The Night of the Solstice

by L. J. Smith

  Don’t cry, Al,” said Charles, when they had turned off onto the first side street from Morgana’s. Alys was standing exactly where she’d come to rest, straddling her bicycle, her face buried in her hands. Charles looked away in embarrassment and addressed a bougainvillea bush across the street. “You did your best,” he told the bush. “You tried.”

  Alys’s shoulders heaved and she said nothing. Claudia leaned over to put a small, sweaty hand on her arm.

  “Anyway,” said Charles, “it was a good idea.”

  “It was a terrible idea,” said Janie. “Of course an expert graphologist would be able to tell she wrote it.”

  These words accomplished what Charles’s solace and Claudia’s sympathy had not. Alys raised her head.

  “You knew that?” She looked at Janie through swollen eyelids and Janie exhaled sharply and looked away, lips compressed. “And you just stood by and let me go ahead?”

  Janie turned back and met her gaze defiantly.

  “Next time, don’t tell me to shut up,” she said.

  “You crud—” began Charles, but Alys broke in.

  “Right, Miss Genius,” she said. “Well, while you were standing aside and having yourself a good laugh, did it ever occur to you that our only chance of help was disappearing forever? And that the solstice is only twelve days away? And that now it’s up to us?” Alys shook her head hard, once, then turned to Charles and Claudia.

  “Okay,” she said. “You were right and I was wrong. Let’s go.”

  “What? Where?” said Janie.

  “Back to the old house, of course.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Alys. “But someone has got to do something.”

  “And what about the police? They said we weren’t supposed to go within five hundred yards of that house.”

  Alys smiled faintly for the first time in a long while.

  “Actually,” she said, “they said they didn’t want to find us within five hundred yards of the house. And they won’t. We’ll see to that.”

  “But—”

  “No one,” said Alys, “is forcing you to come.”

  But Janie did come, walking her bike slowly behind the others with an odd, set look on her face.

  “The vixen said the spell for making the amulet is written down somewhere,” said Alys, when they were inside the house again.

  “In a grimoire,” said Charles. “What is a grimoire, anyway?”

  Claudia leaned a little closer to Alys. “Is it a big book?” she asked huskily. “A great big book on a stand with funny handwriting in it and a black cover?”

  “Yes, very likely,” said Alys, turning back to Charles. “It’s a book of spells, and what we have to do—” She stopped. “What do you mean, ‘Is it a great big book on a stand with a black cover?’” she asked Claudia.

  “I found one like that in a little room beside the kitchen,” said Claudia simply. “When Charles sent me there to wait. I didn’t know what it was.”

  Janie was looking at Alys with unconcealed horror. “And so we’re just going to whip up a spell on our own, is that it? As if it were a recipe for banana bread?”

  “We don’t have any choice. You saw to that.”

  The grimoire turned out to be the largest book they had ever seen, with pages made of parchment illuminated with tracery, and it was open to a page thickly covered with elegant, intricate writing. The problem was they couldn’t read the writing.

  “Latin?” said Alys doubtfully, once they had carried the book between them to the kitchen table where there was light. The script was fine and beautiful but so crowded together it was impossible to distinguish individual words.

  “Why Latin?” said Charles. “If you want old, there’s plenty of languages older than that. It could be, uh, Greek, or Babylonian, or Egyptian hieroglyphs.”

  Claudia was dismayed. “You mean we can’t do the spell?”

  They all stared at the book unhappily.

  “I hate to say this,” said Charles, “but those letters don’t even look like our alphabet to me.”

  “I know,” said Alys. “Well, maybe it is Greek. Or Russian. Russian’s in another alphabet, Cyrillic or something, isn’t it, Janie? Janie?”

  Janie had been gazing at the writing as intently as the others, but now she gave a little start and blinked. “It’s not Cyrillic,” she murmured and abruptly got up and went to stand by the window.

  Alys gave her an exasperated glare and returned to the page. The words didn’t look Greek to her; they looked even stranger, more alien and unreadable. Yet they also had an air of mocking familiarity, and she felt she would be able to read them if she only looked at them the right way.

