Spellbinder (22 page)

“The living girl,” he said. “You are playing a dangerous game.”

Belladonna tried to conceal her disappointment; Slackett was definitely at the bottom of her list of potentially helpful people. She wasn’t sure if it was even worth mentioning the problem.

“Something has happened,” said Slackett, his eyes narrowing in his angular face. “What have you done?”

“Nothing,” said Belladonna. “That is . . . Steve is . . . I think he’s stuck.”

“Who is . . . ? Ah, the boy who is frightened of creepy-crawlies. The Paladin.”

“You keep saying that,” said Belladonna. “What do you mean?”

“You are the Spellbinder,” said Slackett. “Stands to reason he’s the Paladin.”

Belladonna stared at him for a moment. The Spellbinder—Lady Mary had mentioned the Spellbinder; she had seemed to expect the Spellbinder to help somehow and to know what to do. It couldn’t be her—Slackett was either confused or deliberately winding her up.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “Really, I’m not. Look, he went through the door again and I was stopped and now the door is broken.”

Slackett grinned. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “The game is too dangerous. Ashe is—”

Before he could tell her what Ashe was, his face suddenly changed. He looked down.

“No!” His voice was suddenly hoarse and its smug simper had given way to the unmistakable strain of
fear. Belladonna slowly became aware that he was sinking into the earth. She instinctively ran forward.

“No!” he yelled, his voice suddenly strong. “Don’t leave the circle! It’s your only hope.”

“But—”

Shafts of light began to spring up beneath him, as if he had broken through the ceiling of a room below. As he continued to sink, he scrabbled in his pockets. “Here,” he said, “take this. Give it to the Paladin. He will know what to do with it.”

He threw something small toward her. It seemed dark and heavy when it landed at her feet, but when she picked it up, it was nothing but a rather beaten-up six-inch plastic ruler.

“I don’t understand!” she yelled.

“He will,” shouted Slackett as the ground reached his shoulders. “He will! Keep it safe! Don’t let my master see it! Don’t let—”

But it was too late. He had disappeared beneath the soil and where he had stood, there was nothing but a shaft of greenish light. Belladonna watched as the light stretched up toward the tops of the trees, then began to fall again, like the water from a fountain. An inexplicable sensation of gloom gripped her stomach and she stepped back toward the center of the circle. The light continued to fall, then stopped at about six feet and formed itself into a familiar shape.

Dr. Ashe looked up slowly. Belladonna hadn’t remembered him looking quite so gaunt and unfriendly;
she couldn’t believe that this was really the same person she had waved to on her way home from school.

“You certainly are a clever girl,” he said, smiling. “If a very foolish one.”

Belladonna couldn’t speak. Her mouth felt dry and her breath was coming in gasps. She held up the book by way of explanation.

“Ah, my book!” Ashe stepped forward. “Of course, the spell to call the Dead. How very enterprising. Now, did you find the amulet?”

Belladonna stared at him and shook her head slowly. A part of her had been clinging to the hope that Dr. Ashe, while irritable and somewhat pompous, would still turn out to be alright, in spite of what the Sibyl had said, and that he really was looking for a solution to the vanishing ghosts. But seeing him here now in the graveyard, with his steely glare and rictus smile, she suddenly knew that the oracle had been right and that the worst thing she could do was to let him know that Steve had the amulet and was lost in the Land of the Dead.

“I summoned you. I—I want to know . . .” she began nervously.

“You did not summon me,” said Ashe, with the unmistakable dripping sarcasm of the worst kind of Math teacher. “You issued a general call to the Dead. You got Slackett. He always was easily led. I merely followed his trail.”

“I want to know—” repeated Belladonna, but Ashe was having none of it.

“
You
want to know?” boomed Ashe. “I don’t give a fig what you want! What are your desires to me? You have my property. Return it at once.”

“No,” Belladonna shook her head firmly. “It isn’t yours. It belonged to the dragon.”

Dr. Ashe looked taken aback for a moment, then smiled his thin, humorless smile again. “And I suppose your shoes still belong to the cow who gave his hide to make them?”

