Magic Elizabeth (5 page)

Of the many doors on either side of the hall, the only ones Sally was sure about were her own, second from the end on the left side, and the bathroom, right next to it. Which one of all the others could be the door to the attic?

Sally opened the first door she came to. From the shadowy room behind it her own face looked out at her, and she heard a whisper of movement. Her heart gave a great thump. “The other Sally!” she thought. But it was only her own reflection in a tall gold-framed mirror that stood in the center of the room. There was nothing else at all in the room. The sun, coming through the drawn shades at two windows, made yellow rectangles of light upon the
bare wooden floor. It was the long curtains on the windows that had stirred at the opening of the door, and made the whispering sound that had frightened her. She drew a shaky breath and gently closed the door. She went on to the next room. In here she found a bed so high that a little pair of polished steps led up to it. A ruffled white canopy supported by slender posts seemed to be floating high above the bed. It was a bed such as she had seen before only in pictures, and it was very beautiful. A pale green rug of a soft furry material lay upon the polished floor, looking like the fur of some animal dreamed by whoever slept in that strange bed. A closet door stood slightly open, and stepping a little into the room, she peered into it. Something black was hanging there, swaying a little. The dress Aunt Sarah had worn yesterday! Then this was her room! The beautiful bed was her bed! She turned and ran the few steps to the door, and hurried out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

She opened the next door. A wooden stairway showed faintly in the light from the hall. It rose steeply up from the doorway and disappeared into the deeper darkness of what must be the attic. Sally could hear a tiny pattering sound somewhere up there. Her knees began to shake again, and she would have closed the door and scurried back downstairs had it not been for the doll. “She might be up
there,” she told herself, “she might.” But what would she do if she
did
find her? Aunt Sarah would never let her keep the doll. But she’d think about that later. There wasn’t much time. She could hear the grandfather clock ticking and ticking.

There was a light switch on the wall, and she clicked it on as she started up the stairs. A dull watery light appeared above her, but the attic was still much too dark for comfort. Heart pounding, she continued up the stairs. She heard the pattering sound again, and just then something soft brushed against her leg. She was so startled that she scarcely kept herself from falling. For one terrible moment she imagined that the green rug on Aunt Sarah’s floor had followed her. She stood there in a panic, not knowing which way to go, and then she saw that it was not the rug at all but Shadow, who had run ahead of her up the stairs. She looked up the long stairway. She could see dust drifting in clouds, slow and dreamlike in the faint light up there, and farther back the deep blackness into which Shadow had disappeared. She swallowed the lump in her throat and hesitated. She could hear Shadow moving around, bumping across the floor, and she was afraid of him, afraid of meeting his narrow green eyes staring at her from some dark corner —

But at that moment she heard the creak of the branches of the tall trees which grew over the
house, and then again the faint pattering. She looked up. The sound seemed to be coming from very high up, from the roof even. “Why,” she thought, “that must be squirrels. They must jump down from the trees and run across the roof.”

She took a deep breath and continued on up the stairs. Despite the light from the single bulb, which she could scarcely see far up in the dusty rafters, it was very dark. The tiny windows high up on the walls were so covered with dirt and cobwebs that it seemed the sun must never get through them. Another tall mirror, leaning against an old chest of drawers, reflected a dusty picture of herself, looking quite lost and bewildered beneath the heavy cobwebs which hung like gray lace from the rafters. She could hear Shadow again, chasing something across the floor. Nothing else at all was moving in that great silent house. Sally began to walk around the attic, peering into corners, behind old bureaus and broken cupboards, and chairs and sofas with the stuffing leaking out.

Pushed back against the walls there were a number of old-fashioned trunks, some tall and thin, with fancy golden keys protruding from their fronts. They looked like enormous musical toys that would begin playing a solemn sort of music if the keys were turned. Others were squat, their rounded tops stripped with brass. Sally, attracted by a faint
glimmer in one corner, approached it and found, hanging from a hook in the wall, a shimmering dress of silver sequins. It swayed as if it were dancing, and she touched it gently, wondering who had worn it. Surely not Aunt Sarah. Like the melodeon and the bed, it was far too pretty.

And just then, oddly enough, a finger of sunlight managed to make its faltering way through a tiny space in one of the cobwebbed windows. It shuddered across the attic and fell on a trunk, lighting up a small brass rectangle attached to the front of its rounded lid. Sally walked closer to the trunk and peered down at it. Something was written on the little brass plate, scratched into it. She bent closer, and rubbed at the dust that coated it. “Sally,” it said, in the finest, most delicate writing she had ever seen. It was just as if the trunk had spoken to her.

As if in a dream, she reached out and lifted the trunk’s heavy lid.

