Free Spellbinder by Helen Stringer Page A

ridiculous—” began Aunt Deirdre, but Grandma Johnson cut her off.
    “I’m serious. We lost track of it years ago. All I know is it’s red and has the number seventy-three on it. It
is
here in town, that much I
do
know. But even if you found it, you wouldn’t be able to go through.”
    “What is it?” whispered Steve, concerned; Belladonna had just got the most peculiar look on her face.
    She shook her head to indicate she was fine and hazarded another peek into the room.
    “But it’s here?” asked Aunt Deirdre.
    “Yes,” nodded Grandma Johnson. “But—my goodness, is that window open? No wonder I’m freezing!”
    Belladonna ducked down as her grandmother leapt to her feet, shut the window, and whisked the curtains shut. The two women continued talking, but now all Belladonna and Steve could hear was the muffled murmur of their voices.
    “Well, that wasn’t very useful,” whispered Steve.
    “How can you say that?” said Belladonna in amazement as they crept back down the garden. “The door is here. We know that.”
    “Where?” said Steve, who was starting to share Deirdre’s frustration. “And what door?”
    “The door to the Other Side!” said Belladonna. “When my Dad vanished . . . right before he went, he said that the doors were all closing. The doors to the Other Side. But apparently there’s one left, and it’s here in town somewhere.”
    “Wait . . .” Steve was staring at her. “Your Dad? Your dead Dad?”
    “Yes,” Belladonna decided that trying to make it all sound as matter-of-fact as possible was probably the best thing. “He and Mum are at home. At least they were. Or they were when I was there anyway, and—”
    “So you don’t live with your grandmother?”
    Now it was Belladonna’s turn to stare at Steve. Was that all he had to say? She’d just told him that she lived with her dead parents!
    “No . . . Doesn’t it bother you that my Mum and Dad are ghosts?”
    Steve thought about this for a moment and shook his head. “Not really,” he said finally. “I mean, if you can see the attic girl—”
    “Elsie.”
    “Yes. Well, if you can see her and she’s been dead for nearly a hundred years, it makes sense that you’d be able to see other people too. I mean, your parents have only been dead for . . .” His voice trailed off and he glanced at Belladonna nervously.
    “It’s alright,” she said, managing a small smile. “I see them every day. Or I did.”
    Steve nodded and glanced at the window. “We’d better go.”
    They crept down the garden and out into the alley. Steve picked up his bike and Belladonna clambered back up on the freezing handlebars. He pushed off hard with his right foot and they rolled silently down the alley and back onto the rapidly darkening street.
    They made their way back, slowly this time, passing brightly lit shops punctuated by the gap-toothed emptiness of closed businesses. The town wasn’t as thriving as it had once been, and everywhere there were the signs of struggle and failure. Even the streetlights were intermittent, with repairs taking second place to other essential services, though looking at all the rubbish that was scattered about, it was hard to imagine which services were the essential ones. The little bike rolled on, passing speedily through well-lit sections, and slowing for the more dimly lit blocks where potholes lurked in the twilight.
    Steve had been concentrating as they passed over the worst asphalt, but as they neared familiar territory, he was full of questions again.
    “The Other Side,” he said, “you mean like . . . the Land of the Dead, the place people go when they . . . ?”
    “I suppose,” said Belladonna reluctantly.
    After their reappearance, she had somehow never thought of her parents, or any of the other ghosts for that matter, as dead. They weren’t spirits either. There was something sort of ethereal and airy about the word
spirits
, and there was nothing ethereal about most