***************
Finally the house was in sight, but the snow was falling harder. The plastic shopping bags Harriet was carrying weren't heavy, but they weighed her down. All she could think about was how inconsiderate her brother was. When she asked him if he could stop on the way home to pick up a couple of things she needed, Frank replied that he would be late for dinner if he had to run errands for her. Since she was spending the day at home, she could take a study break and walk to the Seven-eleven which was just around the corner.
As she picked her way through the fresh snow accumulating on the sidewalk, Harriet's thoughts slid back to her college days and to Dexter Markus. He was the one fellow student who seemed to be more interested in her intellect than in what good looks she may have had. When the two of them discovered that they were both devoted to Emily Dickinson's poetry, they spent long afternoons sitting on the Quad, reading poem after poem and commenting on what each had to say about feminine experience or humanity's arguments with God. It was on a wintery day such as this, she recalled, when she and Dexter walked through the snow for hours, losing track of time while they speculated about the mysteries of Emily's love life. They talked endlessly about the inhibitions the poet may have suffered from as a result of her tyrannical father and insensitive brother. Harriet felt close to Dexter and surely, Dexter felt just as close to her. But by the time graduation rolled round, neither had carried the relationship any further. They wrote each other for a while from their separate graduate schools and then the letters dropped off. As usual, Harriet had been cheated in life.
Since the spare key to the house only worked for the back door, Harriet was forced to take the extra steps up the driveway. To her dismay, Harriet thought she heard the voices of children yelling at play. She was quite sure that her brother's house was not near a school. She was even more sure that all children in the neighborhood should either be in school or sick. She was just about ready to turn the corner at the back of the house when a child's voice practically rang out in her ear. Harriet stiffened and prepared herself to give the errant child a royal reprimand. But, at the back of the house, there was not a child to be seen. There were, however, small footprints in the fresh snow.
With the snow falling ever harder, it seemed unlikely to Harriet's logical mind that children could have made those footprints and then disappeared so quickly before she could catch them in the act of trespassing. She marched through the snow to take a closer look at the tracks. The plot thickened. Among the small footprints she took for those of children, there was a set of very large footprints that seemed to come from a large animal.
Harriet's speculations were rudely interrupted when something cold hit Harriet in the face. Surely a snowball! Children laughed at her from all sides. Just as they laughed at her when she was a school girl herself. When her fingers closed over the offending missile, however, it turned out, not to be made of snow, but of fresh, white flowers. Harriet whirled around. She heard frantic footsteps and more laughter, but saw no one.
"How dare you throw this at me!" Harriet yelled at the invisible children.
The laughter stopped. Everything became still. A surprisingly warm breeze stroked Harriet's face.
"I thought they were nice flowers and that you would like them," said a child.
Harriet turned a full circle found herself face to face with a girl. She looked familiar. In fact, she appeared to be the same girl Harriet had met in the elusive room in the house. To Harriet's astonishment, far from have a winter coat on, the girl was wearing a light pastel dress.
"What are you doing, trespassing on this property when you ought to be in school?"
The girl looked in another direction as if appealing for help. Amid childish chatter, several children ran to her side. The children looked at Harriet and then at each other as if they had run into a crazy person. One of the boys stepped forward, trying to look as bold as he could. He had a nut-brown face, brown hair, and eyes that danced with mischief.
"To the first part of your question," the boy replied, "we are not trespassing on this property, as we have been invited by this world to live here. To the second part of your question, school ended ten degrees of the sun ago."
Harriet couldn't help but look up into the sky. The sun was bright and the sky was clear. She started to realize that she was sweating profusely in the heat, but she did not know what to do about it. At first, Harriet thought that the ground was still covered with snow, but a second look showed her that she was standing in a field of white flowers growing on long green stems. Instead of a wire fence, the yard was surrounded on three sides by a gray brick wall. Frantically, Harriet looked for the house. It wasn't there! A large tree, thick with yellow leaves stood where the house was supposed to be. Seeming to sense her puzzlement, the children giggled at her.
"What's so funny?" Harriet asked them.
The children exchanged looks once more before a little girl took a baby step forward.
"That's a nice coat you've got."
"I'm glad you like it," Harriet replied in her stiffest voice.
As she spoke, the tree with the yellow leaves rustled violently. The children whispered to each other excitedly, then ran over to the tree, leaving Harriet alone with her anger and perplexity. A shower of leaves rained down on the children as the branches shook and then, with a shattering crack of a breaking branch, a gorilla-like monster with teeth like a wolf jumped out of the tree in the midst of the children. The children cautiously gave the monster a wide berth, while trying to decide how to handle it. The monster peered at the children as if it, too, was trying to decide how to handle them. Unbelievable as it seemed, it was the same monster Harriet had seen through the window of the mysterious room.
