Free The Changeover by Margaret Mahy

shoes, no racing down the path, or pushing a car into life so that school and work could be reached at the appropriate time. These people had time to make pot pourri and arrange flowers. They might be better organized than Kate — Laura was fair enough to acknowledge this— but she realized, too, that this hall spoke of the advantages that money could confer, and one of these was time. It might be fair to love Sorry for his riches because one loved the chance they offered to become harmonious and beautiful.
    A figure appeared in the lighted arch — old Mrs Carlisle, quite as tall as Miryam if she were to straighten herself, but pillowy in shape, head pushed forward like an elegant tortoise. She watched Miryam and Laura in silence as they stopped outside one of the doors leading out of the hall.
    "This is Sorensen's study," Miryam explained, knocking on the door, and Laura tried to imagine having a door that people actually knocked at— a door behind which she too, could be silent and mysterious.
    "What is it?" asked a voice behind the door—Sorry Carlisle's voice, no doubt about that, not deeper, but darker than it was at school.
    "It's Laura Chant," said Miryam, opening the door for her, and Laura noted with astonishment the familiarity with which her name was used. She was known here, singled out from the rest of the population of Gardendale, though she had never visited the house before. Out of sudden and unanticipated embarrassment she looked at the room beyond Sorry who was half-rising from his desk to meet her. She saw, first of all, real bookcases filled with books, few, if any of which had been acquired out of the 'Cancelled' box at his local public library. She would have expected books, however. Sorry also had an old leather settee, battered but still good, brightened with patchwork cushions, and real pictures on the wall, the marks of the painter's brush giving its texture to the painted surface. Among the pictures was a large poster of a naked woman and beside it, standing in its own wooden frame, a complete human skeleton, yellowish white, shining and smiling. Directly above this was a painted mask, funny — and frightening because it was funny even though it was so still. Laura felt a sigh trying to force its way out of her lips at the prospect of owning such beauty and of living with it day after day. But then she saw that one complete shelf in the bookcase was filled with women's romances, such as she and Kate despised, and this made her feel strong, as if they proved Sorry to be stuck at some inadequate level of understanding which she herself had grown beyond. The cat pushed slickly past her legs and jumped up on to Sorry's knee where it disappeared, for he was wearing black and his greater blackness swallowed the cat's lesser one. Laura saw, even before she looked at him properly, that this was a different version of Sorry Carlisle from the one she had known at school. His black dressing-gown, or caftan, was part of the change; his hands, redefining the cat by stroking it, were another. For they were covered in rings, some of them old and beautiful, gifts perhaps from his grandmother who also wore many rings. However, when she looked into his face, as she was bound to do, at last, her hair stood quite simply on end, for in this room he was somehow expanded, less simple, less mild, less good— overflowing with blackness. At the same time he stared at her incredulously as if she had had a precisely similar effect on him, appearing in his doorway, a visitation hoped for and feared, a test he was forced to take before he was ready to do so. To be taken aback and frightened is one thing; to find that in some way you are frightening someone else is another. If it had not been for the picture of Jacko she carried in her mind, she would have turned and run out of the house.
    At the same time Laura saw, with relieved satisfaction, that Sorry had a few pimples at his hairline and the thought that this witch