The Key & the Flame Read online

  Holly shifted in her seat. Something was poking her. She reached behind her and found a small square box tied with a ribbon. A tag read: HOLLY.

  For her? She groped around the sofa cushions and the two armchairs, but she didn’t see presents for anyone else. It didn’t seem fair, but then again, she was the only one bothering to get to know this place. The rest were busy upstairs, chatting and opening drawers. She heard Ben saying, “Which converter do I plug in the outlet?” and Mrs. Shepard saying, “Put that thing away and unpack first!” and Mr. Shepard saying, “I guess we’ll have to go buy something to eat.”

  They’d be back downstairs soon. If Holly wanted to keep her present a secret, she’d need to open it now. She turned the box over in her hands. It was made of a smooth, fragrant wood. She untied the ribbon, undid a funny hooked clasp, and opened the hinged lid.

  Inside was a heavy iron key. It was exactly as long as the box, about three inches, and one end was forged in a loop. The other was notched in three or four places. She had never seen a key like it.

  Holly noticed something else tucked into a corner of the box—a folded piece of stiff paper. She opened it and read:

  Only the strong of heart take the circular path,

  For to return from whence you came

  Brings the ending back to the beginning.

  Holly stared, blinking, at the message. But no sooner had she read it than she heard Ben galumphing down the stairs. Behind him came the more orderly steps of her parents. She glared at the staircase; it was like she had opened an especially wonderful birthday present that her mother had put aside, saying, “Isn’t that nice! Well, let’s move on. What else have you got?” Holly didn’t want to move on. But she grabbed her backpack and stuffed the wooden box deep into one of the zippered pockets before anyone else saw it.

  The rest of the day was filled with things that ordinarily would have been interesting. They walked the streets of Hawkesbury and bought food with strange names like Weetabix and Typhoo. They stopped in a pub called The Willy Wicket and ordered fish and chips that came in paper-lined baskets (for everyone) and very dark beer (for Holly’s parents).

  Back at the cottage on Hodges Close, Mrs. Shepard herded everyone into the kitchen with bags of groceries, then up the stairs to finish unpacking. “Now, I don’t want anyone going to sleep,” she said. “We need to adjust to British time. Let’s all hang in there until eight o’clock.”

  Holly heard her mother on the stairs behind her, but her voice was growing fainter and the call of her bedroom louder. She barely had time to notice which bed had Ben’s backpack splayed across it before she fell, already asleep, onto the other.

  Chapter 4

  * * *

  The Caretaker

  Holly had traveled a very long way, slept scrunched in an airplane seat, and eaten odd-colored food wrapped in plastic; and so, when overtired from chatter and bickering, she arrived to a soft bed, she slept very well. She fell asleep at six o’clock in the evening and didn’t wake up again until nearly five the next morning. The sun was already up. The first thing Holly remembered when she woke was the key.

  She slipped out of bed, still dressed in the rumply jeans and T-shirt she’d worn on the plane. Slowly, so as not to wake Ben, she disentangled her backpack from the rest of the luggage. Then she cleaned her glasses extra thoroughly, so she wouldn’t miss anything, and tiptoed downstairs, through the kitchen, and into the back garden.

  A wrought iron table and two chairs sat on a tiny flagstone patio. Tall hedges of pink hollyhocks framed the garden, giving it a sweet, enclosed feeling. An ivy-covered arbor led out of the yard. Holly sat down at the table, unzipped her backpack, and took out the wooden box.

  Only the strong of heart take the circular path,

  For to return from whence you came

  Brings the ending back to the beginning.

  What did that mean, the circular path? She hadn’t ever been to England before, so how could she return from whence she’d come?

  She shook her head and picked up the iron key, balancing it in her hand. It felt surprisingly warm. Someone who knew her name had entrusted her with a key to . . . what? It was too big to belong to a file cabinet or a padlock. Holly glanced back at the cottage. She walked around the garden path to the front door, but the lock was a tiny modern one that her key couldn’t even fit in.

