Secret Summers. Glynda Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ question,” Monique replied, “without an answer nearby.” Of course our logic was flawed, though for not quite eleven, we weren’t doing so badly. There was that nagging matter of me not really being a girl, the error that might cause all we deduced to be incorrect, but ‘the open hand’ and all that. Perhaps right now, right here, I was a girl. What really was the difference?

      “I think we’re in trouble,” Monique said matter-of-factly. ”No matter what they tell us, we’d better stay together as much as we can.”

      That sounded okay to me, but … ”Why did he let us see him?” I demanded. ”Where we were safe. He didn’t have to let us see him watching us.”

      “I think that part’s easy,” she responded. ”I think he meant to scare us.”

      “Why though?”

      “There’s something he doesn’t want us to find out.”

      “What?” I asked again.

      “There’s the matter of the little girl,” Monique ticked off the point on a forefinger. ”The Book,” finger two, “the box with the little poem on it, and the fact that he showed up when you did,” fingers three and four. “So there’s something in there he doesn’t want us to know,” back around to the thumb. Just then a shaft of bright light shone through the curtain at the window, swept across the floor, made us both look peculiarly orange-yellow and passed on. A few seconds later it happened again, then again.

      “What is that?!”

      “The lighthouse,” she said. ”You can’t see it from your house, and it always lights up around this time of night. I always think of it as The Friendly Eye, except for some times.”

      Or The Orb? I thought but didn’t say that out loud.

      “Lighthouses help ships not to crash onto the rocks,” Monique elaborated.

      “I know that,” I said. ”Which times?” Again I didn’t really want the answer but couldn’t help asking.

      “Around midnight, I guess.” She shuddered a little. ”Or real late like that. Some nights there just seems to be a time when everything goes crazy like you’re older than you’re supposed to be or younger or in some different place—or sometimes the light is trying to hold back something really dark.”

      “Like the man,” I said.

      “I suppose.”

      “Doesn’t it keep you from sleeping?”

      “What the lighthouse? No, it’s my friend. And this,” again she moved to the foil and cardboard structure near her window, “is sort of a baby lighthouse. I pretend that it can talk to the big lighthouse and learn from it.” Emboldened by the Friendly Eye, I supposed, Monique flicked a switch in the extension cord to the lamp bulb and a brilliant beam of clear yellow light flashed through her window just about in time with the lighthouse. Flicking the light on and off, she giggled in delight, and the whimsical idea of the two lights talking so charmed me that I begged her for a chance to flash the light myself.

      “You built this?”

      Monique nodded. ”I got the idea from an article about solar energy mirrors,” she said, “and found out they could work just as well for searchlights.” We played for a time then, showing beacon for beacon, and when the occasional car came down the road, she worked the angling mechanism of the reflector to light them through this gloomy stretch of coastline, tracking the beam from extreme right to extreme left. The odd horn honk indicated recognition from the drivers. Whether good or bad, we knew not.

      “Okay,” I said as we were seated once more on her bed, tired of the light play. ”Since he showed himself to us outside, near your house, the thing we’re not supposed to find should be out there,” I gestured. ”Does that make sense?”

      “It might,” she conceded, “but he may just have been there to scare us, so we don’t know for sure what we’re not supposed to find out what he’s trying to scare us away from. I’m afraid we’ll just have to see him more to know that.”

      I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to see him more. In fact, I was pretty sure I didn’t.

      “How do we find him though?” I demanded, not at all happy how this conversation had gone.

      “I don’t think there’ll be a problem with that,” Monique declared. ”I’m pretty sure he’ll be trying to find us.”

      “But shouldn’t we stay away from him?” me again.

      “If he meant to hurt us,” she told me, “he could have done that lots of times today or even yesterday. I think he’ll want to lead us in the wrong direction, so we don’t find out whatever he’s hiding, and if we’re pretty sure he’s leading us in the wrong direction, we’ll just try to look in places he doesn’t show us.”

      This sounded a lot like a needle in a haystack to me, but it was nice that Monique at least thought we weren’t in immediate danger.

      “Gir-rels!” It was Monique’s mom. ”Time for bed!”

      Aunt Claire showed in the opening doorway. ”We’ll be staying the night,” she informed us. ”You,” she wiggled a finger at me, “come with me for a minute.” She led me into a bedroom with a bathroom off it and told me to remove my dress. She stepped out, giving me privacy to go to the bathroom and take off most of my clothes. When I’d flushed, she returned with a worn-looking, yellow cotton nightgown, embroidered with a spray of daisies across the front, just below the neck. ”Put this on.” I pulled it over my head, letting it fall past my knees. Aunt Claire bent down in front of me doing something to the hem of the gown. ”There,” she said, “Just in case. Young people can get up to mischief.” I had no idea what she was talking about, but then I had no real idea why a lot of things had happened today, so I said nothing. Soon enough, I found she’d secured the hem of the gown between my ankles with three large safety pins.

      I returned to Monique’s room to see her in a green nightie pretty much like mine, and I saw that two sleeping bags had been rolled out on the floor. ”Can get chilly at night,” her mom told me as she fluffed pillows. ”Sweet dreams, girls.”

      “They want to hmm-hmm,” Monique made that coughing noise again in her throat, indicating with her gaze the direction the grown-ups had gone. ”They don’t want us to though,” she indicated her nightwear, “so they make us wear these things. It’s not as if we don’t have better things to do.” I didn’t know exactly what Hmm-hmm meant but figured my imagination could get me close enough for now. We crawled into our sleeping bags, and surprisingly enough, I felt pretty tired. Monique reached over and pecked me on the cheek. ”You’re a good friend,” she said.

      “You too,” I told her, pecking back but coming closer to her ear. ”Good night.”

      “Good night.”

       Today I wore a dress, and everybody saw me doing it and didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about it, but this wasn’t by any means the strangest thing that happened today.

      I did not go to sleep immediately though but lay awake for some time as the rather comforting lighthouse beacon swept the room through the closed but uncovered СКАЧАТЬ