MILO BARNEY was born in the city, grew up in the woods
and spends time now in both places.
The A Kind of Magic Trilogy are Milo’s first novels.
CHAPTER 1
Silent Wings
It was the most beautiful day of the year, and there was nothing to do.
It was a bright sunny blue-sky day in the middle of a rainy summer. The honey bees and butterflies were scrambling from flower to flower. Even the wasps were too intoxicated with the sweetness of the wild purple phlox to think of stinging anyone.
Griffin was watching one butterfly in particular – a gorgeous tiger swallowtail. A yellow and black, furry stained-glass window, six inches across at least, with ten pale blue spots, five on each wing, like a baby’s toe prints along the bottom of each. That’s how he knew she was a girl.
She was perched on the golden-red pincushion of a coneflower – so close to him he was afraid to cough. Then she sailed off past the zinnias to the huge golden pumpkin blossoms, lying flopped open in the sun like old linen napkins. Her flight was so easy, so silent. You’d think something so big would make a noise: a flutter, a buzz, a flap of wings. But she sailed over the garden fence and into the woods to lay her eggs on the tulip poplar tree, without a sound.
Griffin knew all these facts about her because he’d looked her up in his grandma’s butterfly book. But he knew the butterfly because he’d watched her in the sunny garden – visiting the flowers his mother had planted between the tomato plants and the zucchini, so Grandma would have something bright to look at from her bedroom window.
It was almost too hot to sit in the garden chair now at noon – especially with Griffin’s dog Buster breathing down his neck. Buster liked to be in the garden with Griffin – patrolling for chipmunks and toads – but Griffin sat him up behind him in the garden chair for safekeeping. Of the toads and the chipmunks.
He had just about decided that he qualified for an afternoon soda (it was 12:02) when the phone rang somewhere in the long, one-story house. After some muffle of voices, a call rang out. “Griffin? It’s Cece for you – she’s BORED!”
Now, Cece was Griffin’s second cousin Cecelia – younger by 2 and a half weeks – and her family was renting a house through the woods while her Dad was on a 6-month Coast Guard tour of duty on the Arctic Circle. She was only 10 and 10 months, Griffin was 11 minus 1 month and 5 days. They tried not to let the age difference get in the way of their friendship.
Cecelia’s folks had moved the family here to be near Griffin’s. Since Cece’s mom had given her not one, but two little siblings under the age of 3, her mother’s response to Cece’s “boredom” was, if she couldn’t be useful, she should be outside.
So the phone call got made, and Griffin and his dog Buster were summoned to make an extraordinary adventure out of an ordinary afternoon.
They didn’t need to talk on the phone. They had a secret meeting place pre-arranged, so no grownups could overhear their plans. They always met at a big flat-topped rock in the diagonal middle of the old field between their houses, now overgrown with hundred-year-old trees. Two stone walls west of the driveway, then one south. You start at the nearest corner, find the 45 degree angle between the two walls, and start walking in as straight a line as the trees allowed.
It was easier than that, though, since there were landmarks: you walked between two big bumps in the old field. Griffin was hoping that they might be burial mounds from the Native tribes that had roamed these woods. His dad thought that they were probably all that were left of the giant roots of some fallen trees, mouldered down to a big lump of clay and rocks and old leaves. Griffin had seen trees knocked over like that, after a hurricane. And, although he was in awe of their ropy framework of twisted arms of roots – sometimes 15 feet high in the air – he still liked his idea better.
Even though he was tempted to dig in the mounds to find the buried remains of a Delaware chief, he didn’t. If he found nothing, then his dreams of ancient tombs was over. And if he really did find something like that, then the woods would become an archaeological treasure instead of just a land preserve, and his days of roaming the woods as lord of the forest would be over. Sometimes it was better just to wonder.
So he clambered over the stone walls, in the same places where the deer had managed to knock over huge rocks to make a path. Hoof tap by hoof tap, the stones had fallen to leave a pathway any forest person could see, clear as a neon sign. Griffin found his corner, where an old log had hollowed out to look like an alligator head. He put himself in the corner, faced right in the middle, and walked toward their meeting rock.
