Creatures Page 4

  “So are amphibians,” said Jake gloomily.

  “Are you worried about it?” she asked me.

  “Of course,” I said. “Mostly, I’m worried about not changing into anything at all.”

  “Then you would be a mundane like me, right?” asked Beth. “I’d like that, actually.”

  I looked up at her we smiled at each other. I thought she still looked a bit sick. She hadn’t really gotten used to all this yet, but she was making a very good attempt to be cool.

  A few minutes later Miss Urdo stalked back into the room. She didn’t shout for our attention. She didn’t have to. She just stopped in the middle of us and stood there. Soon, everyone quieted down and looked at her, knowing she would have something important to say.

  “Time to prepare, children. This time, you will dust and organize the attic.”

  Jake groaned. We’d all heard strange stories about the attic.

  “Where are all the other kids?” asked Danny.

  Urdo turned on him slowly. She didn’t really like questions. You could just tell.

  “Few others are coming,” she said. “Your class has been requested. You are the youngest generation of new changelings, and Vater wants to meet you in person.”

  There were a lot of gasps, but no more questions.

  Chapter Ten

  The Attic

  After climbing four flights of wide, creaking steps, we finally reached the attic. In most houses, the attic is no big deal. You have to make sure you don’t bump your head, but that is about it. But the mansion’s attic was different, very different. First of all, it’s huge. The roof didn’t come to a single peak over this giant house. Instead, it sort of flattened out into many small roof peaks over different sections of the building.

  The attic itself consisted of dozens of oddly shaped rooms with walls that cut at sharp angles. Sometimes you could hardly stand up straight because the ceiling slanted down on you and the whole room was only four feet high. All the rooms were dimly lit and dusty and strangely quiet. Usually the only light came from tiny dirty windows that cut slits in the ceiling or down close to the floor. The light that did get in past the cobwebs and layered dust was gray and lifeless.

  “Everything smells old,” I said, twitching my nose.

  Beth followed me closely. Sarah and Jake had gone off in another direction to explore. We entered another room, looking around. This one was storing five huge chandeliers of cut glass covered in white sheets. They hung down from chains mounted in the slanted ceiling. The chandeliers tinkled when you touched them.

  “Do they honestly expect us to clean this place up?” I asked her, holding up my broom and dustpan. “It would take an army a year to do all this.”

  Beth bent down and swept up a foot-wide hole in the dusty floor. “See? It can be done, you just have to actually do some work,” she said laughing at me.

  “Oh,” I said, “now that we are alone, I wanted to apologize for Sarah’s mean words. She isn’t normally like that. I don’t know what got into her.”

  “You don’t?” she asked. She sounded surprised.

  “No, she’s normally sweet.”

  Beth shook her head and widened her clean spot on the floor.

  “She’s just jealous, silly,” she told me.

  “What?”

  “She’s probably used to having your attentions all to herself. You know what I mean.”

  I opened my mouth to deny it, but snapped it shut again. It did make sense. Beth was new and Sarah was used to getting all my attention. But that meant…

  “You think she actually likes me?” I asked.

  Beth just laughed and rolled her eyes. I joined her in sweeping up. After a few minutes, the room looked a lot better.

  Then I heard a familiar sound. It was the sharp tread of boots on the creaking hardwood floor. Miss Urdo was coming. We were hard at work when she came in and she nodded curtly. We had even cleaned some of the junk off the tiny slit windows along the floor.

  “Very good, children,” she said. “Come with me, I’ve got something to show you two.”

  We got up, dusted off our knees and followed her. Beth gave me a questioning look and I shrugged in answer. I had no idea where she was taking us.

  We followed her graceful, sure steps quietly. Even Beth had figured out by now that Principal Urdo didn’t like questions.

