Winter Door (7 page)

Rage stared at him incredulously. “Stay up all night?”

He shrugged. “What else? It doesn’t kill you. Unless you want to be sent somewhere by that silly cow, Somersby. Given the way she looked at you the other day, she’ll have you sleeping in someone’s doghouse.”

Rage laughed. “I’d
rather
sleep in a dog kennel than call her. You know her?”

“Unfortunately,” Logan said laconically. “Let’s just say she makes kids like me her business.” He said this in a good imitation of Mrs. Somersby’s harsh, malicious tone.

“Hey, you really are good at that,” Rage said, laughing in admiration.

Logan said roughly, “Look, what I’ve been trying to say is that if you like, I’ll stay with you the whole time. Show you the ropes, like.”

Rage was touched. “Is Logan your real name?”

He nodded. “My mum—my real mum, I mean—she got the name from television. Not the
X-Men
character but a man in this old sci-fi movie. He’s a government hunter who chases anyone older than thirty or maybe twenty-five to kill them because they don’t want to waste any food or water or anything on old people. All people who get old are supposed to go in this machine thing and die, but some run and he chases them. Then this guy, Logan, ends up being chased, even though he’s not old.”

“She must have liked the character,” Rage said.

“He
was
pretty cool,” Logan said with mock modesty. They smiled at one another. Rage thought later that this had been the first moment of true, if unexpected, friendship.

Uncle Samuel came into the library less than an hour later, explaining that he had set off to town as soon as he had played the message. He knew about Mrs. Marren’s accident because Mrs. Marren had left a message, too.

Uncle Samuel glanced at Logan, whom Rage had shyly introduced as a friend. “Can we give you a lift home, Logan?”

Logan looked as if he might refuse, but Rage said quickly that it was a good idea. “You never know what might be out there on a night like this.”

Logan blinked twice and accepted. Neither of them had mentioned what had happened outside the school. Rage guessed that Logan was leaving it to her. She decided to leave it until they got home, when she could be sure of being calm about it. The truth was that she felt curiously embarrassed at the thought of trying to explain in front of Logan what had happened.

“It’ll be a bit of a squash because I’ve got a lot of supplies on the backseat. Whereabouts do you live, lad?” Uncle Samuel asked Logan as they walked out of the school. Rage and Logan surreptitiously looked both ways, but there was no sign of the creatures.

“The other side of Lockwood Avenue, Mr. Winnoway,” Logan answered politely. “If you can get there, I’ll direct you.”

Rage climbed into the middle seat, leaving the window seat for Logan, but as he made to enter, Billy growled from the back. Logan froze.

“It’s just my dog,” Rage said quickly. “Billy. This is Logan. Logan, this is Billy Thunder. Let him sniff your hand,” she added.

“Billy
Thunder
?” Logan laughed shakily, offering the back of his hand. Billy hung over the seat and snuffled it thoroughly before giving a soft bark of approval.

When Logan climbed out in front of a nice, ordinary redbrick house twenty minutes later, Rage wondered why she had imagined that he lived in a tougher area. Uncle Samuel honked the horn before pulling away and said, “Your friend seems like a nice guy.”

He was a foe before tonight,
Rage thought, still amazed at how the whole thing had turned out. She slid over to the window seat and buckled herself in as Billy climbed over to take his usual place in the middle of the front seat. He put his head on her lap with a contented sigh, and Rage slipped into a light doze that did not end until her uncle shook her as they were pulling into the driveway of the farm.

Watching her uncle prepare a late supper of bowls of thick potato-and-leek soup with slices of dark bread, Rage made up her mind to say nothing about being chased. But she must have been tired because suddenly, without planning it, she found herself talking about Mam. Seeing her uncle’s face turn to stone, she immediately wished the words unsaid.

“Dr. Kellum called this afternoon,” her uncle said in a clipped monotone that was exactly the way Grandfather had sounded. “They will be moving your mother to Leary on Sunday afternoon. They don’t want to delay any longer with her condition and the weather worsening. I’ll take you to see her Sunday morning.”

