2

It is like no place Meg has been in before. The entrance is narrow but widens quickly. Along the sides are gleaming white stakes, their sharpened points reaching toward her. She is filled with horror as she realizes the stakes are giant teeth. When she looks upward, she discovers more teeth threatening her from overhead. She is walking into a huge mouth!

Ahead, light slants through long slits in the walls. Gills, she thinks. I’m inside a fish, like Jonah in the Bible.

The thought of the old Bible story calms her for a moment. Jonah didn’t die in the whale. But as she moves into the dim cavern of the fish’s mouth, she becomes increasingly fearful. She won’t die in the fish, but something bad will happen there. Something bad …

“Meg, wake up. Rhoda’s on the phone.” Mrs. Korshak’s voice cut through the dream and brought Meg upright in bed. She was in her own room, with sun pouring through the window. A garbage truck clanked and grumbled in the street below. The giant fish was gone. But it was one of the real dreams, Meg thought, and she shivered in spite of the mid-June sun. Grandma Korshak called the real dreams a secret window into the future. Grandma had them, too, and she considered the window a special gift. But she didn’t dream about a monstrous fish with a gaping, hungry mouth.…

Meg jumped out of bed, eager to put time and space between herself and the dream. She would tell Rhoda about it, she decided. Maybe Rhoda could think of an explanation for a fish big enough to swallow a person.

Her hand was on the hall telephone before she remembered she had much more than the dream to tell Rhoda about. Memories of the furious scene in her mother’s bedroom the day before came flooding back. It had ended with Meg rushing into her own room and slamming the door behind her. She’d stayed there all evening, had even refused the Korshak King Kong Klub sandwich (bologna, Cheddar cheese, tomato, pickles, and mustard on rye bread) that Bill brought to her door at about nine. The summer was ruined, absolutely destroyed by some dumb old uncle whom nobody had seen or heard from for years. And by Meg’s mother, of course.

“Hi, Rho.” Outrage made her voice tremble, and Rhoda noticed at once.

“What’s the matter with you? I thought you’d be up at dawn doing Indian love calls out your bedroom window. Mr. Cody told me you’re Princess Running Deer. Congratulations! I wanted to call you last night, but my dad came home early and we went out to shop and have hamburgers.”

“Congratulations to you, too.”

There was a pause. “Something’s wrong, right?” Rhoda said slowly. “How about meeting me on the steps?”

“Something’s wrong. Right.” Meg sighed. “I’ll see you there as soon as I get dressed. And have breakfast,” she added, suddenly aware that she hadn’t had anything to eat since the ice-cream cone on the way home from the tryouts. What a long time ago that seemed! Before she thought her mother might be getting married again. Before Mr. Cody’s telephone call. Before the announcement that Meg was to be shipped off to stay with her father, whether she wanted to go or not.

In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her face and stared into the mirror. Maybe, she thought, her father wouldn’t want her. Maybe he just wouldn’t have time for a visitor this summer. He might flatly refuse to let Meg come, and she would be able to stay home and be Princess Running Deer, no matter what her mother wanted. How would she feel, though, if her father said she couldn’t come? She snatched a towel and buried her face in its soft folds.

The smell of warm chocolate filled the kitchen when Meg was ready for breakfast. Her mother was making brownies, one of Meg’s favorite foods.

“Feeling better this morning?” Mrs. Korshak asked brightly, as if nothing were wrong. “Did you sleep all right?”

“I had a bad dream.” Meg sat down at the table and filled her bowl with cereal. “Is Bill up?”

“Up and on his way,” her mother replied. “That boy has more ambition than any three kids I’ve ever met. He said to tell you he’d be home from work fairly early, in case you wanted to—to talk.” Mrs. Korshak sounded uncomfortable, as if she were wondering why Meg would want to confide in Bill rather than in her mother. The reason is, Meg answered the unasked question, that what we usually talk about is you. And sometimes, she added, my dreams.

Bill and Rhoda were the only people besides Grandma Korshak who knew that Meg’s dreams often came true. She’d tried to tell her father about the real dreams once, long ago, but he’d changed the subject, after warning her never to talk about such things to her mother. Mrs. Korshak didn’t Believe in what she couldn’t explain, Meg knew that, and she knew her father didn’t like problems. He wouldn’t say so, but he’d rather people kept their worries to themselves.

There was silence in the kitchen while Meg ate her cereal and her mother lifted the brownie pan from the oven and set it on the edge of the sink to cool. “I want you to know I’m sorry you’re going to miss that play,” Mrs. Korshak said. “Bill tells me it’s something you really want to do.”

Bill tells me. Meg scowled. I told you myself, but you don’t listen to what I say. “I have the lead part,” she muttered. “I’ll never get a chance like this again.”

“Never is a long time.” Mrs. Korshak began cutting the brownies into squares.

“I can stay with Rhoda,” Meg rushed on desperately. “She wouldn’t mind.”

Mrs. Korshak shook her head. “Certainly not. Rhoda’s father has all he can do raising a daughter by himself. He works long hours, and I’m sure it worries him to leave Rhoda by herself so much. I’d never ask him to be responsible for you, too.” She paused. “I said I was sorry. There’s just nothing I can do about it.”

