Part 15 (1/2)

'But all kids is Switchers,' said Lizzie. 'Didn't you know that?'

'What do you mean? How could all kids be Switchers?'

Lizzie began to beat flour into the eggs. 'All kids is born with the ability. But very few learns that they has it. You has to learn before you's eight years old, because after that your mind is set and you takes on the same beliefs as everybody else. A lot of kids find out they can Switch, but when their parents and friends say it's impossible, they believes them instead of theirselves, and then they forgets about it, like they forgets everything that doesn't fit in with what everyone else thinks. It's only a few who has enough faith in theirselves to know that they can do it despite what the rest of the world thinks.'

'So was it all just chance, then? Just coincidence?'

Lizzie was beating furiously at her batter. 'Chance?' she said. 'Coincidence? I doesn't know what the words mean.'

A movement in the chimney breast made Tess look up. One crooked nose and four small ones were poking out of the hole, and five pairs of eyes were fixed upon her. 'Grandchildren,' said Nose Broken by a Mousetrap. 'Tail Short Seven Toes telling krools, mammoths, dragons, little ones watching.'

The four small noses quivered in nervous antic.i.p.ation. Tess laughed and, while Lizzie fried the pancakes, she told her story once again.

Tess's parents were astonished to see her arriving home. They had forgone the chance to escape the weather and flee to southern Europe and had stayed in the seized-up city instead, in case Tess returned. When the snow began to melt and the roads were cleared their hopes rose, but by the time she finally knocked on the door they had almost given up on her. They greeted her with tears and laughter, and there was much talk of forgiveness and all being well that ends well.

But they found it difficult to adjust to the changes that had happened to Tess. Because although the date told her that it had not been so long since she left her bedroom window in the form of an owl, by another reckoning it was a year, a lifetime, an ice age. She could barely remember the child that she had been.

Tess had always been aloof, preferring her own company to that of others, but now it was more than that. She had become a stranger to her parents, and in all the years that followed they never learnt more about her absence than they had heard from Garda Maloney's report. All they knew was that she had been away with a boy, and that she would not or could not discuss the matter. It was clear from her withdrawn behaviour that in some way or other it had ended badly, and they believed that she would tell them about it when she was ready.

So, although they noticed that from time to time Tess wore a silver ring that they had never seen before, they didn't ask her about it. They left her alone and tried to resume the family life of old. Tess tried, too, but it was clear to all of them that she was acting mechanically and not from her heart. She made an effort at school, and succeeded in making one or two friends, but that was mechanical, too, and superficial. It helped to pa.s.s the time, but it did nothing to relieve the deep loneliness she felt. Nor did her occasional trips to the park, to join with squirrels or birds or deer for an hour or two. She was not a part of their world, she knew, and nor was she a part of the world of home and school. She was somewhere in between, and all alone.

And her sense of isolation increased whenever she turned on the TV or radio and heard them talking about the famous 'Northern Polar Crisis'. The krools, as she suspected, had retreated back into the ice cap and left no trace of their pa.s.sing apart from the mysterious barren pathways which stretched for hundreds of miles through the vegetation in the Arctic Circle. A thousand theories were put forward, and it seemed that there was a new one getting aired every week. Each was as ludicrous as the last, but what really made Tess's blood boil was the unanimous agreement that General Wolfe and Scud Morgan were the heroes of the day. And no human being apart from herself and Lizzie would ever know the truth.

Tess's parents never reproached her, but she knew that they had suffered a lot when she disappeared. They didn't try to stop her going for her walks in the park, but they made her promise never to be away for more than two hours and never to go out at night without telling them where she was going. Tess knew that in their terms it was a reasonable request and she agreed. She was sure that in time they would come to trust her again, and she would have more freedom, but in the meantime she would have to live without seeing either Lizzie or her friends the rats.

So she had to look elsewhere for comfort. She saved up her pocket money until she had enough to buy the biggest cage in the pet shop and the nicest white rat they had. Her parents were surprised, because Tess had so often expressed her disapproval of keeping animals in captivity, but they didn't object.

