Poison (17 page)

I looked back. It was only for the most fleeting moment, but I saw her watching me. To my surprise her face looked inexplicably sad.

“Morgan . . .,” I began, but she was lost to me.

•

It was beautiful. That was all I could think of when I found myself standing in the meadow where the painting had taken me. Wildflowers blossomed all around me. The sky was cloudless, and the sun cast a golden light over the distant green hills. . . .

Those hills.

They were oddly familiar. I looked around.
Everything
here was familiar to me.

Suddenly it came to me—my vision. When I’d held the pieces of plastic in my hand, I’d seen this same scene. Into it had walked a young girl with her magician father. She had changed daisies into butterflies, and then cried when he’d left her.

Why had I seen this? What was the connection?

“Hello?” I called. “Anybody here?” But my only answer was the faint, low hum of insects in the grass, droning in the warm sun.

“Oh,” I said as I caught myself staggering. The sun was so
warm
. Sun, yes . . . It had been night when I’d left—night and winter. Had I really left, then, or was my body still back at the Emporium of Remarkable Goods? I took a deliberate step to see if my foot left an imprint. It did. The insects droned louder, as if in complaint for disturbing them.

I reached behind me, and could feel the faint thickness of the air where I’d crossed into this . . . what? Place? Dimension? Time? I had no idea where I was or what I should be doing here, and with every passing second, it seemed, my mind grew foggier. I must have had some purpose in coming here, but frankly, I was becoming too tired to care.

That was it. I was tired. I needed to rest. It had been a long day . . . Or was it night back where I’d come from? Which was . . . where, exactly? All I knew was that I had to lie down here, in this fragrant meadow, right now. Just for a minute.

A voice in the back of my mind was shrieking. The drink.
The drink!
Morgan had given me a lemonade. But of course it hadn’t been lemonade; it had only looked like lemonade, the way those horrible moldy gingersnaps had looked like delicious cookies.

But why would Morgan do that? I was her friend. The Mistress of Real Things. Why would she poison me?

Poison.

Oh, God. She’d
poisoned
me! Blindly I reached out for the barrier, but I could no longer feel it. My fingers felt like bananas, no longer connected to my body, as I swiped at empty air.

My knees buckled beneath me. I fell into a thick patch of blossoming clover. It smelled wonderful.
Paradise,
I thought.
While part of my mind was panicking and struggling to make my spaghetti legs stand upright again, the other part was breathing in the scent of the clover and longing to stretch out in the warm sun. If I could only rest for a few minutes, I was sure I’d be able to think more clearly.

I remained there on all fours for what seemed like a very long time, nodding off but fighting it, trying to keep my eyes open while drool spilled out of my mouth.

Poison
, I thought. But why? What had I done? Through the fog of my drugged vision I saw the blue ring on my finger. It was glowing brightly.
It’s laughing,
I thought.
It’s happy.

The insects around me grew louder. They crawled up my arms and inside my jeans. Into my ears. Into the corners of my eyes. I shook my head like a cow trying to rid itself of flies, but the movement was slow and pointless. Then they started to bite.

I gasped, sucking in some of the creatures that were gathered around my mouth. Choking, I tried to crawl away. Where was the barrier? I could no longer remember. I swatted at the bugs, which were now swarming around me in clouds so dense that I could barely see through them to the vague shapes that were rising up from the grass.

They were like wraiths, these beings that floated just out of reach, ghouls with the faces of ancient women, dressed in rags that swirled around them like smoke.

Needing desperately to come out of my stupor, I pinched myself and tried to stand up, but I was so uncoordinated that I fell over. That was when I saw the birds. They were vultures, huge beasts that were heading toward me from the opposite direction as the wraiths, their wings so wide that they made shadows on the ground.

“Wait a minute,” I said thickly. Shadows on the ground. Vultures.

I remembered. The little girl in my vision had been running from
vultures
. In this same place. And they had caught her.

As I watched, horrified, the giant birds turned into women—the same sort of ragged women that had risen out of the ground around me, their spectral garments waving in the wind, their faces twisted with malice as they surrounded me. One of them spoke:

“Poison.”

I blinked hard. How did they know I’d been poisoned? I’d only figured it out myself a minute ago.

They came closer, reaching out for me with gnarled, clawlike fingers. I remembered how the little girl in my vision had screamed with fear and hopelessness when they’d descended on her, predators clutching at their prey. What had they done with her? Killed her, probably. Torn her apart like confetti while she cried out for help . . .

Well, that wasn’t going to happen again. Not to me. Poisoned or not, I had no intention of making
anything
easy for these hags. If they were going to murder me, it was going to cost them.

Summoning more strength than I’d thought I possessed, I grabbed two handfuls of dirt and threw them in the direction of the ghouls. They backed away. I lunged for the bony hands that had been taunting me, and they withdrew with a shriek.

They don’t want me to touch them
, I realized. Oh, my God. Could it be? They were actually
afraid
of me. With a scream worthy of the coeds in the Freddy Krueger movies, I forced myself to stagger upright. The women—if that was what they were—flew out of my reach.

