A Most Magical Girl

by Karen Foxlee

“I don’t know, you big greasy buffoon,” said Kitty, and she bent down and coughed until she could spit into the grass. By the moonlight the spittle was dark.

  She closed her eyes, and her heartbeat was very loud in her ears.

  On the heath there was a grass that shone a certain way beneath the moon, lit up all silver along its edge. Since she was small, she had called it the moon grass. She had seen one hundred full moons or more, she thought, though she couldn’t say for sure, not knowing her age or her beginnings.

  She didn’t have a mother the way Annabel Grey did. She did not have great-aunts or a long-dead father. She had London Town. The lap of the heath where she had often slept, the cluttered-up streets, the wild dark tenement heart. Yes, the city was her mother, a confounding, beautiful mother, with her lonely churches and warm stables and flowing park skirts.

  Kitty touched the moon grass, and she coughed and coughed until her body felt quite hollow with coughing. From up high she looked back upon the city beneath the moon and was glad for its mothering.

  Annabel Grey, she said to herself.

  But the Totteridge yew called her name, and she wondered at that. The yew’s voice was much clearer now. Onward, Kitty, onward. She hummed up her heart light, half to frighten Hafwen, and when it came, it was the deepest green. She marveled at how easy it had come, as though the cage she kept it in, her body, had grown more fragile. It slipped out of her simply.

  Hafwen peered at the light from the corner of her eye and looked worried. “Is it far, skinny?” she asked.

  “No,” said Kitty. “Not far now, Hafwen.”

  “If a young lady does not wish to join in parlor games, then she must occupy herself with a quiet pastime, such as needlework or reading.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  Annabel didn’t want to hear any more. She tried to think of the emerald-green ice skates, but her mind was used to that trick. It would not conjure them up. It said, Here is the story of your father’s last moments. Pay attention, Annabel Grey.

  Mr. Angel pointed the wand at the long table and blasted it with purple light so that it disappeared into a pile of dust. The shadowlings writhed with amusement. All that was left was Annabel and her chair.

  Mr. Angel walked slowly toward her.

  “The Great Geraldo Grey opened his eyes, Annabel,” he said. “And he looked at your mother. He had been gone, Annabel, and now he had been returned. He looked at the tubules and the pistons and the way he was pinned to the apparatus. He looked at the great receiving bells that sat above him and had called his spirit back. Can you picture it?”

  “Yes,” whispered Annabel.

  “The horror of it?” asked Mr. Angel.

  “Yes,” whispered Annabel.

  “He was quite gone from this world and now returned. ‘Gerald,’ said your mother. ‘Gerald.’ And how she clutched at him. ‘Vivienne’ was his reply. ‘What have you done?’

  “His only words, Annabel. ‘Vivienne, what have you done?’ The machine was new, Annabel, never tested on a human. He seemed filled suddenly with confusion and rage. He tried to sit, and the needles were ripped from his skin. ‘Vivienne,’ he said, reaching for her blindly, and she tried to calm him, Annabel. ‘Vivienne!’ he cried, for he could no longer see her. She held him by the hands. ‘Vivienne,’ he said, and then he fell backward and was gone.”

  Mr. Angel watched Annabel. He watched the tears that slid down her cheeks. He watched the way she trembled. There were volumes of tears in the child. Tears of abandonment. Tears of confusion. Tears of loss. Tears of sadness. She tried to contain the ocean of tears, and it made her all the more pitiful.

  “You tricked her,” she whispered. “You tricked my mother with your terrible machine. You made her think he would be back the way he was. She never would have done such a thing otherwise.”

  “I gave her no such assurances,” said Mr. Angel. He gazed upon Annabel sadly. “I offered her my services; I told her there were no guarantees it would work. How she wept over him, Annabel. The Great Geraldo Grey—not so great after all. I gave her my handkerchief, of course, and when she left, when she ran from that room, she left it lying on the floor. It gave me an idea. That handkerchief and the glass tubules, the receiving bells. A new and more wonderful machine.”