Except let me stay home where I belong. Aloud Meg said, “Maybe Dad won’t want me to come right now.”

“I talked to him last night,” Mrs. Korshak said, without turning around. “He’ll meet you at the bus station in Trevor Monday afternoon.”

Meg pushed her cereal bowl away. That was it, then. She was going. In spite of her resentment, she felt a thrill of relief that her father had been willing for her to come. She wondered if there had been a big argument before he’d said yes.

“You’ll have a good time,” Mrs. Korshak said. “Maybe you’ll make nice new friends.”

Meg didn’t bother to answer.

“Do you want a brownie? They’re still warm, but—”

“No, thanks.” Meg stood up and carried her dishes to the sink. “Rhoda’s waiting for me downstairs,”

“Maybe she’d like a brownie.”

Meg paused at the door. “I don’t think so,” she said. “She has a good part in the play—a little boy—and she won’t want to put on any weight.”

It was a ridiculous thing to say; Rhoda never put on weight. She could probably eat fourteen banana splits in a row without gaining a pound. But Meg wanted her mother to know that baking brownies didn’t make up for spoiling a summer. Two people’s summers—Rhoda was going to be terribly disappointed, too.

Feeling only a little guilty, Meg hurried from the apartment.

“It’s no use making a big fuss, Meggie,” Rhoda said. “Believe me, it never works.”

Her first response to the news had been to lean back on the apartment steps and pull her visored cap down over her face. Meg waited, thinking how different this morning might have been. We’d be doing something to celebrate. A bike ride, maybe. Or a picnic. Something neat.

After a minute or two, Rhoda sat up and pushed the cap to the back of her head. “It never works,” she repeated.

“I’m just so mad,” Meg groaned. “It was going to be a perfect summer.”

“Well, being in the play won’t be much fun without you,” Rhoda said thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll pull out, too.” She twisted a red curl, weighing arguments for and against quitting. “No, I might as well stay in,” she said finally. “I don’t have anything else to do. But it won’t be the same. I’m really sorry you have to go away.”

It was like Rhoda to take bad news calmly, consider all sides of a question, and end up worrying about someone else’s disappointment as much as her own. “They decide what you’re going to do,” she said now, without explaining who they were, “and you might as well go along with it.”

“I know.”

“Of course,” Rhoda went on, “that isn’t always bad. My dad decided we were going to move to Milwaukee. I hated to leave New York, but if we hadn’t moved, I never would have met you.” She grinned. “You’ll only be gone about three weeks, right? There’ll be a lot of good stuff we can do when you get back.”

Meg nodded.

“And you’ll get to see your dad again,” she continued. “That’ll be nice. He’s living in a cottage on Lake Superior, isn’t he? You can work on your tan.”

“It’s my great-uncle’s cottage. He’s letting my dad stay there and look after it.” In spite of herself, Meg’s spirits began to rise. Then she remembered the other thing she must talk to Rhoda about, and she shivered.

“I had one of the real dreams last night,” she said. She described the dream—walking inside the giant fish, the feeling of dread—and Rhoda listened intently.

“Who wouldn’t be scared?” she said when Meg had finished. “Inside a fish, for heaven’s sake!”

Meg shook her head. “That’s the strange part, Rho. It wasn’t only the fish I was afraid of. I mean, I knew something else—something scary—was going to happen if I kept on walking.”

“The monster fish swallowed a monster octopus just before it swallowed you,” Rhoda suggested. “Right around the corner eight long arms were waiting to—”

“It’s not funny, Rhoda,” Meg said. “Not if it’s going to come true.”

“You’re sure it was that kind of dream?”

Meg nodded. “It was very bright, the way the real dreams always are,” she said. “I can’t exactly describe the difference, but I always know which ones are going to come true. I wrote this one in my dream book before I came down here.”

Rhoda sat up straight. “Okay. But there has to be an explanation. I mean, maybe the fish represents something else. Something you’re worried about.”

“Maybe.” Meg stood up. Rhoda had made her feel better about going away but she wasn’t going to be of much help in explaining the dream. There was no use talking about it. Meg would just have to wait to see what happened. After all, she was going to be staying with her father on the shore of the biggest lake in the country.…

“Fish don’t come that big in Lake Superior,” Rhoda said slyly. “Don’t worry about it when you go swimming with your dad.”

Meg snorted. “Are you a mind reader or something?”

“Don’t have to be,” Rhoda said cheerfully. “I know you pretty well.”

That was the truth, and it was another reason why Meg didn’t want to go away from home, even for a short time. She liked being with people who understood her—Rhoda and Bill—people who could guess what she was thinking and feeling before she told them. Her father wasn’t like that; he had been away for so long that she felt as if she hardly knew him. His letters asked lots of questions but didn’t tell much, and his occasional visits, while the divorce was being settled, had been hurried ones.

A disturbing thought struck her. What if she didn’t recognize her father in the Trevor bus station? It was a scary idea—worse even than the thought of meeting a giant octopus inside the stomach of a monster fish.