Chapter Two

You Want Alchemy

Chapter Two begins where the first did: with Maggie in the world of dreams. This will become an important theme as her story progresses. Especially when someone else begins to take part in them!

✪

Maggie was flying again. This time, she could see that what she was wearing wasn’t one of her own nightgowns. It was more like a long, white dress that billowed as she banked, and tangled around her ankles when she stopped too suddenly. She couldn’t understand why she hadn’t seen something so simple the last time. Now, she could even feel its weight and texture, as if it was made of thick, coarse wool instead of some more modern fabric.

Her hands raked the tops of the trees, but this time they were just bare branches. All the leaves were gone. The bony fingers reached out for her and tried to snag her dress, but she laughed and flew higher, across the Westbrook Elementary playing field where, earlier today and in the real world, a bunch of student ball players had churned the grass to mud.

The school was dark and the windows all had shutters pulled over them. The effect was like seeing a familiar face with the eyes rubbed off. The school was blind, turning its vision inward.

She paused for a moment in mid-air, unsure, feeling herself sink ever so slightly, the dress whipping gently around her feet.

Then she was off again, flying toward her house. Third period was cancelled, and she didn’t know why she didn’t feel like going to assembly, but there it was. What went on in that shuttered, quiet school wasn’t her affair. She was a bird, free as the wind.

She looked south, trying to spot her house. She saw Dunsinene, and flew along its serpentine curves, over the canopy of tall, bare trees, over Patton, over the first entrance to Castledown Crescent and up to the court.

It was dawn. A few wisps of smoke trailed up into the breaking sky, and Maggie still couldn’t see her house.

A red light started flashing on and off, and she was thrown off balance by a sudden gust of warm air. It was followed by a sustained rush of hot wind, and Maggie was tossed backward, away from the man who had appeared just in front of her, his face a red mask. The thick nightgown tangled around her ankles and wouldn’t come undone. She tripped, still somehow in mid-air, and fell out of the sky sideways, still fighting the stubborn dress.

✪

And the sunlight on my face startled me awake. I was half on the floor again, the sheet wrapped tightly around my feet and legs. Nothing had happened in the night, no strangers banging on the door or my window, trying to haul me off to a father I didn’t even remember.

I was struck again by how like a dream the entire previous day had been. Even now, I had trouble believing it had really happened, the dark-haired man and the black car. It was even less likely that I’d dreamed it in advance. It was probably some perversion of my mind, the amount of time I spent reading in contrast to the time I spent actually relating to other people. My imagination always wanted to turn every situation into an adventure novel. Trying to make up for my usual disinterest in my surroundings, I figured. So was anything that happened after school, or on the tarmac, entirely real, the way I remembered it now, or had I injected my imagination into what had actually happened?

I thought the latter, although it troubled me. Was I a little crazy? Had all the time spent in mostly my own company left me a little loose from reality? One thing for sure, I was keeping my eyes open today, and my wits sharp. Just in case.

✪

That morning was overcast again, with a steady drizzle that was even more of a depressant than the sporadic showers of the day before. Jason was on edge; he had arrived too late to corner Scott before the bell rushed them all to their separate classrooms.

The only person he had managed to speak with was Maggie Stuart, a humiliating experience. He had apologized in the most absent of ways for forgetting their date the day before, seeming probably ruder than he had intended just because of the embarrassment, of how stupid the whole thing made him look. Wasn’t it bad enough that he couldn’t do his work without her help?

And she had helped, patient and not too obnoxiously intelligent. She even led him around behind the shed in the yard to where no one else could see her helping him. Maybe he should give her some more credit—but she only seemed to talk about school when she talked at all, and that was not exactly his favourite subject.

Sitting in the classroom now, Mr. Hunt was saying something about serotypes, which Jason assumed meant kinds of blood—he’d missed a couple of minutes of the lecture zoned out in a daze. The fact that Mr. Hunt was pacing in front of the very desk where last night all was insanity made him feel like an impostor in his own body. He had almost mentioned it to Maggie he was so shaken, still.

