The Night of the Solstice

by L. J. Smith

  “Stir widdershins,” said Janie, as she poured the mixture into the crucible. “Counterclockwise.”

  Alys stirred carefully, and presently the contents of the bowl resolved themselves into a multicolored mixture, mainly greenish brown because of the herbs, but with the brilliant glints of minerals through and through.

  “Now for the blood and spit,” she said, and reached into her backpack.

  “What,” said Charles, “is that?”

  “This,” said Alys, “is an X-Acto knife. Well, we need blood, don’t we?” she added, as everyone stared at her.

  “I was thinking of maybe a safety pin,” Charles muttered.

  “We can’t sit here all night squeezing blood out of pinpricks. Come on, I’ve had first aid at the Y.”

  “So if you sever an artery you’ll know how to apply a tourniquet?” But Charles allowed her to make a small jab at the tip of his finger. After an instant blood welled out.

  “Drip into the bowl,” instructed Alys, and she turned to prick Claudia. Claudia joined Charles over the crucible, and soon Alys was bleeding companionably along with them.

  Janie hung back.

  “It doesn’t hurt—much,” said Claudia.

  There was a pause.

  “I don’t want to,” said Janie.

  “Get over here,” said Alys impatiently. “You’re not afraid of a little cut, are you?”

  Janie’s nostrils flared and she tightened her lips. But she held her position by the door.

  “Look,” said Charles. “You were practically willing to let Claudia sacrifice her whole finger, and now you’re making a fuss about a few drops of blood. Coward!”

  “Don’t,” said Alys. It was dark outside by now. “If she doesn’t put her blood in, she can’t go through the mirrors, that’s all. We’ll have to leave her here.”

  After another moment of deadly silence Janie yielded. Alys tried to be gentle, but somehow Janie’s cut was deeper than the others’, or else her blood was thinner, because finally her finger had to be wrapped in a dishcloth to stop the bleeding. Janie was once again wearing her killer-frost expression by the time they had finished.

  After they each spat into the bowl, Alys stirred again.

  “And now we’d better go outside,” she said. “We have to let the first ray of moonlight shine on the crucible.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone noticed,” said Janie in a polite, expressionless voice, “but it doesn’t say the first ray of moonlight. It says the reflection of the first ray. As in mirror reflection.”

  “Hey, she’s right,” said Charles, checking the battered sheet of paper.

  Alys wanted to shake Janie. “Couldn’t you have mentioned this before?” she demanded angrily. “Instead of waiting until the last minute to show off how clever you are?”

  Janie’s purple eyes blazed. “There are dozens of mirrors in this place! We can use any one of them!”

  “Any one small enough to carry. Claudia, run and find one while we take this stuff outdoors.”

  The grass was damp under Alys’s slipper-shod feet as they walked out to the garden behind the house. Beyond this flat space the ground sloped steeply away, and the wood-covered hill stretched down to the lights of Villa Park below. They had barely reached the spot Alys had chosen when Claudia’s voice came to them faintly.

  “I can’t get it out!” With the shout, Claudia herself appeared, flushed and panting. “I took the little mirror off the kitchen wall, but I can’t get it through the door. It isn’t heavy. It just—won’t come out!”

  It took Charles only a moment to ascertain that this was true. “It’s like there’s some kind of magic wall there,” he said, returning. “Doesn’t anybody have a mirror on them?”

  Alys, in her sodden slippers and too-tight pants, clutched the crucible to her chest with one hand and juggled her backpack and the flashlight with the other. “Would we be standing here if we did?” she snapped, and then: “Oh, no—look.” To the east a pale radiance showed in the sky, and a sliver of white appeared over the foothills.

  There was instant pandemonium. “Where can we get a mirror?” “Nowhere—it’s too late.” “Could we use something else shiny?” “There isn’t any time.” “Janie, I’m going to kill you!”

  “Wait!” shouted Charles. Half a crescent of white showed above the foothills as he fumbled with the zippered pocket of his windbreaker. Getting the pocket open at last, he pulled out a familiar flat shape—a Hershey bar.

