Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 12

“Can we go hang around?” Monique inquired. ”I’ve got some stuff I want to show Ninian.”

Her mom’s forehead creased, and for a moment she looked away, then said, “I’d just as soon you stayed near the house. It’s getting pretty dark you know.”

Monique nodded. ”Sure. Come on, Nin.” She led the way across the yard through the remnants of the party, up a set of somewhat wiggly wooden steps into the laundry area, then through the kitchen, and on into what turned out to be her bedroom. I’d seen my sisters’ rooms, of course, and Monique’s was nothing like theirs. There wasn’t a doll or stuffed animal in sight, but there was a beautiful carved statue of a dolphin, done in—I was to find later—apple wood, mounted on a stand in one corner. A set of shelves held books of all sorts and descriptions. A table held a jumble of clothes and a few grooming items. The bed was inexpensively canopied with a framework made of some kind of pipe or tubing, hung with flowered, fabric shower curtains and old bedspreads. Near the window, however, was the most unique thing of all. This was a structure made of cardboard, tape and foil; it was dish-shaped and about two feet across. There was a complicated looking structure of boards, dowels, and wires that held the dish and allowed it to be aimed. There was a light bulb within the dish and an extension cord running from it to a wall socket. ”My searchlight,” Monique commented, following my gaze. ”That’s how I lighted you in last night. The road’s so dark.”

“Wow!”

“She couldn’t be our ghost,” Monique said. ”The little girl Allison was telling about. She’s supposed to be only five.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion that we had a ghost, and why, I wondered, must it be our ghost?

“Aunt Claire said there wasn’t a ghost,” I said.

“No, she didn’t,” Monique countered. ”She just said you were safe, but you noticed how Mother Morland put the blessing of the Goddess on us?”

“Don’t they do that for everybody?” I asked.

“Not the way they were looking at you tonight.”

“Hmmm,” I said. ”You ever notice how when grown-ups tell you you’re safe, that’s the time you want to watch out?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if somebody really had disappeared,” I said after an uncomfortably long silence, “wouldn’t it make sense to tell us about it?”

“Maybe,” Monique considered. ”That would make sense to us, but grown-ups think that if they don’t say anything to kids, it keeps us from worrying.” And that was certainly true (the thinking part, that is.)

“I wonder though,” Monique said darkly, “if they’re right after all.”

“Right about what, about us not worrying?”

“No about not thinking. There are some things that shouldn’t be thought about, things that follow your thoughts and might get in somehow.” From the road running by Monique’s window and a long way off, the sound of a vehicle approached, low and rumbling. Monique made a move toward her foil and cardboard apparatus, then drew back with a slight shudder. “He was dark,” she stated.

I nodded for I knew who she meant. Monique moved to close her drapes, then found a piece of paper and a stubby pencil.

“’The key to things without,’” she said aloud, writing, “‘is that locked safe within.’ That means,” she said, “that the answer to who this guy is comes back to something we can find in ourselves!”

Catching her enthusiasm, I said, “The thread may run all over the place. We might ask all sorts of people, follow this guy all over the countryside, but eventually it must lead back to where we started?”

“Open hands, open minds,” she said then. ”If we ask the question enough ways we’ll eventually arrive at the answer.”

“Gosh,” I said I can’t say I understand that, but …”

“But still it’s true,” she dismissed my objection. ”Now what do we know about this person?”

“So far,” I said, “we know that he’s a man, that he’s wearing dark clothes, and that we saw him on the beach.”

“Maybe,” said Monique. ”Do we really know all of those things?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Do we know he’s a man?”

“Well, he sure looked like one to me,” I said.

“Still,” she cautioned, “He may have been …” she let the sentence trail since neither of us wanted to put a name to it.

“Okay,” I said, “we know he looks like a man. He’s dark looking. He was on the beach. He was looking in our direction.”

She nodded. ”So why would he be looking at us? ‘The thread that runs, however far…’ The answer to who he is or maybe what he is must have something to do with us.”

“Okay,” I conceded. ”What do we know about us?” As I said that, I suddenly wished I hadn’t.

“Well,” Monique forged ahead, not noting my discomfiture. ”We’re young. We’re girls. We’re together. We live here, at least now. You’re new here though.”

