White Is for Witching Read Online Free PDF Page B

took her suitcase up in the lift, feeling like a guest. She missed being able to see to the bottom of the shaft, the mysterious dustiness of it. She went into her room and there was a stack of cardson her bed, cards filled with hugs and kisses from girls at school. She wondered what Eliot had told them, and whether it was worth returning to school with an assumed limp and only the vaguest explanation of her absence: something about having fallen out of one of the trees at the back and having broken her whole body, “You know . . . just
everything
.”
    Miranda’s room smelt of musty petals, and she could hear Eliot avoiding her, helping Azwer to shovel snow outside. The dull click of spades on gravelled ice.
    In a psychomantium glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind.
    Miranda looked in.
    She looked with the most particular care and she saw Lily Silver standing there in her room, smiling sadly.
    It took half a minute, too long a terror, to realise that she was only looking at herself. Wasn’t she? It was the haircut and the fact that she had grown thinner and her eyes had grown bigger in her head. She had been eating exactly what she liked, and she didn’t like the usual things.
    Still, Lily seemed to gaze and gaze at her and say, Oh, Miri. You fell asleep. How could you?
    Miranda turned away from the mirror. “I don’t like this blame culture,” she whispered. “I don’t like it at all.”
    She checked Lily’s watch. It was midnight in Haiti. The ticking of the watch grew very loud; she wished it would not tick so loudly. She fumbled across the room to put on a CD, but she had taken it out and put it back in, pressed play three times before she realised there was nothing wrong with it, it played every time she pressed the button. There was Ella Fitzgerald, whispering
a tisket a tasket
. She grittedher teeth. She needed the sound of the watch stopped; she couldn’t hear the music for the sound of the watch. She knelt on the floor and slammed her wrist against it.
    Tick, tick
    (break it
break
it)
    tick, tick
    It was the pain that made her realise what she was doing. She undid the watch clasp, inspected it for damage, then put it on the table and rubbed her swollen wrist. Then she felt for her pills, cursing her hand for trembling so much. She put her steady hand over her trembling hand, to no effect. She lay down and didn’t want to shut her eyes. With the curtains drawn it could almost be night. But she heard someone talking to Luc downstairs, she heard the clatter of cutlery, she heard the whir of
     
    the lift
     
    broke down in the night. No one knew what time. The timing became important when Azwer and Ezma couldn’t find their older daughter in the morning.
    Luc had had the attic converted into two large, low rooms. Azwer and Ezma slept in one, while Deme and her little sister, Suryaz, slept in a double bed in the second room. Deme was ten and Suryaz was seven. The two of them went about with their hands joined, smiling and full of secrets so simple that they were given up if asked after. Deme and Suryaz hopped more than they walked; it was always as if they had just left the site of some mirth particular to them. They babbled in prettily accented voices. The combination of their near-identical manes of curly hair and their mother’s tendency to zip them into similarly patterned dresses meant that Suryaz had an air of havingbeen formed without detail. Deme was the oldest, so you looked at her first.
    Both girls admitted that they had spent the day before playing around with the lift, pressing buttons for three floors all at once, holding the Door Open button until the lift zinged with confusion. That was reason enough for the lift to later get confused and try to travel unbidden from first floor to second, grinding to a halt between the two. But why was Deme standing in the