Cecelia had had a morning not so much boring as bad. She was woken up by Bo-bo Baby’s crying, then almost-three-year-old Emma started bawling to get out of her baby-cage. It was vacation, but there was no escape for Cecelia. Mamma needed her help – so she dragged Emma out of her cage, sat her on the potty, threw out her pull-ups, gave her a tee shirt and a bag of pretzel goldfish and turned on the TV.
Cece had a lot of shows she liked, but Emma cried if she couldn’t watch Elmo’s World. Over and over. Cece was okay with that as far as Mr. Noodle. Cece still liked the crazy way he had of moving his neck like a turtle eating a popsicle. But after that she couldn’t take it anymore. She was 10 and three-quarters. She had a life to lead. Somewhere else.
Her last four houses (the ones she could remember) had been in neighborhoods. They’d been surrounded by families with kids around her age, out biking and rollerblading, pushing doll-strollers and bouncing in each other’s backyard trampolines. Here there was no base, no PX, no rec center, no station school. Not even sidewalks. Just paths in the woods.
School was out. She had only gone for a couple of weeks before the end of the year. Not long enough to make any friends among the already life-long best friends of the girls in her new class. Now she was in the middle of three months of big fat nothing. Unless she wanted to go to the supermarket with her Mom and those babies. Again. Not!
Thanks to their cousins’ brilliant idea... “Rent the house down the road for the summer, it’s cheap and we’ll be able to give you a hand with the kids!’’ ... here they were, stuck all summer in the woods. At least there was Griffin – who was pretty okay for a boy. At least he wasn’t mean or anything, and he was really happy to show her “his” woods.
To him, it was like every rock was a street sign – or maybe a newspaper – with little traces of life as stories to tell. He had told her about growing up here lonely himself, as a little kid with no brothers or sisters or neighbors. How he had wished so hard for someone to play with that he almost believed there was someone, out there in the woods.
When he was a kid, he said, he used to build little huts out of stones and sticks and acorn caps, at the mossy cool bottom of a tree, among the roots; a tiny house with an acorn chimney, stone roof, mossy furniture and front lawn. Even an upturned acorn cap for a birdbath for visiting emerald bottle flies.
But no one ever came. That he could tell. He told Cecelia that once, when he was very sick, he’d heard a voice, different from the crickets and the whirring locusts. It was whispery, and it was calling his name. “Griffin. Griiiiifffiiinnn!” His mom had said it was just a fever dream. But he wasn’t so sure.
Cecelia stepped out of the kitchen door of their little house. The family that had built it was Dutch, so it had a split door. The top was already open to let in the cool forest breeze. Now she turned the heavy lock-bolt of the bottom half and swung it open. Closing it firmly behind her to keep the babies from following her, she slipped down the cool stepping-stone path into the woods.
Griffin had been worried at first that she would lose her way in the woods. It was almost 200 acres of land preserve – with only the casual paths of the animals still running through what used to be an old camp run by a charity for city kids. They could still find dump sites full of broken dishes – fat and white – rusty milk cans – for some reason an old washing machine. And weirdest of all – the remains of a basketball court with trees growing out of the old blacktop. Cecelia was never quite sure where that was. But Griffin could always find it.
For her to find her way to the meeting rock, Griffin made a trail. In the old days, when his mother was a girl, trails were cleared every year, with blue triangles showing the direction at crossings. But since the ticks had started carrying Lyme disease – and the mosquitoes with West Nile Virus – nobody much came to the land preserve that his mom’s parents and their neighbors had fought so hard to save. Now it was a 200-acre town park. And nobody used it except Griffin and his dog, Buster. And now, Cecelia.
So Griffin made her a trail. He found some red and white curly ribbons in his mom’s wrapping box, already cut in handy lengths. He picked apart each “curly bow” and walked the trail, tying the white ones on the right and the red ones on the left like lights on buoys in a harbor. He tied them to lower branches of young trees and shrubs on either side of the path from Cecelia’s back door to the meeting rock. Of course, the birds had stolen some of them for nests, Griffin said; at least he thought it must have been them. But by then, Cece had the hang of it. Now she didn’t really need them any more, but they were a nice reminder of how unmean a boy her cousin Griffin could be.