"Get away from that thing!" Harriet screamed.
The monster roared. The children scattered and ran to the garden wall, scaled their way to the top and jumped off on the other side. The monster faced Harriet and hesitated as if it did not know what to do.
"Go home," Harriet commanded the monster.
By then, home was the only place Harriet herself wanted to be. When the monster leaned in her direction, she took off and didn't stop until she had the key in the door. Of course she had the key in the wrong way and she had to try again. Sure that the monster was on top of her, Harriet fell through the door and slammed it shut. The silence inside the house was deafening. After a frozen moment of leaning against the kitchen counter, Harriet released herself and found her way into the living room where she plopped down in a chair until her heart stopped racing.
When it occurred to her that she still had her winter coat on and that she might hang it up, Harriet realized with a sinking heart that she must have dropped her shopping bags during the course of her wild adventure. Cautiously, she walked through the dining hall and peered through the back window. To her relief, she saw the snowy landscape that belonged to her time and place. But she did not see her shopping bags. With even greater caution, Harriet opened the kitchen door and looked out. The back yard was still there, snow and all, but still no shopping bags. Feeling slightly sick that her trip had all been for nothing, she braced herself and opened the closet door. This time it really was the closet and so she hung up her coat.
As she slowly walked up the stairs to her room, Harriet thought she heard the scuffle of someone running in the hallway, then children's voices, followed with more laughter.
"What is going on up there?" Harriet yelled.
Harriet was answered only by silence. With her whole body shaking, she stood on the stair for a long time without hearing another sound. When she figured she had waited long enough, she continued the rest of the way to her room. Fearing what she would find there, she hesitated and braced herself for the worst. When she did open the door, she jumped a bit and a squeak escaped from her throat. On top of her bed stood her two shopping bags.
************
Tim was right to bring his sketch pad to the dinner table. As he had suspected, nobody was going to talk to him anyway. His father and Cindy brought the papers of their current science project and his mother and Peter brought the music of the Schubert piece they were practicing. Aunt Harriet, getting the hint, made a quick trip to her room to fetch a book. The resulting alignment had followed the consequences of the night before to their full conclusion. This time, though, Tim did not have to sit in isolated silence while his mother and Peter talked past him while Aunt Harriet glowered in similar isolation between Cindy and Father.
The food itself could do with as many distractions as possible. His father seemed not to have had his mind on cooking. The noodles weren't cooked enough and the gravy mixed with the beef stroganoff had something missing. Ordinarily, his father would have been subjected to some good-natured razzing and, perhaps, Mother would have popped a frozen treat into the microwave. But, thanks to Aunt Harriet, the ordinary was not happening and everybody ignored the ineptly prepared food. The only consolation for Tim was that, early on, Aunt Harriet pushed her plate away contemptuously and turned a stiff back to her brother, who was oblivious to her anger.
As Tim sketched on so as to distract himself from his own empty stomach, he started to amuse himself with more sketches of Aunt Harriet's face. He looked up surreptitiously and then draw what he saw, or what he thought he saw. After a couple of sketches of his aunt, he started drawing the computer animal Aunt Harriet had accused him of planting in her room. He ended up with quite an exquisite sketch of Aunt Harriet and the animal staring each other down, eyeball to eyeball.
"Don't look at me like that!" Aunt Harriet snapped.
Tim jumped in his seat. His last look at her obviously hadn't been surreptitious enough.
"Who'd want to look at you?" Tim asked in return.
"Stop arguing," Father interrupted, "Cindy and I are in the middle of something."
Frank turned his back turned on his sister so quickly that he spared himself the full intensity of Harriet's withering look.
Since only store-bought ginger snaps were available for dessert, Tim wasn't interested. He slipped away from the table without bothering to ask to be excused and made his way to the computer room. The overdue book report he had been trying to write, in vain, was still on the screen, just the way he had left it. He had thought that a book on Attila the Hun would be exciting. It wasn't. Tim was disappointed over how boring Attila's life of violence was on the printed page. Besides, with his obsession over the disappearance of his monster, it was hard for Tim to keep his mind on Barbarians of centuries past.
Seeing the wand of leaves he had brought down that afternoon still lying next to the computer keyboard, Tim absently dropped his sketch pad and picked up the wand. Getting back to Sarabania seemed worth at least one more try. He gently waved the wand across the wall as he said his incantation:
"Abracadabra Abracazil, open the door according to my will."
Nothing happened. Tim shrugged. If he had been more interested in his book report than he was, he would have slumped over his computer and plodded away at his assignment. But since he was still hoping that the assignment would go away if he gave it enough time, he traced the outline of the monster on the wall with his wand and said the magic words once more:
"Abracadabra Abracazil, open the door sesame, according to my will."
