Aunt Maria (28 page)

He opened the box wide, until it was flat across both his hands. The stuff in it rolled out over the square in a huge trembling whirl. A lot of people crouched down to get away from it. But I think it rolled through and over anyone, whatever they did. I felt it roll through me, and I saw Mum surrounded in a tight coil of it, looking very surprised. The shimmering round Chris gave him wolf's ears for a moment. Everyone round us was gasping from it—it does fizz—and I noticed the orphan who got the birdlike bit of it had another and was holding it in his open hands, laughing the way he did before.

In the midst of it, Antony Green went down the steps and quietly walked away.

We only caught up with him because Chris happened to notice him going down the road to the seafront with one of the boatmen. Mum said, “Chris, he wants to be with his friend!” but Chris took no notice and pelted after him.

Antony Green didn't seem to mind our coming out in the boat with him. It was the first time since we had been in Cranbury that we had had anything to do with the sea, really, and it was lovely. The sea was salty swellings with silver sparkles and so gentle that even Mum couldn't be seasick, though she tried. She went pale and said it was the smell of the engine chugging away in the middle of the boat.

But Antony Green did obviously want to talk to the boatman. He was called George and he was a friend from former days. The two of them did a lot of laughing and gossiping up at the steering end of the boat, while Antony Green's hair mysteriously blew out into a mane again. George sternly kept his hair under a weathered cap and rolled cigarettes for them both and steered with his elbow and grinned.

So I asked Chris about how Elaine had let him through the line of beaters when he was a wolf. I thought it was just luck, but it wasn't quite.

Chris said, “I'm not a fool, you know. You think wolf-way, but you can still think.” He had tried to go inland to get away, early that morning, but someone in a farm had shot at him and he had bolted back into the woods before he was aware. Then he was even more scared to find people assembled in the fields up at the top. “I was only in the edge of the woods,” he said. “I crawled along, keeping an eye on where you were all spreading out to. I was looking for you, actually, Mig, because I knew if I hid in your path you'd pretend I wasn't there or something. But when you formed up, there was a Mrs. Ur on one side and a gunman behind you. So I crawled on till I found Elaine and took a risk on her. I lay downhill beside a log and hoped. And she stepped over the log and said, ‘Keep there. Nat Phelps is hunting Germans again. Don't go uphill till he's gone past.' Then she patted my head and said, ‘Good luck!' and went on downhill. I waited until Mr. Phelps had gone charging past shouting, and crawled up to the meadow again and hid in a bush there.” I suppose Elaine is not so bad, really—if you are a boy.

Then Mum told us a bit about how she and Antony Green had gone round and round the woods, calling Chris. “I know every tree by now,” she said. “I think I would have run about screaming, but luckily Antony needed someone sane to talk to. So I hung on in and just got more and more tired. So Antony said I could sleep in the barn while he tried a stepped-up sending for Chris. I think that's what fetched you in the end, Chris.”

“Maybe,” said Chris.

By then we had got right far out beyond the bay. We could see Cranbury at the edge of the sea, like a white toy village, in half-circles of little houses.

“This will do, George,” Antony Green said.

George stopped the boat's engine and we drifted. Then Antony Green fetched the empty green box out of his pocket and floated it on the gentle rising, slapping waves, all opened out into two green squares with sides. He took the tiny figure of Aunt Maria in her wheelchair out of his pocket and balanced her on one half of the box. Then he gave the lot a push to send it gently floating away.

“Good riddance,” said George, starting his motor again. We curved round back to Cranbury.

“Does she know? At all?” Mum asked, looking after the small floating box.

Antony Green nodded and spread his wide mouth wryly. “She thinks she's in Cranbury, going on just as usual.”

“But surely… ,” I said. “Couldn't Cranbury start up again—sort of in her mind? So we'd all be figments of her imagination there and have to do what she wanted?”

Mum looked defeated at this. It was as bad as time travel to her. Antony Green nodded again. “I have to take that risk,” he said.

“And what
was
the stuff in the green box?” I said.

“You know,” he said. “It's not easy to describe.” But I didn't know, so he said, “Well … everyone has some, anyway. It was that which made Chris understand my sending or your mother understand I was buried alive.”

“Oh,” I said. And I broke down and howled. Everyone stared at me, except George, who turned away looking Mr. Phelpsish. “I'm not a genius!” I yowled. “I thought I was—I
know
it was the stuff of genius in the box, and I haven't got it, or I would have understood your ghost, too! It's the power of the
mind
, isn't it?”

Chris made derisive groans. It's all right for him. He's sure he
is
a genius.

Mum said, “Mig, do stop being silly!”

“She's not being silly,” Antony Green said. “
You
didn't see my projection's mouth move?” he asked me. I shook my head and snorted sobs in all directions. “And you expect to see a mouth move when someone talks,” he said. “Sometimes what is really there gets covered up by what you
expect
to see. That's all.” And he stopped my effort to cry louder than ever by saying, “So now you know, you won't very often be deceived by your expectations. People who understand instantly might be deceived a second time, but not you.”

George changed the subject then by saying, “Got much of the stuff left yourself, Tony? Always seemed to me you didn't need a green box.”

“Let's see.” Antony Green ran his hands thoughtfully along the sides of the boat. Where his hands had been, the white plastic-sort-of boat broke out in multicolored glitters. It seemed to have colored glass stuck into it. He looked at it carefully. “Diamonds, mostly,” he said. “Emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and so on.” He looked at George's face. “I kid you not. It's been building inside me for twenty years, George.”

“Take it off, darn you!” George shouted. “What do I do with a bloody tiara for a boat? Pardon my language,” he added to Mum.

