Two Girls, a Clock, and a Crooked House Read online

  Amy stood back and stepped in a cow patty but didn’t care. She could still hear the story whirling around in Moo’s head, winding down. How Moo’s mom’s hair had gotten gray, and she seemed to turn gray inside, too. How the doctors had said Moo might start moving on her own again someday or might not, but she probably wouldn’t be able to talk again. How Moo’s mom had taken Moo to school that one time but had been told it was no use, no use.

  No use.

  Overhead in the sky, the horses hung their heads.

  It began to rain ever so slightly.

  And then harder.

  They pulled their hoods up over their heads and stood looking at each other—a cow and a butterfly in the middle of the pasture.

  We have to go into the woods, said Moo.

  WHAT?! thought Amy. You don’t go into the woods! Hello? The witch?

  Well, we can’t just stay out here getting poured on and saturated. We’ll get pneumonia or diarrhea or something. We can just go into the edge part of the woods.

  “But—”

  I’m pretty sure that witches live in the deep parts of the woods, not at the edges.

  It made sense. And the rain was getting awfully wet and cold. Amy thought she could feel some pneumonia starting to stir down in her lung. Or her lungs.

  “MOOooooOOOOooo!” said the cows, some distance away, and Amy saw that they were moving out of the pasture. Amy had read that it was often a smart thing to pay attention to what animals did.

  Still! It was getting late. She could feel it getting late.

  Amy found herself worrying about her parents. Maybe Moo’s story had put her mind in worry mode. She hated the idea of them sitting in the dark, on top of the red X, with that awful, stupid machine creeping up on them, faster and faster. A LOT faster, if it was going to be there in less than a day. Her heart started knocking on her ribs as if it wanted out. At the same time, everything that was happening was like a strange, wild wind blowing through her life, promising to take her places and show her things if she would allow it.

  Amy? said Moo. I’m starting to have symptoms of the Black Death from the Medieval Ages, I think. Let’s go!

  Amy went. A thrill of excitement electrified her skin.

  The girls held hands and headed for the woods.

  A FUNNY THING HAPPENS when it rains in the woods.

  It doesn’t rain at first, because the rain stops and pitty-pats around on the leaves, way overhead. So you can hear it, but you can’t feel it yet, and everything stays dry for a minute or two.

  Then the rain starts to find its way in, first dropping from leaf to leaf and finally plunging down among the bushes and dead gunk on the forest floor, and the sound it makes is this great big enormous SIGH, as if the woods were breathing.

  The girls stopped and sat down under a tree about a hundred steps inside the woods just as the water started dripping down through the leaves.

  Amy said, “It’s going to get really dark soon. Is your mom going to freak?”

  Moo shrugged. Not necessarily. She goes to bed really early….It’s like she spends her whole life being tired and depressed. It’s almost her job….So if we get back kinda late, she might not even know.

  “Well, we should definitely go back when it quits raining.”

  It got visibly darker while they were having this conversation.

  “Whoa,” said Amy. “It got darker.”

  The rain got wetter.

  “Are you afraid of the dark?” Amy asked. “I am.”

  I know.

  “What do you mean, ‘I know’?”

  You wrote me a poem about it one time. It went like this:

  I’m afraid of the dark and the night.

  Who knows what goes on when you turn off the light?

  Amy waited.

  That’s all, said Moo. It wasn’t very long. Or very good.

  Amy might have been slightly offended, but she had other things on her mind. She could feel things around them in the dark….

  There ARE things around us in the dark, said Moo.

  “There are not! Like what?”

  Ghosts.

  It got completely dark just then. The dark almost went THUMP—that’s how sudden and complete it was.

  Amy jumped and yelped.

  Shhhh, said Moo. Calm down. Not like Halloween ghosts.

  “There’s another kind?”

  Uh-huh. How can I explain it? Things are older in the woods than they are in your bedroom or at school. The woods have been here longer. They have dreams and memories that kind of float around. Like ghosts.

  “What kind of dreams and memories?”

  The rain came down harder, in huge, splashy drops.

  Like, right where we’re sitting? said Moo. A deer died once. And all through the woods, there was a fire a long time ago. Plus, the new trees remember the old trees, and they remember when they were seeds and acorns. Right now the rain is making the woods remember other times it rained.

  Amy felt better. Sort of. Not really.

  She realized suddenly that she could see Moo hunched beside her. Not clearly.

  A light, over in the trees.

  Ghosts! thought Amy.

  The moon, said Moo.

  And so it was.

  “So beautiful,” said Amy, yawning.

  Beautiful, agreed Moo, yawning because Amy yawned.

  They fell asleep watching it rise through the trees.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN AMY WOKE UP, she found herself in another world.

  A world made of fog.

  But what a fog! Morning sunlight diffused into a glow, as if the woods had filled up with wool. If someone shrank you to the size of a flea and set you down on the back of the world’s fluffiest sheep, it would be just like this fog.

  OMG! Memories of everything that had happened came flooding back to her.

  Moo had spoken! Rain! The woods! Ghosts!

  “HOLY COW!” she cried.

  Moo, next to her, opened one eye and said, Loud Girl.

