Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (10 page)

"We have a friend who lives nearby," I said.

"And ghosts don't scare us," Molly said.

Not only was it almost dark, but a fog had rolled in. Everything was gray and murky-looking. Jack said goodbye to us and led Diablo away. They were swallowed up in the murk in half a minute, and we started along the driveway.

"Well, we got here before night—sort of," Molly said.

"Did you mean it when you said ghosts don't scare us?" I asked Molly.

"Sure I meant it."

"Good—because this is the ghostiest-looking place ever."

It was hard to tell what was shadow and what was solid object in the fog. It was one of those greenish, greasy fogs, and when we were twenty paces into the Christmas tree farm we had no way to tell where we were. Only by continuing to walk in the direction we'd started could we have even a vague clue that we were heading the right way.

We didn't talk. By the time we reached the point at which we couldn't tell if we were still in the Christmas tree farm or had reached the woods, I realized we were holding hands. Then Molly spoke.

"Do you smell something?"

"You mean like—?"

"Like muffins."

"Yes."

"It can't be, can it?"

Of course, it could, and was—a sweet muffiny smell, the smell you would get if you opened a bag of muffins and stuck your nose in. And there was a thick, darker place in the fog ahead of us—ahead and above—where there was something tall and ... evil. My whiskers were tingling.

My mind was processing a lot of information that I was not getting from the usual senses—it wasn't something I saw or heard, or the muffin smell, that told me it was something evil. I was getting that from some part of my brain I hadn't known was there. But I was certain that something really bad was closing in on us, and from the way Molly was squeezing my hand, I could tell she was getting the same message.

"Why don't we stop walking?" I asked myself. And then I realized we had stopped—it was the patch of darkness that was moving ... toward us, and getting darker, and bigger.

We never did see him clearly. He remained just a cloudy darkness, even when he spread himself and rushed us. I felt myself choking. Like choking on a muffin. We were being enveloped in the blackest black. There was no pain, but I was very sure the worst kind of pain was about to come. Molly screamed.

Well, she didn't exactly scream. It was like a scream, but also like a whistle, also like rattling pebbles in a can, also like breaking glass. It was the kind of sound that makes you see colors and flashes of light. And it wasn't a scream of fear. It was more like a weapon, a sharp knife.

And in that moment there were thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of sharp knives whizzing all around us. Fast-moving, making a keen, hard, singing noise, slicing and slashing—I knew these things could cut through anything, and I imagined the burning wounds and my hot blood spilling, but they were not touching us. They were after the big black foggy thing—and it was hurting. I saw, or felt, or maybe heard it twist and shift, recoil and jump, trying to collect itself so it could get away. But they were after it, the thin, quick, vicious things. And all the time, Molly was screaming that ear-breaking scream.

Then the scream stopped. The sharp, angry flying things stopped. The black thing was gone. And here was Chicken Nancy, holding up a lantern and carrying an old-fashioned blunderbuss. Weer, the dog, was with her.

"Well, I see I had no call to worry about you," she said. "You're quite the dwerg, Molly dear."

"Chicken Nancy! You saved us!" I said.

"Not I," Chicken Nancy said. "Though I did bring my blunderbuss loaded with rock salt and juniper berries."

"Would that have worked?" I asked.

"Well, he wouldn't have liked it," Chicken Nancy said. We were walking along now. "But what Molly did was much more effective. I doubt he'll be back this way for a year or more after that experience."

"What exactly did I do?" Molly asked.

"It was your dwergish instinct," Chicken Nancy said. "You called out the tree spirits to protect you."

"The tree spirits?"

"Oh, yes. Every Christmas tree has a fierce, bloodthirsty demon within it," Chicken Nancy said. "And people think all they risk by bringing them indoors is burning the house down."

We were sitting at Chicken Nancy's table. She had cut us thick slices of hot apple pie with crumbly cheddar cheese on top, and poured glasses of milk from a crockery pitcher. There was a fire in the kitchen fireplace, and the room was lit by candles. Weer was sleeping by the fire. We felt so cozy and safe in the little house that being scared to death in the fog seemed like it had happened a long time ago.

"What happened out there?" Molly asked.

"You ran into the Muffin Man," Chicken Nancy said.

"We figured that out," Molly said. "But the other things that happened. Tree spirits, you said. What was that all about?"

"You summoned them," Chicken Nancy said.

"How could I have summoned them? I never heard of them before."

"It was instinct," Chicken Nancy said. "Dwergs have powers."

"They do? The only power I noticed dwergs having when I was living at home was the power to stay on their feet after drinking lots of homemade Catskill Mountain gin."

"Are you sure?" Chicken Nancy asked. "Have you never noticed any powers?"

"You mean like knowing things about people before they tell me, and knowing what they are thinking?"

