Spellbinder Read online

  “Horrible little man,” she muttered. “In my day, I wouldn’t have let the likes of him cross the threshold. Off you go.”

  Belladonna turned and walked to the door. She glanced back to see if Mary was still there. She was.

  “Don’t forget to tell the Spellbinder about the baby!”

  Belladonna nodded and followed the round man down the stairs, through the Great Hall, and out to the car park.

  “Come on, Johnson!” shouted Mr. Watson. “Pick up your feet! Stop dragging along. I’ve never known a girl for hanging back like you.”

  He hustled her onto the bus, quickly counted heads, and nodded to the driver that they were ready to go. The engine coughed into action and the old bus heaved itself out of the car park. Belladonna looked back at the house through the streaky window. There was nothing to see, just the same dark, mullioned windows, the dip in the lawn where the moat had once been, and the gleaming white and deep black of the half-timbered walls.

  And then it was gone, and they were surrounded by the concrete and brick of the modern city. Belladonna sighed. Sometimes it really did seem as though she spent more time talking to dead people than living ones. But it was so confusing. And who (or what) on earth was the “Spellbinder”?

  The bus screeched to a halt in front of the school. Which was an improvement over the driver on the last trip. That driver had zoomed past Dullworth’s and was headed for the city center before Mr. Morris (who had taken them to the depressing computer assembly plant) had looked up from his science magazine and realized that they were severely off course.

  Of course, Dullworth’s was the sort of place it was easy to pass by without ever realizing it was a school. It had been started over a hundred years before by two elderly, energetic sisters who couldn’t understand why boys got to learn interesting things like History and Latin, and girls only got training in sewing, singing, and simpering. But the Dullworth sisters were not the sort who sat around bemoaning the status quo—they were the sort who leapt to their feet and marched about demanding change and scaring the horses. So they bought a house in what was then a quiet part of town and started a school for girls. Eventually the school expanded to occupy three Victorian houses connected by rickety covered walkways, and as the years passed, it finally admitted boys as well. But it still looked like a row of houses, and it felt rather like that too.

  Each house had been adapted with classrooms where living rooms, parlors, and bedrooms had once been, but there was always the feeling that you were wandering around some vast gothic mansion and sooner or later the owner would turn up and demand to know what on earth you were doing there. The hallways were wide and boasted high ceilings and elegant plasterwork, while the classrooms ranged from splendid rooms with views across the grounds to tiny garrets whose windows let out onto the gray rooftops. Staircases popped up everywhere, from the broad flights that led to the science labs and the Head’s office, to narrow, twisting back stairs that had once been the haunt of servants. Even the school hall had once been a ballroom and had a vast domed ceiling, painted midnight blue and stuck all over with large gold-painted plaster stars that periodically crashed to the floor in a hail of dust and tinsel, leaving pale gaps in the artificial firmament.

  The rest of the day was fairly ordinary: English Lit., French, and double P.E. (which Belladonna did manage to spend in the sick bay—Miss Gunnerson was much more credulous than Mr. Watson). And then it was over and a horde of screaming kids raced out of school and into the late autumn dusk.

  Belladonna dawdled home, glancing in shop windows and pausing at the sweet shop on the corner to buy a packet of Parma Violets, pore over the magazines, and pick up a newspaper for her father.

  Then she walked past the old launderette. It had stopped being a launderette over a year ago, though all the machines were still inside. But it wasn’t the rather grubby battalions of old washers and dryers that interested Belladonna; it was Mr. Baxter.

  Mr. Baxter had apparently owned the shop a long time ago, and he had never left it. When he appeared in the window, the washers, dryers, soap dispensers, and slowly curling notices about the proprietor’s lack of responsibility in the event that one of his machines ate anyone’s clothes seemed to slowly fade away, and the bare blue walls turned a kind of yellow ochre and gradually filled with shelves from floor to ceiling. Every shelf was laden with bottles, jars, and pots of all shapes and sizes. Belladonna could see a long polished oak counter at the very back of the shop with what looked like a bright brass tea urn taking pride of place. The front window seemed to become misty, and she could just make out “. . . pothec . . .” in very fancy gold lettering across the wavy glass, from which she deduced that Mr. Baxter must have been an apothecary.

