Aunt Maria (14 page)

“Oh, Chris!” I said. “I
am
glad to see you!”

He is miserable. I could tell that at once. His coat was still damp from the rain and the fog, and I know he was freezing for a day and a night. But it is more than that. It is a kind of shame. He knows he is a wolf and he hates it. He hates the strong way he smells when he is wet. I could tell that because he kept breaking off whining all the time I was lighting the lamp, to give himself disgusted little licks. He hates having a tail. He turned round and bit his tail when I'd got the lamp going, to show me.

“I know,” I said. “But I can't think of any way to make her turn you back.” He knew that. He looked at me as if he'd expected it, resigned to misery. Even though he has gray wolf eyes and a black nose, he still looks like Chris, with Chris's expressions in his face. He is a very young, skinny, forlorn wolf. “Are you hungry?” I said. His ears pricked. He was starving. I'm not sure he could bring himself to kill things and eat them raw.

There were no more cookies in the flower basket, so we had to creep downstairs. I was terrified Aunt Maria would wake up, but she never did. I think she sleeps much more soundly toward the middle of the night. She never woke up the night I ran away from the ghost, either.

In the kitchen, Chris drank a bowl of milk—he did it very noisily and badly; I could see he was not used to lapping yet—while I fetched out all the loose food I could find. He nosed aside the lettuce, but he ate everything else, even a tomato. He ate raw sausages, raw bacon, a frozen hamburger, cold Yorkshire pudding and a lump of cheese.

“Are you sure this won't make you ill?” I whispered.

He shook his head and looked up hopefully. He was still hungry. I tried him with cornflakes then, but he sneezed them all over the floor. Wolves don't seem to get on with cornflakes. So I found the sardines Mum had got for Lavinia and a lot of cake. Chris gobbled it all, while I crawled about sweeping up cornflakes and making sure no paw-prints showed on the linoleum. I'm used to that with Lavinia.

Chris did a wonderful stretch then, rocking back with his forepaws straight out and then standing up slowly, so that the stretch traveled the whole way down his body and out at each back leg in turn. Then he shook, to show me he felt better. His coat fluffed up, quite thick and almost glossy. He is not really gray, more brindled, with darker hair on top and yellower hair underneath, and the colors mostly mixed together on the rest of him. He jerked his head to say, Come with me, and went trotting swift and busy through the dining room. I heard him softly loping upstairs as I switched out the kitchen light and groped after.

It's all right for you, you can see in the dark! I thought. Wait for me.

I was sure he was going to jump through the window of his room again. But when I got to the room he was on the bed, lying on his side with all four long thin legs sticking over the edge, looking at me pleadingly. He was terribly tired and sick of being alone.

“All right,” I said. “I'll stay with you.” Actually, I hadn't realized how much I'd missed Chris until I thought he was leaving again. I was going to ask him to stay. So I left the window open so that he could get away when he wanted and hauled the covers off the floor and wrapped them round both of us. Chris put his narrow muzzle on my knee, heaved a great sigh, and went to sleep. Animals are good at doing that. And Chris has always been good at sleeping.

I stayed awake for a long time, guarding him. If you look at wolves in a zoo, you will see that they always leave one of the pack awake on guard. That made it a bit like when we were small, and I was afraid of the dark. Chris used to guard me. I stroked him sometimes, as if he was a dog. He is awfully thin. I could feel all his ribs through his coat, and his hipbones were like knives. Perhaps wolves are always that thin. His fur is soft inside by the skin but much harsher on the outside. Anyway, he didn't like me poking at him and shrugged crossly till I stopped. He got beautifully warm and I suppose that made me go to sleep. I don't remember turning the lamp out, but I must have done. It was out when I woke up.

All this time I had clean forgotten the ghost. I sort of remembered in the middle of a dream I had, but then the dream became too horrible to remember anything else. It started with a smell of earth and growing things. I could hear grass and leaves rustling, and I thought, I'm somewhere out-of-doors! But that wasn't quite right, because the rustling was overhead somewhere, as if there was a tree growing on the roof. I was terribly cold, so I thought, I must be outside. Then somebody's feet ran over the top, where the tree was growing, with a kind of solid booming. And I realized I was buried in the earth.

It went on for years, too. Sometimes I struggled and shouted. Nobody heard me, and I could hardly move. Sometimes I lay with chill cloggy earth all round me and despaired. This went on so long that I panicked. I shouted and raged and struggled and cried. When that happened, I could tell that great storms came in from the sea. I could hear the wind shouting and hail threshing the trees overhead, and sometimes one cracked and broke. I could tell that long lines of storm clouds went out from me, far inland, and made havoc in places I had never seen. And after years and years, I thought, If I know this and can do all that, then I ought to have strength to get out of here. So I began working, working, slowly and patiently, to get free. I had almost found out how, when I woke up and found a dim streetlight sort of light in the room.

I was so glad to be out of the earth that it didn't strike me as at all frightening when I saw a man in the room beside the open window. He didn't seem a frightening sort of man, anyway. I had fallen asleep leaning one shoulder against the wall, so I was sitting up, with a good view of him. He was odd-looking. He had a small, pointed face with a lot of swept-back hair and very thick dark eyebrows that bent in two upside-down Vs like a clown's eyebrows. His whole face was kind of quirked and crooked and surprised-looking. When I first saw him, he was drumming all his fingers on the edge of a bookshelf and rubbing his pointed chin, puzzled, as if he'd forgotten what he'd come for. Then he nodded. He'd remembered. He turned and came toward the bed. He leaned down, quite near me, and I saw he wanted to speak to Chris.

