By Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
Chapter Eleven "Further In"
Granny, Sarah, and Barnabas (who seemed more resigned than surprised to hear that magical enemies resided in Traeshurstaene) discussed the possible implications of Granny Pansy's insights. Granny Pansy backed off of her assertion that "enemies" were aware of Sarah. Perhaps Sarah had merely roused the old magic inadvertently. And then again, perhaps not. Granny felt they needed to be certain before they could proceed. She hadn't lived in the town herself in several years. She would have to get "the lay of the land," as she said before she could know how to proceed in these magical matters. That's what she had been doing with the cauldron, trying to create a window into current events--a sort of way of going "through the mirror," as she put it. But all she had been able to discern was a fog in the other realm, dim activity taking place in a thickening mist. An occasional figure bobbed closer to the surface now and again, but not with any reliable clarity.
"You're quite strong yourself, child," Granny noted. "Your voice has grown into a surgical dagger, and can cut through in any direction. Such a skill, used without training, might on its own arouse the Gods of Autumn, or hurry along some sequence of events."
"My voice?" inquired Sarah. "You mean just because I was singing their names, the Gods of Autumn are reappearing?"
"Well, it may be child. The old gods are always just under the surface of things, anxious for any chance to break back into the world of active mischief."
"Can that truly be so?" doubted Barnabas. "I didna see naught, as I told ye. And Sarah herself was sort of tranced, as if sleepwalkin'."
"Hmm," mused Granny Pansy. "The gods' careless havoc is just the sort of sowing of confusion that our enemies would delight in."
"Are you sure you're not leap-froggin' yer guesses, Gram Tone?"
"No," she admitted. "I am not sure. I'm not sure at all. What we need is some hard intelligence, and not this frivolous guesswork."
Granny Pansy had put her hat on a chair and was pacing the kitchen nervously, hands clasped behind her back. The sight of her Granny Pansy looking so uncertain was in many ways the scariest thing Sarah had seen yet.
"Well," said Granny Pansy finally. "Why don't you and Abbey go play outside after you've had a shower and cleaned up from your misadventure, young lady. And when you do go outside, wear that pendant on the outside of your blouse. Barnabas, keep an eye on those two, would you please? I have to go into town for a little while and pick up some supplies and whatnot. I'll take Dar with me."
"Granny Pansy, can't I come into town with you? I don't want hang around and play with Abbey."
"Why not, she's your cousin. And you've hardly had any time to get to know each other. Why, when I was a girl, my cousin Charlie and I had all sorts of adventures all over Traeshurstaene. Those are memories that I still value, and lessons that I could've learned in no other way, my dear."
"All right," moped Sarah, who knew better than to argue with her grandmother.
"I'll keep an eye on the pair o' them," promised Burrbuckle.
* * * *
"We'll go no farther than the Crossamum Falls," Barnabas Burrbuckle informed Sarah and Abbey as their Grandmother drove away in her son's ramshackle station wagon. "I've promised yer Grammum."
Sarah and Abbey looked about as thrilled as a pair of pooches in the dog pound.
"Barnabas, as long as we're going to be spending the day playing together, would it be all right if I called up Missy and had her come over too?"
"And Shelly too," added Abbey quickly.
"Yes, and Shelly too," agreed Sarah.
"Well, I don't know," thought Barnabas aloud. "Yer Grammum didna say one way or t'other about having more friends come by."
"Well, if she didn't say ..." began Sarah.
"Then its up to you," finished Abbey.
Barnabas looked at the empty driveway where Ganny Pansy had just left.
"Its just a couple of friends," said Sarah persuasively.
* * * *
The four girls were chatting away like a brood of birds as they skipped along ahead of the lumbering Barnabas Burrbuckle. Occasionally a ripple of giggles would flit through them as they enjoyed the cold afternoon. They all had good hats and coats on, but Barnabas made sure that Sarah kept her pendant plainly visible on the outside of her clothing.
The afternoon went by before any of them were aware of it, including Barnabas, who enjoyed watching over the girls with a sort of Dutch uncle's indulgence. Before any of them expected, they could hear the gurgling sound of Crossamum Falls just beyond the next turn in the road. It was that very waterfall from which the fabled Aedh was said to have leaped when her true love was slain in battle.