  She liked Mr. Baxter. He was rather elderly with an impressive head of snowy white hair on top of which perched a red pillbox hat with a large black tassel. He wore a dark red coat, a fine yellow waistcoat, and a splendid black cravat at the neck of his freshly starched shirt.

  The first time she saw him he had been at the back of the shop behind the counter and hadn’t seemed very pleased to be seen. She had looked away quickly and hurried home. But since then he had become much more friendly. He always seemed to be tidying up his window display and always waved cheerily at Belladonna as she passed, as if she were a regular customer. At first, the smile had seemed odd, as if the muscles in his face were unused to stretching upward, and Belladonna thought she caught a glint of something cold in his eyes. She walked past as quickly as she could, but then she noticed that he seemed ever so slightly disappointed.

  And why wouldn’t he? she thought. The poor man might not even realize he’s dead. And if she went for nearly two hundred years without seeing another face, maybe her cheek muscles would seize up too.

  She began to feel guilty, as if he were a sick relative who she hadn’t visited in the hospital, so one day (after looking around carefully to make sure no one was watching) she smiled back. It seemed to cheer him up no end, and for some reason it cheered her up too. So now she made sure she walked past every day, with her newspaper and her Parma Violets, and no matter how glum she’d been feeling or how dull school had been, Mr. Baxter always made her feel better.

  He was there today, true to form, and she waved and he waved back and she carried on with a slightly lighter step, down the High Street, past the church and the graveyard, and up to number 65 Lychgate Lane.

  “She’s home!”

  Her father poked his head out of the sitting room. And that was the problem right there, really.

  Where most fathers would have poked their heads out of the sitting room door, Mr. Johnson poked his right through the middle of the wall.

  “Did you bring the paper?”

  Belladonna looked at him reprovingly. He immediately vanished back into the sitting room and reappeared in the doorway.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot. Did you bring the paper?”

  “Honestly, Dad, anyone passing by could’ve seen you through the window!”

  He took the paper and turned back into the sitting room with a shrug.

  “No one can see me. Only you.”

  Belladonna followed him in, exasperated.

  “Gran can see you. Lots of people can see ghosts; you see them talking about it on the telly all the time.”

  “Charlatans,” muttered her father, settling down an inch above his favorite chair.

  Belladonna grunted, dumped her bag near the fire, and meandered back to the kitchen. It was a hive of activity. Pans on the stove were busily stirring themselves while bread was being sliced and buttered on the counter and plates were flying out of the cabinet and setting themselves on the table. Her mother was in a corner, examining a recipe book with some consternation.

  Elspeth Johnson was everything her daughter was not; she was tall and willowy and always impeccably put together. Her hair never slid out of place over one eye or started the day sticking up on one side, and her clothes were never rumpled. A
nd that was when she was alive. Now that she was dead, she was an absolute fashion plate. Belladonna hoped that she was going through an awkward stage and would grow up just like her mother but in her heart of hearts, she knew she never would.

  “Hello, darling,” beamed her mother. “Did you have a nice day at school?”

  “We went on a trip,” said Belladonna, helping herself to some bread and butter.

  “That’s nice.”

  “To Arkbath Hall.”

  “Oh, how lovely!” Elspeth looked up from her book. “Did you see Lady Mary?”

  Belladonna nodded.

  “I remember seeing her when I was your age. She had all sorts of useful advice about making beer and jam. Darling, could you taste that big pan and tell me if it’s right? I used to make this all the time when I was alive, but not being able to eat anything is such a handicap when you’re cooking.”