But the rat turned out to be a terrible disappointment. It was terrified of the brown rat that she turned into, and terrified to leave its cage. When she did finally tempt it out into the room, it was timid and clumsy and slow, and no amount of persuasion would bring it to attempt the stairs. The worst of it, though, was that the poor, stupid creature could not even speak Rat. It had been born and brought up in a cage like its parents and grandparents, and it had never been allowed, much less encouraged, to use its intelligence. It had a few basic words-images, but beyond that it was mute, and no effort on Tess's part succeeded in teaching it. The white rat was a mental infant, and would remain that way all its life.

It was company, nonetheless, and quite often Tess would lie awake at night, listening to it exercising itself on the wheel and talking baby-talk while she mulled over her experiences and thought about the decision which would face her in another year or so, when she turned fifteen. Time after time she dreamed of the possibilities, weighing the peaceful lives of dolphins and whales against the briefer but more thrilling lives of rats and goats. Time after time she seemed to reach a satisfactory decision, only to remind herself of how heart-broken her parents would be if she were to disappear from their lives for ever, without explanation. And on a particular night a few days after New Year, she had just reached the point, once again, of deciding to stay human, when something happened that was to make her think all over again, in an entirely different way.

It was the white rat's sudden silence that pulled her out of her reflections and alerted her to the change in the atmosphere. She watched it sniff the air, then turn around and gaze steadily into the darkness outside her window. The hairs p.r.i.c.kled on the back of Tess's neck as she got out of bed and crossed warily to the window to look out.

There, on the same tree that the owl had once called from, was the most beautiful bird she had ever seen. It was familiar to her, somehow, and yet she was sure that she had never seen it before, or any other like it. Its bright feathers glowed in the light cast out from her room, and its tail hung down below it, way longer than its body. Then, suddenly, Tess remembered the page of the book where she had seen the bird pictured, and even before she noticed that it had only three toes on its right foot, she knew that it was Kevin. She knew that he had learned, in the nick of time, to find for himself the invisible path which lies between what is and what isn't. As he had fallen, burning, that autumn night which was the eve of his birthday, he had made his final, irreversible Switch, and become the only creature, either of this world or not of it, that could survive that raging fire. And when the helicopters had left the following morning, he had appeared again, rising from his own ashes; a beautiful, golden phoenix.

Tess's heart leapt, racing ahead of her into the night skies where she would soon be flying beside her friend. With a silent apology to her parents for breaking her promise, she reached for the latch and pushed open the window.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fict.i.tiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1998 by Kate Thompson.

Cover design by Michel Vrana.

978-1-4804-2420-3.

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media 345 Hudson Street.

New York, NY 10014.

.

Midnight's Choice.

The Switchers Trilogy, Vol. 2.

Kate Thompson.

CHAPTER ONE.

THE WHITE RAT WATCHED as the two golden birds rose up into the night sky and disappeared from view. A few minutes ago, one of them had been his owner, Tess. Then she had seen the other bird on the tree outside her window, and she had s.h.i.+mmered, changed, and flown away. For a moment or two the rat remained still, staring into the empty darkness in perplexity, then he twitched his whiskers, washed his nose with his paws and jumped back on to his exercise wheel.

As she soared up high above the park, Tess had no thought of what she had left behind her. In her young life, she had used her secret ability to Switch to experience many different forms of animal life, but she had never been a phoenix before. All her attention was absorbed by this new and exhilarating experience, and until she had become comfortable with it, she could think of nothing else.

She followed the other bird faithfully as he rose through the night sky, higher and higher. Each sweep of her golden wings seemed effortless, and propelled her so far that she felt almost weightless. Behind her, the long sweeping tail seemed to have no more substance than the tail of a comet. It was as though the nature of the bird was to rise upwards; gravity had scarcely any power over it at all.

Up and up the two of them flew, not slowing until they had risen well clear of the city's sulphurous halo and into the crisp, cool air beyond. Then the three-toed phoenix began to drift upwards in a more leisurely way and eventually came to a halt. Tess slowed down and began to hover beside her friend, using her wings to tread the air as a swimmer treads water. But when she looked at him, she noticed that he wasn't using his wings. He was merely sitting on the air, floating without any effort at all. With slight apprehension, she followed suit and stilled her wings. It worked. The two of them floated there, weightless as clouds, looking down on the city of Dublin below.