"Look!" noticed Missy Quicknass, running ahead and away from the path toward a low stone wall that ran along the dirt roadway. "An overturned turtle! Let's get him right side up again."
The other girls gathered to Missy's side swiftly. They were examining the markings on the underside of the turtle's shell. It was a very large turtle, at least two and a half feet in diameter. Barnabas looked down with a mild curiosity, making sure that this wasn't a snapping turtle that might mistake a little girl's finger for a tasty worm.
The turtle's slow legs rotated at the four quarters of its shell, churning mildly in the crisp autumn air. "There's where he went awry," noted Barnabas, pointing at a sloped rock in front of the tortoise, leading through what seemed to be a large break in the stone wall. "He fell off of his sunning stone, I've little enough doubt."
The girls knelt down by the opening, trying unsuccessfully to shove the turtle over, while Barnabas got to his knees, and lifting the heavy tortoise easily, set it on its legs in the grass. Once having regained its freedom, the turtle set off sluggishly. Just as the children were about to set off down the path again themselves, out-racing the turtle in a few skipping strides, Barnabas caught sight of something that disturbed him through the crevice in the wall.
"He walks kind of like Mr. Burrbuckle," said Missy, looking at the turtle. The other girls all laughed. They were in high spirits, thrilled to be only under the permissive purview of Barnabas.
"Oh," chuckled Abbey, doing a fair, if squeaky, impression of Burrbuckle herself. "I wouldna say he's all that slow-footed."
"Hush now," came in Barnabas in a harsh whisper. "There's them that we wouldna want ta hear us just across the way now."
The girls immediately fell silent and crowded close to the wall. Five pairs of eyes looked across an empty backyard at an ungainly Victorian house that perched on a sandy hilltop, with one crooked, bare tree beside it. Four long shadows marched down the slope toward Barnabas and the children, crossing to a basement entrance at the side of the house in the gathering dusk. Two black cars had moments before swum into view along the noisy gravel drive. It was the loud sound of the cars' rapid braking that had first alerted Barnabas to the fact that someone was on the other side of the wall. There looked to be three adults and a child. Between two of the larger figures, a long box was being handled. It seemed to be quite heavy, causing the men to walk with deeply bent knees. All of them could hear the basement entrance clang shut with a shudder. After a few more moments, when no one else appeared from the cars, the girls began to pepper Barnabas with questions.
"Who is that?" started Abbey.
"Why must we stay secret from them?" added Shelly, looking bemused by Barnabas Burrbuckle's continuing to stoop lower than the stone wall.
"Are they the enemy?" asked Sarah tensing up visibly in her crouch.
"What enemies are you talking about, Sarah," said Missy, clearly astonished to hear such a word. The other girls turned surprised faces toward Sarah, who continued to look intently at Barnabas, hoping against hope that he would tell her "No." For clearly, these must be the very people they were warned against at the breakfast table. And for all his doubting then, Barnabas had taken every syllable of Granny Pansy's warnings with utter seriousness. When Sarah didn't answer, the girls all turned toward Barnabas too, and looked up into his large, kind but impassive face like so many flowers turned toward the sun.
"Well, now," said Barnabas slowly. "We'd best be on toward home."
The girls waited to see if Barnabas would add anything to this laconic summation. But when he continued silent, and made as if to turn back up the road, the girls all erupted in a sing-song of protest.
"Hush now. Hush now!" Barnabas commanded. But it was too late. None of the girls would stay quiet until they at least got some answers. None, that is, except Sarah, who looked fixedly through the gathering shadows at the narrow house up the slope.
"I may as well tell you what is there, so that you'll all agree to go back quietly," Barnabas began. "A peep's as good as a roar when yer bein' hunted, me Da always said."
Barnabas gave the girls an abbreviated lowdown on what had been happening to Sarah.
"You mean all that's happened to you, and you haven't breathed a word to me!" said Missy, thoroughly offended. "Well, you won't keep me out of your adventures any longer, I'll tell you."