Maggie Stuart. He had a strange suspicion, so odd that he didn’t even know how to think about it, that Maggie might just have been the perfect person to tell. Scott might not believe him, so he’d almost decided on reflection not to tell him. All of the other girls he knew would have laughed, and that would have been an end to his social life.

Maggie was far enough outside the loop—but what could anyone say to help things make sense? Would she be able to explain it away, give him a logical reason that his science teacher was performing what he could only imagine was an occult ritual inside the supposed haven of his own school? Not likely.

No, he would tell Scott when he got the chance, and he would prepare himself for the inevitable ridicule. But he had to say something. It was too strange and unsettling a thing to have seen to carry it alone.

✪

That day at lunch, I perched as usual on the steps of the janitor’s shed. My book was open on my lap, but I wasn’t reading. In fact, all I’d managed was to scan through the rest of the novel for any more mention of scrying in pools and still bowls of water to see the future.

The dreams, and the black car. My father. Jan, happy. Something was so off-kilter in my life suddenly that I had no idea where to start taking it apart for answers.

I was even behaving strangely. My eyes were carefully made up, and I had scrubbed my hair in the shower that morning until it actually did what I wanted when it was dry. Instead of combing it into the usual ponytail, I’d left it loose and forced it into an arc which curled forward in a loop under my ear. I wore my standard boyish sweatshirt and jeans, but, for once, was pleased with the whole effect.

Elated, in fact, that I’d done it on the day when Jason Lawson had actually sought me out, notwithstanding the pedestrian reason.

I could pretend that I was thinking instead of reading, but it didn’t wash. I was watching the boys play basketball, and wondering why, after receiving the scare of my life the night before, I’d gotten so dressed up.

Mr. Sterling was on yard duty, and some of the grade six girls were trying to interest him in a chocolate cookie from their snacks. I could see him raising his hands to refuse, and I knew he was telling them he was ‘watching his figure.’

He had been saying that as long as I could remember. He was one of the youngest teachers at the school, round-faced, fair-haired, and blue-eyed. I knew that he was always trying to stay fit, for his trip every year to Jamaica or something. Girl-chasing. It was funny.

I was glad I had no such concessions to make—and proud of myself for overlooking the obvious reason for my own attention to my appearance that morning.

Mr. Sterling even worked out at some gym after school every day, and talked about his squash game during slow class days. He’d chatted with me on occasion, which I quite enjoyed, when I wasn’t feeling defensive and embarrassed like last night.

It was a bit of a pattern, I guess. Every now and then, some person who otherwise would never so much as look at me would come up and spill their deepest secrets. Then, they’d flit away as if nothing had been said, and their secret was as safe as if they’d told it to the proverbial wall.

Don’t be frightened, I thought. I’m really just part of the wallpaper. Your secrets are safe with me.

I let my eyelids droop, suddenly tired, but still half-watching the basketball game, which had taken a strange turn. Jason Lawson was staring down into one of the little round pools that dotted the tarmac.

As I watched, I saw Scott going for a shot, Jason frozen, bending over the pool. Scott plowing right into his friend, Jason unaware of anything but the scry.

Scry. I said the word in my head. Jason had seen something. My head throbbed.

Jason went down, still staring at the water. In the back of my mind, like in a dream, I heard again the sweet singing of the boy—Suddenly, the spell was broken. Scott helped Jason up, apologizing. They slapped hands in complicated sequence. The bell rang, and everyone, from the sevens on the diamond to the boys on the court to the girls like gossipy flies by the wall, headed mentally as well as physically toward third period.

I descended the shed steps slowly, looking over to the circle of water on the tarmac I had been fascinated by the day before. I stepped closer, peering down. Nothing was reflected today in the half-light under the clouds except me, my reflection rippling in a faint gust of wind across the playground.