Of course, not all of this was true either, but Monique believed it to be. ”Haven’t you ever seen this person before?”

Monique shook her head. ”I’m sure I haven’t.”

“So you think he’s here for some reason because of me?” I asked, my voice sounding very small.

“No question,” Monique replied, “without an answer nearby.” Of course our logic was flawed, though for not quite eleven, we weren’t doing so badly. There was that nagging matter of me not really being a girl, the error that might cause all we deduced to be incorrect, but ‘the open hand’ and all that. Perhaps right now, right here, I was a girl. What really was the difference?

“I think we’re in trouble,” Monique said matter-of-factly. ”No matter what they tell us, we’d better stay together as much as we can.”

That sounded okay to me, but … ”Why did he let us see him?” I demanded. ”Where we were safe. He didn’t have to let us see him watching us.”

“I think that part’s easy,” she responded. ”I think he meant to scare us.”

“Why though?”

“There’s something he doesn’t want us to find out.”

“What?” I asked again.

“There’s the matter of the little girl,” Monique ticked off the point on a forefinger. ”The Book,” finger two, “the box with the little poem on it, and the fact that he showed up when you did,” fingers three and four. “So there’s something in there he doesn’t want us to know,” back around to the thumb. Just then a shaft of bright light shone through the curtain at the window, swept across the floor, made us both look peculiarly orange-yellow and passed on. A few seconds later it happened again, then again.

“What is that?!”

“The lighthouse,” she said. ”You can’t see it from your house, and it always lights up around this time of night. I always think of it as The Friendly Eye, except for some times.”

Or The Orb? I thought but didn’t say that out loud.

“Lighthouses help ships not to crash onto the rocks,” Monique elaborated.

“I know that,” I said. ”Which times?” Again I didn’t really want the answer but couldn’t help asking.

“Around midnight, I guess.” She shuddered a little. ”Or real late like that. Some nights there just seems to be a time when everything goes crazy like you’re older than you’re supposed to be or younger or in some different place—or sometimes the light is trying to hold back something really dark.”

“Like the man,” I said.

“I suppose.”

“Doesn’t it keep you from sleeping?”

“What the lighthouse? No, it’s my friend. And this,” again she moved to the foil and cardboard structure near her window, “is sort of a baby lighthouse. I pretend that it can talk to the big lighthouse and learn from it.” Emboldened by the Friendly Eye, I supposed, Monique flicked a switch in the extension cord to the lamp bulb and a brilliant beam of clear yellow light flashed through her window just about in time with the lighthouse. Flicking the light on and off, she giggled in delight, and the whimsical idea of the two lights talking so charmed me that I begged her for a chance to flash the light myself.

“You built this?”

Monique nodded. ”I got the idea from an article about solar energy mirrors,” she said, “and found out they could work just as well for searchlights.” We played for a time then, showing beacon for beacon, and when the occasional car came down the road, she worked the angling mechanism of the reflector to light them through this gloomy stretch of coastline, tracking the beam from extreme right to extreme left. The odd horn honk indicated recognition from the drivers. Whether good or bad, we knew not.

“Okay,” I said as we were seated once more on her bed, tired of the light play. ”Since he showed himself to us outside, near your house, the thing we’re not supposed to find should be out there,” I gestured. ”Does that make sense?”

“It might,” she conceded, “but he may just have been there to scare us, so we don’t know for sure what we’re not supposed to find out what he’s trying to scare us away from. I’m afraid we’ll just have to see him more to know that.”

I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to see him more. In fact, I was pretty sure I didn’t.

“How do we find him though?” I demanded, not at all happy how this conversation had gone.

“I don’t think there’ll be a problem with that,” Monique declared. ”I’m pretty sure he’ll be trying to find us.”

“But shouldn’t we stay away from him?” me again.

“If he meant to hurt us,” she told me, “he could have done that lots of times today or even yesterday. I think he’ll want to lead us in the wrong direction, so we don’t find out whatever he’s hiding, and if we’re pretty sure he’s leading us in the wrong direction, we’ll just try to look in places he doesn’t show us.”

This sounded a lot like a needle in a haystack to me, but it was nice that Monique at least thought we weren’t in immediate danger.