Antony Green scooped his hands along the edges of the boat and rattled the glittering stones in two handfuls down into the green moldy bottom of the boat. “That better?”

George bent his hatted head and stared, grudgingly. “Think you could make it pearls, instead?” he said. “More natural and easier to sell, those are.”

So Antony Green ran the handfuls of jewels through his hands again, and they rattled down like peas, only pinkish and whitish and nacreous. (Now there's a good word! Only a genius would have used
nacreous
.) We left George sorting them out into sizes after we landed and walked back along the seafront to Aunt Maria's house. Antony Green, a bit to my surprise, came with us, and we met the Phelpses on the way. Miss Phelps was very cheery, but Mr. Phelps was long-suffering. “Pity you can't stay,” he said stiffly.

We all came up the street together. And it was lucky that Aunt Maria's house didn't have a garage at one side the way the Phelpses did across the road. Aunt Maria's house was not there anymore. There was no gap. Elaine's house was up against the house on the other side of Aunt Maria's. Mum's rattletrap little car was parked in the street between the two.

“Oh, dear!” said Mum, thinking of all our clothes that seemed to have gone for good.

“I rescued one or two important things,” said Miss Phelps.

She had, sort of. Mum's pea green knitting was on the bonnet of the car with Chris's guitar and his sacred workbooks. My precious locked book slithered off the bonnet and fell in the road as a desperate gray cat jumped off the knitting and ran toward us, mewing for help and comfort.

“Lavinia!” cried Mum. “I'd clean forgotten about her.”

Lavinia instantly lay soppily on her back on the pavement, waving paws in the air. Antony Green said, in a tired way, “I'd better see to her, too.” He squatted down and put his hand on Lavinia's squirming chest. She most ungratefully dug all her front claws into him and treadled his hand with her back ones. She squalled and tried to bite him. Antony Green's hand was in a worse state than Mr. Phelps's cheek by the time he had forced the gray cat to spread into woman shape. He had to keep forcing, too. Every time he relaxed, Lavinia shrank back into a gray fluffy cat. At last, he forced her head at least to appear as a flatfaced old woman's head with wild gray hair. “Don't you want to be turned back?” he asked the face.

“No,” said Lavinia. “Let me be a cat. Please. So much more restful.”

He looked up at us. Mum said, “I bet Auntie led her a dreadful dance.”

Chris said, “Running in the night was fun.”

“I
loved
being a cat,” I said. “Let her, if she wants.”

So Antony Green took his hand away, and Lavinia shrank gladly into a cat again.

“She had next to no brain, poor woman,” Miss Phelps said, when I kissed her good-bye for rescuing my book. Miss Phelps had saved all the right things, whatever Mum says.

Mum, naturally, took Lavinia back to London with us in the car. Now she runs adoringly after Mum whenever Mum is in. Chris and I treat Lavinia with the contempt a floppy-cushion cat deserves, but I suppose she cheers Mum up during the times Antony Green disappears.

Antony Green begged a lift with us to London. Then he went away. He said he couldn't bear to be under a roof for a while.

He has other troubles. He turns up every so often, sometimes exhausted and shabby, sometimes ordinary, and once looking very smart, saying he had just flown from New York on the Concorde. And he talks and talks to all of us. One of his troubles is that poor Zoe Green killed herself that morning they plowed up the mound. Antony is sort of resigned, because he thought he had been underground for about a hundred years and had got used to the idea of never seeing his mother again. But he keeps wondering, the way things worked in Cranbury, whether she didn't give her life instead of him.

I tell him it is just a stupid waste. If only we'd met her earlier, or later—when we were time traveling, anyway—we could have shown her he was alive. And I can't think how she missed seeing him when he was capering round the town. But I am glad Mum didn't go dotty that way when Chris and I were missing.

Antony Green has trouble adjusting to losing twenty years, too. He says things have leaped onward, and he goes to all sorts of classes and lectures to catch up. When he comes to see us, he sits leaning over our TV as if it was a teaching machine. But his worst trouble is dreaming about being buried. We all know how that feels. Mum says she doubts Antony will ever be quite normal again.

I sometimes wonder if Chris will be, either. He seems quite usual. But sometimes he gets a wistful wolf look in his eyes and talks about how marvelous it is to run in the night. “Yes, but think of when it rained,” I say. And Chris says yes, he knows, but he has decided not to be a genius at math anymore. He's going to make films of wildlife. Mum had to buy him a movie camera for his birthday and she says it nearly broke her.

P.S. That was all six months ago now. I have spent the time rewriting this biography and doing to the end. Sometimes I have added bits and sometimes I have cheated a bit so that it looks as if I wrote more than I did. Chris says if I really wrote that screed at Aunt Maria's, I wouldn't have had time to do anything else. But I want it to be good when I finish it. And I want to finish it soon because when Antony Green comes to see us, when he's in a good mood and we all go out together, things always happen. I want to put those in a book, too.

The divorce came through. Dad rang up yesterday to say he had married Zenobia Bailey. The silly fool.

Antony Green has just turned up again. Mum and he came in while I was writing my P.S. and made their Special Announcement. Chris looked up from his stack of animal photographs, and we both made faces. I said we must be the only people in the world whose mother is going to marry an ex-ghost.

Chris says that's another thing to blame Aunt Maria for. But I don't think he meant it.

D
IANA
W
YNNE
J
ONES
wrote more than forty award-winning books of fantasy for young readers. For her body of work, she was awarded the British Fantasy Society's Karl Edward Wagner Award for having made a significant impact on fantasy and the World Fantasy Society Lifetime Achievement Award.
www.dianawynnejones.com.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Diana Wynne Jones