T
he trunk opened
with a faint, protesting screech. A puff of dust rose from its interior. Sally began to cough. She closed her eyes and waved her arms at the dust. When she opened her eyes, the dust had settled somewhat and she could see in the trunk, at the very top, the rather crumpled but still bright yellow bonnet that the other Sally was wearing in the painting. Trembling with excitement, she lifted the bonnet from the trunk and brushed at the fine dust that covered it. Carefully, she placed it upon her head. She found that it fitted her exactly. She ran over to the mirror, looked at herself, and tied the ribbons in a bow beneath her chin. Yes, it was the very bonnet in the picture, and she
did
look just like the other Sally, “except for the rest of my clothes,” she thought, looking down at her short skirt and saddle shoes. She could see a corner of the open trunk behind her in the mirror, and remembering that there were other things in it, she hurried back and reached again into the trunk. This time she brought out the pale blue dress in the picture, and then a lace-edged petticoat and a pair of high-buttoned shoes. She was laughing out loud with delight by now, and Shadow had come to watch her. He sat in a pale patch of sunlight on the dusty floor, blinking in a superior sort of way each time she laughed, as if he were warning, “You won’t be laughing for long.” But Sally was far too excited to worry about him now.

However, she did look anxiously toward the stairs for a minute, and she listened before removing her own clothes and putting on the others. But all that she could hear in the rest of the house was the steady ticking of the grandfather clock.

She found the shoes rather hard to manage. The little round buttons kept slipping from her fingers, and at last she left a number of them undone. She wondered how the other Sally had made them work. Everything, even the shoes, fitted perfectly. She ran to the mirror and could hardly believe what she saw. She looked just like the other Sally in the picture. “I
am
the other Sally!” she whispered. She swayed
back and forth, dreamily watching how the skirt swirled around her shoe tops. And as she swayed, she found that her hands were curving in front of her, as if they were holding something. The doll, she thought — that was the one part of the picture still missing.

The trunk! The doll had to be in the trunk! Oh, what if Aunt Sarah came back now! She ran frantically back to the trunk, leaned over its side, and reached again into its dark interior. Her hand closed upon something hard and slender, and she drew it out. She was holding the handle of a rolled silk parasol. She pressed the little button on the handle. Slowly the parasol creaked open, revealing layer after layer of pink ruffles. It was like watching a rosebud open. How pretty it looked, blooming there in the dark attic. “Did the other Sally carry the parasol on sunny days?” she wondered.

But she put it down almost immediately and took up the search for the doll, feeling that at any moment she might hear Aunt Sarah’s footsteps downstairs.

This time she began throwing things helter-skelter from the trunk, shawls and muffs, dresses and gloves. She even found a doll, but the wrong doll entirely — a very nice doll with a china face and brown hair, but not at all the one she wanted. She felt like crying with disappointment as she laid
her gently upon the growing pile of clothes on the attic floor.

At last there was nothing else at all in the trunk. She was ready to put everything back when she noticed, way at the very bottom in a dark corner, a small book. She leaned over the side of the trunk, picked the book up, and brought it out. The covers of the book were of soft brown leather, and there were some letters stamped on it in gold. But because it was quite dark where she was sitting, she could not read them. She looked around the attic for a spot where there might be a little more light, and found that Shadow was still sitting in the small pool of thin sunlight that made its way through one of the dusty windows. Sally looked uncertainly at him, and then walked over and sat down next to him. She held the little book into the light. Stamped upon the cover was the word DIARY, and beneath it, 1899. Sally opened the soft cover and looked at the first page. “Sally” was written there. The yellowed old page seemed to be whispering her name in a graceful handwriting which had faded over the years to a very faint brown. Beneath the name was written, “Age ten.”

“Why, she was my age,” Sally thought, and she turned the brittle old page with trembling fingers. “January First” read the printing at the top of this page. The writing beneath it looked almost golden
in the faint light. The words seemed to have been very carefully formed, and with their pretty loops and swirls they gave a lacy appearance to the page. Here and there the words had tumbled and spilled a bit over the faded blue lines of the paper. As she sat there on the attic floor, reading what the other Sally had written so long ago, Sally felt almost as if the other Sally was speaking to her, and that if she was, her voice would sound just the way the pretty golden handwriting looked. Perhaps, she thought, the other Sally had written this page with the feather pen on the desk in her room, sitting there on a day like this one, tickling her cheek with the tip of the feather and thinking …

But no, it wouldn’t have been a day like this at all — it was New Year’s Day, and maybe it was snowing …

“Dear Diary,” the other Sally had begun, “I will write something every day. It snowed and snowed all day, and yesterday too. Mama says we will be snowbound if it continues. I do hope so, for then I will not go to school. But I suppose I would take my lessons with Mama. It is cozy inside with Mama and Papa and little Bub. He is my baby brother and we call him Bub because he makes bubbling sounds with his mouth. Mrs. Perkins helps my mama to care for him. She is very funny, because she calls everyone, even kittens, ‘dear little things.’ My Aunt
Tryphone lives here too and she is very old. Her father knew George Washington when he was President, but I do wish she would not say it so much. I was playing with my rag doll Elizabeth [so that was the doll’s name, thought Sally — Elizabeth!] in my bedroom tonight, and Mama came and said that she had a surprise in the kitchen. It was a wonderful surprise! My black cat, Mrs. Niminy Piminy, has three new kittens! Their eyes are not open yet. I gave one of them to Elizabeth, and we played by the fire in the kitchen. Elizabeth’s cat is named Tom, and he is black like Mrs. Niminy Piminy. I think that Elizabeth and Tom will be good friends.”