  “Charles,” Alys screamed, purple-faced, “if all you can think about at this moment is your stomach—”

  Charles tore off the outer paper wrapper in one motion, revealing the inner foil wrapper. “Here’s your mirror,” he said. “Or as good as. It’ll reflect light.”

  The white crescent in the eastern sky looked elongated, as if its bottom horn clung to the hills below. Alys dropped her backpack and snatched the shining rectangle of foil from Charles, falling to her knees with the crucible in front of her.

  “I don’t know if this will work or not—I don’t even know if I’m holding it right.” Shakily, she shifted the foil back and forth, trying to judge the angle that would throw a ray on the crucible. The others crouched over her.

  “Moonlight isn’t like sunlight,” said Charles. “I bet we won’t even know exactly when it works.”

  He was wrong. On the word works the moon separated entirely from the mountains. At the same instant Alys saw the smudged foil blaze and then a beam of purest silver shot out to strike the golden crucible. There was a flash like summer lightning and Alys nearly fell backward. They were all blinded. When they could see again through the dazzling afterimage, the crucible was topped with a ghostly flame, translucent and radiant as the moonlight itself, rising twelve feet into the air.

  “I wouldn’t touch it if I were you,” said Alys thickly, at last.

  “Touch it!” Charles said, gaping.

  They lost track of time, watching that cool, unearthly column of flame which neither rose nor fell but endlessly poured its energy upward. Long after they were too numb to feel the cold it began to flicker, and between one flicker and another it went dead. Blinking, the chilled watchers stirred.

  In the crucible, the grayish, moisture-clotted mixture had undergone a transformation. It was now fine sand, the color of the eldritch flame, the color of moonlight, or running water, or the surface of an empty mirror. Janie, overcome by curiosity, tested it with one finger.

  “Cool,” she said huskily.

  “Give me the bags,” said Alys.

  No one moved as Alys divided the star-colored sand into four parts and pinched it into the bags. No one spoke or urged her to hurry as she clumsily stitched the open ends of the bags closed. When it was done each of them took a bag and looked at it quietly, feeling the soft weight of the sand inside. And then they realized that it was all done and they were wet from kneeling on the grass and half-frozen from the night air and it was terribly late and they had to go home.

  Stiffly, they gathered the used materials and started down the hill.

  Above them, the crescent moon rose in the sky.

  Chapter 9

  THE FIRST MIRROR

  I ’ll go first,” said Alys gently.

  “Let’s get it over with, then,” said Janie.

  It was the next evening, just after moonrise, and they had been arguing all afternoon about which mirror to go through. Charles and Claudia wanted to try the cellar, maintaining that this was the logical place for a prisoner like Morgana to be kept, but Alys and Janie thought it would be more useful and less dangerous to use the little hallway between the kitchen and the living room, and as usual Alys had had the last word. Now she had also ended the debate about who would lead the way into the Wildworld.

  She paused, looking at their four reflections in the hallway mirror and fingering the silk bag which hung from a shoestring at her neck. “Give me a moment after I go through,” she said finally. “If there’s something dangerous on the o
ther side—like Cadal Forge—I’ll come back fast.”

  She hesitated. “Everybody ready? Nobody has to go to the bathroom or anything?”

  “Oh, let’s hurry!” Claudia couldn’t restrain herself any longer.

  “Right,” said Alys. She squared her shoulders and faced the mirror directly, one hand upraised as if to push aside a curtain of strung beads. She took a small step.

  “Alys through the looking glass,” said Charles, and he laughed nervously.

  Janie leaned forward, and with all her strength, gave Alys a sudden shove in the middle of the back.

  “Hey—”

  “Look out!”

  Charles grabbed for Alys but could not check her. She fell directly into the mirror, but instead of shards of glass and blood and breakage there was a kaleidoscopic blur of light. Charles saw an orange-red figure like the silhouette of a falling girl on a shifting blue-green background. Then the colors were gone, without even a ripple to show they had ever existed, and he was staring at his own openmouthed reflection.

