Double Spell (9 page)

J
ane said nothing to anyone about the barking in the night or Marble’s strange behavior, but she was badly frightened. It had come to her in the dark and muddle of her dreams that they, she and Elizabeth, had brought ghosts to Aunt Alice’s house. In the morning she felt foolish.
There aren’t ghosts,
she told herself crossly.
There aren’t. Maybe there are dreams and maybe they mean something even, but it doesn’t mean there are ghosts.
But she didn’t entirely believe the things she told herself. Ever since the roses had shown up on the old leather box, she had been shaken and unsure. Ever since yesterday afternoon in the attic, she hadn’t been able to throw off the uneasiness that clung to her like a smothering velvet cloth. There was something wrong. Something was going to happen. Against all sense and reason she knew something was going to happen.

There was a heaviness in the air, which didn’t help Jane’s mood at all. Already, at seven o’clock in the morning, the sun was a round yellow furnace in the sky – a furnace with a ring of fog around it. There was scarcely a cloud, and even the gulls were barely floating, not flying. The lake gave a lazy now-and-then lick at the shore as if too exhausted to do more. The heat eased its way into the house and sent Jane and Elizabeth and William down to the beach. They took their toast crusts to feed the ducks.

Everything on the beach seemed so normal that Jane made a determined effort to forget about her fears and forebodings.
Wasn’t it enough,
she argued with herself,
to have all that business about the doll, without me thinking we have ghosts in Aunt Alice’s house? I’m getting worse than Elizabeth.

But just as they arrived back at their own garden, Patrick came charging out of the coach house, bellowing as he came, “Where are those twins? Wait till I get my hands on them. Just wait.” He saw them and thundered toward them.

“Shall we run?” whispered Elizabeth.

“Too late.” Jane stood and faced Patrick.

“What do you mean going into my stuff like that?” he roared. “What do you want in there, anyhow? What have I got in there that you have to go and turn everything upside down? You kids make me so mad!” His face went dark red. His brown hair stood up in tufts where he had pushed his hands through it. His khaki pants were dirty where Horse had climbed over them with wet, muddy feet and he
hadn’t any shirt or shoes on. He really looked funny, and Elizabeth started to giggle.

“Don’t you laugh, you little misery!” Patrick grabbed her long pony tail and pulled. In doing so he dropped something from his hand. Jane bent down and picked it up.

“What’s this?” she asked, paying no attention to Patrick’s anger. Elizabeth drew back out of his arm’s range, rubbing her head.

“What’s that,” he began to roar all over again. “What do you mean, what’s that? You should know. You left it there. Who else around here has bracelets and doodads and things like that?”

Jane looked closely at it. It was a bracelet made of links. Dirt and age had encrusted them, turned the metal quite green, and completely obscured their design.

“It isn’t ours,” Jane said flatly.

“Don’t tell me that garbage,” said Patrick. “Gar-bage,” he said again, this time more controlled but sharp and distinct. “GAR-BAGE,” he said once more and turned and marched, hands in his pockets, back to the coach house. “And,” he turned back to the twins, “don’t go near my stuff again. I’ll skin you if I find you near that coach house.”

Elizabeth looked at Jane. Jane was decidedly pale.

“What’s wrong? It isn’t like you to let Pat get you down.”

“I don’t know,” Jane answered slowly. “Pat didn’t bother me. He’s just a steam engine.” She giggled unexpectedly. “He runs down like William’s windup car, doesn’t he?”

Elizabeth laughed but she knew something was bothering Jane. Jane had been so silent ever since yesterday afternoon, off in a dream or something, paying no attention to her, not wanting to talk about the doll – or anything else for that matter. And now she seemed really worried. She watched Jane twist the funny old bracelet from the coach house round and round on her wrist.

“Let’s see the bracelet,” she said. Jane held out her arm without taking the bracelet off. “Wonder where it came from?” Elizabeth asked. “It’s a funny color, isn’t it?”