  Belladonna slouched over to the stove, grabbed the spoon in mid-stir, and had a taste. Her face wrinkled up.

  “There’s no salt in it!”

  Elspeth slammed the book closed. “Of course! I don’t know where my memory’s gone.”

  The salt pot slid across the counter, opened itself, and slipped a teaspoon of salt into the pan. The spoon stirred enthusiastically. Belladonna watched it for a moment. When her parents had first manifested after the accident, she had thought that perhaps they’d become magical and all sorts of wonderful things were going to happen. But they weren’t magic, they were just ghosts with all the usual ghostly skills (walking through walls, floating, moving inanimate objects, appearing and disappearing), but no really magical ones. And while the ghostly skills had seemed pretty impressive at first, Belladonna had to admit that they’d become a bit annoying.

  “Mum . . .” she said finally.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Lady Mary said that her baby had vanished.”

  “Really?” Elspeth paused for a moment. “He wasn’t in the cradle?”

  “No, she said he vanished two days ago. She said I should tell the Spellbinder.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary, dear,” said her mother, but she looked thoughtful.

  “Who’s the Spellbinder?”

  Elspeth looked at her for a moment, then smiled and nodded toward the clock on the wall. “Dinner in five minutes,” she said cheerily. “Get your coat off and tell your father it’s ready.”

  Belladonna glowered at her mother. Her parents were always doing this: not even bothering to make something up, but just changing the subject whenever she started talking about something that they didn’t want to think about. Or didn’t want her to think about. Which had the opposite effect, of course.

  She trudged out to get her father.

  Dinner consisted of everyone sitting down at the table, but only Belladonna actually eating. It was a pretty dreary experience from their daughter’s point of view, but Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were great believers in the family dinner and just because they were no longer corporeal, they saw no reason to let things slide.

  They were halfway through the beef stroganoff when there was a cold blast of air from the front door.

  “It’s just me!”

  The door slammed shut and Belladonna’s grandmother strode purposefully into the kitchen. She did everything purposefully, like one of those country ladies who are always walking the dogs or returning from the hunt. She looked like one of them too.

  Jessamine Johnson was all tweeds and sensible shoes. She had her hair done once a week by a man in town who created a helmet of gray curls that didn’t budge an inch between one appointment and the next, and she wore a pair of bright gold glasses with a fine chain that kept them from falling to the floor. But Grandma Johnson was anything but sensible.

  “Hello, everyone!” she said, kissing the top of Belladonna’s head on the way to the sink. “That front gate is absolutely filthy. Look at me, I’m covered in it!”

  She washed her hands and turned around.

  “Well, don’t you look glum, Miss Johnson. How was school today?”

  “Fine,” said Belladonna with no enthusiasm at all.

  “They went to Arkbath Hall,” volunteered her mother.

  “Did you now?” Grandma Johnson retrieved a bottle of wine from the fridge and pulled a chair up to the table. “Did you see Lady Mary?”

  Belladonna nodded. She wished she was upstairs pretending to do her homework instead of down here talking about dead people.

  “What did she say? Did she tell you about beer and jam?”

  Belladonna stared at her plate.

  “Oh, I see, one of those evenings, is it?”

  “She told her she didn’t throw the baby out of the window,” said her mother.

  Grandma Johnson humphed and took rather more than a sip of her wine. She gave Belladonna the beady eye and then started to recount her own day in second-by-second detail.

  Belladonna got up and started clearing the table. She opened the dishwasher and rinsed off the dishes under the tap. As she put each one down on the counter, her mother whisked them into the dishwasher without touching them or even breaking the stride of her conversation with Grandma Johnson.

  “. . . and that Jane Lee came in this afternoon,” said Grandma. “You remember her, don’t you, Elspeth? Small, dumpy woman with absolutely appalling bad breath. Well, she—”

  They were destined never to know what Jane Lee had done because at that moment there was an almighty crash as a plate, a cup, and one of the best glasses missed their slots in the dishwasher and hit the tile floor.