  “If I don’t get back at some point,” said Amy, “my parents will think I’ve been abducted. They’ll call the air force.”

  This was not actually likely, she knew. Her parents loved her to death, but they were soooooo absentminded. They might notice she was late, or they might not. They had a lot on their minds.

  “I have to get back to see what happens with the Big Duke,” she said.

  She told Moo about the strange man in the suit who had urged them not to quit and go home. “As if something important and unexpected was going to happen.”

  Moo nodded. She seemed to understand about important and unexpected things.

  Amy bit her lip and frowned. “There’s more to it, though,” she said. “I’m not sure how to explain it. My mom and dad connect with the world in big ways, like knowing we have to stop messing up the earth, but then sometimes they miss obvious, simpler stuff. I think I’m supposed to be there…to help make sure they don’t miss something. I don’t know what. It’s like these vision thingies we can see; I can’t explain it yet, but it’s real. If I’m not there, something bad might happen.”

  Well, said Moo, I have two things to say. One: it does sound like you should be there. And two: there’s no reason you can’t be. It’s early. Isn’t it?

  The two of them stood together, separately considering the fog.

  Amy glanced down and discovered that a pool of water had collected between two mighty roots. Her reflection—her parallel-dimension self—looked up at her from this pool.

  “It probably is early still,” said Self. “But do you know which way to go to get out of the woods?”

  “Of course,” Amy answered, pointing. “It’s that way.”

  Self looked ske
ptical.

  “Or,” said Amy, “maybe that way. It’s definitely that way, this way, or that way there.”

  Uh-oh. Mrrzzl.

  What, asked Moo, are you doing?

  “Um. Arguing with my reflection. Myself in a parallel dimension. It’s a habit. I do it when I’m nervous.”

  Well, stop. It’s weird. We have each other to argue with now.

  “This is true.” It was true, Amy thought. How nice.

  Are you arguing about which way is home?

  “Maybe.”

  Well, I can’t tell; can you?

  “I don’t suppose you can, like, see the spirit of the way we came, or sense which way your house is?”

  What, like a lighthouse?

  “Yeah.”

  Moo appeared to be thinking.

  Maybe, she said after a moment. Not sure. I have, after all, been mostly sitting on the porch for two years.

  She appeared to think some more.

  That way, she said, pointing. On a scale of one to a hundred, I’m ninety-four percent sure this is the way back toward my house.

  And the funny thing was, Amy thought she could feel it, too. Every direction looked the same (foggy), but this particular way had a kind of glow to it. A kind of THIS WAY feeling. A 94 percent feeling.

  So she said “ ’Kay,” and took Moo by the hand and gently pulled—

  Wait, said Moo. Let go of my hand.

  Moo’s voice had an odd tone to it. Amy let her go.

  I want to see something, said Moo.

  She stood there silently for a moment.

  “You’re trying to move on your own,” said Amy. “Aren’t you?”

  Moo nodded and said, Shhhh.

  More silence. Then Moo said, I think I remember doctors telling Mom that I might be able to get my own movement back someday. I kind of thought, with me following you around as much as I’ve been doing, maybe something had shaken loose.

  “And?”

  Moo shook her head. Not yet.

  She sounded disappointed but not defeated.

  Amy took her hand again and gave a little tug, and they climbed together over a fallen tree that they didn’t remember climbing over on the way in.

  “I kind of think I should remind you,” said Amy, “that these aren’t just any old woods.”

  Kids got eaten here, answered Moo. I know.

  Rain began to hiss down through the leaves.

  Thunder rumbled. Amy wondered how far away. If she were to see a lightning flash, she would count. (The idea of lightning didn’t appeal to her very much.)

  They passed through a clearing and around a huge, mossy rock. They stopped to throw stones in a small, dark pond. Amy didn’t recall having passed the pond. She had a feeling she would have remembered it; the water, like wind and stone, had a theme. Not something she could see. It was something she heard. Or almost heard, the way you almost hear a train sometimes, far away.

  Thunder again. Closer? Hard to tell.

  I think maybe I have more of a fifty-two percent feeling, Moo admitted.

  “It still feels like the right way, though,” whispered Amy. “Right?”

  I guess, Moo whispered back, in a 40 percent kind of way.

  The rain came down harder, and it was colder than before.

  We need a tree, said Moo. A big one, with big leaves, that will act like an umbrella.

  FLASH! Lightning strobed the woods.

  “One one thousand,” Amy counted, “two one thousand—”

  BOOM! A stout thunderclap! RuuUUMMBle…!

  “Lightning,” said Amy, in a voice like a mouse.

  So maybe not a tree, said Moo. Lightning likes trees. Maybe something more like a big rock to hide under.

  Amy tried to use her spirit-vision (that’s how she thought of it) to zero in on a big rock, but it didn’t seem to be working—

  Over there, said Moo.

  “A tree?”

  No. Something…

  Amy saw it, too.

  It was a house.

  A dark little house, looming in the fog, with waterfalls of rain splashing from its old, sagging roof.

  Immediately Amy thought, THAT’S WHERE THE WITCH LIVES! and came THIS CLOSE to peeing herself. Not that it would have mattered; they were pretty much soaked by the rain.

