Read Online The Changeover by Margaret Mahy - Free Book Online Page A

value of the land changed, it was re-zoned and, when the old farmer died, his brothers, city men themselves, subdivided and sold the fields where horses and sheep had grazed, turned away the cows and the bull, and sent in the bulldozer. For a little while the terrain became spectral as roads and street lighting went in ahead of any houses.
    It shone at night, threaded with streets where nobody lived and pavements where nobody walked. However, in due course the sections were sold and the hectic homes of the Gardendale subdivision spread everywhere, each on its own little patch, a bright rash over the subdued land. A trim desolation had succeeded the farm. Now an instant coziness succeeded the desolation.
    However, at the heart of the subdivision, set among the new houses with their small gardens, their bareness, and the constant autumnal fluttering of red nursery labels on young trees, there stood a wood of silver birches and poplars showing above a tall hedge that had marked, in previous days, the division between the Carlisle farmhouse lawn and the orchard and vegetable garden. Behind this hedge, among these trees, lived Sorensen Carlisle, the latter-day, stammering son of the old family, with his mother and grandmother. Every day, in order to go to school, he emerged from behind this woody hedge, flowering with a fairytale tapestry of Tom Thumb roses in the early summer, and travelled the two miles to school on a small motorbike.
    The house had a name and a gate, both of which belonged to the vanished farm. It was called Janua Caeli and the letters were cut deep into the stones of one of the big gateposts. Locally, however, it was mostly known as 'the old Carlisle house'.
    A scudding nor'wester beat clouds over the face of the moon, not yet full, but when it could it shone on the new gardens with an intermittent and threatening light, making them look stunted and strange by night, while, around the edges of curtains and blinds, light trembled with the constant pulse of television sets. Sometimes the curtains were still apart, and Laura could look into people's lives, see their lips move without words, watch them laugh at jokes she could not hear. It was like looking into a series of family peep shows, but Laura knew she was a stranger in the dark, spying on private moments, and hurried on.
    Someone came walking down the street towards her, and Laura, hearing the ring of steps, turned in at a gateway and hid behind a family car until the shadowy man had gone by. The subdivision was filled with young families, but for all that it was dangerous at night. Two months previously an elderly woman had been robbed and murdered, tied up with wire in front of her own television set, and only ten days later a plain, lumpy girl from the seventh form, Jacynth Close, had been beaten and raped in the trees that bordered the Gardendale Reserve. People at school made uneasy jokes about how desperate the rapist must have been, but Laura was horrified at the injustice of the world, for it seemed as if the one advantage of Jacynth's plainess should have been to save her from this brutality. It made Laura realize that she herself could be chosen. All that was necessary was that her path should intersect with that of an appropriate savage at an appropriate time, and darkness was the most appropriate time of all. She was not altogether easy with the new, and in some ways blatantly female, body that had recently opened out of her earlier childish one, but was obliged to accept its advantages and drawbacks, as well as all the obligations of caution that came with it. So she went very carefully, skirting the overlapping circles of light, not sure whether to let herself be clearly seen and to see others or to stick to the shadows and run the risk that the savage might be lying concealed there, waiting for her.
    Janua Caeli said the gates of the old Carlisle home in a single iron voice. They were locked, but not with a padlock and chain. Shaking them