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

furtively to find the pattern of their resistance, Laura determined that they were bolted and spoke the name of the house like a magic spell as she wrestled with the bolt.
    "Janua Caeli," she said as the bolt yielded, and pinched her hand painfully. She slipped through, bolted the gates behind her and went on up a dark, shingled drive, sucking her fingers to help them recover from their sufferings.
    The smell of untamed trees immediately surrounded her and with the smell came the conviction that wild beasts might spring out of the shadows at her... that she might have to run for her life at any moment. Still, she did not mind this feeling, for it had an edge of poetry to it that had not been part of the chilly anxiety of the street outside the gate. Better to be eaten by a tiger with golden eyes than beaten and raped by the savages of the Gardendale subdivision. Yet, after all, the world was ferocious one way or another, Laura thought, and could be just as savage behind the curtained windows of a family home.
    For a moment she lost the path and, as she stood still trying to make it out, something soft and electric with life touched her leg, making her gasp with alarm. A moment later she realized it was the tiger's little cousin, a cat so indistinguishable from the shadows it could only be a black one. She saw then that the drive had actually swung to the left and she followed the faint clues of light which became stronger as she came out of the trees and into a courtyard that appeared to be full of giant chessmen and barnyard roosters. She was accompanied now by two shadows, a faint, grey moon shadow and a much blacker one flowing away behind her, cast by a welcoming light over the door. As she approached this door the moon shadow ignored it, but the lamp shadow shifted and shrank around her like a nervous dog.
    The population of shapes in the courtyard was something Laura had read about but never seen before — a topiary company, trees, some of them in tubs, clipped into shapes they would not have chosen, left to their own devices. Laura walked between them nervously. It was easy to believe that one of the giant roosters might be real, might even now be twisting its head to look down at her passing under its beak, but she arrived at the door safely and noted with pleasure that it was made of heavy planks, very thick, old and secure, well able to keep unfriendly forces at bay. For a moment she thought that a face looked at her out of the depths of the wood, but it was only a door knocker, an iron gargoyle obligingly holding a ring in its mouth. Laura knocked boldly, for she had not pursued this
    dark, half-enchanted journey to be hesitant at the end.
    Sorry's mother, Miryam Carlisle, opened the door. She could not have been much older than Kate, but her hair was quite white. She was very tall, perhaps as much as six feet in height, and though Laura could not see her face clearly she found she could fill it in from memory — very cool and calm and always about to change to another less ordered expression, but never quite doing so.
    "Mrs Carlisle," Laura said, "I'm sorry to come so late but I wondered if I could have a word with Sorry— with Sorensen, that is."
    "Laura Chant!" exclaimed Miryam Carlisle, astonishing Laura who had certainly not expected to be recognized. "Do come in. We've been hoping you would come and see us some day."
    Laura stepped into a hallway that smelt of flowers, light falling softly through a big arch opposite the entrance and revealing wonders: a carved chest, a slender table inlaid with scrolls of ivory and pearl, a huge vase of mixed flowers, the purple and pink spires of foxgloves standing out against the white wall, and a shallow bowl on a second glass-topped table filled with pot pourri and embossed with blue and green hummingbirds. All these objects spoke of people with a different sort of time in their lives from that available to Kate and Laura. No wild searching in the morning for missing