“There’s a way out!” squeaked Marlene.
“Stupid! It’s just tempting us!” shouted Enna Hittims.
But Anne gave the heroes no choice. She held the cat flap open and shoved hard with her foot. The tray went right up against the door. The heroes were forced to leap out through the cat flap or be squashed.
“We’ll get in another way!” Enna Hittims shouted angrily as the flap banged shut.
“No, you won’t!” said Anne. She left the trolley pushed against the door, and she overturned the kitchen table and pushed that up against the back of the trolley to keep it there.
She was just setting off to make sure all the windows were shut when she heard a car outside. It was the unmistakable, growly sound of her father turning the car around in the road before he backed down into the garage. A glance at the kitchen clock showed Anne that he was back almost two hours early.
“I can’t let them stab his eyes!” she gasped. She raced through the hall, her head full of visions of the heroes standing on the garden wall and climbing up Mr. Smith as he walked back around from the garage. She dragged the front door open and made warning gestures with the poker.
Mr. Smith smiled at her through the back window of the car. The car was already swinging round backward into the driveway. Anne stood where she was, with the poker raised. She held her breath. The heroes were standing about halfway up the drive. Marlene was pointing at the car and gasping as usual. “Another monster!”
“Go for its big black feet!” Enna Hittims shouted, and she led the three heroes at a run toward the car.
Mr. Smith never saw them. He backed briskly down the drive. Halfway there, the heroes saw the danger. Marlene screamed, and they all turned and ran the other way. But the car, even slowing down, was moving far faster than they could run. Anne watched the big, black, zigzag-patterned tire roll over on top of them. There was the tiniest possible crunching. Much as she hated the heroes by now, Anne let her breath out with a shudder.
Before Anne could lower the poker, there was a sharp hiss. The enchanted sword, and perhaps the magic spike, too, could still do damage. Mr. Smith jumped out of the car. Anne ran across the lawn, and they both watched the right-hand back tire sink into a flat squashiness.
Mr. Smith looked ruefully from the tire to Anne’s face. “Your face has gone down, too,” he said. “Did you know?”
“Has it?” Anne put up her hand to feel. The mumps were now only two small lumps on either side of her chin.
While she was feeling them, her father turned and got something out of the car. “Here you are,” he said. He passed her a fat new drawing book and a large pack of felt tips. “I knew you were going to run out of drawing things today.”
Anne looked at the rows of different colors and the thick book of paper. She knew her father hated going to the drawing shop. There was never anywhere to park, and he always got a parking ticket. But he had gone there specially and then come home early to give them to her. “Thanks!” she said. “Er—I’m afraid there’s rather a mess indoors.”
Mr. Smith smiled cheerfully. “Then isn’t it lucky you’re so much better?” he said. “You can tidy up while I’m putting the spare wheel on.”
It seemed fair, Anne thought. She turned toward the house, wondering where to start. The macaroni, the china lamp, or the milk? She looked down at the pack of felt tips while she tried to decide. They were a different make from the old lot. That was a good thing. She was fairly sure that it was her drawings that had brought Enna Hittims and her friends to life like that. The old felt tips would not have been called Magic Markers for nothing.
THE GIRL WHO LOVED THE SUN
There was a girl called Phega who became a tree. Stories from the ancient times when Phega lived would have it that when women turned into trees, it was always under duress, because a god was pursuing them, but Phega turned into a tree voluntarily. She did it from the moment she entered her teens. It was not easy, and it took a deal of practice, but she kept at it. She would go into the fields beyond the manor house where she lived, and there she would put down roots, spread her arms, and say, “For you I shall spread out my arms.” Then she would become a tree.
She did this because she was in love with the sun. The people who looked after her when she was a child told her that the sun loved the trees above all other living things. Phega concluded that this must be so from the way most trees shed their leaves in winter when the sun was unable to attend to them very much. As Phega could not remember a time when the sun had not been more to her than mother, father, or life itself, it followed that she had to become a tree.
At first she was not a very good tree. The trunk of her tended to bulge at hips and breast and was usually an improbable brown color. The largest number of branches she could achieve was four or five at the most. These stood out at unconvincing angles and grew large, pallid leaves in a variety of shapes. She strove with these defects valiantly, but for a long time it always seemed that when she got her trunk to look more natural, her branches were fewer and more misshapen, and when she grew halfway decent branches, either her trunk relapsed or her leaves were too large or too yellow.
“Oh, sun”—she sighed—“do help me to be more pleasing to you.” Yet it seemed unlikely that the sun was even attending to her. “But he will!” Phega said, and driven by hope and yearning, she continued to stand in the field, striving to spread out more plausible branches. Whatever shape they were, she could still revel in the sun’s impartial warmth on them and in the searching strength of her roots reaching into the earth. Whether the sun was attending or not, she knew the deep peace of a tree’s long, wordless thoughts. The rain was pure delight to her, instead of the necessary evil it was to other people, and the dew was a marvel.
The following spring, to her delight, she achieved a reasonable shape, with a narrow, lissome trunk and a cloud of spread branches, not unlike a fruiting tree. “Look at me, sun,” she said. “Is this the kind of tree you like?”
The sun glanced down at her. Phega stood at that instant between hope and despair. It seemed that he attended to the wordless words.
But the sun passed on, beaming, not unkindly, to glance at the real apple trees that stood on the slope of the hill.
I need to be different in some way, Phega said to herself.
She became a girl again and studied the apple trees. She watched them put out big pale buds and saw how the sun drew those buds open to become leaves and white flowers. Choking with the hurt of rejection, she saw the sun dwelling lovingly on those flowers, which made her think at first that flowers were what she needed. Then she saw that the sun drew those flowers on, quite ruthlessly, until they died, and that what came after were green blobs that turned into apples.
“Now I know what I need,” she said.
It took a deal of hard work, but the following spring she was able to say, “Look at me, sun. For you I shall hold out my arms budded with growing things,” and spread branches full of white blossom that she was prepared to force on into fruit.
This time, however, the sun’s gaze fell on her only in the way it fell on all living things. She was very dejected. Her yearning for the sun to love her grew worse.
“I still need to be different in some way,” she said.
That year she studied the sun’s ways and likings as she had never studied them before. In between she was a tree. Her yearning for the sun had grown so great that when she was in human form, it was as if she were less than half alive. Her parents and other human company were shadowy to her. Only when she was a tree with her arms spread to the sunlight did she feel she was truly in existence.