladonna swung her backpack to the ground.

  “I found something,” she said, and proceeded to tell him about her grandmother’s new client and the mysterious feather.

  Steve seemed about to make some smart remark about people who went to séances in general and her grandmother’s clients in particular, but his expression changed when she got to the part about the feather. Belladonna thought he blanched slightly and she definitely saw a muscle in his jaw tighten.

  For her, much of last October’s adventure had been about discovering why Dr. Ashe had captured all the ghosts, trying to prevent the long-dead necromancer from opening a door to the Dark Spaces for the Empress to return, and realizing that she, Belladonna Johnson, really was the Spellbinder. But she knew that for Steve the most vivid memory was of the Night Raven’s poison scorching through his veins, and she suspected that he still woke up in the night with his heart pounding at the memory of hovering near death with the evil Dr. Ashe administering just enough antidote to keep him alive, but never enough to make him well.

  “No,” she said hastily, “I don’t think it’s a Night Raven. It’s too big.”

  She flipped open the top of her backpack and rummaged around. Where was it? Why was nothing ever easy? She threw her notebook, six packets of Parma Violets, and two cans of Tizer onto the floor, pushed aside the remains of last Wednesday’s sandwiches (some kind of nasty avocado spread), and finally retrieved the long, blue-black feather.

  Steve looked at it, then took it from her and turned it over slowly.

  “D’you think it could be a—”

  “A Kere?” It was the one thing that would be worse than Night Ravens, for the Kere had said she was the bringer of Death itself.

  “Yeah.” He handed it back. “But it couldn’t be. We killed her or sent her back to wherever she’d come from.”

  Belladonna nodded dubiously and bit her lip.

  “What?” said Steve, starting to get annoyed.

  “Don’t you remember what she said? She said she was one of the Keres, bringers of death. One of. What if there are more?”

  “More?”

  He made her feel that it was somehow her fault. She began shoving her belongings back into her backpack.

  “Did she have wings?” asked Steve as Belladonna slid the feather into a side pocket and zipped it closed. “The woman, I mean. The visitor. Could you tell?”

  “She was wearing a big black coat,” said Belladonna. “But … no, not that I saw.”

  “Well, she can’t have been a Kere, then, could she? I mean, you’d hardly miss wings that size, would you?”

  Belladonna looked at him. She was almost certain that a creature like a Kere would have no difficulty concealing her wings from mortal eyes, and she was just as certain that Steve knew that. But there was a sort of eagerness in his eyes, a desire for things to return to the way they had been before they found the Door. Could he really feel that way? Only a few months ago he’d joined her quest to find her parents on the Other Side with almost fearless glee. But perhaps that was the problem—she had found her parents, but he had returned to discover that his mother had gone. Just gone. In that ordinary human way that happened every day and that no amount of questing or adventure could fix.

  “No, you’re right,” she said, smiling. “I was just being silly, I suppose. She probably didn’t even drop it.”

  “You said it was nearly dark.”

  Belladon
na nodded and swung her bag over her shoulder. Steve walked with her to the front of the shop.

  “See you on Monday, then,” he said.

  “Yeah, see you,” said Belladonna and headed for home.

  A slow drizzle had started and the icy wind clawed at her face and ears. As she trudged up the street, she could hear Steve’s Dad asking him where the MP-whatsits were and what on earth he’d been doing in the storeroom all that time and didn’t he know that there was a sale on and he couldn’t see to every customer himself and …

  The sound of his voice gradually faded into the general babble of voices and sounds, and Belladonna walked quickly home, hoping that Steve was right but knowing that he wasn’t.

  3

  The Chair

  THE WEEKEND’S DRIZZLE had developed into a full-fledged downpour by Monday morning. Belladonna gazed grimly out of the kitchen window as she ate her cereal. Her father was leaning against the doorjamb, watching the steady rivulets of rainwater cascading down the kitchen window.

  “Sorry I can’t take you into school, Belladonna,” he sighed. “You’re going to get soaked through.”

  Belladonna smiled encouragingly. She knew her parents hated the fact that they couldn’t take more part in her life, but given that they were dead, she thought they did a pretty good job.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll just take an umbrella.”

  The umbrella was purple with two broken spokes and a small tear on one side. It did nothing to belie Belladonna’s image as a fashion disaster, but it did keep some of the rain off as she trudged through the gloomy streets to school.

  By the time she got there, she was freezing, her hair hanging down like rats’ tails and her shoes soaked through. She hung her coat and scarf on a hook in the cloakroom and made her way to the classroom. Sophie Warren and her friends were already there, of course, warming the backs of their legs on the radiator. Sophie’s Dad drove her to school every day, so she always looked flawless, though she was the kind of girl who never seemed to get ruffled at all. Netball, lacrosse, tennis, Sophie came through it all with the sleek aplomb of a supermodel. On days when outdoor sports combined with pouring rain and slicing wind, and every other girl in class ended up looking like they’d been dragged through a hedge backward, there was still hardly a hair out of place on Sophie’s blond head. Though Belladonna suspected that, given the opportunity, the Wild Hunt would easily take her down in a chase to the death. She smiled a little at the thought of Sophie running for her life, pursued by a howling mythological horde, horses and riders thundering out of the sky, their huge dogs baying beside them, but she was soon brought back to earth by the sound of barely suppressed giggles.