Free Spellbinder by Helen Stringer Page B

of the ones she knew.
    “And to get there, you just find a door with the number seventy-three on it?”
    “Well, not
any
door. I mean, there are probably lots of doors with the number seventy-three on them. This is a special door.”
    “Special?”
    “Um . . . it’s red.”
    “So any red door with the number seventy-three on it is actually a portal to the Land of the Dead?”
    She could hear the sarcasm in his voice and was just about to shoot some right back at him when she saw something in the street in front of them.
    “Stop!”
    “What?” he said, not stopping.
    “It’s the Hound!”
    Steve glanced at Belladonna, then slowed down slightly and peered down the road ahead. In the distance he saw a tabby cat creep under a parked car, but there was definitely no dog.
    “You’re losing your marbles, Johnson,” he said. “I mean, Elsie is one thing, but—”
    He never got any further; Belladonna had slid one hand back along the handlebars and grabbed his left hand. The moment she made contact, he saw it.
    A large black dog, teeth bared, stood in the road about six car-lengths in front of them. Now that she saw it again, Belladonna realized that it was the biggestdog she had ever seen. Not tall like a wolfhound or a Great Dane, but massive and powerful; its head was muscular and flat, with small ears pressed against its skull. The strangest thing of all, though, was the fur, which didn’t seem like fur at all, but like a piece of the blackest starless night. A snarling hole into a place of nightmares.
    Steve hit the brake and clamped his feet to the ground. The bike skidded to a halt, but as it did so, Belladonna lost her grip on the handlebars and shot off, hitting the ground with a thud and rolling forward along the road. For a moment, after she let go of his hand, Steve couldn’t see the dog any more, but as he watched her skidding along the tarmac, the giant animal again shimmered into view.
    Belladonna slid to a halt about a meter from the dog. Even in the dark, she could see the fog of its breath and the homicidal glint in its eye. To her horror, she discovered she couldn’t move: She just lay there in the street, watching, as it crept closer and closer.
    Just as she had decided that this really was it, something white flew past her face and landed at the dog’s feet. The animal glanced down, then eagerly gobbled up the projectile before turning its attention back to the bigger prize. As it did so, it got what Belladonna could only describe as a funny expression on its face. Then, in the deepness of its fur, a sort of wrinkle appeared. No, more like a ripple, as if a stone had been thrown into a very deep, dark well.
    And like a ripple, the waves seemed to spread outward, across and through the slavering beast, leaving . . . nothing. The dog simply vanished from the middle out. When the last vestige of beady yellow eye had disappeared, Belladonna turned and looked at Steve.
    “What did you do?”
    “Nothing,” he stammered, still in shock, “I just threw it my leftover lunch. A ham sandwich . . . with mustard.”

 
     

The Door
     
     
    T HE NEXT DAY was Saturday. On normal weekends, Belladonna would lie in bed late and look at the sky through the narrow slit where her bedroom curtains didn’t quite meet. Her mother had made the curtains and miscalculated by the merest scad, so a strip of daylight always streaked into the room at dawn.
    On this particular Saturday, as she blinked into the late autumn sunlight, for a moment Belladonna imagined everything was as it used to be. She was curled up in bed, her father had nipped out to get the paper, and her mother was pottering away in the kitchen inventing new and wonderful (and occasionally not so wonderful) things to have for breakfast.
    She lay very still, as if not moving would make it true. But no amount of wishing could conjure up the aroma of frying bacon, or the comfortable sounds of to-ing and fro-ing with doors banging, pans dropping,