An Unlikely Quartet
Celia’s foot slipped from beneath her, and for a few long seconds she hung from the cliff by the fingers of one hand as angry waves crashed into giant rocks fifty feet below. Her short-cropped red hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat as her sinewy body dangled in thin air. Take that, Otto Bodkin, she thought, as she swung her body back toward the cliff and clung to a crevice with her toes. The mayor of Hedley Helm had passed a law, a stupid law, against cliff climbing, and now Celia McNeil was about to make it to the top. She looked at the overhang of jagged rock above her and considered her position. She had two options: climb back down the way she had come, or risk falling to her death by pushing off with her legs, jumping two feet up and out, and grabbing hold of the outer rim of the ledge above her. The choice seemed obvious. Celia tensed her muscles, crouched, and leapt.
† † †
Sebastian had been on his way to the Hedley Helm Arts Cinema to catch an afternoon showing of Casablanca when he heard shouts behind him. Other kids in Hedley Helm liked movies, but Sebastian Garcia loved movies. He knew everything there was to know about movies and he also knew, judging by the voices from across the courtyard, that he wouldn’t be making it to Casablanca this afternoon.
For the past two days, Boris Bodkin and his gang of goons had pitched Sebastian into the fountain after school, and anything Boris did for three days in a row became habit. Sebastian didn’t want ending up in the fountain to become a daily occurrence, particularly since Boris and his companions, as they tossed him into the drink, liked to shout hateful things like, “Why don’t you go back to where you came from,” or “Speak English!”
This was especially rich considering that, though his family came from Peru (and not Mexico or Spain which were Boris’s most frequent guesses), Sebastian had been born in Hedley Helm. Two of Boris’s three primary minions had arrived in town just last year. Though Sebastian could speak Spanish, he never did so at school. As a matter of fact, his grades on grammar quizzes in their shared English Language Arts class were a heck of a lot better than Boris “the beast” Bodkin’s.
So, when he saw Boris and company headed for him across the courtyard once school let out, Sebastian decided today would be different. He ducked into the archway that led into the street, quickly pulled off his red hoodie, and turned it inside out so only the blue lining showed. He put it back on, yanking the hood as far forward on his head as he could. Sebastian stood on the tips of his toes, adding several inches to his height, then stumbled back into the courtyard, looking behind him and yelling in a gravelly voice, “Hey, go back to where you came from, Señor loser.” It was a trick he had seen in a Tom Cruise movie, and it had worked perfectly.
Boris didn’t even glance at the tall hooded figure. He and his gang ran through the arch and into the street. Nice to have such dimwitted persecutors, thought Sebastian, as he strolled across the courtyard. He had nearly reached the gate leading from the school into Ocean Park when he heard shouting behind him. Boris and his henchmen had discovered the deception. But now, Sebastian had a big head start, and all he had to do was run.
He dashed across the park and into the forest on the other side. He crashed through the spring undergrowth for several minutes and emerged on a meticulously kept path he had never seen before. He stopped and listened, his breathing gradually slowing to normal. There was not a sound—not even wind in the trees or the singing of a bird.
It seemed unwise to return to the open space of the park right away. If he waited, Boris would give up the search and would find someone else to torment. So, rather than turn to his left and take the path downhill back toward the park, he turned uphill and ambled through the forest.
Sebastian was just imagining what fun it would be to hurl Boris into Shrek’s swamp, when he turned a corner and came to a long stone staircase winding upward. Next to it was a crudely painted sign reading “No Trespassing—by Order of the Mayor.” Sebastian had explored Ocean Park and its forest all his life. He had never seen a stone staircase. He had never even heard of a stone staircase. And he certainly didn’t care anything about the mayor’s “No Trespassing” sign. What the heck, he thought. And he began to climb.
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Juliet’s eyes stung as she staggered through the forest, desperate to find someplace she could be alone, where she could hide from everyone and finally let loose the tears she had been holding in since morning. Why should Juliet Okafor, the most popular girl in school, want to escape from the very people who worshiped her? Well, she couldn’t let them see her cry, could she? Crying was … it was for babies and losers. The moment Juliet showed the tiniest weakness, Melanie Davies would swoop in and take her place as queen of Hedley Helm Day School, and the rest of Juliet’s life would be mired in the misery of second place.
Juliet hadn’t always been queen bee. She had worked for years to reach the top of her school’s social ladder. She had mastered the art of falsely flattering those who could aid in her rise and cruelly scorning those who could not. Juliet had mastered the art of being a mean girl. And when that didn’t work, she used her parents’ money to buy loyalty with gifts, parties, and vacations. She wasn’t about to let a public sob-fest ruin years of effort. But sometimes, when she was this angry, a good cry was the only thing that helped.
