Authors: Robin McKinley
Dad died when I was ten and Ran was six, because this guy who got drunk the first night they let him out of jail for drunk driving came over the median strip on the highway in his double-muscle-macho car and killed him. The guy didn’t kill himself until the next time they let him out of jail and he ran into a tree, but that was too late for Dad. I think I was sweet for the next several years, after almost everyone else had turned into a teenager, because I was afraid that if I wasn’t really good maybe Mom would die too. I was young enough to believe that kind of thing, although when Ran kept asking me—especially when he hadn’t been good—I always said no, it was a stupid accident and Mom was really careful. She was really careful, but Dad had been really careful too; there just wasn’t a lot he could do about something the size of an army anti-cobey truck coming over the median strip at eighty miles an hour.
Mom dated a few other guys over the years, but not very many. “I don’t have time,” she said. Mom always had pictures of us on her desk. This would be cute except that even after she had pictures of us well past the rug-rat stage she kept the really loser baby ones. She worked five and a half days a week as the office manager for an accounting firm, which meant that she should have met lots of interesting men, because every grown-up has to do their taxes, but Tennel & Zeet didn’t have the right kind of clients. I know they didn’t have the right kind of clients because Val was one of them. Tennel & Zeet had a specialty in immigrants from the Slav Commonwealth so that’s probably why Val went to them.
Ran and I didn’t think a lot about it at first when she said she was bringing this new guy home. She did occasionally bring guys home—or, better, we’d all go to a restaurant: neutral ground, and somebody else cleaned up after—although she hadn’t in nearly a year, so whoever he was would be a little interesting for the novelty. But by the day he came I wanted to hide the salad or lay the tablecloth (yes, a real tablecloth and in the real dining room) facedown or something, just to break the circuit, as she went zinging around the kitchen like she was the most organized person in the world, which she isn’t. We had a joke, Ran and Mom and me, that she used up all her organization at work. But the way Mom was behaving was the first clue that Val might be more important than the other (few) guys we’d met, so I was probably already on the wrong channel with him when the doorbell rang.
Also I’d been thinking why were we having him over for dinner for this first meeting? I like having someone else doing the cooking—someone other than Mom (or me. Although quite sane people will come to dinner when I make my spaghetti sauce). Val didn’t have much money—Mom didn’t quite say this, but I figured it out. And she wanted to show him what a happy little family we were. Well, he could have cooked
us
dinner, couldn’t he? At
his
place.
So I was feeling kind of unplugged about Mom pretending we were supposed to believe it was no big deal about this Val person coming over. And when she sang out—and I mean
sang,
it was disgusting—for me to answer the door when the bell went, I think I was going to dislike him even if he was a billionaire with a private island big enough for a wild animal sanctuary and a really cute son who was just my type.
But when I opened the door . . .
It was like there was more than just Val there. As if he was twice the size of a human person, or there were two of him, or something. It was really dark out, in spite of the porch light, and at first I couldn’t see his face. I was frightened. I didn’t like being frightened. I’d been frightened about almost everything since Dad died.
And there was something
wrong
with Val being too big. In that first shock I don’t think I noticed there was something wrong with the darkness—it was February, it still got dark early, it was nearly seven p.m.—that it was
shadows.
If I’d noticed they wiggled I might have just slammed the door on him.
“I am Val,” he said in his funny voice, and stepped forward and I got my first eyeful of his clothes sense, which was pretty frightening all by itself. I stepped back like he was a big ugly cobey-unit goon with a zapper and I was a homeless loophead, and now in the light of the hall I could see him plainly, see that he was short and hairy as well as having a funny voice, and I’ve seen orangutans that wore clothes better. I didn’t recognize Val’s accent but that wasn’t surprising. The Slav Commonwealth is like ninety countries, some of them no bigger than your front yard, and every one of them has its own language.
He was smiling at me. It was a hopeful smile and I didn’t like it, because it meant this dinner was important to him too, and I’d already decided I didn’t like him. Or his big (wiggly) shadows.