Her path was not so geometrical as Griffin’s. She wound her way through the woods, zigzagging to avoid the backyards of the old neighbors. (It seemed like they were all old.) Then the ribbons stopped.
She had to watch out, and dash across an open field beside old lady Moselle’s driveway. She had big dogs; penned up, but still, you never knew. She was sharp-speaking and bent over like a Grimm’s fairy-tale witch. Griffin’s mom said she’d been responsible for saving the forest, as a fierce conservationist. Cece wasn’t sure what that was, but she never forgot the “fierce” part.
She looked for the old millstone on its side – a huge rock, perfectly round with a square hole in it – and knew the path to the meeting rock was just to the left. Then Griffin’s ribbons started again. They led off to the left – diagonally ahead through the purple and white phlox, smelling so sweet it made her a little dizzy – and over one crossing of stone walls.
All the while the birds were singing. Well, not singing exactly, more like cheeping and chirping, peeping and screeching – noisily going about their birdy lives. Getting food and feeding their squalling babies. Fighting off attackers or even their own kind if they got too close.
And underneath, the zigzag noise that Griffin said were insects – not just the occasional buzzing bee but a constant rattle-chattering of locusts. Or was it cicadas? And, last night, the katydids had started their argument (“Katy did!” “Katy didn’t!”) that meant it was 6 weeks ’til fall, Griffin’s mom said.
And crickets. Her favorite.
Once she had found a bright green cricket in her house in Texas. She made a little mayonnaise-jar home for it, with holes punched in the top. She even named it: ‘Emerald’. But she fed it store lettuce and it died. Her mom said it must have been from the pesticide that the farmer grew the lettuce with. Cece didn’t know why it had to kill her cricket, too.
But here it was all green and living and breathing and chattering away, not at all afraid of people. Not only insects and birds but big animals, too: skunks and opossums, squirrels and chipmunks, woodchucks, deer and wild turkeys. Even coyotes! That was new, Griffin’s mom said. And that they couldn’t let the cat out at night anymore.
Somehow the darkness and the light, the greenness and the brownness of the woods, made Cece think about the scary stuff. But Griffin liked that sort of thing. He was a boy, after all.
Before either of them saw the other, Buster bounced away ahead of Griffin, past the meeting rock, in leaps and bounds over the fallen trees and rotting logs, to greet Cecelia and lead her back, panting with triumph, to Griffin at the rock.
CHAPTER 1
Spring Break
Clunk.
Clunk.
Clunk.
Griffin’s eyes opened before his dreaming self could remember what that clunking sound was. He rolled over and squinted past the big glass turtle tank and out the window. Even though the trees were gray and bare, he could have sworn that a bright green leaf – shaped like a mitten – blew past the window outside in a misty-gray blast of wind. His morning mouth tasted something like root beer. “Sassafras?” he mumbled muzzily.
Clunk.
George, one of his two turtles – sorry, Horsfield tortoises – was propped up on the food dish, the one that looked like a frozen plastic lava flow. He was trying to dig his way out of his 2-foot by 3-foot prison. George had got himself almost vertical in the corner where two glass walls meet. He was heading out toward the wild world yonder out the window, then – clunk – he fell back into the odd ends of old green beans and broccoli leaves left from yesterday.
“Thanks a lot, George! I was having a great dream!”
In his dream, Griffin was swimming around in the coral reefs he had seen in National Geographic – but with no scuba gear – just flying through the water, warm and bright with flashing blue and yellow fish... he was just slipping back into it... meeting a brilliant green parrot fish face-to-face when...
Clunk.
“Oh, man!” Griffin sat up and tore off the covers.
“It’s bad enough we can’t go anywhere for spring vacation... Bad enough you have to live in a tank and come back and stay with us when school is closed. I know there’s nothing to do all day... You could at least let me sleep!”
Griffin was almost 12 now – growing fast – and was starting to sleep like a teenager. In the old days, last year, he would have jumped up at 6 AM on a day off from school – just because he was so happy to call the day his own.
Clunk.
