Magic or Madness (5 page)

It was 7 AM. The adrenaline leaving me, I smiled. I’d had hardly any sleep, but it didn’t matter—I’d survived my first night in the wicked witch’s house (and possibly an earthquake).

Alive, but also hungry and lonely. At least I could do something about the first. I dug the last sossi roll and half a Violet Crumble out of my backpack, all that remained from my dinner last night. So much for my supplies lasting. I ate it all in seconds, still feeling hungry afterwards.

Was Esmeralda up yet? I couldn’t imagine how she could have slept through that rattling. I pressed my ear to the door. The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs made me jump back. Had Esmeralda been waiting for that exact moment?

She stopped outside my door. I held my breath. The floorboards creaked. I looked at the gap under the door. A white envelope appeared.

I heard her going back down the stairs. I breathed again, pulled the letter out. It was thick. My name was on the front in big, slanting, even handwriting. I placed it on the desk unopened.

Then I washed my hands.

As soon as I was sure she wouldn’t hear, I crept out to the top of the stairs, listening to the sounds coming from the kitchen. The back door opened and closed, creaking loudly on its hinges. The whole house shook again.
What on earth?

I tiptoed down the hall, picked my way carefully across Esmeralda’s messy floor and out onto her balcony. Peeking down through the lacework railing, I couldn’t see her anywhere. The fig tree blocked a lot, but not the path she’d take from back door to garage door. She couldn’t have gotten to the garage that quickly. Besides, it was a roller door—I’d’ve heard it. Maybe she hadn’t gone out back at all? I crept to the top of the stairs and listened intently. Nothing. The house was quiet.

I checked every room: library, lounge and dining rooms, even the laundry and downstairs bathroom, ready to run back upstairs at the slightest noise. They were all, including the cellar, empty. Esmeralda wasn’t anywhere.

Was there a hidden passage? Could she be watching me right now? Sarafina had warned me that the house was strange, that her mother had a habit of appearing from nowhere.
Esmeralda has many ways,
Sarafina had said,
of convincing you that magic is real. You have to remember that it’s just tricks. Mirrors and light. Nothing supernatural
.

I wondered, as I had many times before, if it was possible that Esmeralda simply used the word
magic
for all those things that science hadn’t yet explained. Even for some that
had
been explained. Lots of things my mother’d taught me didn’t entirely make sense. She explained them in terms of patterns and numbers, but I could imagine someone with less knowledge of mathematics would think them magical. It isn’t magic that on so many flowers—from buttercups to orchids to passionflowers—the number of petals is a Fib, just science.

To make sure the house was empty, I did one of Sarafina’s tricks, one of the ones that didn’t entirely make sense to me: I stood still, closed my eyes, just as she’d taught me. Squeezed the ammonite in my pocket and thought of the stars at night. Hundreds and hundreds of stars as far as I could see, too many to count at a glance. I let my fear and anxiety slip away. When I was relaxed, or as close as I’d managed since Sarafina had gone to the hospital, my head was filled with Fibs and a spiral grew inside me, radiating out, making me its centre as it moved through the house. It touched no living thing bigger than a skink.

I opened my eyes again. There wasn’t anyone in the house but me.

Sarafina called this process meditation. When you meditate, your brain chemistry changes. You become more sensitive to the patterns of other people, of animals. Not just their brain, but the energy they expel just by living. In a meditative state you can feel entropy, the process of decay, and know whether anything living is nearby. Rocks, bricks, wood don’t have brains, so they expel energy at a much slower rate. Their patterns are more static. Not magic, science.

It never failed.

A house empty of people. I could feel it. The only buzz came from the electrical appliances, the plants, cockroaches, spiders, ants, lizards, and skinks. Nothing human but me.

With Esmeralda gone, I could check out the downstairs escape route, through the backyard. I walked into the kitchen. Seeing the reality was a lot different from looking at the plan. It was bigger than a kitchen had any right to be, and it was
all
escape routes: a back door and lots of large open windows.

And a note from Esmeralda stuck to the fridge:

She’d signed it with
love.
I tried not to gag. I wondered if Rita was another freak who liked to hurt animals and people and used magic as her excuse. On the counter were two wooden blocks full of knives.

I turned the handle on the back door, but it resisted stubbornly. I tried to rattle it, but it wouldn’t budge. Turned it the other way. Nothing. But I’d just heard Esmeralda open it. It didn’t feel like it was sticking—it was locked.

I lifted the raincoat from the hook on the back of the door. No key hung behind it. The coat was heavy and damp. Weird. It hadn’t rained. I touched the lining. It felt like fur. But it was January, the middle of summer. Why on earth would a winter coat be hanging there? It was 7:30 AM and already boiling.

I searched through the pockets, finding no key but plenty of coins. I dug them out, hoping for lots of two-dollar ones. But they were wrong: not heavy enough, too thin. None of them had the queen on them. United States of America, they said. Useless.

I looked in the large fruit bowl, but it held only fruit: sugar bananas, a big juicy-looking mango, and some weird kinds of fruit I’d never seen before, including three that were red and hairy.

I loved mango. I looked at it longingly. Surely Esmeralda couldn’t tamper with a mango? But Sarafina had warned me not to touch
any
of Esmeralda’s food. Best not to risk it.

Why would anyone lock the door but leave the windows open? Was Esmeralda hoping for stupid thieves or ones who were too short to climb in?

I climbed onto the counter, unlatched the window over the sink, and pushed it as wide as it would go. I sat on the sill, surveying the yard.