  Annabel did not want her father, whom she did not know, to have died not once but twice. She wanted him to be at home, at that very moment reading a newspaper or practicing magic tricks with cards. The tears would not stop. They slipped down her cheeks and dripped onto her hands in her lap.

  “The machine, dear Annabel. Now is the time,” said Mr. Angel, and then to the shadowlings: “Guard her. I will prepare the machine for its last meal.”

  As soon as he was gone from the room, the shadowlings drew closer. They slipped from the walls to stand about her in a circle.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” she said to them as they moved around her, their shapes blending and changing. They made themselves into copies of Mr. Angel peering down at her. “I am not afraid of you, do you hear?”

  But she was. They breathed against her skin, and she flinched. They watched her every move.

  She took the ruby-red seeing glass from her bodice and placed it on her palm. There was barely any light in the room, but she hoped there was enough. Please, she said to herself. Please. Please, someone tell me what to do. She looked into the glass and saw nothing but dimness.

  Her mind raced. She needed the Miss Vines to appear, or the Finsbury Wizards. Oh, it would be good to hear kindly advice from them. She peered into the dark glass, but nothing came.

  She remembered the cup of her mind. She examined her thoughts, and there were many. She was running out of time. Hafwen would be frightened. Kitty was unwell. Her father had died twice, and it just wasn’t fair. Her mother should have told her the truth. She should feel angry, but all she felt was longing. All of London was in danger. She was the Valiant Defender of Good Magic, even though she didn’t want to be. There, she’d said it. And now she’d let everyone down.

  She peered into her ruby-red seeing glass and waited. The shadowlings crowded around her. She saw darkness, she saw dimness, she saw the sudden silvery moonlight on long grass.

  Hafwen and Kitty trudged through a heathland. Kitty held the wand and the broomstick. Hafwen gazed in awe at the stars.

  Annabel didn’t think she had ever been happier to see someone. “Hafwen!” she shouted. “Kitty!”

  But they faded just as quickly as they’d appeared. Now there was nothing but the opaqueness of the glass, and when she looked up, Mr. Angel was waiting at the door to take her upstairs.

  Kitty heard the shout. It wasn’t so much a word as a sudden change in the landscape. The wind blew out one hard breath, and the trees shook their leaves, and the grasses banged down their tips once to the earth. Hafwen stopped in her troll tracks.

  “Did you hear it, too?” asked Kitty.

  Hafwen nodded.

  “We are close,” said Kitty.

  She held her aching chest and coughed another violent cough. When she spat, there was more dark blood on the ground.

  “We must not tarry, skinny,” said Hafwen. “You can keep going?”

  “Yes, Hafwen,” replied Kitty. “But I must listen.”

  She closed her eyes. Her ribs ached, and every breath caught and snagged inside her as though she contained a thorn. She listened. She listened to the night. Annabel’s shout was gone, but it had left behind a faint echo, the way a bell leaves a sound where it has broken the air on a clear, still day. She heard a new sound. A dark sound. A grinding, turning, rattling sound. A noise that did not belong there. It pulsated in the night air. She felt it in her body and knew it to be wrong.

  “Yes,” she said, but that one word made her cough, and her knees crumpled beneath her, and she fell to the ground.

  “Before climbing stairs, a young lady arranges her skirts in such a way as to make the task possible, but so gracefully that none would n
otice she had done so.”

  —Miss Finch’s Little Blue Book (1855)

  Mr. Angel led the way. The passageways creaked and groaned beneath their feet. Up above them the machine clanked and sighed. Mr. Angel climbed the stairs before her, and the shadowlings came after her. Hundreds of them, clouding the air, whispering in her ears. They said her name and her mother’s name, and they hissed the words the Great Geraldo and giggled. Every part of the story that Mr. Angel had told, they repeated.

  Annabel felt the machine. It rattled the banister. It shuddered the floorboards. She wished for Kitty and Haffie. She did not want to be here alone.

  Nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine. Even the darkness of Under London was nothing compared with the darkness of the machine. In the gloom it vibrated and twitched, and its giant bellows, as if sensing her, snapped open and then huffed shut. The room was cold, so cold.

