The Dark House of the Sea Witch (AKA Meg and Maxie) by Joan G. Robinson

Author:Joan G. Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780698204942
Published: 1979-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

7. ‘Who’s There?’

Dazed, Meg sucked her grazed fingertips and jumped again. The need to make sure helped her to stay balanced longer this time.

Maxie was there! She had not imagined it. He hadn’t been drowned. Or had he, and was he now sitting there dead? Oh no! She rejected the thought almost before it was formed. But there was something so uncanny, so unearthly, about the way he looked. He was still sitting surrounded by candles, his profile to the window, unmoving, staring blankly into space. And he was wearing some sort of white shawl or robe draped round his shoulders.

Her hands slipped, and again she fell. Again she jumped. This time she saw Mrs Jarvis move forward out of the shadows at the back of the room, one arm held out in front of her. Meg felt, rather than saw, that she was looking at him with that same brooding, intent expression that had always frightened them, and her blood ran cold. Still Maxie did not move.

So the spell had worked! And it was true! She realized in that instant that she had never really believed in witches right up to that minute. She had played at believing in them. Yet she had been right all along… Her fingers gave way, and she dropped down into the earth in a limp, trembling heap.

So Mrs Jarvis was a witch. Not a frighten-yourself-to-death-for-fun kind of witch, but a real one. And it had been a spell to draw him into her house, just as she’d suspected. (No wonder she hadn’t opened the door!) She’d probably started working on it at Rook Hall days ago. That would be why he’d suddenly wanted to go past her lane yesterday—and then she’d said why don’t you let him choose the way when Meg had tried to make him go the other way, knowing of course that he would choose the way she wanted if left to himself. Meg felt a certain pride to think she must have sensed the spell even then.

It was cold sitting on the ground, and wet too: the dew had started to settle. Over the far end of the house the dead branch of an oak tree hung, dark against the pale sky, like a large black claw. Meg shivered.

How had the spell actually worked? Spells were something younger children believed in usually. Yet it was a useful word to use for things you couldn’t explain ordinarily. (Like ‘isolated.’ You might well need to be isolated because of an evil influence, a bad magic or something.) Huddled under the window, she tried to work out how Mrs Jarvis could actually have got hold of Maxie. By some sort of influence, she supposed, which might have worked in a quite ordinary seeming way. He would have decided not to go to Nanny T’s after all, but to go home, feeling drawn to go the way past her little lane—it was the shortest way, after all—and she would have been there waiting for him, laughing quietly, like she was yesterday.

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