The Midnight Gate (32 page)

As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, Belladonna froze, her mouth hanging open in astonishment.

“Miss Parker!”

 

22

The Chariot

MISS PARKER DIDN
'
T
seem stunned at all, beyond an expression that seemed to indicate mild surprise that Belladonna hadn't knocked first.

They stared at each other for a full minute, Miss Parker not moving from her desk and Belladonna frozen in the doorway that she now realized was behind the tall narrow bookcase that she'd examined so closely while trying to decide what to say when she and Steve had been sent there after Chemistry last October.

Then it occurred to her—that wasn't possible. The bookcase was between two windows, and Miss Parker's office was on the second floor.

She spun around. There were the windows alright, with their not very impressive view of the street outside and the run-down buildings opposite. And there was the bookcase and the door. There should be nothing but a long drop, but Belladonna could still see the narrow corridor with the green wallpaper stretching into shadow.

“Hey, let me in!”

Steve gave her a sharp shove and half stepped, half tripped into the room.

“Whoa!” he blurted. “You have got to be kidding me!”

“My feelings exactly,” sighed Miss Parker, standing up. “I'd been rather hoping that Mrs. Jay was wrong.”

She walked around the desk and took the old lacrosse stick down from its display case, then turned and looked at them both critically.

“You look a mess,” she said. “I don't suppose it occurred to either of you to pack a comb in those backpacks of yours?”

Belladonna and Steve shook their heads. Miss Parker opened a drawer in the desk and handed a comb to Belladonna.

“There's no excuse for slovenliness,” she said as she pushed the bookcase back against the wall. “Particularly when you are in school uniform.”

“Are you the…” began Steve, ignoring the whole comb thing, but his voice trailed off before he actually asked the question.

“Thank you,” said Belladonna, running the comb through her hair and handing it back. “We got the nobles … and there was a rhyme … so are…”

But her voice trailed off as well. For some reason the question seemed so ridiculous, looking at Miss Parker, with her sensible shoes, her ill-fitting navy blue suit, and her helmet of dark hair trimmed so precisely just at her jawline.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” said Miss Parker impatiently. “Yes, I am Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Abyss. There. Now you know.”

Belladonna tried to absorb the information.

“But … you're Miss Parker. The head of our school.”

“How terribly observant of you, Miss Johnson,” said Miss Parker drily. “Were either of you intending telling me something useful, or did you think you'd just stand there with your mouths hanging open?”

“The guardians—” said Steve suddenly. “We were nearly killed! Twice!”

Miss Parker looked at him as if she were going to impose detention or issue one of those letters to parents that fill all schoolchildren with unnameable dread. But she stopped.

“Of course!” she said, her eyes opening wide and displaying a rather unsettling amount of white around her green pupils. “You got past my manticore—”

“And the Keres!” interrupted Steve. “Who nearly killed us, in case you're interested!”

Miss Parker's eyes narrowed, as if she were seeing them both for the first time.

“How did you do it?” she asked.

“Well,” said Steve, “with the manticore I just added something to the poison on his darts and it became poisonous to him.”

“From the herb garden?”

Steve nodded.

“Wolfsbane? Helibore?”

“Dunno,” said Steve. “I thought I'd killed him, but I think he's just asleep, so…”

“You don't know?” said Miss Parker in a voice that was a little too loud.

She glanced at the door, then strode over to Steve and lowered her voice.

“You defeated him with a herb? Whatever gave you that idea?”

“I … that is, we thought that adding something to the poison might change it, that's all.”

Miss Parker looked at him and sighed. “So it was luck.”

Steve nodded.

“And the Keres?”

“Their wings … they—” began Belladonna.

“I know about their wings,” snapped Miss Parker.

“I thought we were going to die, then I thought of the door. The first door, the one in the theatre. I reached for its handle and I said the Words.”

“What words?” Miss Parker's eyes bored into Belladonna.

“The … my grandmother says they're … um…”

“You said Words of Power,” said Miss Parker.

“Yes.”

Miss Parker looked at her sharply, then strode to the office door and locked it. Belladonna watched her quick movements and impatient glances and realized that they were taking a chance on Miss Parker being a force for good.

“Has anyone ever made it before?” Belladonna asked, trying not to sound nervous.

“No,” said Miss Parker in a matter-of-fact manner, “except for Old Ones, of course. But no living people.”

“But why do you … Are they your friends?” Steve was clearly still suspicious and Belladonna could see him fingering the plastic ruler, just in case.

“Who?”

“The Keres … the manticore.”

“No,” said Miss Parker. “No, they are not. And you can put that ruler away right now.”

Steve reluctantly slid it back into his pocket, but he was far from convinced, and Miss Parker seemed to realize that she was going to have to provide a bit more detail if these particular students were ever going to trust her again.

“There was a Chinese thinker,” she said. “He wrote a rather tedious and obvious treatise on war. Well, I thought it was obvious, but then I've been around since the Beginning. Anyway, he said, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.'”

“So the Keres are your enemies?”

“Their loyalty does not lie with me,” she said, as if that was sufficient explanation. “Now, what brought you here?”

“You don't know?”

“Would I have asked if I did?”

“But why not?” asked Steve. “If you're such a big deal, why don't you know what's going on?”

“Do you have any idea how big the Land of the Dead actually is?” she asked, in that way that teachers have of making you think that maybe they already told you this and now there was going to be a test. “Everything that ever lived and died? Can you even begin to comprehend?”

“Well, I…”

“And there's this school, which seemed like a good idea at the time but I have to tell you is more trouble every day, what with government requirements and inspections, parents constantly wanting meetings about their dull children, who they are inexplicably convinced are ‘gifted,' and pupils who seem utterly incapable of just sitting still and learning things.”