Back in Tess's bedroom, the white rat's wheel was spinning so fast that its bearings were getting hot. He didn't understand what had occurred when Tess had Switched and taken flight but it excited him, and the only way he had of expressing that excitement was in movement. So he ran and ran, the bars of the wheel becoming blurred as they pa.s.sed beneath his racing feet, again and again and again.

A faint breeze moved the curtain and reached the rat's cage. He paused in his stride, then stopped so abruptly that the flying wheel carried him right round inside it three times before it fell to swinging him back and forth and finally came to rest. The white rat was frozen to the spot, every nerve on edge as he strained his senses to understand what that mysterious breeze had brought with it. He waited, and was just about to return to his futile travels when the message came again. There was no mistaking it this time. Somewhere in the city streets, someone or something was sending out a call which Algernon had no power to resist. He hurled himself against the side of the cage, scrabbling with his paws and biting the bars. When this failed he began to dig frantically against the metal floor, throwing food and sawdust and water in all directions in his desperation to escape. But the cage was too well made. The message grew weaker until at last the white rat resigned himself and curled up, exhausted, among the disordered bedding in the corner.

Once Tess had become accustomed to the strange sensation of floating, she turned her attention to her friend. Everything had happened so quickly that she hadn't even greeted him yet; not properly, anyway. There was so much she wanted to know, so much news to catch up on. There was no need for them to recount their adventures in the Arctic when they had fought the dreadful krools; nor was there any need to remember the awful moment when Kevin had Switched just a moment too late and got caught by the flying napalm. The last time she had seen him he had been a small bird, burning, tumbling into the flaming forest below, and there had seemed no possibility of hope.

She could understand the leap of imagination that had enabled him to escape by turning into a phoenix and rising again from his own ashes, but a lot of time had gone by since then and she was impatient to know where he had been and what he had done.

She turned to look at him, but when she caught sight of his golden eyes, all her questions suddenly seemed to be without meaning. Her mind stilled and became peaceful, merging into his in a kind of featureless calm. All at once, Tess felt that she knew all there was to know about the nature of the phoenix. It was ageless, timeless, the essence of all that was pure and beyond the reach of mortal concerns.

Far below, the life of the city continued despite the lateness of the hour. The last buses returned to the station and parked; taxis picked up party-goers and brought them home; lovers stretched the evening on into the small hours, strolling slowly home. Beneath the roofs, nurses worked night-s.h.i.+fts, presses rolled with the morning's newspapers, babies and small children woke and cried, bringing their parents groggily from bed. And still further down, in their own subsystem of homes and highways, hundreds of thousands of city rats were awake and going about their business. From her great height, Tess perceived it all happening. It was her city, her home, and yet she was so detached from it that she might as well have been looking down on an ants' nest. She sank into the ecstasy of the experience and all her cares melted away.

When Tess returned to her bedroom shortly before dawn and resumed her human form, the sense of joyousness remained with her. It was as though all the worries of the last few months had vanished and been replaced by a calm certainty that the future was a.s.sured. The choice of the final form that she would have to take when she reached her fifteenth birthday seemed to have been made for her. Nothing that she had ever been before could compare with the serene, weightless existence of the phoenix, and she could not imagine ever wanting to be anything else. Already she was beginning to miss it.

Although she wasn't particularly tired, Tess got into her pyjamas and s.n.a.t.c.hed a couple of hours' sleep before breakfast. So it wasn't until her father woke her and she began to get into her school uniform that she noticed the state of the white rat's cage. There was always a certain amount of clearing up to be done there in the mornings, but Tess had never seen anything like this before. The water bowl had been knocked over and the floor was a mess of soggy food and sawdust. The top of the chest of drawers where the cage stood and the carpet underneath it were both littered with debris that the rat's scrabbling feet had thrown out, and the shredded paper of his bedding had been pulled out of the nest-box and slung over the wheel like festive streamers.

'What on earth have you been up to, Algernon?' said Tess.

In reply, the white rat hopped into the wheel for a morning stroll, but before he had done two turns the paper strips caught up in the axle and jammed it.

Tess tried to speak to him in the visual language of the rats that she had learnt during her adventures with Kevin.