“Gir-rels!” It was Monique’s mom. ”Time for bed!”

Aunt Claire showed in the opening doorway. ”We’ll be staying the night,” she informed us. ”You,” she wiggled a finger at me, “come with me for a minute.” She led me into a bedroom with a bathroom off it and told me to remove my dress. She stepped out, giving me privacy to go to the bathroom and take off most of my clothes. When I’d flushed, she returned with a worn-looking, yellow cotton nightgown, embroidered with a spray of daisies across the front, just below the neck. ”Put this on.” I pulled it over my head, letting it fall past my knees. Aunt Claire bent down in front of me doing something to the hem of the gown. ”There,” she said, “Just in case. Young people can get up to mischief.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but then I had no real idea why a lot of things had happened today, so I said nothing. Soon enough, I found she’d secured the hem of the gown between my ankles with three large safety pins.

I returned to Monique’s room to see her in a green nightie pretty much like mine, and I saw that two sleeping bags had been rolled out on the floor. ”Can get chilly at night,” her mom told me as she fluffed pillows. ”Sweet dreams, girls.”

“They want to hmm-hmm,” Monique made that coughing noise again in her throat, indicating with her gaze the direction the grown-ups had gone. ”They don’t want us to though,” she indicated her nightwear, “so they make us wear these things. It’s not as if we don’t have better things to do.” I didn’t know exactly what Hmm-hmm meant but figured my imagination could get me close enough for now. We crawled into our sleeping bags, and surprisingly enough, I felt pretty tired. Monique reached over and pecked me on the cheek. ”You’re a good friend,” she said.

“You too,” I told her, pecking back but coming closer to her ear. ”Good night.”

“Good night.”

Today I wore a dress, and everybody saw me doing it and didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about it, but this wasn’t by any means the strangest thing that happened today.

I did not go to sleep immediately though but lay awake for some time as the rather comforting lighthouse beacon swept the room through the closed but uncovered window. Monique seemed to drop off right away and, in general, in spite of her rather macabre way of viewing events about us, seemed actually to worry very little about real harm. I wasn’t at all sure that I would sleep for the rest of the summer, but in mid speculation about the stranger or the specter who was probably at this very moment prowling the attic above my room or the mysterious way things of mine had disappeared, I did sleep only to wake into an eerie dreamlike reality somehow quite different from that which I’d bade goodnight on crawling into my sleeping bag.

It was no sound or touch or even trick of vision that leant the disorientation to me and the room about me, but an unaccountable and rather subtle oddness in the very quality of being. I know this sounds nonsensical and would have to be called a function of intuition rather than true observation, but I felt that the little island of floor I lay upon had somehow come lose from the earth to which it had recently been attached and a slight movement must send me skidding off, ceiling or not, into the black night sky. As I took in my sensory surroundings, I noted the absence of any sound, none of the noises houses always make during and cooling night, no suggestion of life or traffic from without. My skin began to tingle. My body felt even lighter than usual. I’d never been a very big kid; and the lighthouse beacon had stopped its rhythmic, almost hypnotic sweep.

I had just time to notice this fact when the light returned but not the same light. This was somehow harsher and flickered considerably more than the sweeping beacon we’d been enjoying, how long, an hour ago? Two? This light also moved much more slowly, sliding off beyond the gaze of the windowpane but crawling rather than sprinting. It was gone for at least a minute, I thought, then returned, crawling along the wall, spanning the room, then disappearing, again at its seeming snail’s pace. There was something ponderous and alarming about the slowness of the beacon, but it was also hugely magnetic and seemed to be drawing me out toward the window, out of the house. A great part of me longed to run outside, past dolphin and bookcase, past work table and laundry room, out across the porch to the beckoning light. In view of what we would find next day, it was probably very fortunate for me that I did not.

“Do you see it?”

I nearly shrieked in alarm at the whisper that cut through my intense concentration, but I recollected myself just in time and said, “Yes.”

“It’s like this sometimes,” Monique said.

“I guess so,” I said, not knowing what else to answer.

“It’ll be okay,” she assured me. ”It only keeps it up for a little while.” She slid out of bed, slightly hobbled by her nightgown, to switch on the brilliant bulb of her searchlight and deliberately began to match the sluggish progress of the altered Orb.