What had Jason seen? And my mind did a flip, as if at last refusing to entertain any more bizarre notions. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and turned my back on it, running to catch up with my classmates before I got in trouble.

✪

Science class, and I was anywhere but. It wasn’t just the idea that I might have suddenly become clairvoyant. It was the suspicion that it was all just wishful thinking. If you’re lonely, how can you not want something to justify it, to give you some kind of special advantage in exchange?

I felt I was getting my own chronology so confused, trying to recall when I’d dreamt what and when things had happened that might tie in. Had the black car really been in my dream? It was far more likely that I’d added it later to justify my own sense of the dramatic. To feel special. I didn’t know what I knew anymore. Like I said, haywire.

Mr. Hunt crashed his meter stick down on my desk, breaking my reverie and making me jump. A ripple of laughter ran through the class. “Hmm?” he asked, obviously following up some question I hadn’t heard. “Miss Stuart, maybe you’ve forgotten that we have an assembly in approximately five minutes?”

Something came to my lips, even as I felt my cheeks redden with embarrassment. “Oh,” I voiced, almost silently.

One of his eyebrows lifted. “Very good. The universal donor blood type is ‘O.’ And the universal recipient?”

He moved on, leaving me stunned. I had actually answered the question correctly. I slumped back in my seat, trying to be invisible, more perplexed than relieved.

And then the class was over, with all the attendant noise and frenetic movement to be first lined up at the door, and I was still in the same position. I saw Jason staring my direction, watched his glance dart away the moment he realized I was looking back.

I felt a surge of hope, at odds with how I had been otherwise feeling all day. He keeps looking at me, I thought, and another guilty thrill slid through me like ice cream on a hot day. Maybe I would have a chance to talk with him again sometime. Maybe he’d actually enjoyed talking to me this morning, and that would somehow overcome the wall of popularity that had always kept us so firmly separated in the past.

Finally, Mr. Hunt gave a signal and my classmates poured out of the room to join the other students on their way to the auditorium. I was lagging behind, pretending to be occupied in arranging the things in my satchel. I hadn’t even made it to the line before it was released into the hall.

“Maggie Stuart.” I heard Mr. Hunt call my name as I decided that I’d run out of procrastination time. Hiking the bag over my shoulder, I went up to the front of the room where he stood, back to me, cleaning the day’s lesson off the blackboard with two brushes at once.

“Yes, Mr. Hunt?” Extra homework, perhaps, arbitrarily assigned, or maybe, just maybe, a congratulations on something I’d handed in to him. Mr. Hunt was not easy to predict.

He turned, tamping the two brushes together as he did. A cloud of chalk dust filled my nose and set me coughing. Through the tearing in my eyes, I saw him lift a glass of water from his desk. “Don’t die on me, Stuart,” he said, mouth twisting, as if it had been my fault that I was having a choking fit.

I took two deep gulps, and then a third as his hand, still on the bottom of the glass, tilted the liquid again toward my lips.

“That’s better,” he told me. “Now breathe—good. All right.”

I shifted my weight, the chalk dust itching in my nose and throat. Mr. Hunt was staring fixedly at me, close enough to make me very uncomfortable, seemingly performing a minute examination of my forehead.

“You wanted to see me,” I prompted at last.

“Yes, that.” He met my eyes with an odd sort of unfocused intensity then cocked his head in a typically Hunt fashion. “I have the results from the work I did yesterday on your blood, and we need to have a bit of a talk.”

Work? He had done something himself with the slides the class had prepared for him? The room began to swim. My head filled with thoughts of fear and indignation. He’s going to tell me I have AIDS—no, hepatitis C. I’m dying. What was he doing running tests on my blood in the first place?

Feelings of betrayal surged through me, quickly followed by nausea. Between those and the dry tickle of chalk in my throat, I found that I couldn’t speak. “Mr. Hunt?” I managed at last.

He had returned to his appraisal of my face, gaze flickering over me like the quick tongue of a cat. The angles between ceiling and walls no longer seemed to be ninety degrees but warped and slid.