Griffin got up and pulled on some sweat pants. Spring vacation was early this year, because of Easter being on a lunar calendar or something – and it was March and chilly in the mornings – misty outside – trees dripping with the night’s rain. Griffin and his parents lived in a flat house built low to the ground in the forest, though close enough to the city for his dad to work there nights.
Griffin headed for the kitchen to rustle up some turtle grub – they hadn’t been too excited by the carrot tops and bean ends his mom had left for them lately. His bare feet slapped on the cold tiles of the living room.
“Griff! Put something on your feet!” his mom with the x-ray ears called from her bedroom.
“Yeah, yeah.” He grabbed a pair of graying socks from the laundry pile by the washing machine and hopped along – pulling them on as he went – toward the refrigerator.
“Hmm – yogurt and granola for me – man – that’s what you get having old hippies for parents... and an old end of lettuce for George and Lilly.”
He got out a spoon, mixed the granola into the yogurt, and brought it all back to his room. Quietly. His mom didn’t like him eating in his room. But he figured that since George and Lilly were back in his room for the week, eating, it was only fair.
When he was five, he had asked for a dog.
He’d gotten George and Lilly.
His mom and dad said that when he showed he could be responsible for the turtles – who didn’t need to be walked, who only ate once a day, and wouldn’t miss it if you forgot once in a while – then they’d see about getting a dog.
Then his mom spent four years feeding them – giving them a bi-monthly shower – cleaning the poops and old vegetable stuff out of the tank full of crushed walnut shells. Then, when he was nine, they got Buster. The turtles came in a sad second (and third) in Griffin’s affections.
And they had gotten so big! Lilly was now twice as big as George (she always was the first to chow down) and didn’t fit under the hollow log they tunneled under for shade anymore.
It was time to get a bigger shade cover, a bigger tank, bigger everything – or maybe give them away, even.
Even though he had Buster, still Griffin wasn’t too happy about that.
And then, a timely tragedy saved the day.
Griffin’s 4th Grade teacher had a class pet – a guinea pig named Gomer – who finally “passed away”. There were many tearful faces in the classroom. Griffin’s mom – being a class mom kind of mom – saw a win-win solution for everyone. The family bought the biggest turtle tank available and had it delivered to the school.
George and Lilly had many great classroom pet qualifications. “They are quiet. No one is allergic to turtles. Being land tortoises, they don’t need their water changed all the time, and don’t carry scary diseases like some water turtles. They’re great recyclers, eating the odds and ends of vegetables most people usually throw away. They look like a kind of dinosaur (but actually turtles are older.) They keep each other company...” Miss Dale had to stop Griffin’s mom and say she was convinced. And so George and Lilly had moved to Woodvale Elementary 4th Grade Class 402.
The catch? School vacations. So Griffin’s family kept the old small tank and the responsibility for George and Lilly when school was closed. But back in the smaller tank, George was restless and, his dad said, “claustrophobic.” Or so it seemed to him.
And Griffin. “I don’t blame you, buddy!” Griffin knocked his own head gently against the glass of the window by the tank.
Griffin’s dog Buster jumped up on the bed next to him as they watched Lilly gobble up the romaine lettuce with amazing speed, and George, just as fast, charge from corner to corner of his old small tank. Griffin put his arm around the warm slope of Buster’s shoulders. “George, old pal, we know just how you feel!”
They all stared out the window at the drippy grey trees of March and sighed.
Griffin had suggested taking them out for a walk in the grass by the house, but his mom reminded him that George and Lilly were desert tortoises. Their favorite temperature was 80 degrees, and that big of a sudden drop could make them sick – or send them into shock – or at the very least, into hibernation.
Now, hibernation – going underground for a nap of a few months or so – is part of the turtle’s natural life-cycle. In fact, it helps them lay eggs. But it doesn’t make for very interesting class pets. He did let George out to race (for him) around the floor of Griffin’s room, but the little brown scooter always had to be brought back before he wedged himself under the bureau. (For some reason, Lilly never seemed interested in exercise, just in eating.)
Now a whole week stretched out in front of them – with Dad not able to get away. No trip to Puerto Rico to learn to scuba dive like they’d hoped. He would have seen his cousin Cecelia there, and had an amazing time. Now nothing – nowhere – nada.