Jane didn’t answer directly. She told about the imprisonment in the attic; about seeing the flower-patterned bedroom (“I guess that’s why you saw it”); about the eyes that watched and her great fear and fight to get away (“And you know, I just remembered. That window was tight shut. The one Aunt Alice had to close that day we first came.”); she told about Horse’s barking in the night and Marble standing guard. She told what she had figured out about the ghosts. “And now,” she finished, trying to control the worry in her voice, “this.” She held up her arm with the bracelet on it.

“There,” said Elizabeth abruptly, getting up and starting toward the house, “someone’s trying to get our doll. I told you someone was and this proves it. All those times it was missing. They weren’t accidents,” she stopped and turned, her hands on her hips, “and I bet it wasn’t Porridge who took it that time either.”

“Ghosts.”

“I don’t know about that, but someone has been sneaking around here. And I’ll tell you something: from now on we’re just going to have to watch Amelia all the time. I think she’s valuable.” And away she went to get the doll.

From then on Elizabeth didn’t let Amelia out of her sight. The stiff little painted face stuck out of pockets, grocery bags, swimming towels – everywhere Elizabeth went. The boys began to make jokes and Jane’s friend Polly, from down the street, came especially one day to ask Jane if there was something wrong with her sister.

Jane wasn’t one bit sure about Elizabeth’s explanation of someone trying to get the doll. She really was afraid they’d brought ghosts to Aunt Alice’s house. She asked Joe what ghosts were like and how you knew if you had them. He told her a long story about a ghost that haunted an island castle because he’d killed somebody. “It was neat. This ghost went around howling and shrieking and yelling ‘peace to my soul, peace to my soul,’ until the family all said he was forgiven and then he fell off a cliff into the sea with an earsplitting moan and was never heard again.” Jane didn’t think the story helped much, but it made her laugh listening to Joe shriek “peace to my soul” and that made her feel better.

And, feeling better, Jane began to organize in earnest. She made Elizabeth spend a whole day and a half sitting in the tower – in the heat – going over the things that had happened, the dreams and the strange feelings, the things
they had done, arranging and rearranging the list to try to find some new bit of information from it.

It all seemed to boil down to the fact that they had an antique doll whose name they both knew was Amelia (“and that could be because we’re twins,” Jane felt obliged to remark. Elizabeth said “Twins, twins.”). They had the dreams. Jane had had a scare. And there were the roses.

“Roses,” cried Elizabeth, leaping dramatically onto her bed. “I know roses. Twin roses in fact. Ha! Ha!”

Jane didn’t laugh.

The scare in the attic, they decided regretfully, might have had more to do with Willy Wallet and the attic being such a gloomy place than with their doll and its house.

And so it went: doll, house, Hester, roses; house, doll, roses, Hester; Hester, house, roses, doll. No more sense than ever. They were both beginning to hate the sight of the bedraggled little doll. And both were enormously relieved when, after a day and a half of this kind of concentration, their mother informed Elizabeth it was dentist day.

Jane went along downtown but she didn’t go into the dentist. She window-shopped all the way down to King Street looking at the cameras and baseballs, trying to forget the worrisome feeling that hung over her. She bought an ice cream cone in a drug store and stopped to look at candies in a little shop just in from the corner of King and Yonge Streets. The window was full of irresistible pink and white candies in beautiful glass jars and cakes displayed on fluted platters.

Deciding to buy something to take home, she put her foot on the step up to the old-fashioned glass door and saw herself. The reflection was broken by the strips of wood that crisscrossed each other holding together the small squares of glass, but she could see it clearly – the long blue dress, the bonnet, the shawl. Beyond that a street where horses and carriages passed and ladies were dressed as she was, in long full skirts. The gentlemen wore tall hats. She pushed open the shop door and found herself in her red and white striped dress, her white socks and summer sandals, just inside a men’s barber shop. Hastily she drew back onto the sidewalk – a sidewalk full of rushing people dressed in ordinary everyday clothes and beside it a street where cars whizzed back and forth.

