The Heart of the Phoenix

by Brian Knight

  “If you say so.” Her doppelganger seemed almost indifferent. “So is it my dream, or yours?”

  “Mine!” Penny almost shouted. “If you are me then this is my dream.”

  “If you say so,” the girl repeated, and shrugged.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “How should I know?” Penny’s doppelganger said, then vanished. Dimly, just another echo in the dark and empty place, the girl’s parting words found Penny’s ears.

  “It’s your dream.”

  * * *

  “Hey, wait!” Penny shouted, but she was already out of the dream. She stood in her pajamas, shouting at her own reflection in the Conjuring Glass, the large magic mirror she’d liberated from a murderous humanoid bird shortly after moving to her new home in Dogwood, and which now hung on the door of her attic bedroom wardrobe.

  She closed her eyes and clung to the last shreds of her dream, already fraying around the edges and well on its way to unraveling, and wondered what she’d been conjuring.

  * * *

  An hour later Penny was showered, caffeinated, and eating a buttered bagel when the phone in the hallway rang. She dropped the last quarter of her breakfast onto her plate and ran to catch it before it could disturb Susan.

  Susan’s workdays started earlier than ever since her shop had burnt down with half of downtown Dogwood. She’d had to downsize, no more books or magazines, but she was keeping the office stationery business alive, barely, by storing product in the basement of their Clover Hill house and taking orders from her home office in the unused second floor bedroom. Penny helped where she could, loading orders into the old van Susan drove now, the old Falcon that was parked at the far end of the dirt and gravel turnaround and hadn’t moved all summer, and some days she helped with the deliveries.

  The stationery business was a shrinking concern. Most of her old customers now ordered online or from the box stores in Centralia. Only the local businesses whose offices hadn’t burned down along with Susan’s the previous spring still ordered from her. Susan was desperately hanging on to what remained of Sullivan’s, but her business seemed to be shrinking weekly.

  Penny hooked the phone from its cradle on the second ring.

  “Hi Kat.” She waited for a second for Katie to respond. “Kat?”

  “How did you know it was me?” Katie sounded surprised and exasperated in equal measures.

  “I don’t know. Just did.” And Penny didn’t either, she had just known. It had been happening a lot lately with all of them, knowing when one of the others was calling or coming over, knowing what one of them was about to say or ask before she even opened her mouth. They seemed strangely in sync with each other… except for Zoe, who had been gone most of the summer, and who Penny hadn’t heard from in over two weeks.

  There was another short silence, and then Katie continued.

  “I got a text from Zoe this morning.”

  Penny felt a moment of annoyance… why hadn’t Zoe called her? Why did she have to live in the one place in the country that didn’t have cell service? …then she had to stifle a squeal of excitement.

  “What did she say? How is she?”

  “She didn’t say anything, just sent a picture.”

  “A picture? Of what?”

  “It’s easier just to show you,” Katie said, then laughed. “How soon can you get to my house?”

  Penny heard the first sounds of activity from upstairs, echoing footfalls and the bang of the bathroom door.

  “I’m on my way,” Penny said, and hung up.

  * * *

  After a quick goodbye to Susan and a promise to return that afternoon to help her with deliveries, Penny climbed up the folding staircase to her attic room to fetch a beaded bag. The bag, a little too large to be a purse, was a present from Zoe that summer, sent from the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho where she’d lived before coming to Dogwood. It held an assortment of the usual teenage girl survival gear, and a few unusual items.

  As far as Penny knew she was the only girl in Dogwood who didn’t own a cell phone, there was no service at Clover Hill so Susan didn’t see the point, but she did have a small oval mirror she could use to call up a few of her closest friends. For some reason she’d been unable to reach Zoe on it since she’d left town, but she tried not to take it personally since Katie and Ellen had also been unable to reach Zoe on theirs. The mirrors were left behind with other relics after Penny and Zoe had driven the Birdman from Dogwood, and seemed to be connected to the Conjuring Glass hanging on Penny’s wardrobe door.