With my foot I felt for the barrier. Even with my adrenaline pumping, I still felt as if I were walking through molasses, but I thought I detected a slight change in pressure. As the hags regrouped, I backed toward what I hoped was the two-by-three-foot rectangle of space that would take me back to Morgan’s store.

A tiny worm of worry intruded into my thoughts.
What if Morgan is waiting for me on the other side?
If she’d tried to poison me with the lemonade, what would she do to me if I showed up again? But I wasn’t going to think about that now. The creatures—they couldn’t really be called human—were pressed together in a tight mass and were moving forward again, their eyes glinting, their breath fouling the air. Together they raised their arms toward me.

As I felt desperately for the opening, I shielded my face with my hands. Suddenly the ring, with no help from me, flashed with a blue light so intense, it was as if the sun had fallen out of the sky.

The wraiths who had been directly in the path of the light fell to the ground, their rags floating behind them, while the others flew away. At that moment I leaped backward into the barrier.

The next thing I knew, I was crawling over the wooden frame of the painting, just me in the darkness, gasping for air.

•

I think I may have fallen asleep right there on the floor, without even knowing exactly where I was. It wasn’t for very long, though, because when I woke up, there were still bugs in my shoes. Smacking my lips with residual sleep, I lumbered to my feet and looked around.

I was back in the store, but all the lights were out, and Morgan was nowhere in sight. Also, the painting had been moved to the back of the store, behind the curtain that separated the clean, inviting retail area that the customers saw from the squalid back room that housed all the broken stuff as well as new shipments and excess inventory.

Well, of course Morgan would have moved the painting over here
, I thought. She’d probably assumed that I wouldn’t be coming back, since she’d obviously sent me to die on the other side of her magic painting.

Some friend
, I thought with a shiver of anger and, well, to be truthful, shame. I should have known that someone as cool
as Morgan wouldn’t have considered having me as a friend. I hadn’t been anything more to her than a tool for her use. She must have sensed how pathetic I was, and had decided that I’d make a perfect dupe.
Way to go, Katy.

I toyed seriously with the idea of stomping upstairs and punching her in the nose, but I knew that wouldn’t do much good. Even if I managed to do it—and I probably couldn’t, since she was a much stronger witch than I was—it would still take more time than I was willing to spare. At least she hadn’t been waiting for me with a dagger to stab into my heart.

I could see that, outside, the sky was pitch-black. I checked my cell phone. Three forty-five a.m. My body was still shaking all over from the fear that had flooded through me. Still, that fear had probably saved my life. But now I was so tired, I was afraid to lean against anything because I knew I’d be out cold again within a minute. And the chemistry exam still loomed over me like a mushroom cloud. With a sigh I tried to shake myself awake. Time and Krebs cycle waited for no one. I stood there for a moment, waiting to work up enough strength to make it to the door.

That was when I heard it, a whisper, as soft as spring rain, coming from somewhere in the darkness behind me.

“Help me,”
it said.

A shiver ran down my spine. I listened. There was no sound. No traffic outside, no furnace noises. Just the faraway ticktock of an old grandfather clock that had stopped telling the right time years ago, and the whoosh of my own breath going in and out.

I don’t know how long I stayed that way, immobile and listening.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Then:
“Kay-tee.”

I leaped up, my heart pounding in my chest.

“Okay, I know you’re there,” I called. As if that meant anything. If it was a burglar, he was probably armed. What was I going to fight him with, a porcelain figurine?

I gulped. I knew it wasn’t a burglar. The voice that had spoken my name hadn’t sounded human.

A ghost, then. A ghost who knew my name.
No big deal
, I told myself. You didn’t hang out in Whitfield for long without encountering a few ectoplasmic entities. But this felt somehow different. Not ghostly, really. More like
trapped
. That was what it sounded like, as if someone were calling me from inside a box. A box, or a . . . I didn’t even want to think the word “coffin,” but that was what came to mind. The voice was so constrained, it was as if whoever was calling for help could barely move their lips.

Immediately I started rummaging through the inventory that was piled willy-nilly behind the curtain. I wished I could turn on the lights, but there’d be no way I could explain to the police—or the school—or Morgan, for that matter—what I was doing there at four in the morning.

With only the light from my cell phone to see by, I had to do most of my exploring by feel. A lot of the merchandise was old, and most of it was dirty. There were books, photographs, an old TV, a bamboo end table shaped like a monkey. Also a jack-in-the-box that almost gave me a heart attack when it boinged into my face. I tripped over a casserole dish that looked like a pumpkin, and I ended up on the floor facing a gizmo made of
iron with a lot of evil-looking prongs sticking out of it.

The hardest part for me was maintaining a psychic distance from these things. I’d called myself the Mistress of Real Things, but the truth was that I still hadn’t fully mastered my ability to feel their history. Most of the time I was all right. I only “read” objects when I concentrated on them. But sometimes I got taken by surprise, like when I’d held those broken pieces of plastic and gotten a preview of life behind the verplinko, or whatever it was called. In this place, surrounded by very old things with thousands of stories among them, I felt my control loosening.