  He rounded savagely on Janie. “What’d you do that for?”

  Janie’s purple eyes were fractionally wider than usual but she spoke calmly. “Just being helpful. I thought if I didn’t she’d never do it by herself.”

  Charles and Claudia were too excited and amazed to stay angry. “Let’s go in,” said Claudia. “I’m going.” She dove into the mirror as if she’d been doing it every day of her life. Again came the colors and the red-orange figure that passed through them.

  When the glass cleared Charles and Janie looked at one another, then Charles put down his head and charged. He did not feel the surface of the mirror as he passed through it, but for an instant the air seemed to thicken and quiver around him. Then his foot came down and he found that he had stepped into a room he had never seen before. Alys and Claudia were staring about them in wonder.

  “It worked,” said Charles, looking at his own hands in surprise. His solid flesh had passed through solid glass.

  “Here comes Janie!” cried Claudia, vastly excited.

  Seeing someone come out of a mirror was even stranger than seeing someone go in. First the red-orange figure appeared and then Janie’s disembodied leg swung out of it and then Janie herself was standing there.

  “Doesn’t it feel funny?” said Claudia with a delighted shiver.

  Charles nodded. “Like electrified Jell-O.”

  “Shhh!” said Alys, looking around uneasily. They were still in a hallway, or corridor, but the ceiling was now twenty feet high and the floor and the walls were made of blocks of rough, pale limestone. Arches in those walls held massive wooden doors cross-barred with iron, and the whole scene was lit by torches that burned eerily blue without smoking.

  “It’s a castle,” whispered Claudia, and Charles stepped over to a window set deeply in the wall. Through the panes of thickly glazed glass he could see moonlight falling on the inner courtyard.

  “I don’t see anyone out there,” he whispered. “And I don’t hear anything, either.”

  Everyone listened. The massive walls held silence as thick as butter. Only the flickering torches moved.

  Alys let out her breath. “Maybe Cadal Forge isn’t here,” she said softly. “But we’ve got to be careful. All right, Charles, you and Claudia go to the dungeon—I mean the cellar. If you find Morgana, get her to the human side immediately, then come and tell us.” This last instruction had cost Alys a great deal of heartache, but she had finally decided that Morgana’s safety came before their own. “If you see anyone besides Morgana, run. Remember, something got the vixen.”

  Charles nodded alertly, and he and Claudia moved stealthily away, through the nearest arch, toward the kitchen.

  Janie was already testing a door which led out into the courtyard, and finding it locked.

  “I wonder how many doors in this place are locked,” she whispered.

  “These aren’t.” Alys was standing in front of the enormous double doors, which in their world shut off the living room from the hallway. They were so heavy that it took the combined weight of the two girls to move them.

  “Oh …” breathed Alys as they stepped inside.

  They were in the great hall of Fell Andred. As in the human house the ceiling was three stories high, but in the Wildworld the stories themselves were more lofty, and the ribs of the vaulted ceiling soared upward as if defying gravity. Thick columns sculpted like statues supported the galleries, and at the far end a staircase wound out of the northeast turret to end between two of these columns.

  As they slowly walked the length of the hall Alys shrank from the titanic statues, which seemed to be staring down at them. Some merely looked impassive, but many had twisted smiles and an air of quietly waiting… .

  “Here’s a fire,” said Janie.

  The hearth was in proportion to the room, and in its cavernous depths a whole tree trunk was blazing. At a distance of ten feet the heat brought a flush to Alys’s cheeks and tingled dryly against her outstretched palms. She stepped closer for a better look, and suddenly Janie grabbed her arm, pulling her out of the way as a fist-sized fireball burst out of the flames and shot toward her, flashing past with a sizzling sound. Gasping, she watched it careen off a wall and fly about the room until, with a hiss, it winked out and was gone.

  “Thank you,” said Alys when she could speak again. She added, “That makes up for pushing me through the mirror.”