  Another of the unusual items in her bag was a wand, an old and dry twist of root with a tiny clear crystal and scorch marks at its tip. This wand was not as pretty as Zoe’s, Katie’s, or Ellen’s, or even the old black wand that now lay untouched in the locked trunk at Aurora Hollow, but it had never let her down, so she had no desire to replace it.

  Penny paused with the bag in her hand and briefly considered taking out her wand and using it on her wardrobe door, a simple tap and she could connect it directly to Katie’s walk-in closet door, the quickest and easiest way to travel. But the ever present risk of stepping through into Katie’s room to discover one or both of Katie’s very confused parents gaping at her and asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about why she’d been hiding in their daughter’s closet stayed her wand hand. Katie’s brother, Michael, already knew about them, an unavoidable consequence of their adventures near the end of the last school year. Letting Katie’s mom and dad in on the secret would probably not make keeping it any easier.

  So, bicycle it was.

  Her bike was parked near the steps to the front porch. Penny slid the bag from her shoulder, dropped it into the bike’s basket and climbed on. She sped down the driveway to the road into town, and when she found it deserted, let the bike raise a few inches above the ground. She would have preferred to go a bit higher, but being spotted soaring through the air on an otherwise ordinary looking bike would have been harder to explain away than her sudden materialization inside Katie’s closet. A few inches above the ground, and at a speed most would have considered suicidal, Penny flew toward town.

  * * *

  “Hi Penny!”

  Katie’s mom and dad answered her knock at the door and greeted her with a bit more cheer than was really necessary. Only a few months previously Katie’s father had banned her from so much as speaking to Penny in the hallways at school, and often referred to her, according to Katie, simply as that… girl!

  Marcus West had held a long grudge against Penny’s family, mostly her aunt Nancy, and that dislike had carried over to Penny when she’d come back in Dogwood. Nancy Sinclair and his sister, Katie’s long lost aunt Tracy, had been best friends as younger girls, and possibly something more as adults, and he blamed Nancy for taking Tracy away from him and Dogwood. He’d since undergone a change of heart, and seemed determined to make up for his rudeness.

  Penny didn’t know if her and Katie’s aunts had been more than friends as he suspected, but she had her own suspicions, and if she was right then wherever Tracy West had gone, it wasn’t with her aunt Nancy.

  Over the past several months Penny had found clues and hints that had almost convinced her that it was her aunt Nancy, her mother’s identical twin, who had taken her out of Dogwood to San Francisco, raised her, and then died when her airplane crashed into the Pacific Ocean, not an accident as everyone had believed, but a sabotage orchestrated by the men who had destroyed half of downtown Dogwood the previous spring, and almost burnt down her home as well.

  If Penny’s suspicions were correct, then her mother was still out there somewhere. Penny was determined to find out where she was, but so far hadn’t managed to track her whereabouts beyond the night of her own birth. The very night Penny was born was the night her real mother seemed to have vanished.

  “Hi Mr. and Mrs. West.” She stepped inside and passed between them, bracing herself for Mrs. West’s obligatory hug and Mr. West’s standard hair ruffle.<
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  “Can I get you anything?”

  “She’s fine dad,” Katie shouted from her open bedroom door down the hallway. “Just let her come in!”

  Ellen giggled, Katie shouted for her to hurry, and Mr. West sent her on her way with a final ruffle of her already mussed hair. By the time she reach Katie’s room Penny’s fire-hued hair seemed to be dancing around her head like real flames.

  Penny reached the open door and a pair of hands, one belonging to Katie, the other to Ellen, shot out into the hallway and yanked her inside. The door slammed behind her.

  “What?” Penny staggered inside and Ellen steadied her before she could fall.

  Smiling, Katie shoved the screen of her phone at her, and Penny saw a picture of a door. It was a plain looking door, off white framed in a weathered brick wall. Letters stenciled on the door read Laundry.

  Midnight was typed below the picture of the door.

  Penny smiled. They were going to see Zoe tonight.

