Pale Phoenix (20 page)

Abby's sad voice stopped her. "It's just Thomas, my brother. But he can't see you. At least he can never see
me.
"

Nonetheless, Miranda cowered behind Dan as the man drew nearer. Her fear was in part the dawning realization that this was a real man—not an actor on a stage or in a film or video. This was a real person—from Abby's time.
From the past.
Miranda tried to take it all in as the man continued walking toward them along the path from the Prindle House. This was a person whose thoughts were untroubled by any single thing in the Brownes' morning newspaper. His world was such a different place from the one Miranda knew, there was almost no comparison. He knew nothing of electricity, of nuclear power, of computer technology. His consciousness was untroubled by such everyday things as trains, airplanes, or cars. Forget rockets and space stations. There wasn't even a United States of America yet. The Revolutionary War was still nearly a century in the future, and the Colony of Massachusetts belonged to England. It was an older, and in many ways, simpler time. Yet despite the man's innocence of Miranda's world, he looked troubled as he stopped at the ruin and passed a hand across his face.

"It's always like this." Abby stamped her foot and sank down to sit on a rock.

"But maybe it's different with the phoenix," said Miranda, retrieving the stone whistle from the ground and thrusting it into her hand. "Take this, and now try to talk to him. See if he can see you when you've got the phoenix."

Abby took the phoenix and stepped forward. "Thomas?" she called to the man, and Miranda caught her breath for a second as he paused. But he wasn't looking at them, merely staring into the ruins of the house. Slowly he started walking through the rubble, bending down every so often to pick up some charred remnant of his family's household.

"I'm nothing here," Abby said bitterly. Her sobs began afresh. "Oh, God, please help me. I hate living like this. I should have died in the fire, too."

"Don't say that," cried Miranda, eyes fixed on Thomas.

"It's true. At least that way I'd be with my family and William. It isn't
fair!
"

The man continued to peer into the rubble. Two other men emerged from the trees behind the Prindle House and started along the path to the ruin. They called out Abby's name.

"She must be here," Thomas called back. "But I can't see where—"

"She couldn't have just disappeared." The two men climbed over a charred beam and stood at his side. The younger one spoke firmly. "It's impossible. All the other bodies have been found and are being prepared."

The language sounded strange to Miranda's ears. It was English, yet spoken with an accent she had not heard before.

"Oh, Thomas," said the older man, who was quite stout, "we all grieve. Do not forget you are not alone in your loss. My own son, my William—" He could not go on.

"Not knowing is unbearable," muttered Thomas, kicking at some blackened stones, once part of the chimney. "Perhaps she escaped unharmed? Could that be it?"

"Oh, Thomas," said the stout man. "Possible, perhaps. But in that case, where is she? Abigail was not a girl to run away. She would have come to you."

"Aye," he muttered thickly, gazing at the ground. Then he raised his head and seemed to look right at the three time travelers. "But if her mind had been addled by the disaster? If she had been hurt and wandered away ... He wheeled around to stare at the forest behind the ruin. "She could be in there. Lost—and afraid."

"We will continue searching, Thomas. The whole village is helping. But we must accept the Lord's will."

"Aye," he grunted, turning over a blackened timber with his boot. "The Lord's will—or something else entirely." When the younger men looked at him questioningly, he turned away. "Come, let's leave this place and help the search parties. There is only sorrow here, and nothing else."

The three men turned together and moved quickly down the lane, away from Miranda, Dan, and Abby. Abby called to them, "But I'm here, Thomas! If only you would see!" She started sobbing again as they started down the rutted road, tried to run after them, but was knocked back onto the grass by a whoosh of wind. She stood up, stunned.

"Abby, are you all right?" Dan helped her stand up again. "What was it?"

"Here—you can feel it, too. It's like a wall of wind—you can't feel it until you try to leave the site of this house." Abby rubbed her eyes. "It's what traps me here."

Dan looped an arm around Abby's shoulders. "You're the Abigail they're looking for, right? It's horrible. Is this what happens every time you come back here?"

Abby sank onto the hillock and nodded. She turned her back. "All these buttons, Mandy. Undo them, please. We're ghosts here. Invisible. And it's too hot for all these layers." Under the long, dark wool dress, Abby still wore her jeans and turtleneck.

