The Passage to Mythrin 2-Book Bundle (3 page)

She clicked “Send,” then started a new message.

Hi Silken! So here I am in an apartment in downtown Dunstone, Ontario. All my worst fears have come true. This place is dire. Luckily I won't
be here long, I'll be in Peru soon if I can get my parents to see reason.

The one cool thing is our apartment building. It's old and only three floors high, with stores and a bank and a newspaper office on the ground floor and apartments on the top two floors. But nobody lives on the top floor right now, because people keep leaving Dunstone instead of coming here (big surprise) so Granny uses one of the top apartments for storage.

She stopped, deleted
Granny,
and typed in
Grandmother.

So, what's cool, you ask? For one thing, my grandmother owns the building. It even has our name in a stone block over the front door. The Hammer Block, 1922. Also, it has these black iron fire escapes down the sides, just like Audrey Hepburn's building in that movie, Breakfast at Tiffany's, remember? And it has a marble lobby and this really slow, creaky brass elevator, like a cage with a criss-cross gate that you pull across.

The reason Grandmother needs all that storage is she has this store on the ground floor. It's called
Boomer Heaven. She says it's a pun on her name, Celeste. (Celestial, get it?) It has all kinds of real sixties and seventies junk. She's really retro herself, she wears these little gold-rimmed glasses like John Lennon's.

But guess what! Something weird happened right away. I was out walking with my cousin Simon, and there was this blue flash, and I

“And I what?” she said aloud. She shook her head, typed in
found
, then slipped her hand under the pillow for the ring.

What beautiful colour, now that she could see it. In this light the stone gleamed richly red. It was about half an inch across and smooth, not faceted. All the same, it looked precious. Could it be a ruby?

It was scratched, though. Too bad. She brought it close to her eyes. Wait a minute, these weren't random scratches. This was a picture. Or a logo. An oval — she closed one eye — no, an almond shape, with a line across the narrow part, like a cat's eye. At each pointed end a thin crescent, like a moon or a claw, continued the line of the eye, curving down and under on the left and up and over on the right.

Oddly enough, the setting and the band were plain and dull and looked like they'd been carved out of some
brown old bone. Or maybe ivory, although ivory was illegal, she thought. She slid the ring onto the middle finger of her right hand, where it swung loose. Made for a man, then. A man with very thick fingers.

She wondered if he was sorry to lose it. “Well, too bad,” she said crossly — crossly because she felt she was doing something wrong, somehow, and didn't like the feeling. “Finders keepers, losers weepers.”

She held the ring to her eye and looked up at the overhead light through the curve of the stone. Inside there were branching lines that turned everything strange. She turned the ring to and fro and the square light shade forked like coral in a crimson sea.

She panned it across the room. The closet door and the dresser with its mirror and the open suitcase on it, clothes spilling, turned into a fantastic mountain landscape, volcanic, lava-draped, pocked with caves and crowned with spires. All ruby-coloured, alive, changing. You could almost see people at the cave mouths. Strange, long faces looking out.

She lowered the ring. Now, that was funny. Just for a second she was back in the town hall square, looking up at the tower. That glimpse of face had been just like ...
Funny
.

Amelia put the ring to her eye again and scanned it slowly across the room. Ridges, peaks, deep ravines. Shapes raced across the mountainside, leaped into the
air as the ring moved. Vanished in explosions of ruby light, like flame.

Wow, this was so —

A face that was all jaws swooped at her out of a blaze of red fire. She dropped the ring with a gasp, then grabbed it and shoved it under her pillow. Enough of that kid stuff!

The laptop went into screensaver mode. She revived it.
Silken, did you ever think you might be going crazy? If you ever did I wish you would tell me. I don't want to be the only one.

A knock on the door. “Ammy? It's me. You want a sandwich?”

She was tempted to say no, except she was really hungry. And sooner or later she would have to speak to Simon again.
Poor Simon
, she thought.
Maybe I haven't been really ... I guess I ought to ... The adult thing would be...

To apologize. She hated apologizing.