  * * *

  Near midnight, Aurora Hollow, the secluded clearing at the edge of Penny and Susan’s property on Clover Hill, was dark and peaceful. One of its two usual denizens, the talking fox Ronan, had been away almost as long as Zoe, but Rocky, a small humanoid with a large head and hands and narrow torso and limbs, stood still as a statue near the fire pit. His gray skin resembled stone, and the blue bib overalls the girls made him wear were dirty. He didn’t breathe, didn’t even twitch, only waited. Rocky’s usual perch was the stone outcropping on the other side of the creek at the hollow’s edge, blending into the rising stone cliff that formed the natural boundary between Penny’s property and the adjoining wild land owned by the State of Washington, but he knew there was going to be company that night and waited for them.

  Rocky was a Homunculus, a magical creature of stone, and had bonded with Penny at the moment of his birth. He had her eyes, and the uncanny ability to know when she was coming.

  There was wildlife about too, the local critters were drawn to the hollow, but they scattered when the old door, which stood improbably wedged between two willow trunks, began to creak open. It spilled light over Rocky, the fire pit, the duff-covered ground, and the quick moving waters of Clear Creek. A second later Penny stepped through. Rocky opened his eyes and chattered a greeting.

  “Hi Rocky,” Penny whispered. Behind her, through the open door, was her dark bedroom. She closed the door as softly as possible, then breathed a little easier when the portal to her house, where Susan still slept, was closed.

  Penny pointed her wand at the fire pit, and flames shot from the stone circle, bathing Aurora Hollow in bright, dancing light.

  Rocky summersaulted past Penny and landed on one of the fire ring boulders. The key for the chest where they kept their most secret things, including the old and maybe a little alive book, The Secrets of The Phoenix Girls, bounced from the leather string around his neck. He chattered at her in his strange, monkeyish language.

  Penny, as usual, didn’t understand a word of it, but the meaning was clear in her mind anyway. The connection with her new little pet seemed to work both ways.

  “Yeah, I know it’s late. They’re coming…”

  The door creaked open, spilling Katie and Ellen into the hollow.

  Katie paused two steps from the door and gave Rocky a narrowed sideways glance, what Ellen called her “Patented Death Glare,” and Rocky returned it. The animosity between them had grown over the summer, beginning with Katie’s continuing distrust of the little gray man after their all-out war with his vicious siblings. Rocky had picked up on her dislike, hard to miss when she kept threatening to blast him if he got too close to her, and was now returning it.

  “You two behave,” Ellen said, swinging the door closed behind her and cutting off the portal to Katie’s bedroom.

  Katie folded her arms over her chest, her wand clutched tightly, looked determinately away from the little gray man, and Rocky followed suit, staring at nothing in particular, taping one of his overlarge feet in irritation.

  Penny had really thought Rocky would have grown on her by now, or that she would have at least gotten used to him, but Katie knew how to hold a grudge, and she showed no signs of letting this one go.

  Stand guard, Rocky, Penny thought.

  He responded with a quick glance at her, his large green eyes blinking, then launching himself across Clear Creek to the stone outcropping. He climbed the sheer stone face of the cliff like a monkey climbing a tree, and then blended into it so well not even Penny could spot him.

  “We better hurry,” Penny said. “She’s probably waiting.”

  Katie gave the world in general a last lingering, hateful look, then nodded. “Yeah, Zoe has some explaining to do. She’s been gone all summer and we haven’t heard from her in forever.”

  “I’m sure she has a good excuse,” Penny said, but couldn’t imagine what it might be. In the past several hours she’d gone from just missing Zoe like crazy, to a growing irritation with her best friend.

  “I’ll do it,” Ellen said, apparently unable to take the suspense. She drew her wand as she approached the door, closed her eyes for a moment while she called up a memory of the laundry room door on Katie’s phone, and gave the weathered old wood a single tap with her wand tip.

  When she opened it, bright fluorescent light fell over them, and they found Zoe waiting for them in the deserted laundry room next to a row of silent washing machines.

  Zoe smiled, then dashed through the open door into the hollow and gathered them all to her in a tight hug.

  “Damn girl, don’t you ever stop growing?” Ellen said, struggling to break free from the enforced mass embrace.

