A Kind of Magic: A Three-volume Novel of Eco-magical Realism

cover photos, design and drawings:

© 2011 Emily King

All rights reserved.

© 2011, Milo Barney Books

All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN for ePub: 97809852340-1-0

A Kind of Magic

Table of Contents

Volume 1: A Trick of the Light

Volume 2: Turtle Crossing

Volume 3: ThunderHawk

for JOAN

with thanks for everything

A Trick of the Light

A Kind of Magic Book 1

for Charles

at his request

CHAPTER 1

Silent Wings

It was the most beautiful day of the year, and there was nothing to do.

It was a bright sunny blue-sky day in the middle of a rainy summer. The honey bees and butterflies were scrambling from flower to flower. Even the wasps were too intoxicated with the sweetness of the wild purple phlox to think of stinging anyone.

Griffin was watching one butterfly in particular – a gorgeous tiger swallowtail. A yellow and black, furry stained-glass window, six inches across at least, with ten pale blue spots, five on each wing, like a baby’s toe prints along the bottom of each. That’s how he knew she was a girl.

She was perched on the golden-red pincushion of a coneflower – so close to him he was afraid to cough. Then she sailed off past the zinnias to the huge golden pumpkin blossoms, lying flopped open in the sun like old linen napkins. Her flight was so easy, so silent. You’d think something so big would make a noise: a flutter, a buzz, a flap of wings. But she sailed over the garden fence and into the woods to lay her eggs on the tulip poplar tree, without a sound.

Griffin knew all these facts about her because he’d looked her up in his grandma’s butterfly book. But he knew the butterfly because he’d watched her in the sunny garden – visiting the flowers his mother had planted between the tomato plants and the zucchini, so Grandma would have something bright to look at from her bedroom window.

It was almost too hot to sit in the garden chair now at noon – especially with Griffin’s dog Buster breathing down his neck. Buster liked to be in the garden with Griffin – patrolling for chipmunks and toads – but Griffin sat him up behind him in the garden chair for safekeeping. Of the toads and the chipmunks.

He had just about decided that he qualified for an afternoon soda (it was 12:02) when the phone rang somewhere in the long, one-story house. After some muffle of voices, a call rang out. "Griffin? It’s Cece for you – she’s BORED!"

Now, Cece was Griffin’s second cousin Cecelia – younger by 2 and a half weeks – and her family was renting a house through the woods while her Dad was on a 6-month Coast Guard tour of duty on the Arctic Circle. She was only 10 and 10 months, Griffin was 11 minus 1 month and 5 days. They tried not to let the age difference get in the way of their friendship.

Cecelia’s folks had moved the family here to be near Griffin’s. Since Cece’s mom had given her not one, but two little siblings under the age of 3, her mother’s response to Cece’s boredom was, if she couldn’t be useful, she should be outside.

So the phone call got made, and Griffin and his dog Buster were summoned to make an extraordinary adventure out of an ordinary afternoon.

They didn’t need to talk on the phone. They had a secret meeting place pre-arranged, so no grownups could overhear their plans. They always met at a big flat-topped rock in the diagonal middle of the old field between their houses, now overgrown with hundred-year-old trees. Two stone walls west of the driveway, then one south. You start at the nearest corner, find the 45 degree angle between the two walls, and start walking in as straight a line as the trees allowed.

It was easier than that, though, since there were landmarks: you walked between two big bumps in the old field. Griffin was hoping that they might be burial mounds from the Native tribes that had roamed these woods. His dad thought that they were probably all that were left of the giant roots of some fallen trees, mouldered down to a big lump of clay and rocks and old leaves. Griffin had seen trees knocked over like that, after a hurricane. And, although he was in awe of their ropy framework of twisted arms of roots – sometimes 15 feet high in the air – he still liked his idea better.

Even though he was tempted to dig in the mounds to find the buried remains of a Delaware chief, he didn’t. If he found nothing, then his dreams of ancient tombs was over. And if he really did find something like that, then the woods would become an archaeological treasure instead of just a land preserve, and his days of roaming the woods as lord of the forest would be over. Sometimes it was better just to wonder.

So he clambered over the stone walls, in the same places where the deer had managed to knock over huge rocks to make a path. Hoof tap by hoof tap, the stones had fallen to leave a pathway any forest person could see, clear as a neon sign. Griffin found his corner, where an old log had hollowed out to look like an alligator head. He put himself in the corner, faced right in the middle, and walked toward their meeting rock.

Cecelia had had a morning not so much boring as bad. She was woken up by Bo-bo Baby’s crying, then almost-three-year-old Emma started bawling to get out of her baby-cage. It was vacation, but there was no escape for Cecelia. Mamma needed her help – so she dragged Emma out of her cage, sat her on the potty, threw out her pull-ups, gave her a tee shirt and a bag of pretzel goldfish and turned on the TV.