When he answered, it seemed like minutes had passed. “Yes?”

“Catch me …” was all I got out, and the floor rose up to meet me.

✪

Scott had saved Jason a spot on the floor. On Scott’s other side sat a serious blond boy from the other grade eight class, whom Jason knew only vaguely. His name was Aaron Scribner.

“Hey,” Jason greeted them.

“This seem at all strange to you?” said Aaron. The question might have been directed to either of them. Jason took a quick look around the room, and did find himself a little disquieted by what he saw. “What’s this assembly for?”

Scott shrugged. “A bit late for Christmas pageants, or any crap like that.” On the edge of the stage, dozens of black candles stood in rows. The curtains were closed behind them, and Jason felt a chill in the air. Candles.

He glanced around at his classmates, who were mostly in the area near the door, because of Mr. Hunt’s late dismissal. But Mr. Hunt himself was nowhere to be seen. Rising in his gut came the same instinct he’d had last night, at the window, witnesses Mr. Hunt’s frightening behaviour. Flee, his brain told him.

“I think I’m going to—” Jason began, shifting his weight, but at that moment, the doors of the auditorium fell shut, and the lights went out.

✪

More than anything, it was like being sat on. My chest felt compressed and it was hard to breathe. My eyelids were so heavy I would have used my fingers to open them, only I couldn’t imagine being strong enough to lift them.

Finally, both the pressure on my body and eyes lessened, and I cracked open my lids. It took me a moment to figure out where I was, and another to focus on the man sitting on the chair by the sink where the red neon of a clock radio blinked steadily. The only light was the dim afternoon sun coming low and weak through the small window. He was turned partly away from me, and as my sight lost its initial bleariness, I caught a quick movement of his hands. A glint of steel—a knife?—and something glass like a test tube—and both objects disappeared into his pocket.

I rose slowly out of the uneasy semi-consciousness, trying to put together a reasonable framing of recent events. I lay on the cot in the nurse’s room under a woolly pink blanket. The blanket scratched against my skin, but dully as if I had been drugged. Slowly, I remembered fainting; I remembered Mr. Hunt offering me a drink of water which he had already poured.

The feeling that something strange was going on lingered, but the edge it had held before was missing. I only wanted to sleep. He still hadn’t spoken; perhaps he didn’t even know I was awake.

“Mr. Hunt,” I asked in a rough croak, “how did I get here?”

He looked up, meeting my eyes with an intensity I found alarming, and cocked a thick eyebrow at me. He shook his head slowly. “You have some nerve. In fifteen years of teaching I’ve never had a student faint on me.”

So that’s what had happened. I laughed briefly, but stopped when it made my head throb.

“Funny, eh? Little runt.” Mr. Hunt stood to go, and paused by the door. “Just remember. I did catch you, so you owe me. Stay put and get some rest. That’s an order. I’ll be back in a few minutes if I can. Just had to make sure there was no permanent damage before I called your mother. Last thing I want is a lawsuit.”

He turned again, then continued, almost as an afterthought, “If it’s all right with her, I’ll give you a lift home. Now remember, stay put.”

He smiled then, not unkindly although with only one corner of his mouth, and came back into the room to help me rearrange the blanket before disappearing into the hall. Before the door closed, I heard a dull noise beyond it, like a distant jet engine.

I rolled over and closed my eyes. According to the nurse’s clock it was nearing a quarter after two, so I guessed I had been out a good ten or fifteen minutes. It seemed a terribly long time to be unconscious. But Mr. Hunt didn’t seem worried, and I, for whatever reason, trusted him. He was a bit difficult as a teacher, and I knew that other students had problems with him, but to me he had always seemed fair and interested, if unpredictable. If he was a bit impatient, well, I couldn’t really fault him. I didn’t need a child psychologist to tell me we were at a ‘difficult age.’