Even TV wasn’t too interesting, since little kids’ shows were all they played on weekday mornings – and Elmo just got on his nerves.
He knew what his mom would say. “Read a book.” As if the world on paper could make up for the big nothing out there. Griffin stopped his mental complaining with a gulp. Which came back out as a root beer burp. He suddenly thought back to last summer, when he and Cecelia had discovered the secret world of trees... and a mysterious something extra he found so hard to believe that most of the time he just didn’t think about it.
Like if you saw a ghost. Even if it made you a believer in ghosts, you would probably mostly forget about it in your usual life, playing basketball and at the supermarket and stuff. But you’d know one again if you saw it. For him, he thought of it as something or someone he called “Sassafras”.
But now the trees were cold and bare and grey – the woods brown with damp fallen leaves. Maybe there was a haze of color where some trees were starting to bud, but oh so slowly. Whoever decided that March was a good time for a vacation was just plain mean.
Clunk. George bit the dust again.
“Oh, come on, Buster. Let’s get out of here!”
Lilly had finished the lettuce without leaving George a bite. Griffin had seen that there were already some dandelion leaves in the sunny part of the backyard. And since he was paid ‘a nickel a root’ bounty by his mom, he pulled on his jeans and his mom’s Bean boots (they wore the same size now!) and went out back with the weed-digger.
“I get to get paid and George gets to eat them. Works for me!” The air was damp and chilly, but the morning sun warmed the back wall of the house enough for a small forest of daffodils to be smiling in the sunlight. Their honey-sweet smell had even lured a very adventurous bumblebee out in search of sweeter rewards.
Griffin had wanted to feed some of the long daffodil leaves to the turtles the day before, but his mom said he’d better not. That there must be something toxic about the daffodils, since even the deer – who ate everything else she tried to grow – wouldn’t touch them.
“They don’t seem too crazy about dandelions either,” Griff pointed out to Buster as he dug up ten within easy reach, snapping off the roots and laying them out on the glass patio table for later accounting. The greens he took up to the turtles, but even after he lifted Lilly off of the food dish and put her safely under the heat lamp, George seemed sniffy and uninterested.
“Hey, Ma! Lilly ate all the lettuce and George doesn’t like dandelions. We got anything else?”
His mom padded in, in her bathrobe, shaking her hair around to find her eyes.
“I wonder if there’s anything out in the woods they’d like, something not covered with pesticides or flown in on a plane from South America. Or both...”
“Why do we get that stuff?” Griffin was puzzled. “I thought we were all like – organic and stuff.”
“Thanks, honey...” his mom gave him that tight-lipped wiseguy smile. “We try. But there’s nothing organic growing around here in March. That you’d want to eat.”
“How about Twinkies? I hear they don’t even biodegrade!”
“Uh... yeah. Anyway – we try, but... hey! Maybe the fiddleheads are up!”
“What’s a fiddlehead? Sounds like a tropical fish or something...”
“Nope, it’s a baby fern. In the old days, people with no supermarkets or refrigerators...”
“Like when you were a kid?”
“Thank you, no, but out here when Grandma was a girl, people were so starved for anything green to eat...”
“I bet the kids were happy!”
“Maybe, but they’d get sick, with no vitamins for months. In England in the early spring they’d go out and get nettles to eat before they were old enough to sting. Here in New England, they found that baby ferns were even better.”
“Why’re they called fiddleheads?”
“Because they’re all tightly curled up, like the carving at the end of a violin. If you cut them at the root with a knife... but don’t take more than a couple from any one plant, or there won’t be any to grow...”
“Uh, Mom... did you say a knife? You mean, I can have a real knife?”
“Well, gee, Griff... I haven’t thought about it much lately... you have all those little pen-knife souvenirs from Grandpa’s old drawer...”
“Yeah! Souvenir of Grand Canyon... Niagara Falls... the Everglades with the little alligator on it... they’re like an inch long!”
“So, maybe now you’re old enough and careful enough for my old Scout camping knife...?”
