The Midnight Gate by Helen Stringer

Author:Helen Stringer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

15

Crossing Over

THAT NIGHT the dreams were far worse and, for the first time, Belladonna remembered almost everything.

She remembered being woken up, but not in her bed. It was as if she had been sleeping in a large empty room. A cold room. She had never been so cold. She couldn’t see who woke her; it seemed to be a person, but she couldn’t quite make them out. And then there were stairs, flights and flights of stairs, all leading down into an impenetrable gloom. The dark figure led the way, but only the step immediately ahead was illuminated, so Belladonna had no sense of how long the stairs were, how far they had come, or how far they had to go. She stumbled occasionally but kept following. She wanted to stop, to turn around and run away, but it was as if she had no control, as if she were merely a passenger in the shell of her body.

After what felt like hours, they arrived at the foot of the stairs, and Belladonna found herself in a barren landscape of brush and bracken. The dark figure led her to another equally misty form. This one took her to a particular spot and placed something around her neck.

“Make them rise, Spellbinder,” it said. “Make them rise.”

For a moment Belladonna was confused. What was he talking about? But then she heard herself speaking.

“Sag-en-tar na szi. Sag-en-tar na szi. Sag-en-tar na szi.”

She wanted to stop, but she just kept repeating the same phrase. They were Words of Power, she knew that, just as she knew that these Words were not coming to her lips in the way the others had. They had nothing to do with what she wanted to say or do and everything to do with what the dark figures wanted. It was as if she were a radio and someone was tuning her to a channel she had never heard before.

“Sag-en-tar na szi.”

Guardians of stone, arise.

“Sag-en-tar na szi.”

As she kept repeating the Words, she became aware of a low rumbling, growing louder with each repetition. At first it felt like the rumble of traffic on a distant highway, but soon it became clear that it was the earth itself shaking and tearing and eventually spewing up … nine standing stones.

The stones were huge, similar to some of the photographs in Steve’s books, but without the erosion of age and weather. Fresh-honed by hands that understood what they were for. They formed a circle around Belladonna and the dark figures, with two stones closer together than the others, forming a sort of frame for the almost-full moon.

“Sag-en-tar na szi.”

One of the figures laid a hand on her shoulder and she stopped speaking.

“Very good,” it said. “Now call the Darkness.”

* * *

The next morning, she could barely move. Mrs. Proctor scuttled into her room and felt her brow with just the right kind of clucking concern. If Belladonna hadn’t known better, she would have thought she really cared.

“Well, you don’t have a temperature,” she said.

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