  Beth skipped ahead of me, and began imitating Miss Urdo’s unique way of walking. She put her hands to her sides with fingers out and walked by swinging her hips. She walked on her toes to create the look that the Principal had because of her heeled boots. Beth really did look like Urdo, but she was overdoing it, of course, exaggerating everything for a laugh.

  Beth looked over her shoulder and gave me a huge impish grin and I almost blew it by laughing aloud. I managed to contain it and only released a single snort.

  Urdo’s head slid around and her eyes landed on us. Beth was instantly herself again. She was quick, I was impressed.

  Urdo gazed at each of us for a second. We smiled back, innocently.

  “This,” she said, reaching her hand down to a tiny door in the wall and twisting the brass doorknob. “Is a very special laboratory.”

  She opened the door, which had to be no more than three feet square. Light and cold air swept in through it.

  Urdo gestured with a slow sweeping motion of her hand.

  We crept through the door in a crouch.

  Urdo followed us and clicked the door shut behind us.

  A large part of the laboratory was taken up by an enormous, old-fashioned brass telescope that stuck up like a cannon through a domed metal ceiling. I had been on a field trip to see Haggart Observatory. There they had computers and electric motors to control the telescope. In this place, there were only huge gears and levers and cranks. Everything had to be moved by hand.

  “Wow,” said Beth, “this is great!”

  Urdo smiled at her. When she smiled, she looked pretty. Normally, I never thought of her that way. She was old compared to us kids. I figured she must be at least thirty. She usually had such a serious look, I never thought of her as pretty.

  Urdo went to a hanging chain that dangled down one wall. She grabbed the chain and hauled on it. There was a rattling, rusty sound as unoiled equipment squealed into life. Part of the dome ceiling slid aside, allowing a slit about a foot wide to open up.

  Snow and cold wind blew down upon us from the gray skies outside. Beth grabbed her own shoulders and shivered, but she looked excited.

  “Are we going to try out the telescope?” I asked.

  Urdo nodded and indicated a big brass wheel near me. It looked like the kind of wheel you saw on old movies to steer sailing ships, except it was made of metal. I grabbed it and cranked it. It barely budged. Beth came and helped me.

  Grunting and straining with effort, we got the wheel moving. It became easier once it was started.

  “Hey, the telescope is moving!” said Beth.

  I looked up and sure enough, as we cranked the wheel, the barrel of the telescope rose up and poked its tip out into the sky.

  “But wait,” I said, pausing in my efforts. “How are we going to see anything? The sky is totally overcast and there is snow everywhere.”

  Miss Urdo gave us a smile. It was a cold, thin smile.

  “This telescope is special,” she said.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Forever Room

  We watched with big eyes as Urdo moved to an old roll top desk and produced a tiny silver key from a chain around her neck. She took out the key and slid it into the lock. It clicked and the rolling cover that closed the desk rolled up and away with a rattling sound.

  There was a lot of stuff on the desk. There were bottles of fine colored liquids and shiny stones. There was a tiny green plant, no bigger than a maple leaf that sat in a pot. It looked green and fresh, but everything else was dusty.

  “How did that plant live?” I asked. I put my hand to my mouth as Urdo turned sl
owly to face me. Her eyes cut into mine.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I know you hate questions.”

  “Nonsense,” she said, turning back to the plant. “I only dislike silly questions.”

  “Um,” said Beth. “It looks like that desk hasn’t been opened in about a hundred years, so how can it be so alive and green in there?”

  Urdo froze and her eyes slid to Beth. I knew the only thing she liked less than questions were interruptions.

  “There are oddities of science in this place,” she said, as if this explained everything. “Some things are from now, some things are from before, and some things are from after.”

  “You mean the past and the future?” I asked.

  “Perhaps,” she said, nodding. “But those words are too certain, too definite. These things are from what might have happened, and from what might yet be.”

  Beth and I exchanged confused glances.

  “We call this room The Forever Room,” said Urdo. “There are things here that can see what might be the past, and what might be the future. Let me demonstrate with a little experiment.”

