At exactly that moment—as the Lady Premiere and the alchemist were staggering toward them, leaning on each other, and Augusta was running toward the pond with her shoelaces on fire, screaming, and the old woman was riding the policeman’s back as though he were a pony, and beating him with her cane to make him go faster—the house gave an enormous shudder, and with a tremendous rolling crack collapsed in on itself.
The walls came down. Wood turned to smoke and ash. The contents of the little wooden box were released, and drifted upward on tendrils of wind and air—upward and outward, over the sloping hill, and down toward the slate-gray water of the pond—and to the velvet-soft ground beneath the willow tree, where they should have been all along.
Somehow, Liesl knew. She felt that the ashes had been returned, and as the last recognizable part of her old home was consumed in flame, she began to cry. But she was not sad; she was filled with joy and relief.
After all that, she had done what she had set out to do. She had brought her father home so he could rest.
Po and Will looked at each other helplessly. The single tear Liesl had shed in the hills had been bad enough, they both thought. This display of emotion was quite beyond the both of them.
It was Mo who squatted down beside Liesl and began to comfort her. “There, there.” He patted her shoulder heavily. “It’s going to be okay.”
Liesl could not explain that she was crying mostly out of happiness, so instead she just nodded.
Augusta charged into the shallows of the pond, skirts hitched up to her knees, where her shoelaces were at last extinguished. She let out a loud howl of satisfaction and sloshed back up to the grass, where she collapsed ungracefully onto her rump. The sight of the ghosts had so unnerved her that she had temporarily forgotten about her stepdaughter. She whipped out a handkerchief and began mopping her face, repeatedly muttering, “Mercy. Mercy.”
The old woman and the policeman had reached the pond as well, and the old woman had dismounted. Now that the fire was smoldering far behind them, and the house no more than a black, smoking pile of soot, the old woman felt able to express her outrage.
“Well, I never!” She gesticulated wildly in the air with her cane. “In all my life! It ought to be illegal! I’ll take it up with the judge!” Without saying so directly, she made it clear that she was referring to magic; and fire; and ghosts; and the whole business.
The Lady Premiere’s head was filled with visions of power. She imagined an army of ghosts; with it she could take over the whole world!
“Again,” she croaked to the alchemist. “I want to see them again. I want you to call up the ghosts!”
“H-here?” the alchemist stammered. Nobody had been more staggered by the ghosts’ appearance than he. Was it possible—conceivable—that he had, in fact, performed the Great Magic? It must be so! And yet he had done nothing out of the ordinary but wish for the magic to occur and the ghosts to appear.
An idea, a pleasurable thought, began winking in the alchemist’s brain. Perhaps he was even more powerful than he had ever known.
“Here and now.” The Lady Premiere was very pale, but her eyes glowed like stars. She looked like someone in the grip of a very high fever. “I must know. I must be sure.”
“You can’t!” the old woman spluttered. “You won’t! It’s an outrage!”
Nobody bothered to answer her. An uneasy hush fell over the assembled group. Liesl and Will knew that the ghosts had come through the door Po had opened—Po had told them so—but still, they couldn’t help but feel as though something great was about to occur. Unconsciously, they leaned forward, keeping their eyes locked on the alchemist.
And indeed, there did seem to be some kind of magical, shifting quality to the air. Even the alchemist felt it: a power growing and swelling around him.
Of course, what he could not know—what none of them knew—was that the magic was there. It was everywhere, unseen, shimmering, waiting to be called up. It was floating on the wind and skimming over the hard, dry earth; it was hanging like a curtain just beyond the visible world.
The alchemist was not sure how he had called up the ghosts in the first place, so he did not know exactly what to do to raise them again. He took a deep breath and spoke out the words to the magic: “The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again.”
His voice rolled and echoed in the silence. For a moment, no one spoke.
Then the Lady Premiere growled, “Nothing’s happening.”
The alchemist giggled nervously. “I don’t know what could have possibly—”
Liesl hushed him. “Look!” she cried out. “Something is happening.”
She was right. Something was happening. That unseen curtain of magic draped everywhere and over everything all at once—that fine, invisible layer—became visible for one white-hot second. The air appeared suddenly to take on the quality of a rainbow, layered with color after color. Will gasped; Liesl cried out; the old woman made the sign of the cross.
Then the earth began to shake.
“What’s happening?” shrieked Augusta.
The alchemist and the Lady Premiere were thrown off their feet. The alchemist landed on top of the Lady and became entangled in her fur.
“Get off me!” she screamed, kicking at him.