It seemed very quiet in the school with everyone else down at the other end of the wing in the auditorium with the doors closed. I couldn’t even hear the tick of clocks or the buzz of fluorescent lights. I listened harder, trying to pick out sounds. Holding my breath, I heard the faint whoosh of the jet noise again, but decided that must come from somewhere beyond the school.

Lying still with my head supported only by the thin pillow, I began to feel nauseated again and swung my legs off the cot. Maybe I should go to the bathroom. My head was still swimming. Moving in a haze, I went to the door and, pulling it ajar, stood perfectly still.

My balance was off, and I steadied myself on the door frame. I had opened the door of the nurse’s office onto a dark hallway, and I wondered immediately if I’d somehow mistaken the time on the clock above the sink. Maybe it was set wrong. Only if school was already over would it explain why everything was so quiet.

Injecting itself into my thoughts came a groaning sound from far off down the hall toward the gymnasium, too faint to identify. What the heck? Something in my stomach started to gurgle uncomfortably.

The sensation that some impending event hung over the school, and more particularly me, pressed down on me. I looked at my own watch, a simple thing with a silver face and black band Jan had given me for my last birthday. Two-fifteen. Right in line with the nurse’s clock. So school wasn’t over, and the assembly was still in progress if the closed doors, dimly visible at the end of the hallway, were any indication.

Aware suddenly that a patch of my skin was crawling, I put a finger to the back of my neck just below the hairline. It came away wet with a single drop of red blood. I rubbed the sore spot until the bleeding stopped. Fainting, and now what? I must have hit something—but no, Mr. Hunt said he’d caught me. I flashed back to the glinting object in Hunt’s hand as I awoke. I fixated on there being a connection, but its meaning was impossible to imagine.

Turning away from the gym, I started down the hallway back toward Mr. Hunt’s room and paused outside the door to the girls’ washroom. Maybe that’s all I needed, to relieve the pain in my stomach and splash some cold water on my face. If Mr. Hunt came looking, he would surely guess where I’d gone, and besides, I wouldn’t be long.

Once inside the washroom, all the tension in my bladder ceased. Seized again by the notion that something odd was happening, I walked down the whole row of stalls, pushing each open, before I settled on the one farthest from the door.

I’d barely entered the stall when I heard the washroom door brush open on its hydraulic arm. Gripped by sudden panic, for no reason I could explain, I pulled myself silently onto the toilet seat, drawing my feet up. Footsteps, the squeal of

rubber on floor, and then a hiss, no more than a breath—my name.

“Maaa-ggggie …”

I filled my lungs and held on to the air, not daring to move. There was silence, then, “Anyone in here?” still in the same low hiss.

I heard the door fall shut against the pressured resistance, and waited. Only after I discerned the faint echo of footsteps moving quickly down the hall toward Mr. Hunt’s classroom was I convinced he was gone.

And then came the hard part, as I lowered my feet to the floor again and went to splash water over my super-heated temples. Why had I not let him know I was there? Why, with the offer of a ride home, and being pretty much told to leave school early, an unprecedented treat, had I not stayed put as Mr. Hunt had told me, and why, when he’d come looking for me, had I pretended not to be there?

But that voice, which had been unmistakably Mr. Hunt’s, had, if I was honest with myself, raised in me a panic unlike anything I had ever known, except perhaps in the moment of terror following in the wake of a nightmare.

I opened the washroom door slowly, even though I was sure he was long gone from the hallway. He was; the school again looked deserted, and the silence now took on an even more sinister aspect.

Unable to help myself, I padded slowly up the corridor toward the auditorium. My heart was tight in my chest. Somewhere above the school, I imagined storm clouds heavy and black, threatening a storm to end all storms.

As I walked, my fingers twitched on the band of my watch. Before I knew what I was doing, the strap was loose and the watch dropped to my feet. But I was unable, or unwilling, to stop my steady, mechanical progress up the hall toward the closed doors. The watch remained where it had fallen, and I continued on.

