Alchemy. Margaret Mahy

       ALCHEMY

       MARGARET MAHY

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Dreaming

Waking

1. Three Pens, a Pie and a Notebook

2. An Alarming Proposition

3. The View Across the Schoolyard

4. Unexpected Difficulties

5. A Complicated Pursuit

6. Remembering Midnight Tears

7. Looking Into an Invented Darkness

8. Saturday

       9. Edging Past Medusa

       10. An Unnatural Stillness

       11. Reporting In

       12. Alchemy

       13. The Flicker in Mr Hudson’s Eyes

       14. Dream or Memory

       15. A Proper Answer

       16. Putting Things in Order

       17. The Third Time

       18. Something Worse Than Fear

       19. On a Riverside Bench

       20. Family Histories

       21. A Dangerous End to an Ordinary Day

       22. Inner Silence

       23. Meeting in the Museum

       24. What the Lions Heard

       25. Sunday

       26. Confessing

       27. The Dark Tower

       28. Climbing With Closed Eyes

       29. Spells

       30. Down the Stairs

       31. Jess’s Story

       32. A Hook in the Head

       33. A Call From Beyond

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       DREAMING

      So here it was again… coming through the dark at him – the dream, the nightmare that had haunted him for years. OK, he’d been through it all before. He already knew what was in store. He already knew there was no way of waking out of this particular dream until it had run its course. It would end in terror – as it always did. And yet that terror seemed to be necessary. He felt himself dividing like a cell, becoming two, then three people – the dreamer, the child in the dream and someone outside it – watching the dreamer dream… watching the child move innocently towards the coffin… and feeling the familiar panic as he watched it happening yet again.

      Look! There they go, moving through the fairground, side by side, Roland and his father – hand in hand, yet apparently joined in other ways as well. And, in spite of the reassuring way his father’s hand curls around his fingers, Roland – the watcher – knows that Roland – the dream child – is becoming more and more alarmed with every step. He is being warned… warned from inside. I’m frightened, he is thinking. I am going to change. Everything is going to change. There’s no escape. Here it comes!

       Yet there is not one single frightening thing to be seen in the world around him. There is nothing he can reasonably shrink from. Hand in hand with his father, the child walks forward.

      I’ve been here before, he finds himself thinking – finds himself knowing – as they idle along through the fair. People in the jostling crowd point things out, waving hot dogs, or ice creams, or balloons as they do so. Looking at the bright, bobbing shapes against the yellow-green of new spring leaves, Roland thinks, There they are again, and walks on beside his father – the very father who will disappear on the day that Roland’s youngest brother, Martin, is born. (How can I possibly know that? Roland is wondering. Look! That’s me walking along! I’m only about four years old. Martin won’t be born for years.)

       Standing on the edge of a small circle of lawn, the man and his son listen as a girl sings a folksong, Then they watch a juggler juggle, and an acrobat flop-and-flip. And now, through the applauding crowd, comes a figure enveloped in a black cloak, with a black crown on