The next morning the rain came down like a waterfall. Mr. Greenly came to the stable, water dripping from the brim of his hat.
“I’m not taking a buggy to London today, boys. We have rivers where the roads should be.”
“Tomorrow maybe?” Snipe asked.
“Maybe,” Mr. Greenly said, and he hurried back to the house. His boots sloshed water off to the side with each step he took.
Pete tried to send a message to Fanon to tell him he couldn’t come for him yet, but Fanon didn’t answer. What if those men with clubs had come back? What if they’d found him? And why did he only keep coming up with questions? Where were some answers for a change? “Arrg.” Another question. Pete huddled in his blanket, with a dark storm cloud of a face.
He liked it when Bailey came from the back and grumped and bossed them around to do the chores. It kept Pete from thinking about all the problems he had.
If Bailey said it once an hour, he said it a hundred times. If they were sleeping and eating at the Kingsleys’, they were working at the Kingsleys’. All except Weasel. Bailey didn’t bother him, so he slept until nightfall.
It was only when Mrs. Greenly came with hot soup that Weasel sniffed the air. Slowly and as if all his muscles were kinked, he eased himself off his back. He blinked, his face looking kind of naked. He patted his eyes and felt behind his ears. “Oh no.” He got onto his hands and knees and ripped up the straw. “I can’t see. Where are they?”
Pete pulled Weasel’s glasses out of his pocket and handed them to him. “Settle down. I took care of them when you almost lost them at the lake.”
Weasel slid his glasses into place. Now, except for the small bump on his forehead, he looked like the old Weasel. Big brown owlish eyes, cowlick sticking straight up at the back of his head, skinny arms poking out of the blanket.
He looked up at Pete. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Pete liked the way he felt when Weasel thanked him. He’d done something right for a change. Maybe his ordinary kid self wasn’t all rotten.
By sunset, the rain turned to drizzle and the clouds slipped away enough for the moon to poke through. An almost full moon.
They fed the horses, cleaned the stalls and watched Bailey grump his way to his back room.
The night turned cold, so they wrapped their blankets around themselves while they ate.
“How’s the head?” Snipe asked.
Weasel fingered the small dark spot on his forehead. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”
“That’s because of Snipe,” Pete said. “He fixed you up.”
“So, how’d you do that?” Weasel asked.
“Like I told Pete, I’m kind of trained, you know, in medicine.” He smiled at Pete. “It’s nothing. Everybody where I come from knows healing. The truth is we’re born that way. Where you come from, I guess you’d call it a gift.”
“Snipe’s from 3010,” Pete said.
Weasel froze, his mouth full of soup.
“I’m a Time Traveler,” Snipe said. “Same as you. Rush here is my Guide.”
Weasel swallowed and pushed his glasses higher onto his nose. “Are you stuck here if Pete doesn’t figure out what the spell is to close the Timelock?”
“I don’t know. Rush? Any idea about that?”
“Straight answer? Yes.”
“I guess you’d better fill me in, then. I don’t want to be in 1837 forever. I just came to take a look around. Now I need to find a Time Portal that’s working, so I can get home. So far, Rush can’t find one.”
Pete told them about Wraith, the deadline, even Fanon and the brain-to-brain communication he had with him and Harriet Hadley.
“That’s a surprise,” Snipe said. “Not the telepathy. That’s kind of how we talk where I come from. It’s Fanon that’s got my attention. So he’s the ‘pet’ that needs rescuing? Amazing.”
“But true.” They whirled around to find Margaret wrapped in a heavy cloak and standing at the door. “He’s quite different from any creature I’ve ever heard of.” She came into the lantern light. “I’m not keen on being close to him, but he’s well-spoken and, I think, shy.”
“I’m not leaving him behind,” Pete said. “I’ve got to get to that lake and pick him up.”
Margaret said, “Of course. But to do that you must leave before sunrise. Mr. Greenly will never understand Fanon, so he can’t drive you. And you will need the carriage since there are so many of you now. The buggy is far too small. That will mean two horses.” She looked at Pete. “Can you manage two horses and a carriage?”
“You’re not coming?” Pete asked, going to her.
Margaret looked away. “I’m sorry. I can’t.” She glanced at Snipe, and then quickly away again.
Pete scratched his head, thinking that might help him think more clearly. He’d driven a truck with a stick shift when he’d rescued Fanon from those hunters. But he’d never driven anything that had horses pulling it.
