The Night of the Solstice

by L. J. Smith

  “But how can he keep her from coming back here?”

  “He can kill her… . But since he hasn’t done that yet I dare to hope that he will not. Still, I can think of a dozen ways. Unless you are a Quislai you need three things to cross through a mirror. The first is moonlight. Moonlight must fall on the mirror before you can go through. He could imprison her in a room with the windows boarded up, say, or bricked over. The second is the amulet. He could take that away from her, although hers wouldn’t work for him. The third is the mirror itself. Obviously, if Morgana cannot reach a mirror she cannot pass through. He could weave a magic circle around her, or cast a binding spell, or simply tie her to a chair.”

  “Tie her to a chair!” said Janie. “If she’s such a hot sorceress, why can’t she free herself?”

  “Why can’t you hammer nails into a board with your elbow?” countered the vixen. “She went to the Wildworld in trust, without even her Gold Staff. A sorceress without her magic instruments is no more powerful than an ordinary woman. And that’s why she needs our aid. I’ve gone through the mirrors every day since Morgana disappeared. I know she’s in the castle somewhere, for I can smell it, but the rooms are so thick with enchantment its hard to locate her precisely. The other sorcerei seem to have left for the time being. If you will help me, if you will go through the mirrors, too—”

  “Us!” cried Claudia excitedly.

  “Yes, you! Why do you think I’ve wasted all this time recounting the history of the Wildfolk? For my own amusement? I need help, and you four have able bodies and fair-to-middling minds. Or so I thought.” The white teeth clicked together impatiently. “Well? Will you do it? Will you help bring Morgana back to close the mirrors once and for all?”

  “I’ll help,” said Claudia instantly.

  “Me too,” said Charles.

  Alys still felt stunned and disoriented—and frightened. She wished with all her heart that she had never come with Claudia to the old house. She had a strange, almost dreamlike desire to turn her back on the vixen, shut the door behind her, and leave.

  But whether she turned her back or not, the vixen would still be there. And so would the house.

  And the mirrors.

  Slowly, she pushed a strand of long hair out of her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it. We’ll do it.”

  The vixen, watching her with amber slits of eyes, inclined her head briefly. Alys couldn’t tell if the gesture was ironic or not.

  Everyone turned to look at Janie. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Janie with a smile. “But this Cadal Forge—what makes you think he can take over the human world? We don’t live in the Dark Ages anymore. Technology—”

  “Plague, famine, war—is technology going to save you from those? He controls them all. Oh, don’t you understand? The man holds a Red Staff. From the way he spoke he means to set himself up as Lord of the Stillworld, with the rest of his Society under him. Then they could use you humans as they see fit. Listen to me. The alchemist who betrayed him had a daughter, an innocent girl whom Cadal once loved. When he killed the father he killed her, too—in ways I will not mention. Once he has the mastery of this world, what do you suppose he will do to you?”

  After a short silence Alys spoke. “All right, but—I don’t want to sound cowardly, but … why us? I mean, shouldn’t you tell someone in authority?”

  “And if I do? First of all, your ‘authorities’ will take me out of this house and put me in a cage for study. Here, as in the Wildworld, all true languages are one, but the minute they step outside that door they won’t be able to understand a word I say. Second, they will seal this house and investigate it with all their top scientists and leading military personnel, and they will still be investigating like crazy when Cadal Forge comes through on the solstice. It’s quite true that you stand no chance against him—but neither would any other human. It all depends upon Morgana.”

  “Oh,” said Alys.

  “Please,” interposed Claudia. “Can I ask something? Are you from the Wildworld?”

  When the vixen spoke again it was softly. “No. I am from this world. Centuries ago Morgana found a wounded fox kit in the woods, an ordinary animal left to die. She fed it and sheltered it and presently she gave it speech and the gift of long life.” She paused, and for the first time the children felt how worried she was, and how sad. “We have been together since then.”

  With a return to her old brisk manner she added, “I must go through a mirror now and look for my mistress. Tell no one, especially no adults, of what has passed here, but be back tomorrow at moonrise, about three P.M. We must make the amulet.”

  “Wait,” said Janie, as the vixen leapt sinuously off the chair, “I haven’t finished my questions. Why can’t Morgana close the mirrors from the Wildworld side?”

  “She needs the tools of her art, which are here. And if she closes herself in the Wildworld the Council will find her and kill her.”

  “Well, one more thing. What if you’re wrong and Cadal Forge has killed her already?”

  The vixen turned and clicked her teeth together gently. “Then,” she said, “you are in a very great deal of trouble.” With this she ran down the length of the living room and leapt toward the mirror which hung on the far wall. Everyone winced automatically, but although the mirror broke into a myriad of changing colors it offered no more resistance to her body than would a puff of air. The next instant she was gone.

  Chapter 4

  THE POLICE

  The next day Alys paced and frowned, Janie withdrew entirely, and Charles and Claudia pored eagerly over Charles’s old magic books, looking for “internal evidence of the Wildworld.” No one went anywhere until three o’clock, when, with one accord, all four children made a dash for their bikes and raced down the road to the old house on the hill.

