When Michael dashed into his back garden and opened the shed door, the shed was empty.
Well, not entirely empty. The lawnmower was there, as were assorted gardening shears, spades and shovels, a bag of mulch, a bale of chicken wire, two cans of paint, the electric hedge trimmer, a push broom, his father's toolbox, collections of nuts, bolts, screws and nails of various sizes and with varying degrees of rust, two labeled cardboard boxes and a pile of small tree branches that Mr. Scott must have cleaned up after the recent storm. What were not there, it was clear to Michael, were the four owners of the four voices that had spoken to him the night before.
Michael had been breathless when he had barged through the garden gate, partly from having run home, mostly from anticipation. The emotion he felt was stronger than on his birthday, more than on Christmas morning, even. True, he wasn't about to open any presents, but he was about to open something much more exciting: the rest of his life. Michael was sure that after he opened the door to the garden shed, his life would change for forever.
As he stood looking into the shed, however, it was apparent that his life wasn't changing for forever just yet. There was not a goblin to be seen, which Michael thought a bit unfair. Stubbornly, he stood waiting for the shed to show him goblins, but the shed showed him tools, mulch, wire and a lawnmower. It was just an ordinary garden shed, like any other garden shed. It didn't rock, and it didn't whisper and rustle and bump, and it didn't speak to him. It stood there at the bottom of the garden and was a shed. Suddenly Michael hated the shed. He thought about kicking it, or at least slamming the door. Before he could, he heard his sister, Willow, approach behind him.
"What are you looking at?" she asked.
"I don't know," Michael answered truthfully.
Willow's long blonde hair peeked around Michael's left side. She didn't need to peek around him, actually, because she was almost as tall as he was, even though she was two years younger. Michael wanted to be much taller, and he was sensitive about the fact that he wasn't, so she was careful not to behave tall, unless she wanted to anger him, which she only did when he was bossy. Just now he wasn't being bossy, just rude, so she peeked around him.
"Is it something I can see?" she asked. She couldn't see anything in the shed that didn't belong there.
"I don't think so," Michael replied.
"Is it something I want to see?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know much, do you?"
Michael turned to look at her. He wanted to be angry with her, but she was right, he didn't know much. Still, the question sort of implied that he was stupid, so he felt he had to have a good answer, which he didn't, so he just looked at her like she was being meddlesome, which he felt she was, a bit.
She was still dressed in her school uniform, a grey cardigan over a white blouse and a blue skirt. As school uniforms go, it wasn't bad, but she hated it, as Michael hated his white shirt and blue shorts. Willow's uniform hung loose on her, revealing how different she looked from most girls her age, as only clothing that was designed to make everyone look the same could make obvious. Her elbows jutted far out from her sleeves, and her knees were too far below her skirt and too high above her stockings, no matter how low she kept her hemline and how high she pulled up her stockings. The shoulders of her cardigan hung limply from her narrow shoulders, and her blouse draped over her torso like curtains in front of a window. The truth was, her being almost as tall as Michael bothered her more than it bothered Michael.
What were most remarkable about Willow, though, were her eyes. It wasn't that they were bright green, which they were. It wasn't that they were large and clear, which they were. It was that they always made her look as though she was thinking important, adult thoughts. Michael loved that about Willow, because she never seemed like a little sister to him--well, almost never. He may have envied that about her, too, just a little.
Her eyes regarded him as he tried to think of something important to say about the shed. Willow didn't give him time.
"Do you want to play a game?" she asked.
He didn't, really, but he did want to get away from the shed for a bit. Maybe staring at it wasn't what it needed to make it interesting again. Maybe it needed to be ignored.
"Yeah," he said, "What do you want to play?"
"Kidnapping," Willow said, in the matter-of-fact way she always spoke. She always spoke like her mind was always made up. "You'll be kidnapped and I'll rescue you."
This seemed all right to Michael. They pretty much shared who would be kidnapped and who would rescue whom when they played. It was a sort of cross between playing make believe and playing hide-and-go-seek. Sometimes it was more fun to hide, and sometimes it was more fun to seek. Today he felt like hiding. It would give him time to think.
"Who shall we be?" Willow asked. Michael could tell by the way she asked that she already knew who she wanted to be, and since he hadn't given it any thought and she obviously had, he confessed that he had no preference.
"You'll be Tarzan," she said, "And I'll be Jane."
Michael thought about this for a moment.
"Jane never rescued Tarzan," he said, and he was sure he was right.
"She can."
"Yeah, she can, but she doesn't."
"She does now." They looked at each other, while Michael tried to decide whether it was allowed for Jane to rescue Tarzan. "Or you can be a chimpanzee," Willow said. Michael most certainly did not want to be a chimpanzee, but the thought was funny, so he laughed.
"Okay," he said, "I'll be Tarzan, and you can rescue me."
Willow often won disputes like this, because she always had an answer like "You can be a chimpanzee" that Michael couldn't argue with. She had a knack.
Now that they had decided on the game, it was time to play. First, though, they needed to change out of their school uniforms. Their mother didn't yell at them often, but she yelled loudly when they forgot to change into their normal clothes after they came home from school. Michael was guilty more often than his sister was, but even Willow's uncanny ability to avoid people's anger could not protect her from their mother when Mrs. Scott had to get grass stains out of a school uniform. The two of them ran up the slate path to the kitchen door, Michael flinging it open and Willow slamming it shut behind them. Their school satchels thumped the kitchen furniture as brother and sister raced to the stairs and tramped on each stair on the way up the staircase.