All the strangeness of the day resolved into angry helplessness. Rage wanted to shout at her uncle that he mustn’t let the doctors take Mam away; that he
must
see her because perhaps it was their only chance to make her want to live. But she only watched her uncle rinse out his bowl, too afraid to speak in case he would pack his knapsacks and boxes and return to the jungle.

After he had gone, she gave the remains of her supper to Billy. Whenever would they be able to go all the way to Leary to see Mam? And even if Uncle Samuel should agree to drive them there, the weather made it virtually impossible.

It was not until she was in bed and drifting on the edge of sleep that she thought again about the animals that had chased her and Logan. She was inclined, in the face of Logan’s certainty, to believe that fear had made her confuse a boar print for a bear print. The one thing they had both agreed upon, and the footprint had confirmed it, was the animals’ extraordinary size. Rather than bringing her more widely awake, this thought drew her into a dream.

It was night and very dark, but a bit of moonlight shone through the ragged edge of a dark cloud, limning what could be seen of the playground equipment and causing it to cast sharp, thin shadows. The moon shadows left by the hillocks of snow were indigo shapes outlined in violet shadows and bluish green pools that gave the whole scene an underwater feel.

The playground swings creaked slowly back and forth. Rage took a step toward them, then heard snow crunching behind her. She whirled to find Billy in his golden dog form flowing over the snow. She felt a muddle of joy and disappointment as she knelt and opened her arms to him, but all at once he was human shaped, and she gave a yell of surprise and fell onto her backside. Billy helped her up, grinning.

Words burst unbidden from Rage’s lips. “Oh, Billy, they’re taking Mam away to Leary on the weekend! I’m so scared for her.”

Billy took her gently in his arms and stroked her hair, making no attempt to soothe her fears with words. It felt so good and right and safe to be enfolded like that.

“You’ve grown,” Billy murmured, sounding surprised, leaning back a little to look down at her. “I didn’t notice it when I was a dog.”

“You look older, too,” Rage said shyly, then she realized that they were acting as if this were a real meeting.

“You want me to go again,” Billy said sadly. Rage saw with alarm that he had suddenly grown less substantial. A few more seconds and she could actually see the swing through him, and his arms felt cool rather than warm about her.

She clutched a handful of his jacket tightly and cried, “No! No, I don’t want you to go! I want you to stay, and in this shape!” Just like that, he was solid again.

Billy looked around, his nostrils flaring. “Something smells wrong,” he murmured.

“What is it?” Rage asked anxiously, looking around, too, and remembering suddenly that he had spoken of the weather as smelling wrong in her dream the previous night.

“I smell the firecat,” Billy said with slight distaste.

Rage stared at him. “In my dream last night, you said the weather smelled wrong,” she said.

“It did,” Billy said. “But the firecat doesn’t smell that way. I guess you must have called it the way you called me to your dream.”

“Called?” Rage echoed incredulously.

“Or maybe the wizard sent it to your dream,” Billy went on, misunderstanding her reaction.

“The wizard would never send it to me,” Rage said. “He’d know I would never trust it after what it did to Bear.”

“Perhaps he was desperate,” Billy said.

Rage shook her head. “He’d know I couldn’t do anything to help him.”

“You helped him before.”

“Only because I had no choice,” Rage said stiffly. “But I meant that even if I would want to help him, I couldn’t get back to Valley to do it.”

“What exactly did it say to you?” Billy asked. Rage told him and he said, “I wonder what the firecat meant by telling you that you would be waking to a nightmare?”

Rage shrugged. “If the firecat was real and not just something I dreamed up, it was probably just a meaningless threat. But Billy, you said I called you into my dream. No one could do that.”

“Maybe it has something to do with what Mama meant by what she said when I came through the night gate,” Billy murmured.

“Bear talked to you about me?” Rage whispered, remembering with a touch of awe the voice that had spoken to her as she had passed through the world gate that Bear had become upon her death.

“She spoke of many things,” Billy said. His eyes were velvety with sadness. “She said that if I willed it, I could be human shaped in this world. But the journey was too quick for me to will anything.”