"Adventures?" said Sarah, incredulous at her friend's attitude. "Are you insane? You don't have any idea what those people in there could be doing."
"Well, neither do you," Missy countered reasonably. "And neither do any of us. What do we know about magic?"
The other girls looked at Missy with blank faces.
"What we need to do," she continued, also reasonably, "is investigate."
In moments, all the girls had taken up Missy's cause. All except for Sarah, that is. Sarah stood quietly looking at the house, now black in the spreading twilight. The full moon was on the wan. The only light coming from the house was a twinkling glimmer in a single basement window.
"Well, Sarah," began Barnabas. "You mun say. Its your fate more'n ours what goes on in yonder house. I'll abide by your decision. Toward home, or to the house?"
Sarah didn't turn or make any gesture that acknowledged Mr. Burrbuckle's words. She continued to contemplate the house in the distance. Finally, she said, quite simply, but with a look the seemed as if she was about to vomit, "the house."
"Bravely said, Sarah" approved Missy.
"More'n you are like to know," said Barnabas with a quiet respect. Sarah began to move through the crack in the wall, and Barnabas put his hand out in front of her. "No, that's not to happen. I'll go first, crawlin' and sidewinding up the slope to the winder. When I get there, I'll signal for you lot to come on up after." The girls all nodded in unison. "If I don't get fried by some wizard's lightning bolt, that is," he ended with a grim smile.
"If anything happens, anything at all, even if its just a fox slippin' through the underbrush, you lot just high-tail it back to the main road, and flag down a car to take you all home."
And with that, the ungainly laborer put his cap in the front pocket of his jacket, and slithered through the narrow opening just as gamely as a snake. The girls watched him carefully, and were impressed by the fact that, even though they were watching him the entire time, they still lost track of him in the high grass and shadows no less than three times. They were all surprised when, several long minutes later, they saw his outline waving his cap in the flickering light thrown by the basement window. The girls threw themselves down in the grass and tried their best to imitate the expert infiltration that Barnabas had just demonstrated for them.
The girls lay in a deflated semi-circle around Barnabas, flat on the ground, their legs splayed. They had chosen their spots carefully, and if anyone had looked out from that basement window, the most they would have thought they saw were ten blinking fireflies clinging to the frosted grass.
Inside the basement, Mr. Plimsoul and his lady friend from the Political Committee meeting were bowing with great concentration over the long box that had been carried in earlier. It was set on a pair of sawhorses, and was as slick and black as a coffin. Around the pair, and around the coffin-like box, strode Mr. Hecatomb and a small, very ugly, man. They were holding braziers of incense, which let our thin streams of scented smoke that penetrated even the night air outside where the girls and Barnabas lay watching.
"What is that stuff made of," hissed Missy Quicknass, unable to stop herself from commenting. "It smells like burnt rattlesnakes."
Just at that moment, the woman in the basement straightened up. She looked around with a whiplike speed. She seemed to ask a question imperiously of all within the basement. Her boa, the same she'd had on the other week, writhed with a sinewy agitation as if alive.
Everyone on the lawn held their breaths. It would not do to have such a woman notice your existence.
Mr. Plimsoul turned his head, and seemed to say a few sharp words over his shoulder. The woman looked subtly annoyed by his insolence, but after a considered moment, snapped her own command at the dwarf and then turned back to face the box with Plimsoul.
The dwarf put down his brazier laboriously on the floor of the basement, and then stepped nimbly over to a corner neither the girls nor Barnabas had a view of, and then returned with a peeling ladder which he put up against the wall with a startling clack. In a moment, they could all see his hideous face pressed up against the basement window. After a short struggle with the latch, the window opened inward; a brown cloud of smoke huffed from the low window. Missy coughed involuntarily, suppressing it as much as she was able.
"Gar," said the dwarf. "Its a night to catch leeches in."
None of those lying in the grass knew why such a night was a good one to catch leeches in, but apparently, the dwarf would rather have the room full of the hideous smoke they were generating in the ornate braziers than the clean night air. Now, at least, the children and Barnabas could hear the conversation happening in the basement with relative ease.
END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN