Aunt Maria

by Diana Wynne Jones

  We stood facing one another on top of our reflections, with the wind clapping our anoraks. Chris looked deadly serious. It was the way Mr. Phelps looked holding his sword. He’s mad now! I thought. I said, “He’d hide it in that place in the car where I put my story. But he had to take my story out to make room for it and hide that. Chris, what happened then?”

  “Somebody found out,” Chris said. He went running off again, calling over his shoulder, “Did our car fall off the cliff? Did it? Whee!”

  I stood there. I thought, I’m mad, too. That blue car. I ran after Chris. “Chris! I met the car again outside the drugstore. Let’s go and buy flea powder.”

  “Let’s,” said Chris. “I can pick the back lock. I got good at it.”

  But we didn’t find the car, not outside the drugstore or anywhere else we looked. It’s just dawned on me where we should have looked—in the station car park where we saw it first. We’d better look there tomorrow—though I still think everyone’s mad.

  Six

  We found the car. I don’t know how to write about all this. It’s so strange. I had to go upstairs and write it while Aunt Maria waits for the Mrs. Urs to come calling. Mum has gone out. She said it was only fair, after she let me and Chris go off two mornings running. So I have left Chris being talked to by Aunt Maria. It’s quite a risk. I know he’ll say something again. I’ll go down and pretend to get out the cake when I hear the row start. But I just have to get this down.

  The flea powder makes me sneeze, but it seems to have worked. Today Chris insisted he needed me to go out with him again. He had thought of the station car park, too.

  Aunt Maria made her low reproachful noise. “I see so few people these days. Are you sure Naomi isn’t avoiding me, Betty, dear?”

  “Of course not,” said Mum inventively. “I’ve asked Mig to choose me some new wool at the handicraft shop. I can’t trust Chris with colors.”

  “Yes, that is woman’s work,” Aunt Maria agreed. “Dear little Naomi. A little woman.”

  So I had to tote a bag of pea green fluffy wool all round Chris’s devious route to the station. First we went along the seafront. There was only Hester Bailey and dog today.

  “Her small obnoxious cur,” Chris called it. Because there was only Hester Bailey, he would have it that the Mrs. Urs had decided we didn’t realize what finding my story meant. I still think that is imagination, about the Mrs. Urs, but I humored Chris. And then Mr. Phelps came striding toward us, tweaking his walking stick smartly and bending into the wind. Chris said, “Good morning.”

  Mr. Phelps almost missed his step. For a moment I thought he was going to fall over his stick. It faltered in midtweak. But he made it into a nod at me somehow, though he was staring into distance over my head. He has fanatical eyes, as bad as Elaine, the same gray as the sky is today, like two fanatical holes in his head. Then he strode on without a word.

  “Chris!” I whispered. “We haven’t found the car yet!”

  “Yes, but I know it’s there,” Chris said. My private feeling suddenly was that the car was bound to be hidden in a locked garage somewhere, but I humored Chris again and we went round and round Cranbury until we got to the vegetable plots I had run through that day we saw the clones and the zombies. We got in by a stile and went up beside the hedge until we could see the roofs of the cars in the car park. Chris made us both sit down, out of sight from the station, to spy out the land. Of course we couldn’t see anything from there. We had to get over the fence again and dodge about among the cars, bent over so that the porter in boots wouldn’t see us. I felt very silly. I kept wondering why I was so nervous when we weren’t doing anything wrong. I jumped when a pebble clanged off my foot onto a car, and expected the porter to come charging out shouting, “Hey, you!”

  We never saw him. But we saw the car in the middle of the second row along, between two much shinier, newer ones. We sat down on the gravel beside it, out of sight, in a sort of canyon of car smelling of petrol and tire.

  “It is ours, surely,” whispered Chris. “That rusty place like a map of Australia.”

  “It’s got a new door the other side,” I whispered.

  “Makes sense,” Chris whispered. “It wouldn’t unlock and Dad kicked it half to blazes. Come on. I’m going to get it open.” He went crawling off to the back of it. I lugged the knitting wool after him and squatted watching while he dug away at the hatchback lock with his penknife. I think it was the tensest few minutes either of us had known. Chris was a strange patchy white color by the time the lock gave a tinny sprung! and he pulled up the hatch door. That whining sound, with a small boing from one side, was so familiar. I knew it was our car just from that noise. I think Chris did, too. He certainly knew the moment he looked inside. He was holding the door down so that it didn’t bob up above the car roof, and his face suddenly flooded dark red. He said, “Oh, God. It is our car. That toffee’s still stuck to the carpet.” His voice was all on one note.

  I looked in. My heart began hitting my throat when I saw the toffee. It had my teethmarks in it and it was all blue hairs from the trunk carpet. But it was the smell most of all. There was no sea smell and no rust smell. Just our dirty-old-car smell. I could tell Chris had come over queer because of that smell.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get it.”

  I dumped the knitting wool beside the toffee and crawled in, over the backseat where Chris and I had fought since we were tiny, over the egg stain across the hump in the floor, to squeeze between the two grave-stonelike front seats. There was Zenobia Bailey’s perfume there on top of the car smell. I took deep breaths like somebody suffocating and reached in under the dashboard to the hiding place. The thing in there felt like a cigar box. By that time I felt as if I was running out of air. I just grabbed it and backed out in a rush.

  “Put it in with the wool, and let’s go!” Chris hissed at me.

  So I jammed the box or whatever in the bag among the pea green wool and backed away. Chris put down the door with the firm thump that usually locked it again. Then we ran. Bent over and gasping, we ran and ran. It was like my mad rush after we saw the clones, only in the opposite direction and trying to hide all the time. I ran out of breath completely when we got to the cow field.

  “Where are we going?” I said with what felt like my last gasp. We were behind a hawthorn bush covered with enough bright green buds to hide us.

  “That—mound by the—orphanage,” panted Chris. “Mr. Phelps is going to meet us there at twelve. He said—the time was important.”

  “Why there?” I said.

  “Because of Antony Green,” said Chris, and he set off running again.

  It was only quarter to twelve when we got to the mound. We went up one of its little muddy paths and sat down to wait at the top. We were in the middle of a lot of these whippy bushes with big pale buds, hidden from the orphanage, where it was all quiet and windless, in a sort of chilly bush.

  “Let’s have a look at it,” said Chris.

  I took the thing out. It was a flattish box, but it wasn’t a cigar box. Whatever it was made of wasn’t wood, or metal, and it was too warm to be plastic, though it sounded like plastic when I tapped it with my fingernail. Maybe it was bone. It was carved all over in patterns, swirly interlacing pictures that were colored in every shade of green you could ever imagine—gray green, faded yellow green, bright dragon green, all greens, right through to sad dark green that was nearly black. It was wonderful. We sat staring at it. It almost made sense, as if the green pictures were meant to tell you something. I almost knew what, too.

  That was when the clones turned up. We looked up to find orphanage kids standing silently all around us, staring at the box as well.

  “Pretty,” said the one nearest, when she saw I had seen her.

  They gave me quite a shock. They had come so quietly, and they looked so much alike, even close up, in spite of all being different colors and shapes of children, and they didn’t move or jig about the way ordi
nary kids do. Chris muttered things angrily. I don’t blame him. They were irritating, standing gooping like that.

  “What are you going to do with it?” said another one.

  “Give it to someone. Go away,” said Chris.

  They went on standing there.

  “It’s not interesting,” said Chris.

  That was a silly thing to say. That box was the most interesting thing I’d ever seen. It was like something alive. It seemed to get more interesting the longer you looked. I was kind of bent over it, and the clones were all craned in different directions so that they could see it round me.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” one of them asked.

  As soon as he—or she—asked that, it was obvious we ought to open the box. I could see the catch on one side of the lid, a little clawed green clasp, and I pushed it up with my thumb. It moved easily. Chris said, “Mig, you’re not to! Don’t touch it!” But by that time my fingers were under the lid and the lid seemed to come up of its own accord.

  I think the lid was even more beautifully green and complicated on the inside. But I didn’t really notice, because whatever was inside the box started to come out at once. It wasn’t quite invisible. You could tell it was bulging and billowing out of the box in clouds, fierce and determined and impatient. The clones all stepped back a solemn pace to give it room. It was all round me. The air felt thick, so that I had to press against it to move, even just to breathe, and it fizzed in a funny way in my hair and on my face. I didn’t know what it was, but I could tell it was very forbidden.

  Chris shouted out, “Oh, you stupid girl!” I had one hand under the box and the other against the lid, squeezing with all my might to try and shut it by then. But the stuff coming out held it open against me as hard as if the hinges were never made to bend. I knew it was horribly dangerous stuff—or perhaps, now I think, I knew it was a terrible waste to let it all out—and I pressed and pressed to get the box shut again. Chris scrambled over and put his hands over mine and we both pushed frantically. The lid didn’t even start to give until the box was at least half empty. Then it went down, slowly, slowly, with more powerful stuff escaping the whole time. It must have taken us a good five minutes to get it shut again.

  Meanwhile the stuff that was out was doing all sorts of strange things. You could tell it was there because it rippled everything it touched—not like hot air ripples things, but in a way that showed it was changing the substance of the bush or the person or the earth it passed through. Chris and I got rippled furiously. Some of the stuff spiraled hugely into the sky. I could see more eddying slowly down into the ground. But a lot of it lingered about, writhing the bushes, forming swirls and shapes as strange as the pictures on the box, and curlicues of nothing. Some of them were horrifying, and one clone who got in the midst of those covered her head in her arms and whimpered. A lot were splendid and solemn. The clones waved their arms at them in a stiff sort of way and looked wondering, and the curlicues of nothing climbed and twisted and wove around them until the stuff must have got thinned away by the air. Anyway, it went. One clone suddenly burst out laughing. A twist of nothing was hovering between his hands like a cross between a dust devil and an invisible bird. He was still holding it and laughing, and the rest of the stuff was fading into the earth in dying twirls, when Mr. Phelps came storming through the bushes slashing his stick.

  He was furious. The orphans stared and then ran, just the way the cat runs away from Aunt Maria. But it was me Mr. Phelps went for, stick up ready to hit me. “You stupid little female!” he said. It was a low snapping snarl that was far more frightening than a shout. I dropped the box and put one arm up. “Half of it gone!” he said. “My last hope against this monstrous regiment of women, and it has to be a female who lets it out! You deserve to be whipped, girl. And you, boy, for letting her!”

  I heard his stick swish. I think Chris got in the way. There was a thump and Chris said, “Don’t do that! We were only trying to help!”

  “Steal it, you mean, just as your father did!” snarled Mr. Phelps. “Get out. Get out of my sight. And don’t let your sister near me again, or I won’t be responsible for what I do!”

  Chris and I pulled one another up, and we ran. Chris remembered the knitting wool, not me. I remember him humping it along, panting, “Oh, Lord, Mig, this is a mess! I thought he was the goodie and Aunt Maria was the baddie, but I’m not sure now. I wish you hadn’t opened that box!”

  I wished I hadn’t, too, so I didn’t answer.

  And I wish it even more now. I don’t know what to do. Cranbury isn’t just mad. It’s a nightmare.

  I finished my writing. I went downstairs. I think I must have gone rather quietly because I was still thinking about that amazing box. Chris and Aunt Maria didn’t hear me. As I came down she was saying, “Snoring, dear? I wasn’t snoring. I’m awake. I’ve been talking to you.”

  “Boring,” Chris said. “B—O—R—I—N—G, that’s what I said you were.”

  I thought, Oh, dear! and hurried. Aunt Maria said, more in sorrow than anger, “You poor boy. I shall pray for you, Christopher.”

  “And get my name right!” Chris snarled. “It’s Christian, you murderess!”

  Aunt Maria said, “What!” in a little faint voice. I felt weak and sort of sinking and had to prop myself up in the doorway. I said, “Shut up, Chris.” I think I did, but neither of them heard me.

  “Murderess,” said Chris. “Shall I spell that, too?” He was standing facing Aunt Maria. She was in her afternoon chair with her hands on both her sticks, staring. She looked hurt and helpless, as anyone would, when Chris went on. “You killed Dad, because he found out about the green box and tried to get it back, didn’t you? I don’t know what you did to him, except I know he didn’t go off the cliff like everyone was supposed to think—”

  “How dare you!” said Aunt Maria. “I’ve never killed anything in all my life, you poor misguided—”

  “You did for him somehow. Same difference,” Chris interrupted. “I know you did. And you did for Lavinia, because she knew too much. And—”

  “Stop,” said Aunt Maria, in a feeble, warning way. “Stop there!”

  “No, I shan’t,” said Chris. “You cover it up with deafness and politeness all the time, but it’s true. It’s the green box, isn’t it? Long before Dad and Lavinia, you got rid of Antony Green in order to get hold of that box and the power in—”

  Aunt Maria stood up then, with no difficulty at all. “I’ve heard enough,” she said. She pointed the rubber end of one of her sticks at Chris. The other she held ready to thump on the floor. “By the power vested in me,” she said, “go on four feet in the shape your nature makes you, young man.” Truly she said that, and she thumped the second stick on the carpet.

  And Chris—Chris gave a sort of wail and folded up as if the pointing stick had hit him in the middle. I remember the way the palms of his hands hit the floor and then sort of shrank and bent, so that he was holding himself mostly on his eight fingers. His thumbs went traveling up his arms, shrinking and growing a curved pinkish nail each. The rest of him was a quick seething, too quick to watch. He didn’t grow much smaller. That surprises me still. He just seethed into a different thing, with pink flesh boiling into gray and brown and yellowish hair, and his own hair getting swallowed under big growing ears. His clothes fell off about then. The thing he was growing into snarled and fought and backed wildly away from the jeans and the sweater, and bent a head with long white teeth in it to tear at the pants clinging to its back legs. There was a thickish gray tail under the pants.

  The kitchen door slammed open. Elaine stood there. “You haven’t done it again!” she said.

  The thing that was Chris backed away from her with the lips of its muzzle up to show its teeth. He looked like a smallish Alsatian dog by then.

  I saw Elaine’s face as she first saw him, and I swear she was almost crying. “Is it a wolf?” she said, sort of hoarse and loud.

  Aunt Maria leaned o
n her sticks and inspected Chris. “I think so,” she said. He was cowering back against the table to keep away from her. “He richly deserved it,” she said.

  Chris panicked then and raced round the room, long and low, trying to get away. He made one dart at the doorway, saw me, and headed the other way. I dodged back from the door into the hall. Partly it was the sight of his face with its panic-staring, light-colored wolf eyes. He was an animal, but he still looked like Chris. Partly I wanted to get the front door open and let him get away, but my knees were weak, and I had to lean against the wall. There were crashings and rushings from the dining room and I heard Aunt Maria say, “Open the window. Chase it out.”

  Elaine said, “I’m damned if I want to get bitten, if you do! It’s wild!” Then there was a bang and she swore and the kitchen door crashed. I think she’d left the back door open and Chris got out that way. I heard her say, “It’s gone. Good riddance. Now what do you tell its mother, for goodness’ sake?”

  That was when I realized that none of them had seen me, except Chris for that split second. They were too occupied, too violent, somehow. I crept to the stairs and sat there, holding the banister. I was shaking. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. I still can’t.

  Aunt Maria said, “Dear Betty. So understanding. No trouble at all, dear.”

  “If you say so,” Elaine sort of grunted. “What of little sister? Where’s she?”

  “Upstairs, dear,” said Aunt Maria. “I think she knows about the box, but that’s all. No harm done. Do try to stop crying, dear. These things happen. He was getting far too dangerous, you know.”

  “I’d gathered that,” Elaine said. “Do you take me for a fool?” She sniffed and coughed and asked, “Are you going to want me here?”

  “Sit with me,” said Aunt Maria. “I feel tired. You can help with dear Betty.”