  Janie looked quickly at her, then away. “Didn’t think you realized that was me,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Forget it.” Alys cast another glance around the hall, more uneasy than ever. That statue over there, of the man with steer’s horns—hadn’t it been on the other side before? And surely the winged woman above them hadn’t been smiling so cruelly.

  “I don’t think Morgana is here,” said Janie in a small voice.

  “No,” agreed Alys. There was nowhere to hide anyone. The vast room was bare except for the great dais which stood at the east end near the staircase and the glittering tapestries on the walls. It might have been a beautiful place, if one didn’t mind the statues, of course, or that faint faraway music which disappeared when you tried to listen to it.

  Yet right beside Alys, hanging in front of the fireplace, was something altogether lovely: a birdcage fashioned of twisted golden wires. “Look, Janie,” she whispered, going on tiptoe to look into it. Then: “Oh!”

  “What is it?” asked Janie, keeping well back in case it was something dangerous.

  “It looks like … I think it’s a snake.” Somehow the thought of a snake being kept like a lovebird or canary was the most horrible of all. This is a different world, Alys thought, and all desire to explore left her. Aloud she said, “Anyway, it’s dead.”

  “Well, good. Let’s go over there, then.” Janie nodded toward the dais, which stood in front of the largest mirror Alys had ever seen, a mirror large enough for four people to walk into abreast. But even as she spoke they heard another sound, barely audible above the crackle of the fire, a sound like a paper bag brushing across a wooden floor.

  “… if you please, gentle ladies …”

  Alys stiffened. She looked up, down, around. She looked at Janie, who was doing the same thing.

  “… gentle ladies … if you please …”

  “It’s the snake,” said Janie. There was a sort of horrified fascination in her face.

  Alys put her head close to the cage. The snake was lying as still and quiet as before, but its black eyes glittered at her. It was alive.

  “… of your mercy, ladies … I beg you …” The voice was as dry and thin as a dead butterfly’s wing.

  “It’s hurt,” said Alys, somehow sure of this. “What’s wrong? What can I do?” she said to the snake.

  “… if it would not be too much to ask … the heat … fire is death to my kind… .”

  Now that Alys thought of it, she saw it would be madness to keep a bird or any other living creature so close to that
great fire. She looked up and realized with dismay that the cage could not be detached from its chain. She would have to reach in and take the snake in her hands.

  “Don’t,” said Janie.

  Alys hesitated. She didn’t want to do it, but she couldn’t just walk away and leave the creature to die. “You won’t—er, bite me, will you?”

  “Ah, lady …” The tiny voice was so pained that Alys felt ashamed. With a sideways glance at Janie she unfastened the cage door and took out the snake, which was neither slimy nor scaly, but dry and very warm. It drooped limply from her hand, head and tail hanging like pieces of old string.

  “It’s cooler at the other end of the hall,” said Janie. Janie might be difficult at times, but she never got hysterical and she seldom nagged. Alys felt grateful for this as she carried the snake back and laid it on the floor near the double doors.

  “Is that any better?”

  The snake gave a weak, appreciative wiggle. “My life … is yours… .”

  “What was it doing there, anyway?” said Janie.

  “Hush. It’s tired out. It can’t talk.” Alys was tempted to pet the snake down its blue and coral length, but she resisted. Although it was nearly two feet long, its back was marred by little bumps or stubs, giving it the look of a very slim caterpillar.

  “What were you doing in that cage?” said Janie again. “I just thought if Morgana did it we’d better know about it,” she added, with a quelling look at Alys.

  “The Lady Morgana … ah, no. It was that devil, Cadal Forge.”

  “Him!” said Alys. They strained to hear the papery voice.

  “That cage was meant for a firebird, a phoenix … but he caught me and put me there lest I fly away.”

  “Fly?” said Janie.

  “Like a butterfly,” said Alys, pleased with her deductive powers. “You’re a caterpillar, aren’t you?”

  When the creature spoke again its voice was a little stronger. “Gentle lady, you mock me.” Then, with a laugh like a whispered sigh, it said, “Although only an infant of my kind, I am a Feathered Serpent.”