It was bad enough that her parents hadn’t even been home most of the week. OK, there were advantages to being left alone with a babysitter who spent all her time watching reality TV, but your parents were at least supposed to be around some of the time.
In addition to the sprawling house at one end of Ocean Street in Hedley Helm, Juliet’s parents kept an apartment in the city, where they both worked for a bank owned by Otto Bodkin. For the past few months, one of them had been spending the night there. Melanie Davies’s parents had gotten divorced last year, and Juliet feared the same thing might happen to hers.
With the pressure of school and with her parents away so much, Juliet took solace in the baby grand piano in the living room. She was a good musician and had been working on an especially difficult piece this past week. She had wanted to play it for her mother, but when Mrs. Okafor finally got home last night, she went straight to bed after giving Juliet a perfunctory greeting.
Then, this morning, Juliet discovered her mother in the living room with a woman wearing a horrid white and gold dress. Her name was Henrietta Bodkin and she was the mayor’s wife and the Okafor’s interior decorator. Apparently, the day was beginning with a plan to redecorate the living room.
“Now the first thing I would do is get rid of the piano,” said Mrs. Bodkin.
“But, Juliet …” said Mrs. Okafor, however Mrs. Bodkin paid her no attention.
“I think we could put a piece of modern sculpture here—much more up-to-date than an old piano.”
“But, Mom,” Juliet protested.
Mrs. Okafor turned to her daughter and smiled weakly, as if to say, there’s nothing I can do. To Juliet, her mother was the most intelligent, most beautiful woman in the world, though she preferred it when her mom wore her colorful silk sari. This morning, Mrs. Okafor wore her usual drab grey business suit and a vacant, exhausted expression. Juliet gave her a look she knew her mother would understand, a look that said, I need that piano.
“We do sometimes use the piano,” said Juliet’s mother, a hint of her Indian accent coming through.
“Why even hire me?” said Mrs. Bodkin angrily, casting a disdaining eye around the room. “If you won’t listen to me, then why am I even here?”
“I’m sorry, Henrietta. I’m so sorry,” said Juliet’s mother. “You’re right. We’ll get rid of the piano.”
Juliet had rushed out of the room, grabbed her backpack, and slammed the door behind her as she left the house. She seethed with anger. She had wanted to cry all day, but she had hidden her anger and held in her tears until after school when she was alone in the woods. As the tears finally came and the sobs choked her, Juliet paid no attention to where she was walking. She stumbled on until suddenly she emerged into a glare of sunlight.
† † †
Angus peered through his curtain of long red hair at the book he was reading as he wandered aimlessly through the woods. If you stopped him and asked, he might have admitted to being slightly winded and may have inferred that he had been going uphill, but he was more likely to ask you if you had ever read Socrates or Plato or some such gibberish.
Angus McNeil loved books—the older the better. The one he read today was particularly old. He had found it in the basement of the Hedley Helm Public Library, in a room marked “No Admittance—By Order of the Mayor.” Ignoring the mayor’s rules was about the only thing Angus had in common with his twin sister, Celia. That and a plethora of freckles, as the mayor’s son Boris never let Angus forget.
But if the mayor really didn’t want you poking around in that room, why leave the door unlocked? Angus had discovered that the “No Admittance” room housed all the oldest (and therefore, best) books—books about ancient legends and mysteries, books about great battles and struggles between good and evil, and best of all, lots of books about magic and magicians.
Angus had become something of an expert on the history of magic by reading volume after volume from the “No Admittance” room. He wasn’t about to march up to the front desk and ask to check out one of these books; he just quietly snuck them out of the library one at a time, read them, and returned them. That’s what you were supposed to do with library books, right?
The book that so absorbed him as he wandered today was a plain volume with no date on the title page called The Persecution of Sorcerers from Earliest History to the Present Day. Angus guessed the “present day” had been at least a hundred years ago, judging from the old-fashioned leather binding. He was so absorbed in reading the account of how one magician had been chased from a village by farmers who thought he was enchanting their livestock that he did not notice the hill leveling off or the brightening of the light on the page as he stepped into the sunshine. Only the sound of a boy’s voice shouting, “Hey,” caused him to look up and to realize that he now stood on a neatly trimmed lawn hemmed in by what looked like an impenetrable tangle of brush and brambles.
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And there, on a lawn none of them had ever seen before, stood the most unlikely quartet in the history of Hedley Helm—Celia McNeil, Sebastian Garcia, Juliet Okafor, and Celia’s twin brother Angus. Celia dripped with sweat from her climb, Sebastian pulled off his hood and blinked in the sunlight, Juliet wiped tears from her eyes, and Angus closed his book. They didn’t know that the fate of Hedley Helm, and of all that lay beyond, was now in their hands.