  Silence.

  Elspeth Johnson stared at the mess, while everyone else stared at her.

  “How odd,” she finally said. “That’s never happened before.”

  “Are you alright?” whispered Belladonna.

  “Yes, it’s just . . .” She looked at her husband. “It felt as if someone walked over my grave.”

  Belladonna started to clear up the mess. Mr. Johnson patted his wife’s hand.

  “Well, you know, dear,” he said soothingly, “maybe they did.”

  The rest of the evening went by as usual, but Belladonna noticed that her parents kept glancing at each other in that way that always meant something was going on. Later, as she lay in bed, she couldn’t help thinking about the night everything changed. Or at least, the bits of it she could remember.

  She had been in the car. In the back seat. They’d spent the day at a friend of her parents’ in Wales, and it was late. They’d played “I Spy” and then sung for a while, and talked about the horrible dinner and how Phyllida’s peas were always like titanium bullets. But then she’d fallen asleep.

  And that was all she could remember until the hospital. The doctors said that it was normal for people not to remember after they’d been in an accident, but Belladonna was sure that she would have remembered. How could you not remember something that changed your life so completely?

  And she remembered everything else. The somber faces, the sympathetic stares, the funeral, and the graveyard. She remembered the faces of everyone at school the first day she went back: sad and sorry but not knowing what to say, so saying nothing.

  And she remembered coming over with her Gran to pick up a few clothes and discovering that Mum and Dad hadn’t gone at all, but that the rules of haunting meant that they couldn’t leave the house. They were almost the same, just ever so slightly monochromatic, as if she were always looking at them through a hazy window. There were no hugs any more, of course, but other than that, everything was as it had been.

  Belladonna rolled over and looked out of the window at the clear night sky. She didn’t want to lose them again.

  Then it happened.

  It only took a second, but as she looked up from her bed, thinking her morose thoughts, the stars went out.

  They came back on again right away, but there was no doubt that for just a moment, the sky was completely, totally black.

  She jumped out of bed and ran to the windo
w. She expected to see the street outside full of neighbors, to hear the clatter of concerned voices, but there was nothing except a small movement near the bushes on the other side of the street, which she was pretty sure was just somebody’s dog. It was as if she were the only one who saw it.

  But she wasn’t. The sound of raised voices floated up from downstairs. She crept to the door and opened it a crack, but her parents had apparently realized that they were talking too loudly and the discussion subsided into urgent whispers. She strained to hear for a while and then slipped back to the window to look at the sky. All was as it was supposed to be: The stars were in their places, the planets in theirs, and the only thing punctuating the tediously static propriety of it all was the occasional shooting star.

  Elsie

  THE THING ABOUT going to school is that it doesn’t give you enough time to think about the important stuff. One moment you’re mulling issues like why on earth all the stars would flicker on and off like a giant celestial night-light, and the next you’re being paired off with Steve Evans for Chemistry and arguing about why the Bunsen burner won’t light.

  Of course, that wasn’t the main problem. The main problem was that he refused to take any interest in the experiment they were supposed to be doing and instead made something that he said would make a “small bang.”

  Which is how they both came to be sitting outside the Headmistress’s office. Miss Parker was not going to be amused. Belladonna glowered at Steve, who was used to being sent to the Office and was gazing about without a care in the world. Steve was tall for his age, with dishwater-blond hair that looked like it was cut by his mother (which it was). He always seemed to have a scratch or scab from some scuffle or other somewhere, and the school uniform never looked as scruffy as when he was wearing it. Steve was always in some kind of trouble, whether it was not doing his homework, tormenting the members of the chess club, or wandering off school property at lunchtime, but he was far from stupid, which frustrated his teachers and irritated his parents. Steve took it all in stride with a sort of “this-too-shall-pass” attitude that made it all but impossible for anyone to motivate him to do anything at all.