  So it is a mystery, she thought with satisfaction as she sat down again in the backyard. Almost at once, she sprang back up.

  Something was moving in the hollyhocks.

  Holly stepped through the archway. The flagstones extended a few feet and then gave way to a much older path made of raised, uneven stones. Grass grew between them. She took a few steps and then gasped in surprise.

  Spread out before her was a deep valley. The path in front of her edged down the hill in wide stone steps. Below, the land rippled like a green carpet sprinkled with a confetti of wildflowers. A dense forest spilled down the left side. A silvery snakelike thing—a river, Holly realized—poured down from another hill across the valley. Something large and dark loomed on the hill, but the thin morning mist hid it from sight.

  A cluster of bluebells at Holly’s feet shook in the breeze, each flower bent with the weight of a single dewdrop. Holly knelt down to touch her finger to one of the blooms.

  “Looking for something, are we?”

  The voice so startled Holly that her feet slipped on the wet stones. She fell, scraping her right elbow on the loose pebbles, and would have rolled right down the hill if a strong arm hadn’t pulled her back. “You want to mind these steps. Not safe, I’ve always said.”

  Holly looked up to see a bent-over old man with a grizzled chin and deep-set, startlingly blue eyes. He wore a plaid flannel shirt and a linen cap over his crooked nose. When he pulled Holly to her feet, she saw he wasn’t much taller than she was.

  Now Holly knew just as surely as you do never to talk to strangers, and certainly not to let them touch you. Had she behaved as she’d been taught, she would have screamed and stomped on the old man’s fragile instep. And yet those rules seemed to belong to a place far away from this sunny morning in Hawkesbury. She brushed herself off, smiled, and held out her hand. “Thanks. I’m Holly Shepard.”

  “Splendid! I’m—”

  “Holly!”

  She dropped the man’s hand in an instant. Her mother appeared through the arbor dressed in her bathrobe, her arms crossed in front of her. Holly had no doubt she could take out the old man if provoked.

  But he stepped up to the garden, still smiling. “Mrs. Shepard? So sorry I wasn’t here yesterday to greet you, ma’am. I’m Gallaway—the caretaker.”

  “Oh, of course, Mr. Gallaway. The rental agent mentioned you.” Mrs. Shepard offered her hand. “Laura Shepard.”

  “Pleasure, ma’am. I trust you got settled in all right?”

  “Everything’s wonderful.”

  Mr. Gallaway held up a white paper bag Holly hadn’t noticed before. “I brought some breakfast. I wasn’t sure if you’d had a chance to do the marketing.”

  Mrs. Shepard raised one eyebrow, which Holly knew meant, What, at this hour? But all Mrs. Shepard said was, “How nice of you! Please, come in.”

  Holly followed the grown-ups inside. Mr. Gallaway winked at her. Holly thought of her present.

  “Were you in our house yesterday?”

  “Just getting things ready. Wood for the fire and the like.”

  “Did you—”

  “Holly, set out some plates, would you? I’ve just put the coffee on, Mr. Gallaway.”

  The old man sat down to share scones and coffee with them and proceeded to talk to Holly’s mother about things like how crowded Heathrow Airport was and how to work the washing machine. Just when Holly was about to excuse herself, Mr. Gallaway turned to her and said, “And certainly you, Miss Holly, must go to school?”

  “Um, yes. I’m going into middle school this fall.”

  “And are you excited about i
t?” asked Mr. Gallaway.

  The old man’s blue eyes prompted Holly to be honest. “Sure. Harder math and no recess, what’s not to be excited about?”

  “It must be quite tedious for you there,” said Mr. Gallaway, his eyes very serious. Mrs. Shepard gave him the look that she usually reserved for Holly just before asking, “Why do you say things like that?” But now she said nothing.