Griffin had been eyeing that knife on the top shelf in his mom’s closet since he’d found it when he was playing Sardines with some other kids at his 7th birthday party. He’d always had to pretend he didn’t know it was there. But from time to time, when his mom was deep into some old movie at the other end of the house, he’d sneak into her closet and climb up and take down the 4-inch, antler-handled beauty in its old (hand-stitched in Art & Crafts) leather sheath, one a Girl Scout in camp could strap to her Girl Scout shoulder belt.
“Knife? What knife?” Griffin sounded almost believable.
“The one you’ve been sneaking looks at since your seventh birthday.”
Griffin flashed her the “ya got me!” look, grabbed his chest and fell over on the sofa.
She half-smiled. “I think you could be old enough for it now. You’re not nearly so clumsy as last year... but you can never – ever – bring it to school!”
“Well, du-uh!”
“And if you ever lose it I will never speak to you again.”
“Hmmm, that could be okay...”
“Griffin. I am serious!”
“Only kidding, only kidding. I will strap it on and guard it with my life.”
“And maybe it will do the same for you one day.”
His mom went to her bedroom closet and rummaged around a bit, then came out with the knife with its sheath, and a Kennedy half-dollar.
“How many dandelions did you dig up today?”
“Ten...”
“Perfect. Here’s your pay!”
She handed him the big, almost white coin with her favorite president on it.
“Wow, Mom! Thanks! That’s one of your special collection!”
“Yes, I know. Now give it back.”
“Whaattt?”
“There’s an old superstition that if you give a person a knife it will cut your friendship. But if they buy it – even with a symbolic coin – then the curse is off the knife. So, you can just buy that back from me with the 50-cent piece...”
“Mom! That’s the cheapest, sneakiest thing you ever did!”
“That’s what you think! So... what’s it going to be? The knife or the coin?”
“The knife, of course... Would you accept a couple of quarters?”
“Not for this knife.”
“Thanks, Mom. I guess...” They carefully swapped the silvery coin for the steely, bony knife. “Geez, does everything have to be a lesson with you?”
“I guess so, honey. It just seems like there’s so much to learn and never as much time as you think...”
She pulled up the single tan-brown sleeve she wore on her right arm, like an Ace bandage, since her surgery years ago when Griff was little. She was fine, she always said, but her illness and the treatments had made her insistent that nothing in life could be taken for granted.
“Sorry if I’m a little preachy sometimes...”
“A little!”
“But with your dad working nights, it feels like I have to do the nagging for two.”
“That’s okay, Mom!” Griff gave her a quick hug. “So... where do you think the fiddleheads would be?”
“Probably out back, over in the old Swanson place... the ferny part’s by the stone walls on the ridge – you remember – on the way to the swimming hole in the ravine?”
“You bet! Come on, Buster!” Griffin pulled the knife out of its sheath and flourished it like a pirate.
“Fiddleheads, beware!”
“Griffin!!! If you...”
“Only kidding, Mom. Only kidding... Geez!”
Griffin carefully sheathed the knife, put it on his belt and buckled it. He put on his own hiking boots and a waterproof hoodie, and headed out the back door with Buster shooting past him towards the tall trees.
CHAPTER 1
Wild Ride
Somehow, he could fly.
Racing along the power lines – swooping from tower to tower – Griffin was spreading wings and soaring in a graceful, effortless rush of feathers. The strip of trimmed-back countryside below him was rolled out like a bright green carpet, up hills and down valleys, in a grassy aisle between the tall trees on either side.
As he climbed up to the top of one tall green metal tower and then dove – skimming along the thick black lines – to the next, he could see every detail below him with an almost painful clearness. Every leaf, every blade of grass, was so sharp it almost hurt his eyes.
The tiniest movement on the ground caught his eye (maybe a mouse) and he almost grazed the next tower top – the green painted metal just inches below his toes. Claws? Talons!
A low rumble alerted him just in time and he looked ahead with his far-seeing sight. His swooping flight was taking him out of the valley and up the mountain, and over to the other side. On the mountaintop he could see the next valley up the river, spread out all sprawled like a quilt – a blanket of houses and businesses and parking lots and woods, crazily rumpled all the way to the big river. Another rumble and rush of wings, and over the old abandoned factories and brickworks and gypsum mines and trap-rock quarries to the river itself.