Shadows of leaves moved across the wall. Tim put the wand behind his back. The outline of a leafy bough still swayed gently in the breeze. Gradually, a whole set of glass doors materialized in the wall. Tim looked out into a yard full of snow and lit by the full moon. A low brick wall surrounded the yard.
"Gosh!" Tim exclaimed in a whisper, "I didn't know Sarabania could look so good in winter!"
He fumbled with the handle on the double-door until he managed to open it. He took a step outside, just under the branch of the tree, and braced himself for the cold. The air proved to be surprisingly warm. Tim bent over to scoop up a handful of snow. It was cool, but not icy cold. And it felt so soft! In fact, it wasn't snow at all. He felt some resistance, then heard a snap when he brought the snow to his face. Then he realized that he held a handful of pale, white flowers.
"Do you like them?"
Tim strained his eyes to follow the sound of the child's voice.
"Are you hiding?"
"Not -- not on purpose."
A swishing sound helped Tim focus his eyes on a girl. Between her pale skin and white dress, she was well camouflaged by the flowers.
"Now I see you," said Tim. "What's your name?"
"Harriet."
"Hmm. I have an aunt Harriet. She's real crabby."
"Ahem!"
Tim dropped the flowers at the sound of the sharp clearing of the throat. He knew who it was. Panic flooded the girl's face and she melted into the flowers. Not knowing what to say, Tim said nothing.
"So!" Aunt Harriet snapped. "You do have a secret room and now I've caught you in it!"
Tim shuffled through the flowers a few steps away from his aunt.
"It's not a secret. And it's not a room. It's -- it's a world."
"You've been playing too many fantasy computer games."
"Uh -- maybe so. But this is not a computer game. This is pretty real. As far as I can tell."
"Why couldn't you people tell me what's really in this house, and what isn't, instead of leaving me to stumble into strange rooms where I don't know where I am?" Aunt Harriet thundered.
"Because that would take the fun out of discovering the rooms for yourself."
To Tim's dismay, he saw that the flowers in the vicinity of Aunt Harriet and himself were starting to droop.
"Tim, you're trampling on the flowers!"
"What do you think you're doing, walking in air?" Tim asked in return.
"Can't you see that you're destroying the flowers?" Aunt Harriet asked, her anger escalating.
"Can't you see that these flowers are wilting at the sight of you?" Tim yelled.
Aunt Harriet's yelling rose into a crescendo, but Tim could no longer make out the words. To his horror and shame, her face took on the distortions that he had just drawn at the dinner table.
"Bug off, Turnip Face!" Tim screamed back at her.
From there, his voice kept on going, but Tim lost track of what he was saying. As if in a dream, Tim became aware that he and Aunt Harriet were eyeball to eyeball as they carried on. What he did not hear, at first, was the addition of a low-pitched roar to their voices. But when the muzzle of the monster nudged its way in between Tim and his aunt, there was no ignoring its presence. Almost instantly, Aunt Harriet and Tim both closed their mouths. The monster, too, ceased its roar and stared quizzically at the two of them. His blood thundered in Tim's ears. Aunt Harriet looked as if the veins in her face were about to burst.
"What are you doing in my house?" Aunt Harriet asked the monster.
"Your house?" Tim yelled.
The monster roared, wrapped its heavy arms around Tim, slung him over its back and bounded over the wall. It had happened so quickly that it took Harriet a while to take in what had just happened. As her heart beat wildly, she waited for the sound of Tim's screams, but she heard nothing. Fearing that she might be trapped in this strange world if she stayed out any longer, she hurried inside. When she reached for the door to close it, her hand struck the wall.
Harriet's first impulse was to run to her brother and tell him what had happened. Her second impulse was to do nothing of the kind as she realized how ridiculous she would look if she started babbling about strange fantasy worlds and monsters carrying children away. Something on the desk by the computer caught Harriet's eye. One look at the pictures on the open page was enough to stiffen Harriet in her resolve to leave Tim to his fate.
With her heart slammed shut, Harriet marched up to her room where her work awaited her. She had come across many more documents during the day that needed assimilation into her thesis. Frank deserved any anguish he might get over his missing son. When Harriet opened the door to her room, she jumped a mile.
"What are you doing in my room?" Harriet asked the girl who had invaded her room. The girl stared back at her. When the girl did not answer, Harriet placed her arms akimbo. The girl did the same. "Don't mock me," Harriet scolded the girl. She waited for the girl to stick her tongue out at her, but she didn't. After another tense moment of staring down the girl, it finally dawned on Harriet that she was looking at herself in the mirror. Ruthlessly, she pulled herself together and sat down at the desk to get to work,