  Mr. Gallaway picked up a scone and the butter, but instead of applying one to the other, he brandished the butter knife to emphasize his point. “Poor Miss Holly! I suppose you’ve been told you don’t ‘live up to your potential.’ You’re not to draw on your paper or natter on about kings and queens and lost princesses. They tell you not to read your storybooks when it’s time for spelling, that you won’t be learning about spelunking or falconry in your year, yes? Heavens!” His fist landed on the table, rattling the dishes. “Holly should be doing fieldwork, not sitting at a desk. Practice digging up a fossil instead of reading about it, eh, Holly?”

  After a brief, stunned silence, Holly said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I should be doing!”

  “You could learn more about ancient Egypt in one trip to the pyramids than you could reading your entire history book.”

  “That’s what I think too!”

  “And what about applying your maths principles? Design a house, make blueprints—”

  “I’d have to figure out dimensions and area—”

  “Go snorkeling to learn about sea life—”

  “On safari to learn about elephants—”

  “Do real research instead of reading that tiresome Internet—”

  “Excuse me.” Mrs. Shepard had a way of halting even a loud conversation while staying very quiet herself. “I suppose,” she said, “that it would be fun to go on safari and design houses, but that’s not what goes on at school, Mr. Gallaway. Holly needs to accept reality and apply herself to what’s expected of her.”

  It was the sort of remark that is like the door slamming shut against a summer day. But before Holly could argue, her father came down the stairs saying, “Do I smell coffee?” And shortly thereafter Ben arrived, and a new argument began about whether he should have to eat breakfast before playing on the computer, and the whole morning became very ordinary. Holly slipped away from the table and out to the back garden.

  By now the sun had dried the steps down the hill, and Holly found that they were not very steep. At the bottom, she could look up and see their cottage ringed with hollyhocks. At her feet, a worn path disappeared into the forest.

  Holly had little experience in forests. She had gone camping exactly once, in what amounted to little more than a clump of trees. There was no getting lost in that wood; Holly had tried, and found her way out in ten minutes. The closest thing to a wilderness she’d experienced was climbing the Monster Rockwall in the mall. But this forest on the edge of Hawkesbury was real wilderness.

  The minute she stepped into the trees a curtain of silence dropped and the sunlight dimmed. She stood very still. The place was like one huge living body, its organs the trees and animals. She could almost feel giant lungs expanding and contracting. Then she did something very smart: She looked down at her watch, which was also a compass, and noticed that her toes were pointed due north. She started down the path.

  Holly had an excellent sense of direction and easily remembered which way she took when the path forked. After a few minutes, the noise picked up. She heard scamperings nearby and squirrels chittering, and the songs of birds that made their homes deep within the wood. A gurgling sound told her she would soon come upon a stream. Underneath it all, she could hear a low hum, which grew louder as she walked.

  At first Holly thought someone was running a leaf blower, which disappointed her, because she didn’t want to meet anyone else. But the noise sounded more like fluorescent lights buzzing, or the static between radio stations. It was like a current, alive, reaching out.

  In a moment she found the stream. She stepped across several flat rocks, then clambered up the far bank, where the path continued.

  The humming immediately grew louder. Holly followed the path straight for a few minutes, then round another bend behind a dense cluster of trees. She stopped.

  She stood in a sun-drenched glade. Several tall, skinny beech trees ringed the clearing like campers around a fire. Right in the center stood a single, ancient oak, twisted like a wrung-out cloth, and so broad that she and Ben easily could have hidden together on one side, and even by linking arms would not have been able to span it.

  She walked up to it as if approaching a wild animal she wanted to feed. The humming grew louder. How strange that only one oak tree should spring up in the middle of a beech forest. But when she walked into its shade, she saw the strangest thing of all. Fitted right into the center of the tree’s trunk was a rectangular iron plate, rather like a light switch. But where the switch would be was exactly what Holly had been looking for: a very large, odd-shaped keyhole.

  Chapter 5

  * * *

  Through the Glade

  Holly drew the big iron key from her pocket and took a deep breath. Finding a keyhole in an oak tree was even stranger—and better—than finding a locked treasure chest. The gnarled, knotted trunk vibrated beneath her fingers; the humming she’d heard came from the tree itself. She knew, just as you do, that this was the beginning of something that would change everything.