"For example," Chicken Nancy said.

"I thought that was just part of being crazy. Isn't it?"

"What am I thinking right now?" Chicken Nancy asked.

"You are thinking it's a pity I didn't come along sooner so you could set me straight."

"I am. But it's not too late. And by the way, remember how you used to be crazy?"

"Sure, until you cured me with that special tea."

"That was Lipton's from the store. You were never really crazy to begin with. It's just that nobody ever explained things to you. You just needed to stop
thinking you were crazy. I hope you will forgive my little deception."

I have to admit, I felt a little jealous. Chicken Nancy was so nice to Molly. I wished I thought I was crazy or needed to have things explained to me too.

"Oh, you're just as mixed up as I am," Molly said to me. "There's plenty you don't understand."

"Oh, yes, the mind-reading thing," I said. "Well, I would like to know about that picture."

"The one of you?" Molly asked.

"The one of Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling," I said. "It's not me."

"Well, there is a striking resemblance," Chicken Nancy said. She had gotten the picture out of the drawer, and we looked at it. In the candlelight, it looked real and alive, and exactly like me.

"That's because it's you," Molly said.

"I don't know why you keep saying that," I said.

"Because it's a picture of you," Molly said.

"Look, unless Chicken Nancy is playing an elaborate joke on me..."

"Which I would never do," Chicken Nancy said.

"...then it is a portrait of a girl who lived well over a century ago."

"And yet you and she are one and the same," Molly said.

"And you think this because?"

"Because look at the evidence," Molly said. "Here is the picture, and here are you, right in front of me."

"Besides my having absolutely no recollection of being Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling, how do you account for the fact that if I were she, I would be older than Chicken Nancy?"

"How old are you, anyway?" Molly asked.

"It's a funny thing," I said. "I don't exactly know. Fourteen, fifteen, somewhere in my teens. You see, Uncle Father Palabra, who raised me, is a retired monk, and even though he is retired he spends a fair amount of time in prayer or being silent, meditating and the like. I always assumed that was why he never told me a lot about my own history. He has various monkish ways about him. For example, we never celebrated our birthdays—instead, we would celebrate the birthdays of Saint Pussycat, who has nine per year."

"Saint Pussycat?"

"A saint Uncle Father likes especially. I'm not sure if she is an official saint. My earliest memory is of reading about Saint Pussycat in one of Uncle Father's books."

Molly was grinning. "So you don't know your right age, and the first thing you can remember happened when you were already able to read."

"I see where you're going with this," I said. "And while I don't know my
exact
age, I think it is pretty obvious that I am not over a hundred years old, so I am obviously not Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling."

"It's not terribly likely," Chicken Nancy said. "But I wouldn't rule it out completely. It is more likely that you are her doppelganger."

"What's a doppelganger?"

"Person who is exactly like you," Chicken Nancy said. "Some people believe each of us has one. Maybe Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling is yours."

"Who was she exactly?" Molly asked Chicken Nancy. "Tell us about her."

"Cups of tea, I think," Chicken Nancy said. "And then I will tell you what I know about Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling, and after that I think it will be time for us to sleep." Chicken Nancy poured out cups of tea. We sat at the table, sipping and listening, with Weer snoring at our feet.

"First, Elizabeth Van Vreemdeling was not actually a member of the family. She just turned up at Spookhuizen under mysterious circumstances and wound up adopted."

"What were the mysterious circumstances?"

"It was said that she had come in a flying saucer."

"They knew about the flying saucers back then?" I asked.

"More so than now," Chicken Nancy said. "There
was more flying saucer activity in the nineteenth century than there is today. People had a lot of theories about them, and there were books written and articles in the press. Even Mr. Lincoln used to tell a story about flying saucers."

"Abraham Lincoln?"

"Yes. He told a story about a flying saucer that landed in New York City and broke a wheel. The captain of the flying saucer went into the nearest open shop, which happened to be a bagel shop.

"'Give me one of those flying saucer wheels,' the saucer captain said.

"'Those are not wheels,' the shopkeeper said. 'They are bagels.'

"'Bagels?' the saucer captain said. 'What are bagels? What do you do with them?'

"'We eat them,' the shopkeeper said. 'Here, try one.' He handed the saucer captain a bagel.

"The flying saucer captain took a bite of the bagel. 'Not bad,' the saucer captain said. 'You know what would go well with this?'

"'What?' the shopkeeper asked.

"'Lox, and cream cheese,' the space man said."

"Abraham Lincoln told that story?"

"Abraham Lincoln knew about lox and cream cheese?"

"And flying saucers?"

"Well, he told a lot of stories," Chicken Nancy said. "And he was president of the United States, so he knew about everything, lox and cream cheese included. As to knowing about flying saucers, some think he came from another planet himself."