“Just a sec!” She typed
gtg. l8r. amelia,
clicked “Send,” and shut down the laptop. When she opened the door a minute later he was still there, plate in one hand, glass of milk in the other. A wonderful smell came from the kitchen.

Simon held out the plate and glass. Amelia took them. “Thanks,” she said. As he turned away she cleared her throat. “Um, and back in the square. When I called you a geeky little boy. That was ... I mean ... I'm sorry.”

He gazed at the doorframe beside her head, then at her, as if he wasn't sure exactly what he'd heard. “Huh.” Then he smiled. “Well, that's —”

“I mean, it may be true, but that's no excuse. I shouldn't have said it.”

Simon didn't look as pleased as she thought he should have, but Amelia felt much better. She carried the glass and plate along the hallway to the kitchen. Grandmother was sitting at the table, sipping from a steaming cup. A platter of chocolate chip cookies sat in front of her.

“Oh, you baked. That's nice,” Amelia said, politely. They did smell good.

“No, Schnarr's Bakery baked. Have some.
After
your sandwich.”

Amelia set down her plate, slid into a chair across from Simon, and started eating. The moment her teeth sank into the sharp cheddar she realized she was famished. By the time the second half of the sandwich and most of the milk were gone, she was ready to look around and notice things outside herself.

The fridge bristled with sticky notes scribbled over with phone numbers and cryptic messages. “Velma S has stovepipes, gd cond.” “Heart-shape rose-col glasses, yes!!”

In among the notes were photos held on with advertising magnets. Most of them were photos of her and Simon. There was Amelia — no, it was Ammy then —
in that dorky ponytail, hands on hips, putting on attitude for the camera. An even younger Ammy showing off a gap in her front teeth. Ammy on a tricycle, zooming past the camera, out of focus. Ammys of all sizes, back to the year she was born. It was embarrassing.

Photos of Simon, too, from this Christmas back to practically the day of his birth. In most of them, no matter what age, he wore the same patient expression. As if he was waiting for life to make sense. Only the earliest ones showed him with his parents, who were killed in a car accident when he was still a baby. Simon's father looked a lot like Amelia's, which wasn't surprising, since they were brothers. She wondered if it hurt Simon to look at those pictures. Could you could miss someone you'd never known? She hoped not.

She reached for a cookie. “Grandmother, if I got a picture of me with my hair like this, would you put it on the fridge?”

“Front and centre!”

Maybe it wouldn't be so dire after all, living here.

The cookies were awfully good. The three of them finished off the platter in the living room while watching
The Wizard of Oz
on TV. Later, Amelia wasn't sure what was to blame for the dream — the movie, all those cookies, or the ruby ring.
She dreamed, and knew she was dreaming. She was soaring in an ocean of sky. Far below lay a landscape of ruby-coloured pinnacles and deep black canyons steaming under a crimson sun.

She'd dreamed of flying before, but this was better. This was freedom! Nothing could scare her now, nothing could catch her. She wheeled and circled till her head spun. She soared towards the sun till her eyes were dazzled. Then dived at the ground, faster, faster, nearer.... Banked at the last possible moment. The world turned sideways; the pinnacles tilted and sank.

And then she saw that the land was not empty. Shapes were leaping from the ruby spires and arrowing towards her. She whirled in mid-air and flew, flew for her life, but something screamed in triumph right behind her and something sharp closed on her heel.

Amelia jerked awake and for a moment thought she was still dreaming. She wasn't in her bed. She was sitting on something hard in a dusty-smelling darkness. No, not darkness — solid blackness, with no vague window shapes in it. No hint of light anywhere. Sitting on ... it felt like wood, rough and grimy. And leaning against a ... it felt like a wooden wall.

Her hands groped out and felt wood on both sides, close. Too close. Like a coffin.

I've been buried alive!

Amelia's breath came quick and shallow. Her head started to buzz.
Don't panic!
snapped a sensible voice in the back of her head. Not a coffin, that's silly. You lie down in a coffin, you don't sit up.

A cellar, then. A sealed room in a cellar. That was almost as bad.