The darkness, or whatever it was, seemed to retreat a little, or maybe press itself down nearer the floor where it wasn’t so obvious, as he stepped forward. I actually peered over his shoulder as if I was looking for someone, or maybe something, but I couldn’t see anything, although the nearest streetlight seemed farther away than usual. I looked back at him and I thought his smile had changed. He was looking at me too hard behind the smile. I thought of all those fairy tales where once you invite the evil magician over your threshold you’d had it. But I hadn’t invited him. He’d just come in, and I’d given way. Did that count?
Probably.
Hey. This is Newworld. We don’t have magicians in Newworld, evil or otherwise.
“Mom’s in the kitchen,” I said ungraciously, but he didn’t seem to notice the ungracious. His face lit up at the mention of Mom. As he took another step forward he made a tiny bow and waved me to go ahead of him, which I should have thought was cute but I didn’t maybe partly because there was something freaky about the shadow of his arm against the wall—a sudden sharp ragged line along the line of his forearm, and then just as suddenly it collapsed into the proper arm shadow like it had realized I could see it. I tried not to stare but by now I was totally creeped out and couldn’t wait to get away from him—but getting away meant leading him farther into my house, farther away from the door. My great-grandmom’s quilt hangs on the other, long wall by the front door, and I put my hand on it, either like I was dizzy or like it was going to protect me. Protect us. I had a moment when I thought, I’m not going to let this shadow man near my family: I’m going to tell him to go away.
Too late. The evil magician was already over the threshold. And the quilt was just a quilt.
I don’t guess all of this took more than a minute. It was a long minute. It was long enough for Mom to call, “Vaaaaaal?” Yuck. When we went into the kitchen Mom’s face was so bright I could hardly stand to look at it. Even Mongo liked him, although Mongo likes everybody. (Also Mongo was so thrilled with himself for staying in the dog bed till I’d released him that
nothing
was going to blow his mood.) Then Ran found out that Val would listen to him about cars—cars were Ran’s biggest thing—and that was pretty much it for the rest of the evening. Ran talked and Val and Mom made shiny electric eyes at each other.
Once we were all sitting down and eating (Mom had made her chicken, apples, and cream, which usually only came out on birthdays) I was watching the shadows on the wall behind Val’s chair. They were too lively and there were
way
too many of them. One or another of them always seemed about to turn into something I could recognize—a Komodo dragon or an alligator or a ninety-tentacled space alien. No, I was imagining it (especially the space alien. Sixty tentacles, tops). I hoped I was imagining it.
I looked at Mongo, who was fast asleep against the manic wall, paws twitching faintly and looking utterly relaxed. That made one of us.
After Val left Mom came and put her arm around me. “Are you okay, honey? You were awfully quiet at dinner.” I didn’t say anything and she laughed a little and said, “Well, you can’t get a word in when Ran’s on full current, can you?”
I could hear her not asking what I’d thought of Val. Before I blurted out something I’d be sorry for later I said, “Where is he from again? Ors—Orsk—”
“Orzaskan,” Mom said carefully. “I have to keep looking it up.”
“And why’d he leave?” I said as neutrally as possible.
I felt her shrug. “The latest bunch of government gizmoheads don’t like academics, and he’s a professor of philosophy.”
Physwiz—the physics of the worlds—is sometimes called philosophy. I hoped not in this case. “And it doesn’t get much more academic than philosophy,” I said into Mom’s silence. Or as loopheaded as physwiz. But I’d never heard of even the most out-there creepo collecting shadows.
She turned me around to face her. “Maggie . . . I’m sorry he made a bad first impression on you. I don’t suppose you want to tell me what went wrong?”
That his shadow is too big for him and there was something out of a bad science-fiction movie on the wall behind his chair at dinner? Not to mention that shirt. I shook my head.
“Well, give him a chance, won’t you?” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
She stared at me a few seconds longer. I could see the thought bubble forming over her head. It said “teenagers.” I smiled, and she relaxed a little and hugged me again, and moved off toward the stairs. “You’ll lock up after you take Mongo out,” she said, which was Mom-speak for “It’s a school night, go to bed.”
“Mom,” I said. Mongo had appeared at the sound of his name, but I waited till Mom had gone upstairs and I saw the bathroom light go on. Then I put Mongo’s lead on like we were going out as normal. Our dining room used to be a garage. Now it’s a dining room, Mom’s office, and a coat closet. I paused at the dining room door and then flung it open and flicked the light switch on as if I was expecting to catch somebody at something.