  Urdo opened one of the dozens of small flat drawers in the desk and produced a disk. The disk was about six inches in diameter. She held it up. It was round and made of rose-colored glass. It had a silvery metal rim.

  “A lenses for the telescope?” guessed Beth.

  Urdo nodded and proceeded to open a sliding door on the side of the telescope. She slid the lens into place. Then she worked small wheels that squeaked as the telescope shifted into place and an oval-shaped viewing cup came up to lock in place in front of us.

  She indicated the viewing cup and I stepped forward. Beth jostled into me. We looked at each other and laughed.

  “You first,” said Beth.

  “You are the guest,” I said.

  Excitedly, Beth climbed onto a stool and hunched over the viewing cup. I could see light shine up into her face. Her eyes widened and she made sounds of appreciation.

  “You see stars?” asked Urdo. She seemed surprised.

  “Oh, yes,” said Beth. “There are stars. Lots of them. Three of the brightest are in a line. Sooo bright. This thing really can look right through the clouds, Connor!”

  “My turn,” I said, feeling greedy.

  “Give her a chance, she must remember the pattern,” said Urdo. She thumbed busily through a large dusty catalogue of star pictures.

  I made a face and practically danced around her.

  When she finally sat back, she beamed a smile that lit up the room. “Okay,” she said reluctantly, “Your turn, Connor. Sorry to be piggy.”

  I climbed onto the stool and it was warm with her body heat. I put my eye down to the eyepiece.

  I did indeed see stars. But they weren’t as bright as she described. And there was no line of three bright shining stars in the pattern. Instead, they looked like a glowy mass at first. There were two reddish ones that looked like eyes, and twinkling hood of dimmer stars around it. These stars were so faint they just made the sky glow, like the Milky Way.

  “Do you see stars, Connor?” Urdo asked me quietly.

  “Yes, but they are nothing like what Beth described,” I said. “I don’t understand. Did you move the gears or something?”

  “Just tell me what you see.”

  “Two red dots, like eyes, and a hood of bluish glow around them, forming a mountain or a triangle, sort of.”

  “Ah,” she said. She pulled two sheets out of a pile of star charts. She showed one to Beth first.

  “Yes,” said Beth, “that’s the pattern. That’s what I saw.”

  “Orion,” said Urdo, “The Hunter.”

  She showed me another sheet, and it did indeed resemble the constellation I’d seen. I realized now that’s what they were, constellations.

  “Loki,” she said, “The Thief.”

  “So we saw different things?” asked Beth.

  “Of course. When using that particular lens, everyone sees the thing they will become.”

  I looked at the telescope in awe. I reached out a finger and tapped it. “This thing is magic.”

  Urdo laughed. It was a sound I’d never heard her make before. Her laughter was muted and smooth.

  “No,” she shook her head, “We don’t use magic. We only use science of a sort that other people have forgotten. Or which, perhaps, they haven’t yet dreamed.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Urdo looked at me for a moment, as if deciding if she should answer or not. I stared back, certain it had not been a silly question.

  “If you went back in time to the most brilliant inventors of centuries past, such as Ben Franklin or Leonardo Da Vinci, and you showed them a working television or a computer, what would they think of it?”

  “They’d be amazed,” I said.

  “Certainly. And what if you showed it to the common folk?”

  “They would call it witchcraft,” said Beth.

  “Exactly,” said Urdo, gracing her with a rare smile. “Any technology, sufficiently advanced, will be considered magic by someone who doesn’t understand it.”

  “But why did we see different things?” I asked, daring another question.

  “What you see shows you what you are, or what you will become.”

  “I’m going to be a thief?” I asked. “I’ve never stolen a thing.”

  She shook her head. “Perhaps you will be something quiet. Something that can move unseen.”

  I thought about it, and realized I’d always been a schemer. Thieves were tricky. I wasn’t sure I liked the whole idea. “Something like a cat? My sister is a cat. Danny and Thomas would love to chase my tail off.”