  And the vixen wasn’t there.

  They waited for her. Alys, who had felt some nameless dread all day, was unable to stand still. She took a tour of the enormous living room, whose ceiling was three stories high, with open galleries circling the walls at the second and third levels. When she returned she found Charles and Claudia making forts of scattered cushions and Janie examining the mirror the vixen had gone through. To Alys’s horror she was examining it by scratching it with their mother’s diamond engagement ring.

  They waited until the shadows outside grew long. At last, feeling that if she did not do something she would lose her mind, Alys suggested that they search the house.

  It reminded her of some mad Easter-egg hunt as they dashed around, looking behind draperies and into chests and wardrobes. The house was so large that at the end of the search they could not be sure they had even seen every room, but one thing was certain. They had not found the vixen.

  “What do we do now?” Claudia looked at Alys with total confidence as they returned to the living room.

  Alys stirred uneasily and shot a sideways glance at Janie. Janie, she knew, had come to the same conclusion as she had. But Janie was not to be relied upon for help.

  “I think,” she said slowly, “that the only thing we can do … is go to the police.”

  Charles and Claudia stared at her, aghast.

  “But the vixen said, about grown-ups, not to tell them!”

  “I know, Claudia, and if the vixen were here I’d do it her way. But the point is she isn’t here. And this thing is serious. It’s beyond us. I can’t be responsible for it.”

  “But when the vixen comes back—”

  “The vixen isn’t coming back,” interrupted Janie harshly. “Don’t you realize that? The only thing that would have kept her from coming today is if she was captured—or killed. Probably killed. Face it, Claudia, the vixen is probably dead.” Claudia’s face looked stricken.

  “Janie, you shut up,” said Alys furiously. “You just love to see people miserable, don’t you?” she added between her teeth as she took Claudia in her arms.

  Janie flushed, then her purple eyes went cold
as ice. She settled back in her chair without another word.

  Charles ignored all this. “Alys, if we tell the police what’s happened they’ll think we’re raving lunatics.”

  “I thought of that.” Releasing Claudia gently, Alys began pacing up and down the room. “But if I talk very slowly and sensibly, and tell the story from the beginning—”

  “—they’ll give you a nice shot of sedative and put you in a rubber room. Come on! Did you believe Claudia when she first told us about a magic vixen? And she’s our sister!”

  Alys looked helplessly at Janie, but Janie’s pointed face was like carven stone. “If we had some evidence—”

  “But we don’t have any evidence. That’s the problem. And we’re just kids, and they’re never going to listen.”

  Alys tugged at her hair distractedly. Her pacing brought her up against an old-fashioned rolltop desk, and she stared down at it, unseeing. Or—perhaps not quite unseeing, for a moment later she found that one particular item on the desk stood out distinctly.

  A wild inspiration formed in her brain. Slowly, she turned back to her brother.

  “Charles … what if we could make them believe us? What if we did have some evidence?”

  “What if pigs flew?”

  “What if”—Alys picked up an ancient quill pen from the desk and twirled it at him—“we had a letter from Morgana?”

  The last thing Alys said before leaving for the police station was, “I’d appreciate it if you washed your face, Claudia. And, Charles, I don’t think that unprintable slogan on your T-shirt is going to help the cause.”

  Once decided, it had all been so simple. Alys was not artistic like Charles, but she had one talent which made her the envy of all her friends, especially those friends who had frequent unexcused absences at school. She could forge anybody’s handwriting.

  It was a gift ideally suited to practical jokes. Alys’s teachers found, to their astonishment, that they had written long complimentary comments on mediocre schoolwork. Friends got love notes from boys who didn’t remember writing them. So far Alys, being Alys, had never used her ability for anything more serious than a prank. But now …

  Of course, they didn’t have a specimen of Morgana’s writing. But Alys had taken a calligraphy class last summer in which she had learned to use an old-fashioned pen and inkwell, and when the letter was finished it certainly didn’t look like anything written by a teenager.

  The contents were straightforward. This letter was written by Morgana Shee, to be unsealed (they had found wax and a seal in the desk) in the case of her death or disappearance. Inside, it told the story as the vixen had told it to them, ending with a plea for help. When Alys finished the letter she placed it partially hidden under the rolltop of the desk, because she thought it would be better if the police found it themselves when they searched the house. It happened that way in movies.

  Once Alys was gone Charles took off his shirt and put it on inside out, so the slogan didn’t show, and then he forcibly washed Claudia in the kitchen sink.

  “But you still don’t look respectable,” he said afterward. Claudia’s brown hair was even more tousled than usual, and her eyes and nose were red and swollen. With only a little trouble he persuaded her to hide in the kitchen when the police came.

  It seemed a long time before they heard a car on the driveway. Charles got to the door just as it opened, then gave way before the tide of two policemen. Alys was pale, with only a spot of color in each cheek, but she nodded at him triumphantly.

  “You see,” she said to the policemen, “this is just the way we found the house. It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said the taller policeman, taking in the destruction of the room. He looked at Charles. “So what do you know about this?”