  “What we need,” said Charles lugubriously, “is a what-do-you-call-it, a person who studies languages.”

  “Um.” Alys’s eyes hurt from staring. When she absently raised her head to blink at him, something caught her attention. “What on earth did you do to your T-shirt?”

  “Turned it inside out. You said …”

  “I know. But I can still read the slogan.”

  Charles tucked his chin under to look. “You can?”

  “Yes.” The black letters were plainly visible through the thin white cotton. “It’s just backward—” Alys broke off, her eyes widening. “Backward!” she exclaimed, snapping her head down to look at the page. “Backward!”

  “What?”

  “It’s English! The spell! It’s English backward!”

  “Not backward,” said Janie quietly, turning. “It’s reversed. A mirror image.”

  Alys stared at her in disbelief. When she spoke, her voice matched Janie’s quiet tone. “So you knew that, Janie. Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Because,” said Janie, holding her gaze, “I have some very serious reservations about this whole business.”

  Charles and Claudia were bent over the grimoire, Charles trying to spell out the turned-around letters which ran from right to left. “‘For … the … uh … T-r-a-v … For the Travels …’”

  “‘For the Traversal of the Mirrors,’” said Janie, still engaged in a stare-down with Alys.

  “Hey, that’s right! This is the one!” Charles began spelling out the next line, but Alys interrupted him. “We need a mirror, so we can look at the reflection of this writing in it. Claude, try to find a small one; I’ll get a pencil.”

  Halfway through copying the spell Alys stopped and stared, checking her writing several times against the mirror reflection. The grim look did not leave her face even when she finished the copying and put down the pencil.

  “What’s the matter?” said Charles.

  “You’ll see. Read it.”

  Charles took the sheet of paper covered with Alys’s own neat round handwriting, and read:

  “For the Traversal of the Mirrors. Be drest in pure virgyn garments fromme head to heel, and girt with a red girdel of pleached corde, and shodde in blue. Take each ingredient belowe, and put it in a mortar, and grynde it all fine till it be enough. Then bring the pouder forthe and put it in a crucible of golde. Add thereto the blood and spittle of ye who wolde traverse the mirrors. Stir widdershins and wake with the first reflexion of moonrise. When cool, parte and sew into bagges of green silke. Wear at the neck.”

  “That’s it,” said Charles. “Then there’s just a list of ingredients. So what’s wrong?”

  “Read the ingredients,” said Alys.

  “Oh. Okay. It says we need, uh, dwaleberry and red wulfenite, quicksilver and peacock coal, hornblende and wild elephant’s ear, stinking smut and bladderwort, flyclub and phoenix feather and sunfish scales and falcon’s tooth and …” He broke off, looking unhappy. “It says—a shard of human bone.”

  “What’s a shard?” asked Claudia.

  “A little piece,” said Janie. “Like a splinter.”

  “Jeez, Alys, are you sure you transcribed this right? I mean human bone? How’re we going to get hold of that?”


  “Oh, well,” said Janie, suddenly cheerful. “There’s always the obvious solution.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, we all have bones, don’t we? It would only take a little one. Like this.” Janie grabbed Claudia’s pinky finger. “This is a nice little bone, just the size of a shard,” she said ghoulishly.

  “Janie!”

  “You wouldn’t mind, would you, Claude? Maybe Mom would give you some anesthetic. It would be over in a minute.”

  Janie leaned forward, smiling madly at the cowering Claudia.

  “Janie, shut up!”

  “I told you not to—”

  “About the other ingredients,” said Charles, placing himself and the list between his sisters. “Some of these sound just as bad.”

  “I know. The first thing is to find out what they are. Remember, these are old-fashioned names. We’ll divide the list up and each research a part. Once we know what we’re looking for we can figure out how to get it.”

  So the list was divided, and because Claudia wanted to help out, Alys gave her the top ingredient, dwaleberry, and had Janie copy the next four for herself. Janie did this without expression, but as she rose to leave she wiggled her fingers under Claudia’s nose.