There wasn’t anything there except a (mostly cleared-off) table and some chairs and the corner cupboards with Mom’s china and stuff, and a piece of Ran’s parka sticking out through the closed closet door. The space alien(s) had gone home with Val. I guessed that was something.
Mongo and I had a nice little cruise around the block while he examined every inch of the sidewalk, fences, trees, patches of grass, and the Watchguard call box on the corner and chose precisely the right six(teen) spots to pee. I locked the door behind us when we came in again, took his lead off—and went back to check that I had locked the door. I always lock the door. I didn’t need to check. I spent a minute staring at the floor, like I was watching for jagged-edged, wiggly shadows to eel under the locked door. For the minute I was watching they didn’t. Then I shut Mongo in the kitchen, where the official dog bed was (plus 5,214 dog toys so he didn’t have any excuses to eat chair legs), and went to bed myself. And dreamed about alligators and space aliens. But that’s my problem, right?
• • •
You already know how chapter one has to end: they got married. I told myself he was
not
my stepfather, maybe he was married to my mother but that doesn’t make him my
anything
father. (He even tried to adopt us. Ran said yes and I said no. I managed not to say “you must be dreeping kidding, no bugsucking way.”)
I was Mom’s attendant and I’d like to say I got a great dress out of it but we were broke. Actually it was a pretty good dress because Mom’s sister Gwenda brought their own mom and grandmom’s party dresses from her attic and told me I could pick one. Gwenda lives in their old family house, way upstate from us in Station. I like vintage as well as the next teenage girl with cash flow problems and wearing dead people’s clothes isn’t usually a problem but there was something a bit buggie about these. Maybe because I knew Great-grandmom had been a magician. It was Grandmom’s generation that got gene-chopped, and they’re still checking in case they missed something. You get scanned at birth and then you get another scan and they give you a blood test some time during adolescence—with girls you’re supposed to go back when you start menstruating. The scan made me pretty sick the second time, which is supposed to mean that I would have had the gene if it hadn’t been chopped. It must have been really, really rough for Great-grandmom and her daughters.
Or maybe I wasn’t hot-wired by the dresses because I was dreading the wedding. By heroic self-control I didn’t choose the black one with the grey lace and sequins although it was seriously electric, and picked out a pink and maroon one instead that looked a little less like the wicked fairy who’s come to curse the princess. Jill was helping me and pulled out a beigey-cream one that would have made me look like I had died (speaking of dead people) but looked terrific against her dark skin.
“Hey, babe,
utsukushii,
” I said, which is Japanese for “beautiful.” Mostly we insulted each other with the (approximately ten) Japanese words we’d looked up on the webnet to annoy Takahiro with. We only knew a couple of nice ones.
Gwenda laughed. “Okay, you have that one,” she said to Jill. Jill by special perk was invited to the wedding to keep me company; other than her it was just Mom’s family and friends. (Val didn’t seem to have any friends, and if he had any family they were still back in Whatsit-kan.) “And you can keep the black one too,” she said to me. “None of this has been out of the attic in thirty years. Nobody’s going to miss it.”
Gwenda herself was wearing this sharp emerald suit for the wedding, totally looking like the no-nonsense lawyer that she was, even if she was as broke as the rest of the family because she specialized in defending people accused of practicing magic. (I’m not talking about big evil-magician-with-electrodes stuff. Just a charm to cure warts or make hair grow, if it worked, the government would come after you.) She usually got them off (she usually managed to prove it was science really) and almost none of them could afford to pay her.
The problem with the green of her suit was the way the
shadows
seemed to like it. Bugsuck. Also
shimatta.
(Japanese for “damn.”) They liked my second aunt, Rhonwyn’s, blue dress too, but not as much as the green. Jill was busy twirling and maybe they didn’t like cream and beige and taupe. The pink and maroon in my dress was in panels, plus this lacy pink shawl Jill loaned me to hide that my dress didn’t quite fit (I’m hopeless with needle and thread) and I was telling myself they liked solid colors, although it was probably just that I couldn’t bear thinking of them crawling on me or my best friend. Although I had the feeling there was one particular shadow that was kind of following me around. It
writhed
along the ground after me.
Uggh.
If I’m not imagining you,
Go. Away.