The Spindlers (21 page)

O
nce again Liza felt instantly disoriented; she appeared to have walked straight into a forest. The ground was carpeted in thick green moss, and large trees formed a vaulted ceiling over her head.

All around her were silver and gold flowers with blossoms the shape of tiny trumpets; the air smelled sweet and was full of birdsong. It was the most beautiful place Liza had ever seen. She heard laughter coming from somewhere beyond the trees; and she had just started to move toward the sound when a girl stepped out of the woods. As soon as she saw Liza, her face lit up.

“Liza!” the girl said, and broke into a run. “I'm so glad you made it!” She seized both of Liza's hands in her own.

“I—I'm sorry,” Liza said, feeling suddenly shy. “I don't think I know you.”

The girl was the prettiest person Liza had ever seen, and seemed to match perfectly with the beauty of her surroundings. She was older—she must have been Anna's age, Liza thought, and in fact she kind of
looked
like Anna, except that instead of wearing jeans with dirty cuffs and an old band T-shirt as Anna usually did, this girl was wearing a dress that seemed to be made entirely of leaves and petals. But she had Anna's long blond hair and straight white teeth.

The main difference in their looks, Liza saw, was in the eyes: Anna had hazel eyes, while this girl's were the vivid green of the thick moss that grew beneath her bare feet.

The girl laughed. Her laughter reminded Liza of bells ringing on a clear day. “Don't be silly,” she said. “Don't tell me you don't know your own sister.”

“Sister?” Liza croaked out.

“
Forever
sister,” the girl said happily, as she began tugging Liza forward into the trees. “The others didn't think you would make it. Of course, I knew you would. I hoped you would, at least. And you did! We'll have a party; we'll get cupcakes. Do you like cupcakes? Of course you do....”

“Wait,” Liza said. “You don't understand. I don't have very much time—”

The girl cut her off with another tinkling laugh. “Time is all we have!” she said. “There's loads and loads of it here.”

They emerged into a clearing. A large table was set up underneath a white silken canopy, which was hung all over with twinkling lights. The clearing was carpeted with tiny flowers of all different colors, and Liza's bare feet sank into the soft petals as she walked.

There was something familiar about the table in the clearing, although it took Liza a moment to realize what it was. Then she got it: The table looked very much like the kitchen table at home, and had four chairs just as her table did, although everything here was larger and grander. There was, for example, no stack of coasters wedged under the second table leg, to keep it from wobbling; and none of the plates were webbed with cracks, as they were at home.

There were three people sitting at the table, feasting on food served from enormous platters: a man, with gray hair and kind-looking eyes; across from him, laughing, a woman, with the older girl's long blond hair and a cape of flowers draped over her shoulders; a boy, probably Patrick's age, with red cheeks, a crown of golden curls, and wide, smiling eyes.

All three of them turned as Liza entered the clearing, and even though they nodded and smiled welcomingly, Liza hung back, feeling shy again.

“She's here!” the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna said triumphantly. “Didn't I say she would come?”

“Welcome home, Liza,” the woman said. She was as beautiful as her daughter: Warmth seemed to emanate from her eyes, filling Liza with a bubbly happiness from her toes to her head.

“This—this isn't home,” Liza stuttered.

“Of course it is,” the older woman said, laughing. “It's your new home. We've been waiting for you! And now everything is just as it should be at last.”

“Exactly so,” said the gray-haired man heartily. “From now on there will be nothing but happiness!”

“And games,” the little boy with the smiling eyes put in.

“And parties,” the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna said, squeezing Liza's hand excitedly. “And laughter all the time!”

“And love, of course,” added the older woman gently. “We will always love one another.”

“Let's toast!” said the man. He lifted his glass.

“Come on, Liza,” said the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna. “Sit and toast with us.”

The bubbly feeling had made all the pain and fear of Liza's journey underground begin to unloosen, and she was desperately tempted to sit down. But she could not forget about Patrick—not when she had come this far.

She said, with some regret in her voice, “I can't. I must find Patrick. I must rescue my brother.” Seeing the gray-haired man frown, she quickly added, “But maybe on the way back? Patrick would like it here too. He loves games.”

“That won't do,” said the gray-haired man, with a shake of his head.

“Not at all,” his wife trilled.

The-girl-who-looked-like-Anna slipped an arm around Liza's shoulders. Her skin smelled sweet, like honeysuckle and raspberry.

“I don't understand,” she said, in her sweetest voice. “Don't you want to stay here and be sisters?”

“Yes,” Liza answered truthfully.

“And don't you want to be happy forever?” the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna asked.

“Yes,” Liza said. “Of course.”