  Indeed, Zoe had grown a few inches taller since they last saw her, as if determined to keep Penny at shoulder level. She was almost cartoonishly thin now, like she had been stretched instead of growing. Zoe ignored Ellen’s question and removed her wand from her back pocket and pointed it up at the canopy of braided willow limbs above them. They rustled for a moment, then unraveled at the center and opened up to show a deep blue sky speckled with stars and showing a thin crescent moon.

  Zoe closed her eyes and sighed.

  “What’s wrong?” Penny stepped back from Zoe and regarded her with growing concern. She was acting strangely.

  Ellen and Katie were staring up through the opening in the willow canopy, as if concerned that something big, slobbering, and hungry for young humans was about to drop down through it.

  “Nothing,” Zoe said without opening her eyes. She was smiling now, as if some great worry had slipped from her shoulders. “I’m fine.”

  * * *

  They sat around the fire pit, Penny’s lingering irritation with her best friend for not staying in touch fading as Zoe caught them up on what she’d been through in the past few months.

  “We were in Nevada, Mom and Dad were at a little casino in a truck stop in Laughlin and I was in the sleeper cabin trying to catch you before you went to bed.” Zoe held up her mirror, a leftover from the Birdman’s kidnapping spree the year before, which the girls had held onto and learned how to use. She looked at Penny. “I called your name, like always, and I saw your hand reaching for your mirror, then it went dark, and I was looking at myself.”

  Penny thought she remembered that night, just drifting off when she heard Zoe whispering in the darkness of her room. She’d picked up her mirror, but no one was there, and when she’d called Zoe nothing had happened.

  “Your mirror stopped working?” Katie asked.

  “Not just my mirror. I couldn’t use my wand either. I thought I’d lost all of my magic, until we went to Lava Lake.”

  “Where?” Ellen and Katie asked.

  “The Lava Lake Inn in Oregon. It’s an old asylum that became a hotel. It’s next to Lava Lake, it’s this little lake with hot springs around it, always bubbling and blowing fog everywhere. The place is supposed to be severely haunted by the ghosts of people who died in the asylum or drowned in the lake.” />
  “Haunted?” Katie raised a skeptical eyebrow and folded her arms over her chest. Given all that she’d seen and done in the past year, Penny was amazed at her ability to remain skeptical of the supernatural. She didn’t believe anything unless she could see it.

  “Yeah, Kat, I know. Mom and Dad thought it would be cool, but they don’t believe in that kind of stuff.”

  There was a moment of silence, as if Zoe was considering her next words very carefully.

  “So, what happened?” Penny was eager to hear the rest. Unlike Katie, she enjoyed spooky stories.

  Zoe grinned and walked back to the door. She tapped it with her wand, one that Katie had made for her last spring to replace the black wand they’d confiscated from the Birdman before sending him tumbling back into his own world, and her grin widened almost to her ears when she opened the door to reveal a mist-covered lake instead of the woods beyond Aurora Hollow.

  “I saw something that no one else could.”

  They crowded around the open door, not quite daring to go through it, and followed Zoe’s pointing finger toward the shallow, steaming pools pouring mist over the cool, still surface of the small lake. Ellen saw them first and let out a little yeep of shock.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Katie said.

  “I don’t think she is,” Penny said, and backed off a step as several isolated masses peeled themselves off from the mist covering the lake and moved toward the girls. Like the mist continually pouring from the hot springs surrounding the lake, they moved slowly. Unlike the mist on the lake, these smaller blemishes of the lake’s dark surface had faces. A few even had arms, and seemed to be reaching for the girls as they glided slowly toward the open doorway.

  “Don’t worry,” Zoe said. “They can’t hurt us. They just stare at you a lot and try to climb up your legs.”

  As the girls pressed forward again to watch the drifting creepshow, a new one floated past the door, only inches away, then stopped and swirled in place to look at them. Its mouth hung unhinged and dragged in the dirt. Its body was nothing but trailing vapor, and it groped itself toward the open door with pale, insubstantial hands.