Miranda wrenched her gaze away from the small figures of the three men down the road, and unbuttoned Abby's dress. Then she slipped off her own long skirt. Dan rolled up the sleeves of his ruffled shirt and unbuttoned the collar. Miranda bundled all their extra clothes into her mother's shawl and tucked them against a rock.

"But now what?" asked Dan. "It doesn't look like the phoenix has the power to send you farther back in time to save your family. We're stuck here."

"Don't say that, Dan!" Miranda shivered despite the warmth of the summer day. "We're not stuck if Abby wishes us home again. Abby?"

Abby sat motionless, staring stonily at the retreating figures of her brother and neighbors. "I was sure you would help me, Mandy. I really thought you would."

"Come on, Abby. It isn't my fault that the phoenix's magic is hard to figure out."

"If only I could go after them. Even if I can't fix things so the fire never happened, I wish I could tell Thomas I'm safe. It isn't right that he should have to be so miserable, searching for me. Oh, if only I could get through this horrible wind! What good is the phoenix if it can't get me home again?" Impassioned, she drew back her arm and hurled the little statue straight into the barrier of wind.

"Abby!" yelled Dan, and Miranda gasped.

The phoenix passed straight through and bounced on the road. It lay in the dust. "How come it can go through the wind?" demanded Miranda.

"Because it's not a ghost, I guess." Abby folded her arms across her chest. "Lucky bird."

Tentatively, Miranda put her hand out toward the barrier of wind. Powerful currents of warm air swirled against her arm. But she pushed against them, then walked forward. She kept walking, though the wind whipped at her hair and clothes and sucked her breath right out of her lungs, until she was standing by an uncharred grove of pine trees on the far side of the dirt road.

"Mandy!" Abby cried. "How can you do that? How can you just walk through it?"

"I don't know," Miranda called back. "I guess it's because I'm not a ghost, either." She bent down and scooped up the phoenix, then looked down the road at the retreating backs of Thomas and the other men. "Hello!" she called. "Thomas? Can you hear me? Can you see me?" The men did not turn.

Dan pressed through the warm wind to join her. It tossed his hair and clothes but did not stop him. Reaching Miranda, he wrapped her tightly in his arms, and they both looked back across the road at Abby, who stood, staring at them with longing.

"Go after them," she pleaded. "Run after Thomas. If I can't go, you'll have to be my eyes and ears. Find out how his family's doing. Even if no one can see you, you can try to make them sense your presence."

Miranda turned to Dan. "Should we?"

He looked worried. "I don't know."

"The two men with Thomas are Nathaniel Prindle and Richard Mather," Abby called. "Mr. Prindle is the fat one. He's William's father. Richard was William's friend. They're both good men. Oh, it breaks my heart to be so near, to have them searching for me, and no matter how loudly I scream or yell, no matter what I do, they don't notice me."

"We want to help, but we're afraid. I wish you could come with us," Miranda called to Abby. She would feel so much safer if Abby were with them, she realized.

"You don't wish it half as much as I do."

"But where are we supposed to go?" demanded Dan.

"To Thomas's house," Abby called back. "He's married to Sarah, and they live in the center of the village. Where The Sassy Café is—in your time. He's a wheelwright, just like my father. I mean, like my father was. They have a daughter, Charity, who is three, and two sons named Nicholas and Daniel—Daniel, just like you, Dan. The boys are four and five."

Miranda wondered what a wheelwright did.

"But what can we do there?" objected Dan. "No one can see us, so what's the point? I think we ought to go home." He scowled.

"I'm afraid, too," whispered Miranda. She stowed the phoenix in heir jeans pocket and took Dan's arm. "But we came to try to help Abby, so I think we should go. She hasn't seen her brother's family for years."

"Then let's hurry. I don't like this."

Abby stood, a forlorn figure, watching them from the charred ruin of her house.

Miranda had to force down the panic that throbbed in her stomach as she and Dan tried to walk along the road. Instead of moving normally, their feet seemed to be treading air, as if they were in water. Miranda couldn't quite get a purchase on the ground but drifted just above it. At the ruin she had walked on firm ground, but here, beyond the strange wall of wind, the law of gravity did not seem to apply.

"We're like—like ghosts!" cried Dan, trying to stand firmly on the road and failing. He, too, hovered an inch or so above the earth.

"How can we be ghosts if we haven't died? We haven't even been born yet," Miranda said. "But we're luckier than Abby—at least we're not trapped at the ruin."

