A Most Magical Girl - Karen Foxlee Page 0,79
funnel.
“Come and look upon the city,” said Mr. Angel. “I will show you all that will be mine.”
She didn’t want to go near the machine. The closer she got, the greater the pull. He guided her around the perimeter of the room, and the machine sang a strange song of grindings and moanings. He led her up the small staircase that wound its way around the moon funnel. Her legs trembled as she looked down into the machine, at all its gleaming moving parts. The shadowlings breathed softly behind her.
On the rooftop they were above London. They looked over streets and parkland and toward the city. The moon washed everything silver, and Annabel didn’t think she’d ever seen London look so beautiful. It shone on Mr. Angel’s face and made him look even lonelier. She thought it must be a terrible thing to be so bad.
“All the parks and palaces. All the people,” Mr. Angel said. He pointed out over the rooftops. “All mine.”
“But pardon me, Mr. Angel, why must it all be yours?”
He sounded like a spoiled boy. She wanted to say so, but he raised up the Black Wand and sang out loud, “Umbra, antumbra,” and from everywhere, from rooftops and the church spires, shadowlings appeared.
“Because, Annabel Grey, darkness should reign, and darkness will reign,” he said. “And I will be the king of all darkness.”
She wished that her mother could have seen her in Under London, with the Ondona raised at the bone wall. It was a simple wish. That her mother see what she had become. Now the time she said good-bye to her mother before their house had turned into the last time, and Annabel didn’t think she’d ever felt sadder. Her heart ached beneath her breastbone, and it wasn’t even the crying type of sadness but a more desolate thing. The machine down below sensed it. So did Mr. Angel, and he took her back down the stairs into the room.
The new shadowlings he had raised from the rooftops and belfries flew down the stairs behind them.
“Up,” he said, and they flew to the perimeter of the room, where they opened and shut their wings and buzzed like angry bees.
From beside a chair Mr. Angel took a small pair of shoes.
“Behold the machine, Annabel,” he said, and he stepped carefully into the center of the room and held them up. “They are the shoes of a pauper I found frozen in a lane behind Hackney Station last winter. It has a fondness for such sorrowful things, the shoes of departed children being among its favorites.”
He leaned his crooked body into a space that seemed no different from any other space, yet his cloak lifted upward toward the machine. He released the pitiful shoes, and they were taken quite suddenly by a great sucking wind, pulled with great speed into a slit at the machine’s side.
It was alive, that machine. Annabel knew it then.
“So, here you are, Annabel Grey, after your journey into Under London to find the Morever Wand. Here you are, with nothing to show for your trouble,” he said.
Annabel let out a little sob.
“Raised in a house filled with such secrets,” he said. “By a mother who did nothing but lie.”
He smiled at her in the darkness, and his white teeth glinted.
She let out another sob, but this time she felt angry.
“Annabel Grey, the most sorrowful creature of all,” he said, and he took several steps toward her. The machine wailed in anticipation.
The shadowlings droned.
He was going to grab her.
She did not want to be grabbed.
She did not want to be told she was sorrowful.
“I am brave,” she whispered.
She was. She had entered Under London and returned.
“I am good,” she said.
She was. She knew she was.
Mr. Angel strode toward her, his awful smile stretching across his face.
“I am brave! I am good!” she shouted now. She had no other weapon.
He was beginning to laugh. The shadowlings laughed with him.
Then he had her by the arm, and he was dragging her toward the center of the room, before the Dark-Magic Extracting Machine.
Mr. Angel was strong. She pulled against him. She tried to unclasp his gloved hand. She kicked at him with her boots and twisted her body to get away from him. For one instant she was free and sprinting, but he grabbed her skirts and pulled her backward, held her hard about the waist, and dragged her, feet lifted from the ground, to the machine.
“The tears of the mother came first!” he