  “Don’t forget, Claude,” she said. “I mean, it’s not as if you were ever going to play piano or anything.”

  “Do I have to copy this?” Charles said as she left the kitchen. “Or can I just tear it in half?”

  “Copy,” said Alys positively, standing up. “Just a sec.” She caught up with Janie at the back door.

  “Now, Alys,” said Janie, looking at her speculatively, “I hope you’re going to keep your sense of humor. I hope you’re not going to say—”

  “I’ve got only one thing to say,” said Alys. “And it’s this. If you don’t lay off Claudia at once and forevermore I am going to knock your head off.”

  Janie’s mouth fell open.

  “I may not be a genius,” Alys continued, “but if there’s one thing I know about it’s teamwork. And you have to decide right now whether or not you’re on our team. If you don’t want to help us, if you’re scared, that’s fine. But if you plan on working with us, you’re going to act like one of us. You’re going to try to help, and if you have any bright ideas you’re going to tell us right away. Because if you don’t I am going to pull your brains out through your nostrils. Understand?”

  Janie’s mouth opened and shut like a fish’s.

  “Good. Off you go, then.” Alys turned on her heel and marched back into the house.

  The next afternoon they gathered in the kitchen once more. They’d done well with their research: Even Claudia had found out that dwaleberry was another name for deadly nightshade, or atropa belladonna. They now knew that quicksilver was mercury, that red wulfenite, peacock coal, and hornblende were all minerals, that wild elephant’s ear, bladderwort, and stinking smut were plants, and that sunfish scales, flyclub, and phoenix feather were parts of animals. But, as Charles said, knowing and getting were two different things.

  “I called that big nursery on Tustin where Dad bought his sago palm,” he told Alys, “and they don’t even have any of these plants. The guy just laughed when I asked about bladderwort and elephant’s ear, and when I got to stinking smut he hung up. And about the other ingredients—how many do you really think we can get hold of, three or four? Much less the human bone.”

  At the mention of the bone everyone looked quickly at Janie, but she seemed to be studying her own list intently. “I’ll tell you something else,” she said without looking up. “I got a book on witchcraft, and according to it witches gather their own herbs. By moonlight. Naked.”

  “Naked!” said Charles.

  “Skyclad, they call it. And there may be special incantations to be said… . Alys, you’re not paying attention.”

  “No,” said Alys. “I’m sorry. But Charles is right. We’ll never be able to dig up half these things, naked or not.”

  Janie looked at her quickly. “You mean you’re giving up?”

  Chapter 6

  THE HIDDEN ROOM

  No! Of course I’m not giving up,” said Alys. “But I’ve been thinking all day and we’re going about this wrong. The vixen expected us to mix up the amulet in one afternoon, like Morgana did. If the ingredients were that hard to find she’d be expecting the impossible.”

  “Maybe they’re growing in the garden,” said Charles.

  “Not wulfenite and peacock coal and hornblende, they’re not. But think. Where does a sorceress get the ingredients for her spells? She can’t cross the Atlantic every time she needs European dwaleberry. She doesn’t keep a nest of falcon chicks or a bowl of sunfish—”

  “A laboratory!” A sudden light came into Janie’s purple eyes. “She’d have a laboratory of her own. Or at least a storeroom for her stuff. I bet it’s right here in the house. Hidden, maybe, behind a false wall—”

  “The cellar!” cried Charles.

  “Damp,” said Janie. “Drafty.”

  “Witches like drafts.”

  “The towers!” squealed Claudia, knocking over a chair as she bolted out of the kitchen. Charles bolted the other way.

  “Wait a minute, let’s get organized,” said Alys, but they were gone. She looked at Janie, who was wearing quite a different expression than she had been these last few days.

  “Faust did it in a library,” Janie said thoughtfully.

  “There’s a library on the second floor,” said Alys. “I’ll go up there. You do this floor. Try not to get lost.”