There it was again, like the dreams, like the attic, pulling her away from herself.

“It’s really awful,” she told Elizabeth when they got home. It was after supper in their favorite place under the cherry tree in the back garden.

“I see things and then I don’t see things. I remember things and then I don’t remember them – things I’ve never seen before.” She rubbed her head, jumped up, and began to walk around the garden, stopping to pull a leaf off the lilac, walking on, pulling a leaf off the cherry tree, then round again.

“It’s sort of like having my memory and someone else’s too. As though I’d borrowed the someone else’s memory – only the one I borrowed isn’t very good. I suppose it all sounds stupid, it …”

“It’s as though the borrowed one had spaces in it and patches, like remembering a song only not remembering all of it,” Elizabeth said.

“Who’s is it?” Jane stopped her walking and faced her sister.

“Maybe,” said Elizabeth, “it’s Amelia looking for something.”

“I don’t see how a doll could have a memory.”

“I don’t either really,” Elizabeth agreed, “but I don’t see who else’s it could be. Hester’s?”

“Hester’s?” Jane was appalled. “Not Hester’s.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know – yes I do. I don’t like Hester and I like this memory – it … it fits.”

Elizabeth started to laugh, but she stopped as what Jane had said sank in. “You’re right,” she said, surprised. “It does fit. Only, what you said before is true too. It isn’t all there.”

“I know,” Jane began her walking again, “and I’d sure like to know whose memory it is that makes me see the things I see. I saw Yonge Street, I’m sure it was Yonge Street, although now I think of it I don’t know why, with horses and carriages and people in olden times clothes …”

“Like Hester’s clothes, and Amelia’s clothes,” Elizabeth interrupted.

“Yes, and I’ve seen sailing ships out on the lake – more than just the one – and that’s something else. I think that the sailing ship we saw from our window belongs to that other memory.”

“I think so too,” put in Elizabeth.

“I’ve seen houses, insides and outs, that I’ve never been in at all and all sorts of funny things. I thought maybe it was dreaming from all those old books, but I don’t think so any more.”

“I’m sure it isn’t, because, Jane, we didn’t have them before we had the doll.”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth told Jane now about seeing the field and the dirt road that day by the streetcar stop.

“You know,” she said, “how it always looks in the dreams, sort of double exposed. It was out in the country. The fence was the same and the big building behind it, but the rest was a dirt road and people, kids I mean, in olden times clothes. I think you were there too …” Her voice trailed off, trying to remember. “Anyways – what I think is, when we find that house and take Amelia back there, the dreams’ll disappear. She wants that house and we have to find it for her.”

“I hope so, oh I hope so,” Jane cried passionately. “I suppose you’re right because certainly all the things I’ve seen – or most of them anyway,” she amended, “have the doll in them. But if it all has to do with the doll and the house and Hester,” she shivered again, “then that feeling I have must have something to do with them too – and if it has,” she paused and took a shaky breath, “then we’d better find it soon because I’m absolutely positive something truly dreadful is going to happen.”

Aunt Alice Again – And a Brooch

E
lizabeth sat very still. A leaf, loosened by Jane’s nervous pulling, fell off the cherry tree. A squirrel dropped an acorn off the roof of the house and it bounced and rolled on the stone walk below. Elizabeth had never seen Jane so upset, not the time the kitten had been hit by a car, not the time she had nearly drowned in Margot Harper’s swimming pool, not even this spring when Willy Wallet hadn’t let her on the baseball team. Elizabeth made up her mind to take charge.

“Look,” she said decisively, “I’ve been thinking and I think you were wrong. It isn’t like a detective mystery. This whole thing is like one of those awful scavenger hunts – you know, where you get a clue and you have to follow it to find the next one. If you find the wrong one – like the third one second or something, it’s no good, you have to go back and find the second one or you never get to what it is you’re
really looking for – and you don’t know what
that
is till you get there.”