“He can handle the horses.” Weasel had stayed on his straw mat, listening.
Pete shot Weasel a quick look. He wondered if that hit on his head had done some damage after all. Then he thought of Fanon being stuck at the lake. He didn’t have a choice. “Uh, yeah. I can do it. Sure.”
“Splendid,” Margaret said. She seemed to want to say more, and she didn’t hurry to leave. “I’d go with you, but may I tell you something? It’s about what I saw last night.”
The way she said saw, Pete understood she meant she’d had a vision. “Uh, okay.”
She looked at Snipe and Rush and hesitated.
“You can talk in front of them. They’ll understand,” Pete said.
“It was in a rather eerie wood. The trees were bare with snarled roots that reached out into dark pools of still water.” Margaret pulled her cloak tighter around her. “Paths wound through the pools and”—her eyes opened wide—“there were people. Some very oddly dressed, others not so much, kept appearing, then disappearing.” She turned her gaze on Pete and Weasel.
“Whew!” Weasel’s glasses had slipped down his nose, and he didn’t bother to push them back where they belonged.
“I know where that is,” Pete said.
Under his breath, Weasel said, “Stranglewood Wildes.”
Margaret held her hands to her cheeks. “What? I’ve never seen into that dark place before, even when I tried.”
“So why are you seeing this place now?” Weasel asked, but he wasn’t asking them. He was asking himself. He closed his eyes in that way he had of shutting out everything while he sorted through his brain.
“Is he not well?” Margaret asked Pete softly.
“He’s just thinking.”
They waited until Weasel opened his eyes and stood up. As he walked back and forth, he mumbled, “When we were there, they were counting villagers. Mattie asked if any strangers had shown up who weren’t—she used the word scheduled—to show up. She wanted to know if anyone was missing, too. Your cousin Eugenia said, ‘Not since this morning’.”
“So there had been strangers popping up and people who should have been there weren’t anymore,” Pete said.
“Exactly.” Weasel stopped pacing. “‘Very irregular’ is how Mattie explained it. Meaning that people used to come and go in Stranglewood Wildes, but on a schedule. Now it’s a free-for-all.”
“That’s when we understood why everyone in those shops was holed up. They were scared,” Pete said.
“Yes,” Pacing again, Weasel passed back and forth in front of Margaret, Pete, Snipe and Rush. They waited, following him with their eyes until he stopped and faced them. “What if there’s a Time Portal there? And if it’s broken, then there’s a big problem for the witches in charge. And that’s why Margaret’s seeing it—”
“Because they need us to go back there, but”—Pete shook his head—“why get rid of us in the first place? Why not keep us there and get Dr. Wraith to meet us where there’s a portal if I’m the one who’s supposed to have the other half of the spell to fix things?”
Weasel shrugged. “My guess? They wanted you out of there. They wanted you to find Wraith and give him the rest of the spell, so he could fix the problem from London without calling more attention to Stranglewood Wildes. Then they wanted you and me to go home. Stranglewood’s already got PR problems, right? They didn’t want you mucking up their reputation more.”
“Great. I’m the wizard nobody wants around.”
“I’ve heard so many unsettling things about that place,” Margaret said.
“We heard a rumor about Stranglewood Wildes, too,” Snipe said. “One of Rush’s Guide friends said it was the only place we might be able to enter a portal. He’d heard some witches there were trying to take care of getting people back where they belong.”
“My cousins,” Pete said.
Snipe smiled. “So you’re a witch?”
“Wizard.” Pete dug his toe into the ground. “Learning.”
“That explains the red eye trick you pulled on that guy Bates and his friends,” Snipe said.
“Not really. I don’t know how that happened. I’m not supposed to work any magic while I’m here. That’s what Wraith and my cousin Mattie said.”
“I will see that Bailey helps you with the carriage and the horses. Then it will be up to you, Pete.” Margaret turned to leave. “I may not see you again, any of you.”
“Come with us. It’ll be okay,” Pete said. He didn’t like thinking about not seeing Margaret ever again.
“I belong here and you belong somewhere in the future. All of you.”
“Not me,” Rush said. “I’m a Guide, and this is my time. If Pete fixes the Timelock, come and see me. I have some friends who will take you where these guys are from. You can visit.”
“Perhaps,” she said before disappearing into the drizzly night.