Free Double Spell by Janet Lunn

let’s play tag. Come on Joe, let’s play tag with the girls. You’re it,” he punched Jane on the arm.
    “I am not,” she said haughtily, “going to play games with little children. Go ask William to play,” whereupon Willy began to snap his towel at her so that it would really hurt, and she ran into the house shouting all the way, “Stop it you miserable little boy.”
    Up the stairs she ran and Willy chased her. Fleeing the snapping towel, she ran toward the upstairs front porch. Willy headed her off. Turning along the hall, she ran down the steps to the unused room that was once the attic, raced inside, and slammed the door shut after her. Close behind, Willy turned the old key in the lock. Jane heard it clatter to the floor as he marched away, saying as he went, “Now spend the afternoon in the hot box and say all the things you like spitey-tongue, ha, ha!” She was well and truly locked in the old attic.
    Out of breath and confused, she thought she was somewhere else, in a room with flower-striped wallpaper and loosely woven white curtains at the window. When her breath returned, she could see it was really the attic, dusty, dingy, gray, with a fat beam going up the center of it and one shutter hanging loose from the curtainless window.
Wishful thinking, I guess,
she decided.
    At first she waited, listening to the sounds of Willy and Joe chasing Elizabeth toward the water, trying to throw her in. After a few moments there was a scream, a splash that told her they had been successful, a great horselaugh, and then silence. Jane knew she was abandoned.
    She looked about her curiously, wondering what about the room had given her the impression it had flowers on its wall. “It’s black and almost burned-looking,” she said to herself. And it did look as though there might once have been a fire. The beams near the window looked quite charred, although they were so black with age no one could really tell. The whole attic was black and bleak. It was the most depressing place Jane had ever been in. She began to feel as though there were eyes watching her –
like the night we found Porridge,
she thought and smiled. But the smile soon faded and the eyes were still there. There was something in the attic, something in the dark attic that didn’t like her. She was sure of it. She had to get away. She ran to the window – the one glow of light.
    “It can’t have been opened in years and years,” she gasped, shoving against it with all her weight. Fear made her strong, and with one creak the window flew up. Jane,flung forward by her own strength, just missed falling out. She clutched the window to save herself and breathed the freshness of the outside air.
    Down below William was trying to ride a very reluctant Horse.
    “William,” called Jane weakly.
    He looked up.
    “Please,” she whispered, “come open the attic door. Willy Wallet’s locked me in.”
    “All right.” William disappeared and in a minute or two was outside the attic fiddling with the key.
    Gratefully Jane slumped through the door and down the stairs. William stood looking curiously inside for a couple of minutes and then he too came away.
    She found Elizabeth in the tower room – thinking. When Jane hadn’t reappeared from Willy’s chase, Elizabeth assumed she had gone swimming. With the idea still firmly fixed in her mind that she needed a think to solve their problem, she had taken the doll and gone upstairs. But it hadn’t worked. She had tried standing on her head, sitting with her hands touching the doll lightly as though it were a ouija board, concentrating with all her might on the little red house, and finally, lying on her bed with her head hung backward over the edge. It had all been no use.
    “The only odd thing that happened,” she told Jane, “was that I thought for a moment that I saw you in an old-fashioned bedroom with roses on the wallpaper, but it went away so soon I’m not sure about it now.”
    It was almost too