I remembered the infinity key; maybe it unlocked the back door. It was the right size. Didn’t matter, though, more fun getting into the yard this way—quieter too. Trees and bushes were crowded thick along the fence; the neighbours couldn’t possibly see me. Perfect.

Tom watched as the girl
dropped softly to the balcony and looked around. If she was a thief, whatever she’d taken was small enough to fit in her pockets. Not that she had many pockets. She wore only a T-shirt and shorts. Her feet were bare.

Moving about the backyard slowly, peering at everything, she wasn’t acting like a thief. Was she looking for gaps in the fence? Or did she think there might be buried treasure in Mere’s backyard? Tom would’ve thought a thief would be in way more of a hurry.

He couldn’t see perfectly from up in Filomena—too many branches and leaves. The girl kept popping in and out of sight. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself by moving about too much. If she’d stolen something from Mere, he would stop her.

Then he lost sight of the girl altogether. He was sure she hadn’t climbed the fence—he’d have heard. And Mere’s garage door was the noisiest in Newtown. He closed his eyes, listening, feeling for her, seeing the world around him through his eyelids, divided into its integral shapes: triangles, diamonds, circles, rectangles, and squares. She was so quiet.

Ah,
Tom almost said out loud.
Climbing up toward me.

He climbed down several branches, shifting as quick and quiet as a lizard to the top of the fence between Mere’s and his father’s place, arranging the bottlebrush so the girl wouldn’t be able to see him, but he could still see her.

The top of the fence was far more precarious than the solid, wide branches of the tree. He couldn’t lean on the bottlebrush for support. Too noisy. He had to keep perfectly still, both his hands clinging to the narrow fence.

Though he knew he shouldn’t, Tom closed his eyes again, feeling for her—following her angular but graceful lines as she eased herself up the tree trunk. Filomena wasn’t an easy climb. Well, once you were up into the branches, it was dead easy. Getting up was the tricky part. The trunk was huge; even the lowest branches were far from the ground. The girl hadn’t looked very tall.

She’d been smart enough not to try the thick hanging roots that temptingly resembled rope but would rip straight from the tree and cover you in bark, twigs, leaves, figs, dead bugs, and, if you were really unlucky, bat shit if you tried to use them. Tom felt the friction of her fingertips and feet against the old bark, like a grasshopper walking on hessian. She found her way with toes and fingertips, using the strength of her legs and back to propel her upward. The girl’s eyes were closed, Tom realised, the hair standing up on the back of his neck.

She’s done this before: not a normal thief. Was she like him?

He opened his eyes. She was getting closer. He heard her T-shirt catching on one of the smaller branches.

He saw her hands first, then her head and shoulders.
She’s gorgeous,
was Tom’s first thought.
She looks just like Mere,
was his second.
She’s not white,
his third.

If she looked like Mere and climbed like
that,
then Tom was certain she was like Mere in other ways too, which meant she
was
just like him. Why had Mere never told him she had relatives? He’d thought he knew all Mere’s secrets.

The girl sat with her back against the trunk, facing him, wiped her hands on her shorts, then her sleeve against her face. She was sweating and grinning widely, dead pleased with herself. Tom found himself grinning too.

She stood carefully, avoiding the branches above. She stepped from one branch to the next, ducking to avoid being smacked in the face, until she reached the thick branch that stretched out over the back lane. Once she was over the back fence, she peered down.

“Hello,” Tom said. He tried to sound as friendly as possible, worried she might jump down and run away.

The girl started, almost lost her footing. “Bugger.”

She grabbed a branch above her head to steady herself and looked down.

“Hello,” Tom said again, a little louder this time. “Over here.”

The girl turned. The expression on her face was a mixture of surprise and annoyance, as if she’d been caught, yet she didn’t run.

“Hi,” Tom said. He pushed aside some of the bottlebrush so she could see him.

“Oh, hi,” the girl said. She moved closer.

“I saw you climbing out Mere’s window. I was wondering what you were doing.”

“Bugger,” she said again. “How? How’d you see me?”

“I was up here. In this tree, I mean.” Tom blushed, having no idea why. If anyone should be blushing, it should be her. “Mere lets me climb it.”

The girl paused. “You mean Esmeralda?”

“Oh, yeah. I always forget that’s her full name. No one ever calls her anything but Mere. Are you two relatives? You look just like her. I mean, except that you’re dark.” He blushed again. “Not that that’s a bad thing or anything.”
Shut your mouth, Tom.

“Esmeralda’s my grandmother.”

“No,” Tom said with total disbelief. Of course she was related to Mere, so Mere must have kept things from him. Not just that she had a child but a granddaughter too. “Bull. No way. That’s impossible.”

The girl said nothing, looking at him as if he were from some faraway planet.

“Your
grand
mother.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow.” Tom realised that Mere had never told him how old she was. It shook him. What else didn’t he know about her? If she was a grandmother, then she was
much
older than he’d thought and how was that possible?

“Don’t you have a grandmother?” the girl asked.

“Huh? Yeah, of course. I’ve got two of them. But they’re really old and they don’t wear gorgeous clothes and they’re not beautiful.”

“Esmeralda’s old. She’s forty-five.”

Tom didn’t quite believe her. He’d thought Mere was maybe thirty. Tops. If she was that old already . . . Tom shook his head, not wanting to think about how long Mere had left. Maybe that’s why she hadn’t told him. “Anyway, that’s not grandmother old. My
mum’s
forty-two.”

The girl shrugged as though it were perfectly normal to her, which he guessed it would be. He wondered why Mere hadn’t told him about her granddaughter. Or the child who was this girl’s mother or father. Did she have other children? Other grandchildren? Was the girl going to be studying with Mere too?