  Alys’s warning to Janie was quite serious. There were so many dozens of rooms in the old house, and so many unexpected twists and turnings, that it was easy to lose the way.

  The house was built like a hollow square enclosing a courtyard. The south and west sides of the quadrangle had been closed off. When their doors were forced they revealed whole wings of little rooms which looked as if they had not been entered for centuries. All were empty.

  On the north side, the ancient, smoke-stained kitchen opened into the three-story living room, which was easily the largest room in the house. The east side was where Alys and Janie were going now. Leaving the first-story rooms to Janie, Alys went up the spiral staircase in the northeast tower to the second story.

  She emerged in a high arched hallway which looked down on the courtyard on the right and had a range of doors on the left. The first door opened on Morgana’s bedchamber, which was dominated by a magnificent canopy bed hung with velvet draperies. In a recess, standing opposite one another, were two full-length mirrors. When Alys stood between these they reflected her, front and back, to infinity, so that the room seemed full of people.

  The second room down the gallery had been converted to a study, the third was a sitting room, the fourth was the library, and the fifth held a great spinning wheel. Each had its own mirror; some were beautiful, like the polished bronze sitting-room mirror, some ugly and strange, like the study mirror which was so tarnished Alys could scarcely see herself in it. Nowhere could she find any sign of a secret panel or hidden doorway.

  The sixth room was different from the others. It was entirely bare: no tapestries, no wardrobe, not even a candle in the alcove. Only a very small bed pushed away in one corner.

  It looks like a child’s bed, thought Alys, and she wondered if Morgana had ever had a child, and if so why this room, this nursery, was now so empty. It looked almost as if someone had stripped it clean in anger, throwing away anything that might spark a memory.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a shout from the tower. “Alys, come quick! Charles says he’s found it.”

  She ran into Janie, who was doing the shouting, in the hallway, and they both hurried down the stairs and back to the kitchen. Here a long, narrow staircase led to the cellar.

  Claudia was already down there, and she and Charles had their ears pressed to one wall. Close by them, glowing in the red sunlight that came through a small window set just above groun
d level, was a rusty mirror.

  “Listen!” Excitedly, Charles beckoned them closer. With his other hand he thumped several times slowly on the wall, while Claudia added a furious counterpart of quick rappings.

  “Now listen,” he said, and reaching an arm’s length away he knocked again. This time the sound was different.

  “And look!” he added. “You can see the outline, sort of, if you stand right. This crack is the side, and that one up there is the top. It’s a door.”

  “And this is the keyhole,” said Claudia. She had four small fingers stuck in a knothole.

  “Wait a minute,” said Janie. Nudging Claudia out of the way, she slipped sensitive fingers almost as small as her sister’s into the hole. “There’s metal in here… . It’s some kind of a lock. If I can just push it right …”

  With a soft click an entire section of the wall swung inward.

  The small room thus revealed was illuminated by slit-shaped windows at ground level, and it had a mirror. Every inch of wall that wasn’t window or mirror was shelves. And every shelf, from floor to ceiling, was stacked with rows and rows and rows of bottles and jars and vials and phials and retorts.

  “Wow,” said Claudia.

  “I’ll bet half of those are poisonous,” said Janie.

  “I told you witches like drafts,” said Charles.

  Alys’s sense of triumph was tempered with awe at the sheer quantity of bottles which shone in the last rays of the setting sun. “I’m afraid it will take us hours—” she began, but Claudia interrupted.

  “Footprints!” she said, pointing.

  It was true; the thick carpet of dust on the floor clearly showed a single set of footprints leading to the shelves and back.

  “Morgana!” said Claudia, hugging herself with delight.

  “Sure has little feet,” said Charles critically.

  Janie, who had already stepped into the room to examine one wall of shelves, suddenly made a strangled sound.

  “Alys. Alys. Alys.”

  “Black widow!” cried Charles instantly, leaping to her side. “Where’d it bite you?”

  Janie pushed him away and stumbled toward Alys. Her eyes were wild.