Her gimlet eye settled on Steve as a prime example of just that kind of recalcitrant pupil and he squirmed uneasily.

“I got taken into care,” said Belladonna.

“I know. I'm really sorry about that, Belladonna, but Mrs. Warren has always poked her nose where it really doesn't belong. She was like that as a child and hasn't changed a bit.”

“You knew her when—”

“She went to school here.”

“Well, maybe you don't know her as well as you think. I got put with these foster parents and they seemed really nice at first, but it turns out they might not be human.”

“What makes you think that?”

“They're living in a building that doesn't exist and using Belladonna to bring pieces of the Dark Spaces into this world, apparently,” said Steve.

Miss Parker looked at him for a moment, her face calm but her eyes slightly narrowed.

“Say that again.”

“I was having really strange dreams,” said Belladonna. “Only it turned out they weren't dreams; the Proctors were drugging me and then taking me out during the night to … I don't know … make the bits of Darkness come. And now they're everywhere, all over Shady Gardens, standing in sort of groups and waiting.”

“Shady Gardens?” said Miss Parker quietly. “That's where you're living?”

“Yes, but Steve has video of—”

“So they've found the Circle,” muttered Miss Parker.

“Belladonna's been getting really sick, with headaches and things and the Wild Hunt said—”

“You called the Hunt?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea how dangerous they are?”

“Well, yes, but Belladonna needed to get away from the Proctors and we thought they might know where her Aunt Deirdre had gone.”

“And did they?”

“No.” Belladonna picked up where Steve left off: “But they said that it was probably me, that I was the one making the stones come and … well, all the things in my dreams. But they're not dreams, so we thought the best thing would probably be to look for the nine thingies that the parchment talked about.”

“The parchment?”

“Edmund de Braes gave it to us. They turned out to be coins, nobles—”

“But they can only be seen by—”

“We know,” said Steve. “We took Elsie with us.”

“Elsie? But she can only haunt the school.”

“We took a bit of the school along too,” said Belladonna proudly. “It was Steve's idea. We took that little rug from the front door.”

“Anyway,” continued Steve, “we found the nobles, but there were only eight and the rhyme said that the other one was in the House of Ashes, so we went to the Land of the Dead to find it. Which is a bit annoying, really, because we could've just come upstairs instead of wandering all over creation and nearly getting killed.”

Miss Parker looked at them both for a moment, then strode over to her desk and pressed a button.

“Hold my calls, Jane,” she said. “Something's come up. I'll be out the rest of the day. See if Watson will cover sixth form Latin for me.”

“Yes, Miss Parker,” said the distant voice of Mrs. Jay's mousy assistant. “Is there anything I can—”

“No. Thank you.”

They watched as Miss Parker clicked off the button and walked back to the bookcase. She was still carrying the lacrosse stick, and nothing could have looked more unlikely. Miss Parker may once have been the sporty type, but now it was hard to imagine any situation in which she would run.
I mean,
thought Belladonna,
she keeps her glasses on a little chain around her neck!

“Stand back,” said Miss Parker.

Belladonna and Steve backed away toward one of the windows.

“Oh, and close the blinds. We don't want anyone seeing this.”

They obediently shut the window blinds. Miss Parker nodded, then held the lacrosse stick in front of her.

“Aturrha-hadar,”
she intoned.

Belladonna jumped at the guttural sound. It was like the Words she spoke, and she knew what it meant.

“Darkness,” she whispered.

“Very good,” said Miss Parker. “Your Ancient Sumerian is coming along well.”

Only she wasn't Miss Parker anymore. The lacrosse stick had collapsed in and telescoped up, until it was little more than the length of Steve's ruler, and her pointy bobbed hair seemed to shiver to its roots before running down her neck, over her shoulders, and nearly to the floor in two fat black braids, while the frumpy blue suit stretched and moved across her body like liquid until it re-formed again as dark blue robes clinging to Miss Parker's thin frame and dusting the floor. The sleeves trickled down her arms and draped themselves over her long white hands and her face assumed the pallor of death. Once the metamorphosis of her appearance was complete, the remains of the lacrosse stick retracted into her hand for a moment before emerging again and expanding into a huge silver-capped ebony staff inlaid with gleaming ivory and festooned with shreds of mourning veils.

Miss Parker stretched her arms and sighed happily.

“Oh, that feels good!” she said.

Belladonna and Steve just stared. Any relief they'd felt at Miss Parker's assurance that the Keres were her enemies vanished at the transformation—because now she looked like one of them.

“You're a Kere!” whispered Belladonna.

“What? Oh, don't be ridiculous, child. Open the door, Evans.”

Steve did as he was told and heaved the bookcase open again. Miss Parker marched through, followed by Steve, but Belladonna hung back.

“You've done well,” said Miss Parker, glancing back. “Now come with me.”

Belladonna glanced back at the office door. She didn't want to follow Miss Parker down the green corridor that led to the Keres, but she took a deep breath, turned her back on the office, and walked back into the House of Ashes, pulling the door closed behind her. It was only after it clicked shut that she realized they weren't in the green corridor at all but in a vast obsidian hall bounded on each side by a forest of pillars six or seven deep. The ceiling was so high that it was lost in shadow, although she could see something moving up there, making slow languorous circles in the night air. The hall itself appeared to be empty, though Belladonna was aware of dozens of eyes watching in awe as the Queen of the Abyss strode through.

She ran to catch up with Miss Parker, who suddenly stopped and peered into the shadowy pillars on her right. Belladonna followed her gaze but could see nothing. Miss Parker waved a hand and the shadows crept away as if they were living things, revealing a man clad all in black, sharpening a large scythe.

“Hello, Edward,” said Miss Parker.

The man in black bowed his head and continued working on his scythe.

“Busy day?”

“Not too bad.”