Oh, it's the ghost! I thought. From the side he had a little hooked nose, like an owl's beak. Or a parrot's. A cross between a court jester and a parrot, I thought. It was a good description, but he was nicer than that.

Chris was curled up in a skinny doughnut shape against my knees. But he came awake the instant the man bent over him. He raised his head, with the pointed ears pricked, and gave a miserable little whine.

The man stopped with one hand stretched out that had been going to shake Chris. He hadn't realized until that minute that Chris was a wolf. He stood like that, staring at Chris, and his face twisted even more with a sort of horrified sympathy. Then his hand flopped in a helpless way, and he started to turn away.

“No, wait!” I said. “You can say it to me. And Chris understands.”

The man whirled round and stared at me. He seemed not to have known I was there till then. One of his clown eyebrows went up and he put his hand up again in a sort of fending-off way.

“It's all right,” I said. “I know I'm a girl, but I'm not on their side. I'm not even neutral now she did this to Chris. Who are you? Do you know what we can do?”

For a moment I thought he was going to speak. His face sort of gathered to make a word. Then he shook his peculiar maned head and smiled. He meant, Sorry, not to you. It was a huge, wide smile, as odd as the rest of him, one long line of smile wrapped most of the way round his face. I know that kind of smile from Chris. Chris uses it to get out of trouble with.

“I'm not trouble, honestly,” I said.

But he was fading by then. I could see books through him, all except his smiling face. That sort of winked out and the light went with it. All I could see was the outline of Chris standing up on all four legs, whining a little, against the window.

“Chris,” I said, “would he know how to get you changed back?” Chris turned and pushed his nose at me and pushed again. “All right,” I said. “I'll come here tomorrow night and try to make him speak. Hadn't you better go now?”

Chris pushed his nose at me and bounded to the window. For a moment he teetered in the opening. I think his wolf's muscles knew they could jump to the coal shed easily, but Chris's mind didn't. Then he jumped,
scrape, thump
, and he was gone, too. I went drearily back to my own cold side of Mum's bed, sniffing a little. I feel quite helpless. I suppose that's what the dream was about.

T
his morning I made Chris's bed, so that I could show Mum it hadn't been slept in. The room smelled of wolf slightly, which is a bit like dog but not quite.

When I showed her, Mum smiled her fond smile. “So he made his bed for once, did he? Or did someone else I know make it for him? You shouldn't spoil him, Mig.” Then she sent me out shopping. “Chris has eaten all the food again,” she said. She didn't seem to realize he must have eaten it raw.

I walked down the neat empty windswept seafront. There was Mr. Phelps, striding back from his swimming in all weathers. I tried to stop him. “Please, Mr. Phelps—” He just walked straight past, staring into the distance with his fanatical eyes.

I went sadly down onto the sand and walked along watching the waves crashing. The sea looked thick, bare, strong, and real. It seemed far more reasonable than anything else in Cranbury. But it isn't really reasonable, I suppose, if you think of the moon pulling all that water up and down like a yo-yo every tide. Perhaps life is all like that, full of terrible hidden unreasonableness.

It was good to have peace to think. Aunt Maria talks and shouts so in the house that my mind is never quiet. I thought of everything that had happened, and it seemed to me that I might be beginning to see a way of doing something. But not quite. A wave bashed down across my shoes. The tide was coming in, and I felt helpless again and went shopping.

Chris must have felt even more helpless and frustrated that day. I suppose he thought he had nothing to lose.

Anyway, Mum had spent the morning washing. She washed Chris's things, including the clothes that dropped off him when he became a wolf, and didn't notice that left him with nothing he could have been wearing. She also washed a row of Aunt Maria's petticoats and mighty blue Baghdads. She pinned the lot out on the line and left them merrily flapping in the wind.

“But, dear, you can see them from the dining-room window,” said Aunt Maria. “I can't have my friends sitting and watching such things.”

Mum protested it was a lovely drying day. In vain. As soon as the doorbell rang for the first Mrs. Urs I was sent out into the garden to take all the washing in. I did it very slowly. It was such a silly thing to worry about. But then if I wore blue Baghdads I wouldn't want my friends to know, either. I said so to Lavinia. She was sitting in the ornamental ferns, watching. I got about half the clothes down and folded them in a basket.

I said to Lavinia, “I suppose I'm not doing this the way you used to, am I?”

But she stared past me and bolted, a long low streak of gray. I looked round, expecting to see Elaine looming over her wall, telling me to get those Baghdads down at once. And it was Chris. He was standing on the back wall, the way he must have come in the night, sort of laughing down at me with his tongue flopping.

“Oh, no, go away,” I said. “Don't be a fool. All the Mrs. Urs are here.”

I suppose that was what he wanted to know. He jumped down into the garden at once, in a lovely limber flowing leap. He's getting better at being a wolf. He can move like lightning. Before I could move at all, he had jumped past me up at the clothesline and landed with a pair of blue Baghdads between his teeth. Then he made for the back door. I had left it open, of course. And the kitchen door opens into the dining room if you shove it. Chris knew that. So I didn't follow him. I went to the dining-room window and looked in.

It was wonderful. Chris was galloping round and round the crowded room trailing the blue Baghdads. The silver teapot had fallen over on its side and was raining hot tea on the carpet. At least one cup was smashed. Everyone was yelling and screaming, and Aunt Maria was waving both sticks in the air. Zoe Green was standing on a chair with her hands together and her eyes shut. I think she was praying. The rest of them were making feeble efforts to stop Chris by grabbing the Baghdads. Just as I looked, Benita Wallins did grab them. Chris simply jerked his head contemptuously sideways and tore them out of her hands. Benita Wallins tipped over backward, with her fat legs in the air. She wears Baghdads, too, pink ones.