“Then you must forget about Patrick,” the girl crooned, and she once again drew Liza to the table. “You must forget about everything that came before, and sit and eat with us; and then you will have everything you've ever wanted, and you and I will spend all of forever never growing up, and being beautiful and young and loved and happy.”

Liza looked at the four smiling faces at the table, perfectly happy, perfectly harmonious, like four well-sounded notes on a piano. She swallowed hard.

“But—” she said. “But I can't stay here forever. I have to return Above.”

“Above!” the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna scoffed, and even the way she pronounced the word made it sound small and dirty and unappealing, like a tiny room with no windows. “What could you possibly want from Above?”

Suddenly Liza had a hard time remembering. She thought of her own kitchen table; she thought of her father's distracted mutterings and the sound of her mother pacing, pacing back and forth. She stammered out, “My mom and dad are Above. If I stay here, they'll worry about me.”

“Will they?” the older woman asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Are you sure about that?” The gray-haired man smiled widely.

“And are they always happy?” the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna said. “And do they always love you?”

Liza thought of the exclamation point between her mother's eyebrows, and her mother telling her to
be a good girl and act your age
, and
stay quiet so Mommy can think
; and her father, who worked all the time and then came home too tired to talk or play. She drew the chair out a little farther from the table so that she could sit down.

“She sits!” cried the gray-haired man.

“Hooray for Liza!” the boy said, bouncing in his seat.

“My lovely girl!” said the older woman.

“My forever sister!” the-girl-who-was-even-prettier-than-Anna said, her eyes flashing an almost electric green.

Liza froze just as she was about to lower herself into the chair. Just that—that momentary flash of green in the girl's eyes—had reminded her of the spindlers' eyes watching her from the dark. She thought, too, of the scawgs; they also had laid a feast for her. With a tremendous effort, she wrenched her hand from the chair and took one step away from the table.

“You are not real,” she said, and the words, too, took a great effort.

The gray-haired man laughed, but to Liza's ears, his laughter sounded forced. “What do you mean?”

“The table, the birds, the forest—” Liza pointed to each thing in turn. “None of it is real.”

“Liza.” The-girl-who-looked-like-Anna came and gripped Liza tightly by the shoulders. “Liza, listen to me. I will be your bravest, brightest, most lovingest sister. Don't you want to stay with me?”

Her words tugged at Liza's soul, drawing her back to the table. It took all her strength to resist. “I can't,” she said.

The girl released Liza's shoulders abruptly. “There is nothing for you Above,” she said angrily. “Nothing but dullness and drudgery, and homework and fighting, and mashed peas and people who won't give you what you want. Here everything is perfect, and you will always have everything exactly to your liking, and you will always be happy.”

Her voice was a thick syrup in Liza's brain. It was so hard to think. But she fought her way through it. “It's no big trick to be happy when everything is perfect,” she said slowly. “And it isn't brave, either. Anyone can do that.”

“And what does it matter what is real and what isn't?” the-girl-who-looked-like-Anna said, her voice rising hysterically. “You believe in us, and that is real enough.”

But it was too late. Liza had taken another step away from the table, and another. And as she did the gray-haired man, the beautiful older woman, the boy, and the Anna-who-was-not-really-Anna—all of them seemed to grow fuzzier, blurrier, like a TV image fading away into static.

“Yes, but Patrick believes in
me
,” she said. “And that is
very
real.”

The almost-Anna let out a mangled cry and ran at Liza, arms outstretched, her eyes growing to huge half crescents: spindler eyes. Liza felt a tremendous rush of air, a current blowing all around her, and suddenly the woods were full of shrieking, and all the birds took off into the sky at once, a swollen black cloud, and Liza felt as though she would be sucked up into the hurricane of noise and tearing. She was terrified, and so she closed her eyes and listed all the things she knew to be real and true, loudly, over the wind and the roaring:

“Mom likes rye toast in the morning. Dad takes his coffee without milk. Patrick does not like the feeling of wet feet on the grass and must have his sandals lined up next to the pool. My favorite color is red. On the bedside table are three purple hair clips, given to me by Aunt Elizabeth.”

The roaring noise around her reached a crescendo, and Liza felt icy hands gripping her wrists, nearly pulling her off her feet.

She yelled out, “Summer comes after spring, and autumn comes after summer, and after winter, spring will come again.”

Suddenly the noise fell away completely. Liza cracked one eye open, and then the other.

She was standing in a perfectly plain white room, completely silent, completely bare. The forest, the trees, the table—all of it was gone. There was a plain wooden door set in one wall.

Liza walked across the room and opened it, and so she left the third and final room, and at last she reached her brother in the Web of Souls.

L
iza stood in a vast, dark space in front of a web the size of a towering building; it stretched up and up and up into the mist and the gloom, trembling slightly in the cool, dank currents of air that swirled through the cavern.