  The key fit; of course it did. The tumblers clicked together as if the lock had just been oiled. Then a rumbling began, deep in the earth.

  If you’ve never been in an earthquake—and Holly had not—it can be unsettling. The earth beneath her feet rippled like a water bed. She stumbled to the ground. A beam of light shot out of the keyhole, and then the tree trunk cracked—first a short split crossways, about six feet above the keyhole, and then connecting to it, a crack down the right side, and another down the left. Holly recognized the shape at once.

  It was a door.

  The tremor stopped. The door opened.

  Holly scrambled to her feet. For a split second she thought of running back to the cottage as fast as she could. But a split second is a very short time, and the fear passed into curiosity as she peeked through the doorway.

  It’s just the same place, she thought, and yet somehow it wasn’t. She stepped across the door’s threshold.

  Yes, the same glade, the same ring of trees. But the trees were brighter, more distinct, and then she saw something else: Each one had a design on the trunk.

  Holly stepped across the glade to one of the beeches. Odd wedge shapes had been cut into the trunk. It was some kind of ancient writing that she couldn’t decipher. She traced the grooves with her finger. In fact, all the beech trees in the circle had runes carved into them—and they all were different. And then she noticed the most important thing: Each one had a keyhole, just like the oak tree.

  “Oi! What’re you doing?”

  Holly spun around. Back in the wood where she’d come from stood a boy about her size with unruly brown hair and ruddy cheeks. His eyes were green with bristly long lashes, and when he stepped into the clearing the sun hit the streaks of red and gold in his hair.

  “Well?” The boy frowned and crossed his arms across his chest.

  “I’m just walking.” Holly knew how odd this sounded, considering that she had caused an earthquake and opened a door in an oak tree and now stood in front of about half a dozen different keyholes. But the boy didn’t seem to think any of this unusual.

  “I can see that. But this is my wood.” He walked past the split oak without looking at it. “What are you doing with that?” He indicated the key, which Holly held out in front of her.

  “I’m not really sure . . . and . . . well . . . ” She glanced back at the oak. “I opened the tree with it.”

  The boy raised his eyebrows, then followed her glance. “Er . . . okay.”

  “See? Right here.” Holly ran back to the oak. She waved her arm through the
doorway in the tree.

  “What are you on about?” The boy frowned at her hand. Then Holly realized: He couldn’t see what she saw.

  Watching him, Holly stepped back through the doorway in the tree. His eyes didn’t follow her, but he said, “So now it’s hide-and-seek, is it?”

  The moment Holly cleared the doorway the rumbling began again. She clutched at the tree trunk and the door slid shut. The cracks around its frame vanished.

  Holly walked around the oak. The ring of trees across the glade looked perfectly ordinary. No keyholes.

  “Are all American girls as odd as you?” the boy asked, after her second time around the tree. Apparently he hadn’t felt the rumbling when the oak tree closed, either.

  “What? No. I just—I thought I saw something. It’s not there now.”

  “Right,” said the boy, smirking. “I’m Everett. You must be one of the family leasing the cottage from Mr. Gallaway.”

  “I’m Holly Shepard. How did you know?”

  Everett shrugged. “Word gets round. What year are you?”

  “You mean at school? I’m going into sixth grade. I’ll be twelve in December.”

  “I’m already twelve. I live on Clement Lane, the other side of the close.” He pointed down another path. “And this is my wood. So what’s this rubbish about opening up a tree?”

  Holly slid the key into her pocket. “Oh no, I was only kidding. It’s just the key to our cottage.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s too big for that.”

  “But it must be,” said Holly, thinking fast. “Mr. Gallaway gave it to me. I just thought—”

  “That it might naturally open a locked oak tree,” Everett finished. “Clever idea, that. What d’you mean, he gave it to you? Like a present?”

  Holly shrugged.

  “He was walking round here too,” said Everett. “I think your mum was missing you.”