  “It knows you are here,” said Mr. Angel quietly. “See how it senses you. It is alive with terrible magic.”

  Annabel stood in the doorway, and her skirts lifted toward it; she felt the pull of it on her skin. What was she meant to do against such a thing? As the most magical girl, she must be meant to do something. She looked at the huge funnel that stretched up toward the ceiling with its great and jagged hole. Pure bright moonlight hit the brass funnel.

  “Come and look upon the city,” said Mr. Angel. “I will show you all that will be mine.”

  She didn’t want to go near the machine. The closer she got, the greater the pull. He guided her around the perimeter of the room, and the machine sang a strange song of grindings and moanings. He led her up the small staircase that wound its way around the moon funnel. Her legs trembled as she looked down into the machine, at all its gleaming moving parts. The shadowlings breathed softly behind her.

  On the rooftop they were above London. They looked over streets and parkland and toward the city. The moon washed everything silver, and Annabel didn’t think she’d ever seen London look so beautiful. It shone on Mr. Angel’s face and made him look even lonelier. She thought it must be a terrible thing to be so bad.

  “All the parks and palaces. All the people,” Mr. Angel said. He pointed out over the rooftops. “All mine.”

  “But pardon me, Mr. Angel, why must it all be yours?”

  He sounded like a spoiled boy. She wanted to say so, but he raised up the Black Wand and sang out loud, “Umbra, antumbra,” and from everywhere, from rooftops and the church spires, shadowlings appeared.

  “Because, Annabel Grey, darkness should reign, and darkness will reign,” he said. “And I will be the king of all darkness.”

  She wished that her mother could have seen her in Under London, with the Ondona raised at the bone wall. It was a simple wish. That her mother see what she had become. Now the time she said good-bye to her mother before their house had turned into the last time, and Annabel didn’t think she’d ever felt sadder. Her heart ached beneath her breastbone, and it wasn’t even the crying type of sadness but a more desolate thing. The machine down below sensed it. So did Mr. Angel, and he took her back down the stairs into the room.

  The new shadowlings he had raised from the rooftops and belfries flew down the stairs behind them.

  “Up,” he said, and they flew to the perimeter of the room, where they opened and shut their wings and buzzed like angry bees.

  From beside a chair Mr. Angel took a small pair of shoes.

  “Behold the machine, Annabel,” he said, and he stepped carefully into the center of the room and held them up. “They are the shoes of a pauper I found frozen in a lane behind Hackney Station last winter. It has a fondness for such sorrowful things, the shoes of departed children being among its favorites.”

  He leaned his crooked body into a space that seemed no different from any other space, yet his cloak lifted upward toward the machine. He released the pitiful shoes, and they were taken quite suddenly by a great sucking wind, pulled with great speed into a slit at the machine’s side.

  It was alive, that machine. Annabel knew it then.

  “So, here you are, Annabel Grey, after your journey into Under London to find the Morever Wand. Here you are, with nothing to show for your trouble,” he said.

  Annabel let out a little sob.

  “Raised in a house filled with such secrets,” he said. “By a mother who did nothing but lie.”

  He smiled at her in the darkness, and his white teeth glinted.

  She let out another sob, but this time she felt angry.

  “Annabel Grey, the most sorrowful creature of all,” he said, and he took several steps toward her. The machine wailed in anticipation.

  The shadowlings droned.

  He was going to grab her.

  She did not want to be grabbed.

  She did not want to be told she was sorrowful.

  “I am brave,” she whispered.

  She was. She had entered Under London and returned.

  “I am good,” she said.

  She was. She knew she was.

  Mr. Angel strode toward her, his awful smile stretching across his face.

  “I am brave! I am good!” she shouted now. She had no other weapon.

  He was beginning to laugh. The shadowlings laughed with him.

  Then he had her by the arm, and he was dragging her toward the center of the room, before the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine.

