A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,31

Annabel wondered if she knew what she was doing, but then her great-aunt shouted.

“Benignus!” she cried.

She fired the word and the wand at the window. A great golden light grew there, and the shadowlings drew back, swept upward, disappeared.

“They do not like the light,” she said, “but it will stop them only for a little while. Quickly, follow me.”

They took the left-hand door through the magical storeroom, which seemed to be humming softly to itself, as though worrying about a complicated problem. Annabel looked at Kitty and saw that her eyes were also wide with wonder. They rushed down the stairs behind the large brown door, Miss Henrietta in the lead, the candlelight rushing down the wall beside her.

Miss Estella was propped up in her bed with a look of wild excitement on her face. “Look at her, look at her,” she cried. “The most magical girl, as magical as can be. And the betwixter girl as the one who will help her on her way.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Kitty. “I took her to the wizards and back. That’s all you asked for.”

“But you saw the shadowlings, Kitty!” cried Miss Henrietta. “You know enough of such things, and the handbook itself says the youngest and most able of the Great & Benevolent Magical Society should have a companion on the journey to retrieve the Morever Wand.”

“Don’t care what no stupid book says,” said Kitty, and she stayed near the door, as if she might run away.

“Sit on the bed,” Miss Henrietta demanded of Annabel. “We must sing the map into you now.”

“Has she got room in her?” asked Miss Estella.

“Enough—hopefully enough,” said Miss Henrietta, and she took one of Annabel’s hands in her own and placed the other on Annabel’s forehead. Miss Estella did the same, and as she did so, she let out one of her wild shrieks, which Annabel would have responded to with a startled jump if she could have.

But she couldn’t.

She couldn’t move at all.

She was completely paralyzed by her great-aunts’ hands.

A light began to fill her, a terribly bright light, and then a sudden rushing, piling, screaming, pushing source of energy. It was as though her head were a little bottle and it was being filled with a raging river. She wanted to cry, Stop! but she could do nothing.

Into her went the streets of London, the well-tended, paved, pruned, manicured streets of her childhood and also the wilder ones, the jagged, rotting tenements and staggering lines of slums. Into her went the streets that petered out into the fields and the cemeteries and the woods that she had never known, pushed and shoved and squeezed into her mind. Old churches and new churches and railway stations and factories and cathedrals and charnel houses and mansion houses and hospitals, until she thought she would explode. Then sewers, suddenly, and tunnels and rivers rushing loudly in her ears, and stone stairwells turning and corkscrewing down into darkness.

And into her went several catacombs, pressed down deep inside her until she could bear no more, and into her went dimmer places, the roots of the great trees of London—she saw them—and deep, dark places with holes at the bottom leading to blacker places still. She looked down, and she saw, where the hands of her great-aunts lay upon her skin, lines appearing.

She looked at them in horror, but there was nothing she could do. The lines appeared upon her left palm first and then spread out—the lines of passages and tunnels and stairwells. Strange words appeared, and arrows and dotted lines and chutes and chambers and, here and there, wild, lopsided writing.

She felt the lines growing over her skin, traversing her arm—caverns and cliff tops and sudden abysses—and they snaked and crept slowly up her neck and onto her left cheek, unstoppable.

“There, now,” said Miss Henrietta, and they released their hands from Annabel. They looked at her and couldn’t hide their dismay.

“I do not remember it being told as such,” said Miss Henrietta.

Annabel turned her left arm, heavily mapped, this way and that.

“It is what it is, what it must be,” said Miss Estella, although she seemed terribly shocked.

Annabel stood then and moved toward the dressing table beside Miss Estella’s bed. She stared at herself in the mirror, at the lines and passageways and chambers drawn all over her arm and face.

“What have you done to me?” she wanted to shriek.

She would have, if not for the crashing sound above and the sound of a rushing wind