No, not a cellar. She sniffed. The smell was wrong. This place smelled of dust and old dry wood, not stone or cement or — oh, horror — earth.

So she was shut in somewhere, but not in a cellar. Where, then?

Don't just sit there
, nagged the sensible voice.
Move! Find clues!

She caught her breath with a gulp. The voice had arrived in her head about a year ago, when life had started to get so complicated. She wasn't sure what it
meant. Crazy people heard voices. Only, the advice this voice urged on her was always sensible. Amelia had a suspicion it might even be her own voice, speaking up out of the chaos. If that was so, she was saner than she knew. Maybe there was hope after all.

Clues. Okay. Her heart quieted. But what clues? She couldn't even see!

She could feel, though. The wood against her shoulder was cold. A thin stream of freezing air needled at her hands. Close to the outdoors, then, she thought, and felt proud of the deduction. It showed she was using her head.

She moved her feet — they were bare — and traced a rounded edge with a drop below it. Felt downward: found more wood. A step. So this was a stairwell. But it wasn't the stairs she'd seen in the apartment building, because those were sheathed in marble.

How,
she wondered,
did I get here — wherever this is — in my pyjamas and dressing gown?
It seemed she'd got up out of bed and put on her dressing gown and tied the sash, all in a sound sleep, before wandering away into the night. That was more bizarre than anything.

Where now? Down the stairs or up? A little more groping around showed that there was no more up. This was the top of the stairs. And the thing she was sitting against was a door, with a round metal handle
and a metal bolt the length of her hand. A door! A way out! Yes!

She jumped up and raised her hand to the bolt. And froze there, hand hovering. The bolt creaked in its socket. She laid a hand softly on the door and it shifted under her fingers, as if the wood was breathing. Or bending, ever so slightly, inward.

Somebody was leaning on the other side of the wooden panel. Somebody large and heavy. Who was trying his best to be silent, which meant he knew she was here. Who was patiently waiting for her to slide the bolt and open the door.

Her thoughts flew to the ring she'd found, sized for a big man. Could he have traced her here? Was he here after his property? Was he furious?

Amelia eased backward down the stairs, one hand splayed on each side wall. She kept her face toward the unseen door. No way she was going to turn her back on it.

One slow downward step, then another.

And then another door crashed open below and a dazzling light blinded her.

§

“Wow!” Simon shook his head in admiration. “I don't think I ever saw anybody jump that high from a standing start before.”

Ammy didn't seem to think it was funny. “You could've called out! Or knocked.” She slumped against the wall and oozed down it until she was sitting on a step. “'Stead of just busting in like that. I could have broken my neck!”

“Well, you didn't. What are you doing here, anyway? It's two-thirty in the morning!”

She mumbled. Sounded like “... sleepwalking ...”

“You're kidding! What's it like?”

“How should I know? I was in bed and then I was here. I've never done it before in my life!” She rubbed her eyes. “Where's here?”

“The stairs to the roof, what did you think?”

“I didn't think, I was asleep — remember? How'd you know I was here?”

“I heard you go out and it seemed weird, so I went looking for you.” He jingled the keys in his dressing gown pocket. “You didn't leave the building — I could tell by the way the doors were locked — and you weren't in the basement, or in Celeste's storage room, so this was the only other place you could be.”

“And you came looking ... why?”

“Curious.” And worried too, he would have added, if she'd been a bit friendlier.

Ammy pointed a trembling finger at the door to the roof. “Somebody's behind that door.”

“Up there?” Simon shook his head. “Can't be. There's just the roof up there. This is the only way up. And” — he reached up past her and felt the bolt — “it's still locked.”

“They could've got up by the fire escape.”

“Uh-uh. The bottoms of the ladders are twelve feet off the ground.”

“Then what the heck good are they?”

Patience
, he told himself. “You get down to the lowest landing and then there's no more stairs — there's a ladder you unhook and it slides down. Pretty clever, actually. They're for escaping from fires, just like the name says. You're not supposed to use them to climb up.”