The Midnight Gate (2 page)

Belladonna shoved the note into her bag.

As soon as school was over, she walked to her grandmother's house on Yarrow Street. Approvals, permissions, and sick notes all had to be signed, and seeing as her parents were currently residing (so far as anyone else was concerned) in a shared grave in the churchyard, their signatures didn't carry much weight. Everything of that sort had to be handled by Grandma Johnson, who took her responsibilities very seriously.

Belladonna rang the front doorbell and saw the familiar twitch of the curtains in the séance room, shortly followed by the sound of the latch and the sight of Grandma Johnson flinging the door wide.

“Well, Belladonna!” she said, beaming. “What a surprise! Come in, dear, come in. Get your wet things off and go into the back room. I've got a client. Won't be a mo.”

Belladonna nodded, relieved that it was just an ordinary séance. Ever since she'd discovered that her grandmother was a senior member of the Eidolon Council, she was never quite sure how many people she'd find in the house. The Council were supposed to work with their opposite number in the Land of the Dead, the Conclave of Shadows, on things that affected both worlds, but Belladonna was still not entirely convinced that they really achieved anything much at all.

She took off her coat, hung it on the end of the banister, and squeezed past all the assorted junk in the hallway to the back sitting room. Grandma Johnson smoothed Belladonna's dark hair with her hand as she passed, then winked and returned to her séance room, resuming a session that involved rather more than the usual amounts of hooting, table thumping, and moans, while Belladonna tried to find something to watch on the television.

Grandma Johnson was the only person Belladonna knew who still had an indoor aerial. Her parents had been dead for two years, but at least they had satellite. She pushed the wires of the rabbit-ear antennae from side to side, up and across, until she managed a configuration that brought in a grainy picture that she thought might be a cooking show. Or something about cars. No … interior design.

She sat in a hard wingback chair and squinted at the screen as the rain stopped outside and silence settled over the house. Except for the moaning next door, of course. Belladonna smiled—whoever the client was, they were getting the full four-star treatment, though she knew that the witch bottles hidden under the front and back steps meant that there wasn't a ghost anywhere in the building.

After about fifteen minutes, she heard the front door click shut, and her grandmother bustled into the sitting room.

“Right!” she said, rubbing her hands together. “What about some cake?”

“Yes, please,” said Belladonna. “I'm starved!”

She followed her grandmother into the ridiculously small kitchen at the back of the house, and watched as she took a box out of the fridge and unpacked a small sponge sandwich cake. Grandma Johnson never cooked. If you couldn't get it pre-made at the local supermarket, then she wouldn't have it. Belladonna had a feeling that her Dad had never had a home-cooked meal until he married her Mum.

Grandma Johnson cut two huge slices, made them each a cup of tea, and herded Belladonna back into the warm sitting room.

“Now,” she said, once they had each had a few bites of cake, “what brings you here? Does something need signing?”

“Yes,” said Belladonna a little sheepishly, aware that she hadn't been seeing her grandmother as often as she should. “There's a trip to Fenchurch Abbey next Tuesday.”

“Ah,” said her grandmother. “Establishment of the monasteries, eh? Or is it dissolution? I can't remember where you're up to.”

“Establishment,” said Belladonna, pulling the permission slip out of her bag.

Her grandmother took it and then spent about ten minutes looking around for her glasses, which turned out to be inside a particularly ugly pottery vase in the shape of a yellow-eyed cat.

“Let's see … hmm … sandwiches, eh?”

“It's an all-day trip,” explained Belladonna.

“I can see that,” said her grandmother, peering at her over the top of her glasses. “Well, it all sounds alright. Though I can't imagine why they have to have these trips in the middle of winter. You're going to absolutely freeze up there. Make sure you wear two extra pairs of socks.”

Belladonna shuddered at the thought of anyone seeing her bundled up like a four-year-old. She'd be suggesting mittens on a string next.

“And mittens,” said her grandmother, right on cue. “They're so much warmer than gloves.”

Belladonna smiled and took another bite of cake.

“Now,” said her grandmother, leaning forward, “how are things going at school?”

“It's boring,” said Belladonna.

“Boring? How can it be boring?”

“It just is,” said Belladonna.

“Nonsense,” said her grandmother, handing her the signed permission slip. “These are the best years of your life. You'll see. It'll get better.”

Belladonna finished her cake and wondered if her grandmother had ever been to school and if it had been different then. Maybe things really were interesting in the olden days. Maybe everyone had been nice and played hockey and had midnight feasts and ripping adventures, but Belladonna doubted it. Something told her that once people left school, a sort of selective memory kicked in and all the bad stuff, all the teasing and humiliation, all the tedious classes and endless mounds of homework, were forgotten in favor of half-recalled sunny summer afternoons filled with laughter, tennis, and surprise picnics.

“I'd better get going,” she said.

“Goodness, is that the time?” said her grandmother, leaping to her feet and nearly knocking over a nearby occasional table crowded with china figurines. “I've got a new client coming at five! Off you go. Say hello to your Mum and Dad.”

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 had been painted in the corners in a vain imitation of snow.