He banked left to skim along the shoreline. Ahead the high wires lead to the twin domes and immense red and white smokestack, blindingly bright lights flashing the warning signals of a nuclear power plant.
“Indian Point!”
Griffin felt his arms wrapped around the powerful shoulders making the wings beat beneath his chest. He wasn’t doing the flying. It was a bird. A huge bird. And it was taking him along, to make him...
“Seeeeee!” the great bird screamed and...
“BAM!!!”
A blue light lit up his room with a clap of thunder so loud it rattled the roof at the same time. Griffin woke up sitting straight up with his arms around Buster, his big brave mutt, who was trembling like a newborn lamb.
Griffin had been reading and dozing and reading some more. The big book of Native American legends had fallen to the floor, but it couldn’t have made that sound.
A long roll of thunder seemed to circle the house, and outside things got lit up in little bursts.
“It’s okay, boy – just another storm.” Griffin was reassuring himself as much as Buster, when his dad tapped on his door and poked his head in.
“Okay, Griff?”
“Sure, Dad. That was a big one!”
“Yeah. I’m surprised the lights didn’t go out. Sounded like it hit a transformer, or maybe the power line itself...”
Griffin’s eyes widened. “That’s funny. I was just...”
“Got your flashlight handy? We might have a blackout.”
“Cool! Grandma would finally be right. And I’m all set, see?” Griffin held up his old glow-in-the-dark Pirates flashlight with the skull at one end and the handle like a big dog bone.
“Cool.”
Another clap of thunder rolled across the roof, and outside the grass and trees lit up, silhouetting the power tower beyond the garden against a bruisey purple sky.
“Want me to stick around?”
“No, that’s okay, Dad. I’m a big guy now. Twelve-year-old guys aren’t afraid of stuff like lightning and thunder...”
“Well, good! When you are twelve. How about eleven and eleven-twelfths guys?”
“We have our dogs to be brave for us.”
“So I see!” Griffin’s dad smiled and patted Buster’s big bony head. Buster was hardly trembling at all any more now – locked in Griffin’s comforting arms.
His dad picked the fat book up off the floor.
“How’s the book Bo gave you?”
“Awesome! Crazy! Everybody’s always turning into some animal – or the animal turns into a person...”
Griffin didn’t mention the tricky nature spirit that kept turning up in Bo’s book. Out West he was called Coyote. Coyote and his tales kept reminding Griffin of the one he was pretty sure was living right out there in his woods, the one he had drawn a picture of, taken a photo of, heard the voice of – but was always somehow just out of sight. When something seemed to be happening for a reason, but there wasn’t any you could see, somehow Griffin got a taste of root beer in his mouth, and the suspicion that Sassafras was behind it all. But he wasn’t ready to risk sharing his suspicions with a grown-up. Even his own dad.
“...And so that’s supposed to explain where something comes from, like a specially weird waterfall, or how we learned to plant pumpkins, or something else useful.”
“Well, Griff, that’s how they taught their kids – legends – around the fire on the long winter nights – no electricity, remember. The elders taught the youngers by telling stories. Stories were their school.”
“Oh, Dad, don’t ruin it for me. It’s my vacation!”
“Yeah? Well, even so – it’s getting pretty late even for vacation. Try to go to sleep.”
“But I was asleep. And having this amazingly fun dream...”
“Yeah? Nice. But you’re too young to leave the lights on all night. That’s for old ladies like Grandma. Unless...”
“No, no, I’m not scared. I’ll turn ’em out. Makes it easier to watch the light show outside.”
Just then, a huge downpour of rain – like somebody threw the switch on a waterfall in a water-park somewhere – got dumped on the roof and came pouring out off the sides of the house.
“Listen to that! I better go check that the pump in the cellar’s working. And put the gallon jugs of water by the toilets. Keep that flashlight handy. We still might lose power if some trees go over. And... sweet dreams, you guys!” His dad patted Buster one more time and kissed Griffin on the head as he turned out the lamp by the bed and quietly almost closed the door behind him.
A flash outside flickered further down the power line. The drumming of the rain almost drowned out the thunder rolling down the valley from the little mountains just north of there.