  “I guess Alys already told you,” said Charles uncomfortably. The shorter policeman was looking around, but he wasn’t looking very carefully, and he was heading for the kitchen. Charles craned his neck to follow him.

  “Don’t worry about him. Just tell me in your own words what happened,” said the tall policeman, and Charles managed somehow to stumble through the story about the vixen. “I know it sounds crazy, impossible, but I swear it’s the truth,” he finished.

  “Mmm-hmm,” said the policeman again.

  Alys was standing by the desk, where just a corner of the letter could be seen. “Don’t you think,” she said, “that you should—well, look around the house or something?”

  Just at that moment the short policeman emerged from the kitchen, holding Claudia by the arm. “Here’s another one.”

  The two officers bent over Claudia, murmuring, and Alys shot an anxious glance at Charles. Then, looking very hard the other way, she caught the corner of the letter with her fingertips and pulled it further into sight. So far, she had to admit, things weren’t going very well. The police had listened to her, yes, and they had come with her, but as to whether they believed her or not … Well, the letter would help.

  “What was that?” she said, snatching her fingers away, as one of the policemen spoke to her. “Oh, yes, I know it’s late for Claudia to be out.” She was blushing furiously. Worse, they weren’t searching the house; they weren’t going to discover the letter. Hadn’t they ever seen any murder mysteries on TV? Wretchedly, behind her back, she tugged at the letter again, and felt it flutter to the floor. She made a grab for it, bent, and straightened to find both policemen looking directly at her.

  “L-look what I found,” she choked out.

  The tall policeman tore the envelope open silently and read. Then he handed the letter to the other one.

  Alys’s face cooled in the silence that followed, and the knot in her stomach relaxed a little. The letter was good, awfully good; she knew that. She’d had enough practice amazing her friends at parties, seen enough reactions of grown-ups, to know just how good she was.

  The second policeman finished reading, and the two of them exchanged a glance over Alys’s head.

  “I’d say,” said the tall one, “that this looks pretty serious.”

  “Yes,” said Alys, with forced calm, her heart lifting.

  “I wonder,” he continued, taking a small notebook out of his pocket, “if before we take this back to the station for evidence, you would each write a sample sentence for me?”

  There was a moment of absolute silence.

  “What—what do you mean? What sentence?” said Alys at last.

  “Oh, how about this one here, ‘to be opened in case of my death or disappearance,’” said the policeman quietly.

  Everything blurred around Alys. The meaning of this was unmistakable—and unbelievable. No one else had ever been so skeptical, not even teachers confronted with their own handwriting. No one had immediately asked to compare it to hers.

  But—wait. What good would comparison do? The calligraphic characters in the letter were nothing at all like her normal writing. As first Janie, then Charles, then Claudia took the pen the policeman was pressing on them, Alys tried desperately to quiet her heart and think.

  Could they tell or couldn’t they? She had to know.

  “Can I—can I just ask why you want us to do that?” she asked shakily. “I mean, if you think one of us wrote that letter—well, we’d disguise our handwriting, wouldn’t we?”

  “No one,” said the policeman, “can disguise handwriting enough to fool an expert.”

  And that, of course, was that. Alys felt somehow she should have known all along. Meanwhile, everyone was looking at her; Claudia had produced some illegible chicken scratches on the pad, and the tall policeman was holding out the pen.

  She could not hope for help, and no help came. Janie’s expressionless face, Charles’s miserable one, seemed unnaturally bright and faraway. For a moment the best thing she could think of doing was to run.

  Her hand fell away from the pen.

  “I wrote the letter,” she whispered.

  “I see,” said the policeman in a hat
eful, smug voice.

  “But it’s true—all the rest of it—everything we said!” The words came in a flood, like the tears that suddenly streamed down her cheeks uncontrollably. “It is, it is. We just didn’t know how to make you believe us. We—”

  “You wanted to be believed, so you forged this letter and lied. Is that it?”

  “Yes—no—” Tears and confusion overcame her.

  “Anyway, look at this place.” Charles had gotten his breath back and was now pointing to the burn the sky-bolt had made on the wall. “It’s trashed. Isn’t that evidence enough?”

  “How’d it happen, son? Fireworks?”

  For the first time since the police had entered, Janie spoke. “Have you ever seen a firework that could do that?”

  “Mexican kind. Illegal.”

  As Charles spun away in disgust, the tall policeman took Alys by the arm. In a very few minutes they were all outside.

  “Now,” said the policeman, and as they stood on the paved courtyard in the moonlight he proceeded to tell them, in words they would never forget, just how little the Law was amused by this kind of practical joke.

  “In fact,” he said, softly, “I think this goes further than a joke. I think whoever wrecked that house was attempting arson. There’s been a lot of vandalism around here recently, most of it down by the schools, but some of it up as far as these hills. If I had a single scrap of evidence to connect you with what I saw in there you’d be on your way to Juvenile Hall right now. As it is, I’m giving you just one minute to get on your bikes and disappear. And I don’t ever—and I repeat ever—want to see you within five hundred yards of this place again. Get it? Now, move!”

  Charles pulled Alys toward their bikes. There was nothing else to do.

  Chapter 5

  THE SPELL