Mrs. Scott's head poked out of the parlor and up the stairs.
"When you two elephants have dropped off my children," she said, "Please tell them to hang up their clothes properly."
"Yes Mum," they replied in tandem.
It was a matter of seconds before they were speeding back down the stairs. Mrs. Scott was waiting at the bottom. Her face was not angry, but it wasn't smiling either.
"Children," she said sternly, "Company."
That was all she needed to say to achieve two goals at the same time. First, it slowed Michael and Willow to a fast walk. Second, it kept them away from the parlor, which they knew was full of older women who loved to coo over them and prod them and ask them what they had learned that day in school. It was an unspoken threat that if they did not behave, they would be brought into the parlor to face the women and their unbearable affections. Good behavior meant freedom in the back garden. Good behavior at this point consisted of being quiet. They were at their quietest as they both pecked their mother on the cheek and slipped silently down the hall to the back of the house, where they opened and shut the kitchen door with extraordinary care. Both Michael and Willow sighed with relief as they walked down to the back of the garden, both subconsciously looking over their shoulders as if afraid the women would all come rushing out of the house and smother them with attention. Neither spoke until they had put the safe distance of the full depth of the house and the length of the garden between them and their mother's guests.
"Not again!" was all Michael said.
"That's the third time this week!" Willow complained.
"What do they have to say that takes three times in a week to say?"
"Shall we go and find out?"
"No way! There's nothing they could say to me that could be worth going into that room!"
"We wouldn't have to go in the room," Willow said. There was a mischievous gleam in her eye.
"I'm not going in that house," Michael said.
"We wouldn't have to go in the house."
"If you think I'm sitting in the bushes under the window, you're nutty," Michael said, "Look, I'll just ask Dad tonight. He'll skip all the boring stuff."
"It might not be boring."
But it would be, and they both knew so. The women in the parlor were the village busybodies, the women on the planning board, or worse, the women with husbands on the board. Not only did they make it their lives' business to run everybody else's lives, they always found the most roundabout, time-consuming method, at least as far as Michael and Willow could tell. Worse, they used the most roundabout, time-consuming forms of expression to say anything. Mrs. Scott had once explained that they were following "forms" and "procedures." Michael had made a comment about the size of their forms and how they were sitting on their procedures. He had been forced to spend the rest of the day in his bedroom, which he thought particularly unfair, since when he overheard his mother telling his father the story later, the two of them had laughed enthusiastically. He had learned, though, not to discuss the women on the planning board with his mother.
"I tell you what," Michael suggested, "You go to the front of the house and listen for a minute. If you hear anything interesting, come and tell me. If you don't, I'll be hiding, and you can find me and rescue me."
Willow mulled this over for a moment, then nodded her head seriously.
"Don't you worry, Tarzan," she said, "I'm off to London now, to get some information from the Queen, but I'll be back long before the Zulus can harm you."
Michael knew the Zulus didn't live in the jungle, but he wasn't sure where they lived exactly, so he didn't correct his sister, who was already skipping up the garden, humming navy music and using her arms as sails to guide her over the ocean.
"Count to at least one hundred," he called. He was confident that counting to one hundred would be much more interesting than anything Willow might hear from the parlor. As far as hiding, he didn't really need her to count that long. He knew exactly where he was going. As soon as Willow was through the garden gate at the side of the house, he pulled open the door to the shed and popped through. He had done this so many times that he had no trouble closing the latch from the inside. He stood listening at the door, waiting to hear his sister opening the garden gate.
Of course, the shed was a terrible hiding place. It was the first place his sister would look when she came back. That wasn't Michael's motive for choosing it. Michael's reason for choosing the shed was investigation. With Willow listening at the parlor window, he had time to rummage about. It was early afternoon, so with plenty of gaps to let in light, the interior of the shed was not very dark. From earlier, he knew what was in the shed, or more to the point, he knew what wasn't in the shed, or even more to the point, who were not in the shed. He knew his visitors from the previous night (he thought of them now as visitors) had gone. They were not what he was looking for.
What he was looking for were clues that they had really been there. Perhaps there were footprints in the dust. There might be fingerprints on the door. One of them might have dropped something, a handkerchief, a pipe, a toothpick. He had no idea what they might have dropped, but they must have dropped something. In an adventure, things were always dropped, things were always taken, things were always left behind. Mysteries always had clues.
The first thing to do was to move that bundle of sticks. They were branches, really, and quite large ones. Michael wondered why his father had left them in the shed. He wondered where is father had gotten them. They didn't look like branches from any of the trees in their garden. He half-picked up an armful. They were heavy. Tossing them to the back of the shed was not an option. He put them back down with the others, then gave the whole lot a good push, to try and force them back behind the lawn mower. They tumbled over, raising a cloud of sawdust and dirt. Michael's eyes stung and watered, and he coughed. He turned and reached blindly for the door latch. He fumbled at the latch, and the door to the shed opened. The combination of dust and sudden bright sunlight made his nose tickle, and he let out a great sneeze.
"Wood bless," said a voice behind him, from inside the shed.
"Shhh!" hissed someone else.
" 'Shhh!' yourself!" the first voice replied.