"I hope to heaven we're not trapped here," he said, and Miranda felt the panic rise in her again.

Okay, just accept it for now,
Miranda told herself sternly as they floated along.
We have to worry about helping Abby—that's why we're here.
Miranda steeled herself for the task before her.

They drifted along, trying to catch up with the men. As they were approaching a small cluster of wooden buildings, the three men disappeared inside the main house. Miranda hovered and watched a girl carrying a basket of vegetables come out of the house and stand by the gate. She wore a soft gray dress that brushed her ankles. The collar on the dress was stiff and white, and lay in two points across her breast. On her head was a simple white bonnet, reminding Miranda of the ones she had seen Amish women wearing in Pennsylvania when she visited relatives there one summer. She wondered if this girl might have been one of Abby's friends.

The girl walked slowly, trailing her hand along the low fence that bordered the chicken yard by the house. Just as she passed by them, Dan waved and called out, "Hello!" But the girl did not turn. He wiped his hand across his face.

Miranda and Dan waited by the fence until Thomas emerged from the house. They drifted behind him again as he set off down the road.

Twentieth-century Garnet was a busy town, a historic landmark on the map of New England. In the summertime artists came to town and set up their easels on the common to paint the quaint old buildings along Main Street. Children bought ice cream cones from vendors on the street corners. Local restaurants offered "traditional" New England fare of meat pies, seafood, and chowder. Garnet in the summer pulsed with tourists, teenagers on bicycles, and the sounds of lawn mowers down the side streets and music from the street musicians on the common.

But Garnet of the seventeenth century was a very different place. Here, there were no busy streets, no motorcycles or cars. There was no music blaring from radios carried by kids on the sidewalks, no calls of street vendors peddling popcorn or hotdogs. The silence was what struck Miranda the most. She could hear birds as she walked, and animals scurrying in the bushes. She saw some deer watching from the side of the path. And there were no stores, as Abby had said, and no schools, no town hall, or hospital. The people she saw were all busy working, many of them doing unfamiliar tasks with tools she did not recognize. These people had a hard life to forge for themselves out of this new land. The artists, the ice cream stands, the restaurants would all be a long time coming;

The reality of having traveled through time in mere seconds threatened to overwhelm Miranda as she stared at the animals grazing on the village green. She breathed deeply as she drifted along, holding tightly to Dan's hand, soaking up impressions, and trying not to think.

All the houses they passed were unpainted, but some were quite large; whenever she had pictured Puritan New England—during a history lesson at school, for instance—Miranda had imagined the houses to have been very tiny log cabins. These were wooden houses, true, but of smooth planks rather than rough, round logs like the Lincoln Logs she had built playhouses with as a child. Every house along the green had a garden plot at the side and usually a chicken yard as well. The beans and corn grew tall in the sun, and the path that she and Dan skimmed along was dusty. Unfamiliar smells assaulted her nose: pungent wood smoke curling from every house, animals in the fields. The air, heavy and hot, smelled of pine.

Miranda shivered in the hot sun. Where were the snowdrifts of the Garnet winter she had left behind? She looked down and saw that although she and Dan had settled onto the path, they left no footprints in the dirt. Who was real and who was not in this strange, different Garnet?

The people they passed looked real. The villagers could not see Miranda or Dan, but they seemed to be real flesh and blood people who had their own lives and concerns—and never once thought of themselves as pages out of a history textbook or as exhibits in a museum. There was a tension about the villagers. A watchful wariness.
What are they afraid of?
wondered Miranda as she flew past.
Witches?
Some people talked in small groups—perhaps about the terrible fire that had claimed the lives of their neighbors. Others walked alone, on errands Miranda could not begin to imagine. There was no bank to go to. No dry cleaner or video store. No corner grocery. She tried to orient herself by imagining the Garnet she knew—they were moving along the edge of the common where Main Street was in the present. A few blocks over would be the high school. Susannah's house would be back where it looked like there were fields. Mrs. Wainwright's house on Elm Street would be built a few blocks to the north, where now there were only thick stands of trees'. Miranda looked toward the hill, where her own house would be built in another hundred years. Dan's would be built even sooner—perhaps in another fifty years. So far the only thing Miranda had recognized was the Prindle House, and yet even that was missing its porch and the newer wing.