  Mr. Angel was strong. She pulled against him. She tried to unclasp his gloved hand. She kicked at him with her boots and twisted her body to get away from him. For one instant she was free and sprinting, but he grabbed her skirts and pulled her backward, held her hard about the waist, and dragged her, feet lifted from the ground, to the machine.

  “The tears of the mother came first!” he shouted above the shrieking of the machine and the laughter of the shadowlings. “And now the small, sad daughter!”

  And as he said it, the moonlight hit the moon funnel squarely and the machine made such a noise that his words were drowned out. A light filled the room. His cloak blew upward with the pull of the machine. He was turning her toward the place where he would let her go. Time slowed. She listened to her own ragged breaths. Her heart beat in her ears.

  Then another noise.

  A slam. A bang.

  Mr. Angel turned his head toward the noise, bringing her with him.

  In the doorway to the ballroom stood Hafwen.

  Stout, hairy Hafwen, holding the broomstick like a walking crook. The only troll in Trollingdom with a twinkle in her eye.

  And on Hafwen’s back was Kitty, with the Morever Wand in her hand.

  “Let her go!” shouted Hafwen. Her voice was almost lost in the noise of that room. “Let Annabel Grey go.”

  “Take them!” cried Mr. Angel, removing one hand from Annabel to wave at the shadowlings.

  The dark creatures leapt down from the walls toward the pair, but Kitty opened her mouth and released a heart light. It was small and pale green. She grew it so that it was as large as them, and they were surrounded by its light. She slipped from Hafwen’s back and stood supported by the troll, with the wand in her hand.

  The shadowlings skittered backward from the light, and Mr. Angel was distracted by their reluctance to follow his command. His grip lessened long enough for Annabel to break free. She pulled herself away from him just as Kitty crumpled to her knees, throwing the wand so that it raced across the ballroom floor.

  Annabel rolled and crawled until she felt the wand in her hand. The lightness of it. The airiness of it. The goodness of it. But the machine, the great inward-drawn breath of the machine, seized her foot and began to drag her along the floor toward its blackness, the slits opening and shutting fast with a noise like a tent buffeted by wind.

  “Help!” she screamed, and Hafwen rushed toward her. She wrenched Annabel by the hand out of the space.

  Mr. Angel was coming toward them.

  “Stand back!” Annabel shouted as sh
e clambered to her feet, pushing Hafwen behind her. “Stay back.”

  She raised the Morever Wand at Mr. Angel, and he raised his Black Wand in return.

  “I cannot be defeated!” he shouted, and out of the Black Wand’s tip came a blast of mauve light.

  Afterward, she could not say if it was her word alone that saved them. The mauve light came toward her, and she shouted the word Benignus at the same time. She shouted the word so loudly that it seemed to break the air, as though it were a force itself. It was louder than the terrible machine, mincing and grinding its sorrows; it was louder than the shadowlings, shrieking on the ceilings and on the walls. It was louder than the city, oblivious to all that was happening in the dark mansion.

  Annabel Grey shouted the word Benignus. The wizards’ word. The witches’ word. The Great & Benevolent Magical Society’s word. She shouted it and knew in that instant that it meant “by good, kind magic,” “by the magic of gentle ancient wizards and gentle, kind witches,” “by the magic of the old trees and heaths and meadows,” “by the magic of girls like Kitty, heart-light singers,” “by the magic of the small folk sleeping in cemeteries,” “by the magic of old places, secret rivers, and sacred wells and springs.”

  “Benignus!” she shouted, and a great golden light came from the end of the wand and met the mauve force that rushed toward her.

  Kitty threw her heart light at the very same moment. She threw it from the far end of the room with the last of her strength, and all three forces collided. There was a great explosion of light, so bright that the shadowlings stood stark against the walls. They’d no sooner opened their dark mouths and claws in fright than they dissolved. They were illuminated and ended in seconds.

  And in the brightness there came a thundering roar and a great galumphing of feet. Annabel saw the shape of Hafwen hurtling toward Mr. Angel. The little troll dived across the space, pushing him to the floor and into the place before the machine.

  The machine caught him.

  It held his ankles with its inward breath.