Cece had a lot of shows she liked, but Emma cried if she couldn’t watch Elmo’s World. Over and over. Cece was okay with that as far as Mr. Noodle. Cece still liked the crazy way he had of moving his neck like a turtle eating a popsicle. But after that she couldn’t take it anymore. She was 10 and three-quarters. She had a life to lead. Somewhere else.

Her last four houses (the ones she could remember) had been in neighborhoods. They’d been surrounded by families with kids around her age, out biking and rollerblading, pushing doll-strollers and bouncing in each other’s backyard trampolines. Here there was no base, no PX, no rec center, no station school. Not even sidewalks. Just paths in the woods.

School was out. She had only gone for a couple of weeks before the end of the year. Not long enough to make any friends among the already life-long best friends of the girls in her new class. Now she was in the middle of three months of big fat nothing. Unless she wanted to go to the supermarket with her Mom and those babies. Again. Not!

Thanks to their cousins’ brilliant idea... Rent the house down the road for the summer, it’s cheap and we’ll be able to give you a hand with the kids!’’ ... here they were, stuck all summer in the woods. At least there was Griffin – who was pretty okay for a boy. At least he wasn’t mean or anything, and he was really happy to show her his" woods.

To him, it was like every rock was a street sign – or maybe a newspaper – with little traces of life as stories to tell. He had told her about growing up here lonely himself, as a little kid with no brothers or sisters or neighbors. How he had wished so hard for someone to play with that he almost believed there was someone, out there in the woods.

When he was a kid, he said, he used to build little huts out of stones and sticks and acorn caps, at the mossy cool bottom of a tree, among the roots; a tiny house with an acorn chimney, stone roof, mossy furniture and front lawn. Even an upturned acorn cap for a birdbath for visiting emerald bottle flies.

But no one ever came. That he could tell. He told Cecelia that once, when he was very sick, he’d heard a voice, different from the crickets and the whirring locusts. It was whispery, and it was calling his name. Griffin. Griiiiifffiiinnn! His mom had said it was just a fever dream. But he wasn’t so sure.

Cecelia stepped out of the kitchen door of their little house. The family that had built it was Dutch, so it had a split door. The top was already open to let in the cool forest breeze. Now she turned the heavy lock-bolt of the bottom half and swung it open. Closing it firmly behind her to keep the babies from following her, she slipped down the cool stepping-stone path into the woods.

Griffin had been worried at first that she would lose her way in the woods. It was almost 200 acres of land preserve – with only the casual paths of the animals still running through what used to be an old camp run by a charity for city kids. They could still find dump sites full of broken dishes – fat and white – rusty milk cans – for some reason an old washing machine. And weirdest of all – the remains of a basketball court with trees growing out of the old blacktop. Cecelia was never quite sure where that was. But Griffin could always find it.

For her to find her way to the meeting rock, Griffin made a trail. In the old days, when his mother was a girl, trails were cleared every year, with blue triangles showing the direction at crossings. But since the ticks had started carrying Lyme disease – and the mosquitoes with West Nile Virus – nobody much came to the land preserve that his mom’s parents and their neighbors had fought so hard to save. Now it was a 200-acre town park. And nobody used it except Griffin and his dog, Buster. And now, Cecelia.

So Griffin made her a trail. He found some red and white curly ribbons in his mom’s wrapping box, already cut in handy lengths. He picked apart each curly bow and walked the trail, tying the white ones on the right and the red ones on the left like lights on buoys in a harbor. He tied them to lower branches of young trees and shrubs on either side of the path from Cecelia’s back door to the meeting rock. Of course, the birds had stolen some of them for nests, Griffin said; at least he thought it must have been them. But by then, Cece had the hang of it. Now she didn’t really need them any more, but they were a nice reminder of how unmean a boy her cousin Griffin could be.

Her path was not so geometrical as Griffin’s. She wound her way through the woods, zigzagging to avoid the backyards of the old neighbors. (It seemed like they were all old.) Then the ribbons stopped.

She had to watch out, and dash across an open field beside old lady Moselle’s driveway. She had big dogs; penned up, but still, you never knew. She was sharp-speaking and bent over like a Grimm’s fairy-tale witch. Griffin’s mom said she’d been responsible for saving the forest, as a fierce conservationist. Cece wasn’t sure what that was, but she never forgot the fierce part.

She looked for the old millstone on its side – a huge rock, perfectly round with a square hole in it – and knew the path to the meeting rock was just to the left. Then Griffin’s ribbons started again. They led off to the left – diagonally ahead through the purple and white phlox, smelling so sweet it made her a little dizzy – and over one crossing of stone walls.