And then I became aware of sounds, finally, like a station tuned in all along on a distant radio and only now close enough to hear. There was the jet noise, coming in long erratic pulses, and the strange, heart-sick groan moving through it like a whale through deep water. And floating above, with a pin-point delicacy enough to bring the promise of tears to the corner of my eyes, was the sweet, beautiful sound of a boy, singing.

I have been entranced, I told myself, and it felt true. I was no longer under my own control. The power of decision had been taken from me. I felt as if a drug was moving through my system, and perhaps it was.

That would explain some of Mr. Hunt’s odd behaviour, if he had purposely thrown chalk dust in my face and then offered me a cup of water spiked with some knock-out drug. It wouldn’t explain why he had done it, of course, or why he had been in the washroom, or why he had been so explicit about keeping me isolated, or taking me out of the school.

And it probably wouldn’t explain why I was being drawn to the auditorium as if the boy’s song was the call of a siren and not to be refused.

But before I could reach the doors, before I could cross the foyer at the juncture of the school’s wings even, the doors exploded out toward me. Jason Lawson came running at me, full tilt, all long legs and panic. Through the opening behind him, I glimpsed candles, and a sheen of red shining on the walls, and students sitting unmoving on the floor in precise rows of exactly the sort never seen in any public school assembly in this world.

Near the door, I saw Jason’s best friend, Scott Saunders, his curly hair matted with shadows, his legs crossed awkwardly under him. Beside him was Aaron Scribner, a boy who I knew only as one of the smartest boys in school, but his blank eyes and fixed gaze had no intelligence at all. There was no sense to the scene, or only an ancient and wild meaning I had no desire to grasp.

“Run, Maggie!” Jason screamed, passing me and fleeing down the hallway.

I turned slowly, unable at first to pull my eyes away from the half-grasped images beyond the doors as they fell shut again. The drug in my bloodstream was making me sluggish again, and I was only dimly aware of a bulky figure pushing me roughly aside to follow Jason down the hall.

It was enough to completely unbalance me, and I crumpled in a tangle of my own limbs, unable for the moment to stand or to do anything beyond watch Jason and his pursuer.

Jason had almost reached the doors at the end of the wing when something winked in the air above the larger figure’s head. As if in slow motion, I watched Jason topple. My breath came faster and faster, the cold floor pounding against my chest and the knowledge of what I had seen in the auditorium, or what I thought I had seen, scorching my back like the flame of an open fire. My heavy hands curved into claws and I dug at the cold tile, pulling myself along and away from the glistening red, which could only be blood, and the silent students, who could only be entranced like I myself had been.

Rising above the pulsing blood in my own ears was that ironic and strangely calming music, the boy soprano singing so sweetly. A new sound began, as the door to the auditorium opened again, a flapping which made me think of the beat of crows’ wings. Above the school, from those storm clouds of my weighty premonitions: it had to be a helicopter.

It was the only explanation I could conceive to match the profile of the noise. A helicopter. Through the glass at the junction of the wings I watched its shadow cover the walls, the beating of its rotor stirring the faded sunlight into bands of light and dark.

Down the hallway, I saw Jason coming nearer, his feet in the grip of his big captor and his head and arms dragging on the floor behind him. His ankles were bound, with some kind of rope. I looked again, and knew what I was seeing. A bolo, rope weighted on both ends. They had brought Jason down like a hunted animal.

And then a figure descended on me as well, a huge hand filling my vision. My head was wrenched around as something cut off all the air into my lungs. I tasted something sweet, and realized with barely resonating shock that the man with his hand clamped over my mouth was my—was my French teacher, Mr. Sterling.

The walls began to swim, and my eyes blinked heavier and heavier. I was only half aware of the voice of the young man from the car on the street, saying something to Jason. I caught the ironic tone, but none of the words.

Then, for the second time that day, I, Maggie Stuart, new crown princess of the really bad day at school, lost consciousness.