“Well, no, but . . . we saw the Sibyl. I asked her about you. She said one word:
phatês
. Liar.”

“Hmph,” said Dr. Ashe. “I never liked that woman.”

Belladonna felt more confident and took a step closer to the edge of the circle.

“You don’t want to find out what happened to the ghosts,” she said. “You don’t need to. I think you made them vanish in the first place.”

Dr. Ashe looked at her as if he was considering a response, but after a few moments he clearly decided not to bother: The smile fell from his face and his voice became heavy with menace. “Idiot child,” he hissed, “give me the amulet.”

“No.”

He nodded slightly, then lowered his head, stepped closer to the circle, and began muttering words which she couldn’t quite hear. As his lips moved, the
whispered words seemed to seep into her head and grow louder, blocking everything else out of her mind. Belladonna knew it was some kind of counterspell to break the circle, and shook her head sharply to try to clear her brain. She stumbled back to the center of the circle and began frantically turning the pages of the book, looking for something, anything, that would make him go away, but Ashe just kept coming, closer and closer to the circle, and she knew, in spite of everything the book had said, that he would be able to cross inside and that she was anything but safe. Yet even as she knew it and even as she knew that her only hope was to find something in the book, the words and figures on the pages began to dance and fade before her eyes. The murmured words were becoming more than one voice, more than ten; it felt like a thousand tongues were crying urgently in her brain, but none was speaking loud enough to hear, each was just an endless supplication without reason or hope.

She shook her head again and tears started stinging in her eyes as she realized that the battle she was fighting was hopeless and the light of life was closing into a narrow tunnel. She looked down, and with what she knew would be her last living glimpse, saw the wet green grass glistening in the moonlight, and the silver bell with its still undulating decoration.

A particle of hope glimmered in her mind, and she summoned the last speck of strength she still possessed, took a deep breath, gritted her teeth, and kicked the
bell out of the circle. It was a titanic effort, and it took all she had. She saw the bell fly across the graveyard and dimly heard it clank as it hit something not far from the yew tree.

And then all was black.

The first thing that woke up was her sense of touch, then her sense of smell: the feel of the wet grass on her back, the smell of rain and the faint aroma of burning wood.

Belladonna opened her eyes. It was still night. The moon was still high in the sky and the freezing breeze reeled around the church spire and whipped down into the graveyard. She sat up. The circle was still there, but Ashe was gone and where he had been was a crawling pile of bronze-colored beetles, suppurating in the moonlight.

She jumped to her feet, shuddering and brushing herself down, just in case one of them might have skittered nearby. The book was still there. She picked it up and put it into her backpack, then tried to remember where she’d kicked the bell. It took a while, but eventually she found it, lying in a puddle next to the grave of someone called Albert Beeston, who had died in 1836, along with most of his family. Belladonna guessed that there must have been some sort of epidemic and thought that she should probably ask Mr. Watson about it. If she ever saw him again.

She put the bell into her backpack and looked
around. Her head was splitting and for the first time she really felt afraid. What was she thinking? Why did she presume to believe that she knew more than her aunt or her grandmother or the . . . thingy Council? She’d summoned the Dead and found out nothing. Steve was still trapped, accidents were still multiplying like bacteria, and her parents were still gone.

She looked at the houses that pushed up against the walls of the old churchyard. The windows were all dark. Everyone was asleep. Was it really possible that not one of them was dreaming?

And then the sound came again.

The howling. The crash and clatter of hooves.

Oh, great
, she thought,
the perfect end to a simply super evening
.

She turned and looked up, over the trees at the far end of the graveyard and up into the sky. The night was pockmarked with storm clouds that suddenly seemed to move, not with the steady pace of the wind, but with deliberate speed. As she watched, they converged and appeared to take on a form, the tops becoming heavy and the lower parts extending downward like legs, hooves, and paws. Belladonna staggered back against Mr. Beeston’s grave as the Wild Hunt descended from the skies.