All the while the birds were singing. Well, not singing exactly, more like cheeping and chirping, peeping and screeching – noisily going about their birdy lives. Getting food and feeding their squalling babies. Fighting off attackers or even their own kind if they got too close.

And underneath, the zigzag noise that Griffin said were insects – not just the occasional buzzing bee but a constant rattle-chattering of locusts. Or was it cicadas? And, last night, the katydids had started their argument (Katy did! Katy didn’t!) that meant it was 6 weeks ’til fall, Griffin’s mom said.

And crickets. Her favorite.

Once she had found a bright green cricket in her house in Texas. She made a little mayonnaise-jar home for it, with holes punched in the top. She even named it: ‘Emerald’. But she fed it store lettuce and it died. Her mom said it must have been from the pesticide that the farmer grew the lettuce with. Cece didn’t know why it had to kill her cricket, too.

But here it was all green and living and breathing and chattering away, not at all afraid of people. Not only insects and birds but big animals, too: skunks and opossums, squirrels and chipmunks, woodchucks, deer and wild turkeys. Even coyotes! That was new, Griffin’s mom said. And that they couldn’t let the cat out at night anymore.

Somehow the darkness and the light, the greenness and the brownness of the woods, made Cece think about the scary stuff. But Griffin liked that sort of thing. He was a boy, after all.

Before either of them saw the other, Buster bounced away ahead of Griffin, past the meeting rock, in leaps and bounds over the fallen trees and rotting logs, to greet Cecelia and lead her back, panting with triumph, to Griffin at the rock.

CHAPTER 2

At the Rock

The rock itself was a mystery.

All over the neighborhood, the farmers of two centuries had dug up every rock – and made them into stone walls to mark the edges of their square fields. The area was so rocky it was named Rockland. One old Dutch farmer, who’d built especially huge stone walls, was asked what he had dug up all the rocks for. His answer: I vas looking for de soil.

The rocks went much further back than that, of course. Back to the retreat of the last Ice Age millions of years ago, when the melting glacier that covered North America left behind millions of tons of – you guessed it – rocks.

But here’s the mystery. Those old Dutch and English farmers had worked back-breakingly hard. They hadn’t left a large rock anywhere, except in the stone walls. So why was there this huge, flat-topped boulder in the middle of the old field, a field now overgrown with 80-year-old trees?

Griffin’s Dad figured it was because it couldn’t be budged by a mule. Or a team of horses. Or a team of oxen. He figured it wasn’t really a boulder at all – but the tip of the hilltop itself. Pure bedrock, connected right all the way down to the continental shelf. Or maybe to the center of the earth.

No Dutch farmer was going to move it – and nobody since then had wanted to. It was a great hunk of quiet gray stone, with a bit of blue-gray lichen on the north side radiating out like a pale, flat flower.

Griffin liked to imagine the Lenapes – the local Native people – leaving offerings to the Spirits here. And he was proud that, whatever else had changed, the rock stayed put, like an anchor to the rest of the planet.

His leaf-brown hand was resting on top of the rock when Cece caught up with Buster, who lay down in a flop on the cool moss on the shady side of the stone, his job well done.

Hey, Cees. Griffin raised one boy-paw in a flat sort of way. His dark curls were a little plastered to his forehead and neck with the heat. He couldn’t wait for the Mohawk his parents said he could get next year at sleep-away camp. This year they had thought it might seem a little extreme to his cousins, so he was stuck with his embarrassingly girlie curls.

Cecelia brushed the sweaty wisps back onto her braids. Her hair was almost white in the summer, and so fine it wouldn’t stay in its tight German braids no matter how hard her mother tried. She was as pale as Griffin was dark – next to him she seemed to glow in the woods like a silver-gray Indian pipe or an overnight mushroom.

Hey there, Griff! Whatcha got? Cecelia pointed to the little box in Griffin’s hand. He held out a little black plastic box about 5 inches by 3 by 2.

It’s an Instamatic. Griff said it with a half-faced grin.

An Insta-what? What’s it do? Stop time? Cecelia joshed.

Sort of... Griffin tried to figure out how. It captures moments of time, then you have to wait a couple of days to see what you got.

"That’s the weirdest time machine I ever heard of. You mean it takes more time than real life?"

Yup. Griffin grinned with both sides of his mouth now. It’s an old-fashioned camera.

Camera? Where’s the screen? The silver knobs and doodads? The expandable zoom lens thingy?

Griffin stopped grinning. Dad says I can’t use the digital camera ’til he’s sees I won’t break this one.