“Oh, Billy!” Rage said, devastated for him. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was not your fault that I came after you,” he said gently, the gold flecks in his eyes glowing. “I would rather be a dog with you than human shaped without you.”

They hugged and Rage wept a scatter of tears that she wiped off on her sleeve before they drew apart so that he would not see them. “Can you…tell me exactly what Bear said about me?”

Billy reddened slightly, but he said calmly enough, “She said that you had powers that you didn’t know you had.”

Rage chewed her lip, thinking about how, when the wizard was trapped in the hourglass, he could not talk to her except when she dreamed. “Maybe the wizard sent that dream of the firecat to me,” she murmured. “Maybe something has gone wrong in Valley. The firecat said he needed me. But even if that was true, what could I do? There’s no gateway to Valley from here anymore.”

Billy’s eyes lit up in excitement. “Maybe you could call one of the others to your dreams like you did me. Then you could ask.”

“But I don’t know how I called you here, if I did.”

“Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to talk to someone and carrying the wanting into your dreams.” Billy gave her a shy look.

Rage gasped. “You must be right! I’ve just remembered! Last night, just before I fell asleep, I wished for you to be human shaped again so that we could talk, just as I did when we went through the bramble gate!”

Billy opened his mouth to speak, and vanished.

The first thing Rage realized when she opened her eyes was that Billy was growling. It was a low, ferocious dog rumble that would have been terrifying to her if she hadn’t known it was him. She sat bolt upright, clutching the warm quilt. Billy was under the window, close enough to the night-light for it to gleam on his coat. He was staring at the curtain, which swayed in a draft.

The hair rose on Rage’s arms and neck at the thought that one of the beasts she had seen with Logan might be prowling about the farm. Wild boar or wolf, one smash and the window would shatter. The walls might even collapse if a bunch of the huge creatures threw their weight against the house. Billy would be no match for one of them, yet she knew it would not stop him from attacking. In his human form, he would be smart enough to realize they were too big for him to fight, but in his dog form, he was almost as bad as Elle had been: all fight and courage and not much thought.

Rage reasoned that it was far more likely that Billy was growling at a fox or some small animal in search of food. Sliding her feet into her slippers, she rose, reaching out to catch a handful of the soft fur ruff at the back of Billy’s neck. He was still growling, and now she could feel that all his muscles were bunched as if he intended to jump.

To her surprise, instead of straining against her grip as he would normally have done, Billy stopped growling at once and turned to look at her. Her fear evaporated in a thrill of joy at seeing the intelligence of his human self in his eyes.

Billy began to growl again, more urgently than before.

“Okay,” Rage whispered. She released Billy and waited anxiously to see what he would do, but he only pawed at her thigh and padded to the door. She followed him because this had been his way of signaling
yes
when they had first returned from Valley. He looked up at her and growled one short, low rumble, as if chiding her to pay attention.

Rage closed her hand around the iron knob in the center of the antique door. It felt icy, reminding her of the burning cold of the bike-shed latch bar. She opened the door. The hall was dark, and cold flowed toward her, making her wish she had put on her bathrobe. She wanted to get to where her uncle slept. It had been added on to the original house and, unlike the rest, was built of double brick. The windows of both the small rooms that made up the extension also had sturdy wrought-iron covers, and a solid oak door separated it from the main body of the house.

Rage crept along the hall past the bathroom door, Billy padding by her side. She passed the door to her mother’s empty room and came to the short hall that led to the oak door and the extension. She opened the heavy door as silently as she could, then shut it behind her and pushed the lock. Only then did she relax enough to become aware that her legs were shaking.

The first part of the extension was a little office room where a big desk was heaped with Uncle Samuel’s notebooks. A night-light lit up a small, uncurtained window behind the desk. Fortunately, a crate on the desk had been pushed in front of the window, so even if something were tracking her movement through the house, it would not be able to see in. She crept through the little office and hesitated a moment at the doorway leading to the tiny sitting room. She could not see where her uncle slept because there was no night-light here and the couch bed was at the end of the room farthest from the door. The only other things in the room were a wardrobe, more crates piled against a wall, and a small case of Uncle Samuel’s few personal belongings and clothes.