As it came closer, the cloud cover dissipated and the images of horses, men, and hounds became more clear. The colossal hounds she was familiar with by now, but the horses were not the flimsy Thoroughbreds she
was used to seeing on television; they were massive and muscular, their necks like the knotted cable that hauled concrete slabs on building sites, and their legs like the bases of dockyard cranes. The men who rode them, by contrast, seemed average in size, if not in manner. Each, in his own way, was superficially ordinary, yet had abandoned the spark within himself that made him feel, love, long. They were no longer human in essence, only in form, and had the wild look of creatures who hunt without any hope of capture, and strive without any expectation of satisfaction. Their Leader set the standard and beat his horse to a foaming frenzy while charging at the front of the stampede. His glare was fire and his skin stone; his cape flew out behind him like black wings as his whip hand tore at his horse’s flank.

Belladonna watched, unable to move as the Hunt galloped closer, expecting any moment to be ground underfoot. But when they reached the graveyard, the Leader of the Hunt held up a hand and brought them all to an improbably rapid halt.

Now that he was close, she could see his pale face, the skin stretched tightly over the bone. His eyes were yellow, with black centers, and were examining her closely. He removed his hat with a flourish and dark hair fell into his eyes, giving him an almost friendly appearance. Almost.

“Greetings, milady,” he said. “Well met, indeed.”

Belladonna pushed her hair out of her eyes and
looked at him, and then at his men, their eyes sparkling hungrily in the night.

“Um . . . hello,” she said.

“You know,” he leaned forward in his saddle with a conspiratorial air. “You don’t really belong here, with
these
people.”

He waved his hand in the direction of the darkened houses with disdain.

“We have a spare horse. A lively creature, eager to run.”

“I don’t really . . . I haven’t had any lessons. . . .”

“No lessons!” He leaned back and looked at his men, who joined in the expected guffaw. “You don’t need lessons, Belladonna, you’ll take to it like a duck to water.”

He held out a gauntleted hand. “Come, join the Hunt.”

Belladonna stood up. There was something tempting about the idea.

“What are you hunting?” she asked.

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than it became clear it was the worst thing she could have said. The Leader frowned his disapproval and his men began an angry muttering that made her flatten her body against Mr. Beeston’s stone again.

The Leader held up his hand and, with an effort, smiled again.

“We’re hunting for the lost,” he said, “for those for
whom this paltry thing called life is no life at all. Come. Come.”

He held out his hand again. Belladonna looked at him, and his yellow eyes called her forward even though every ounce of common sense told her to run in the opposite direction. She stepped away from the relative comfort of Mr. Beeston’s grave and extended a hand. The Leader smiled and showed white teeth that were a little too sharp.

“I knew you would,” he murmured.

He removed the gauntlet from his right hand and reached down with long white, waxy fingers.

Belladonna, her eyes glazed, reached up.

“No!”

A small hand grabbed hers and, with surprising strength, pulled her away.

“Get out, you half-dead creatures! Go!”

The spell was broken and Belladonna looked down in surprise. Aya’s purple eyes flashed in anger at the riders of the Wild Hunt and, in spite of her size, they all shrank back, the hounds whimpering as they sought cover among the legs of the horses, and the black steeds whinnying in fear of the tiny creature.

“Hah!” said the Leader. “Another time, then. Give your aunt my regards!”

And he wheeled his horse and took off toward the east, climbing into the sky pursued by his baying pack of hounds and his cursed men.

Belladonna stared at Aya.

“It’s been a long night, hasn’t it?” said the charnel sprite.

“I have to get to the Other Side,” whispered Belladonna. “I mean . . . sorry . . . thank you.”

Aya smiled.

“Steve is trapped,” said Belladonna urgently. “I have to get to the Other Side.”

“What about the door?” asked Aya.

“It’s gone . . . broken. Please. He doesn’t know about Ashe. Well . . . he suspects, but that’s not the same, is it?”

“There are other doors,” said the charnel sprite, “other doors in other places. Lots of doors.”

“But I don’t know where they are, and anyway, my Dad said that they are all closing. I don’t have time to find another one. I need to get there, I need to warn Steve now. He can’t give Ashe the amulet!”

Aya looked at her for a moment, then took her hand and led Belladonna across the churchyard to the yew tree and down a staircase near its roots that Belladonna was pretty sure had never been there before.