  I’m not sure anyone lives there, said Moo. It looks kind of past tense.

  True.

  But, said Moo, it’ll be drier in there. Probably.

  “It will also be gross and dark, and possibly a witch lives there.”

  Moo gave Amy a searching look.

  If you really think about it, she said, I mean reeeeeeally think, honestly, do you seriously believe there’s an actual witch?

  Amy reeeeeally thought about it.

  Possibly not, she admitted. Kids had disappeared, according to Dad. But that was a long time ago. And she was old enough to know how stories behaved, growing larger with time.

  Besides, she reeeeeally wanted to be someplace dry. And what if there was someone inside who was friendly and helpful?

  She gave the house a thoughtful look. A brave look.

  It reminded Amy of Moo’s house, in a way, because it didn’t sit up straight. The only thing holding it upright, in fact, was a tree. A tree grew up one side, hugging the house with branches and roots. Beneath the largest branch, a door opened like a mouth.

  The girls hesitated.

  FLASH! BOOM! RUUUUUUMMMMMMMBLE!

  They shot through the door, into darkness.

  AT FIRST, BEFORE THEIR eyes adjusted, the girls could only tell that the house had one room and that it was…full. Not packed-from-floor-to-ceiling full, like a storage room, but full in the way a house is full when a busy and interesting person has lived there.

  There was, for example (their dark-adjusting eyes discerned), a row of old kettles and teapots on a shelf above a fireplace. A picture of a cow, framed and faded. A bookshelf full of books, all swollen and discolored. A statue of an Egyptian cat goddess, some Chinese paper lanterns hanging from ruined beams, an oilcan, a vacuum cleaner, some wine bottles, an old radio with an enormous silver dial, a little bronze rabbit the size of a Ping-Pong ball, a cardboard box full of Legos—

  “Score!” cried Amy.

  —a tool bench with tools on it, and a rocking chair. A framed, faded picture of a majestic black bird. A cardboard box full of what looked like buttons, a number of discarded snake skins, a string of rusty cowbells—

  Score! cried Moo.

  —a pile of old record albums, an unusually large birdcage, a stone fireplace with logs in it, the skulls of a number of small animals, a tall wooden clock with a door in the front, a cloudy glass jar with something horrible in it, and a hand-painted china platter featuring a partridge in a pear tree.

  Over this whole collection, a leaky roof splashed and dribbled and plinked and plunked.

  Amy and Moo surveyed these things, imagining what kind of person lived like this and wondering if that person was a witch.

  Whoever it is, said Moo, they like cows. How bad could they be?

  “I guess so,” said Amy. A huge raindrop blooped down right on the tip of her nose and made her face twitch.

  The clock, said Moo.

  “What about it?”

  Bring me over there.

  They drifted across the floor, and Moo stared at the clock as if hypnotized. Amy was unsurprised to find the clockface, hands and all, practically ablaze with pulsing green light.

  It’s old, said Moo. Seriously old, like from the George Washington DC times.

  “You see the green, right? I think it’s—”

  It’s time. It flows and surrounds things, just like fire or water.

  “I knew it!”

&n
bsp; The clock was a fabulous piece of work. Fancy lines and leaves and scrolls had been carved into the cabinet, surrounding painted scenes from faraway lands: sea dragons and mystical gardens, swordsmen in turbans, and fire-eaters floating on clouds. The panels curved out as if the clock had swallowed a beach ball. The face itself, beneath the green halo, appeared undamaged and was etched with a pair of caterpillars smoking cigars.

  Amy reached out to touch it.

  Maybe you shouldn’t, said Moo too late.

  Amy’s finger pierced the light, provoking soft, bright ripples.

  She brushed the minute hand with her thumb.

  The clockface changed.

  Changed how?

  At first Amy thought the face shrank. Or did it grow larger? It turned pink! No, it filled with stars.

  “Oh!” she gasped, withdrawing her hand. A tiny green cloud clung to her thumb for a moment, like a glowing tentacle, as if she had disturbed a tiny luminescent octopus.

  The tentacle faded and fell away. The girls backed up a step.

  “This is the most wonderful experiment of all time,” Amy whispered.

  This is witchy, said Moo. That’s what it is. Aw, man…the roof just leaked a big one right on my head!

  They looked at the clock for a minute. Amy felt the clock looking back at them. If this was an experiment, she thought, what exactly should they try to learn? What form should the experiment take?

  RuuuummMMMmmble! Outside, the thunder seemed to have put some distance behind it. The plinks and plunks of the leaky roof backed off, too.

  “I want to try something,” she said.

  Be careful, said Moo, who of course already knew what she had in mind.

  Amy raised her hand to the clockface again. This time, ever so gingerly, she gave the hour hand a push.

  Just like before, the face turned pink (or purple?) and spun (or sang).

  The hour hand moved, with a faint creak, from the 3 to the 4.

  Moo made a surprised noise, out loud.

  Amy stepped back, shaking green time tendrils from her finger.

  “Well,” she said.

  Moo was looking at her with HUGE, giant, surprised eyes.

  You didn’t see it, she said, did you?