  “Does everyone see something different?” asked Beth.

  She nodded her head. “Yes, unless they are mundane.”

  “What do mundane people see?” I asked.

  Urdo lifted a graceful hand into the air and directed her finger out into the open slit that revealed the gray skies. “They see only the sky and the clouds and the falling snow.”

  I turned to Beth. “So you aren’t just a normal girl after all,” I said.

  Beth’s eyes widened. “Then what am I?”

  Chapter Twelve

  Abandoned

  Urdo lifted her head as if she heard a distant call. I thought I heard something, but couldn’t be sure. Urdo twisted her long neck around without moving the rest of her body. She looked up into the gray daylight that came in through the slit in the sky.

  I wanted to ask her if she heard something, but she so obviously did that I couldn’t bring myself to ask a silly question like that. Beth and I glanced at each other and shrugged.

  Finally, she turned her head around again to face us. “You two are of interest. I must leave you for now.”

  She walked over to the tiny square door and put the silver key in the lock. It clicked.

  “Um,” I said, “Shouldn’t we be going down to the basement? Everyone will be getting ready for the Hussades.”

  She smiled at me with half her mouth. “I doubt you will be missed.”

  It was my turn to frown. The Hussades were obstacle challenges and the competition required you to change your shape in various ways to cross the obstacles. Her remark indicated that we wouldn’t be important because we couldn’t change into anything. I crossed my arms.

  Then she did something quite unexpected. She turned into a hawk.

  First, her head narrowed. Then her face extended forward, poking out at us. The nose grew to a point, then became harder and longer and began to curve downward into a beak. The beak shifted from pink to whitish gray. Her nostrils became tiny slits on the top of the beak.

  I could hear Beth breathing next to me, quick, shallow puffs of fright. Her hand groped for mine and clasped it. I didn’t say anything, I was too stunned. I was as surprised and amazed by the process as Beth was. I knew people changed, everyone did it, but for us it was like changing your clothes. It was something you did in pr
ivate. You simply didn’t stand in front of people and openly shift your form. Doing so would allow others to see all the intermediate forms, sometimes odd, embarrassing or disgusting sights would emerge during this time.

  The black, stretchy clothes Urdo wore beneath her cloak accommodated her new shape easily. Specially designed, they fit her in either form. As a hawk, she didn’t shrink in size as Sarah did when she became a blue jay. She became a huge hawk of human weight with a wingspan of perhaps twenty feet or more. The wings grew into sight, arching up over her back. They loomed up higher than her head, and then she folded them down on her back again.

  “Connor,” whispered Beth. She squeezed my hand very hard.

  I squeezed back lightly, but didn’t say anything. I felt it was best that we simply stood there quietly.

  Feathers were sprouting everywhere now. They were reddish brown and long and thick. Since she was bigger than any natural hawk, those feathers were over a foot long and they rustled as they popped out of her skin. Her beak opened and we watched her teeth recede in her mouth.

  She shook off her boots one at a time. Yellow wrinkled skin covered her taloned feet.

  She opened her wings and snapped them once, experimentally.

  We backed away reflexively, up against the roll top desk. Beth still gripped my hand.

  “That was most unusual, Principal Urdo,” I said diplomatically.

  She looked down at me. Her eyes had the same hard glint in them they always had. In any form, she seemed to have the cold predatory eyes of a hawk.

  “Things have changed, little thief,” she told me. The words sounded deeper coming from her altered throat.

  I was immediately upset. I didn’t like to be called a thief by anyone. I’d never stolen a thing in my life. It wasn’t fair. I opened my mouth to protest, but she brushed past us. She hopped up onto the brass tube of the telescope. Her talons scrabbled a bit, but she managed to climb up the polished tube. When she reached the roof, she ducked her head down, folded her wings tightly and squeezed out into the open sky.