Night Gate

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  For more than forty years,...

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Preview of Winter Door

  Acknowledgments

  Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy

  Copyright

  This book is for my mother,

  because all children, out of love,

  try to save their mothers.

  If human lives be,

  for their very brevity, sweet,

  then beast lives are sweeter still….

  For more than forty years, Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.

  Yearling books feature children’s favorite authors and characters, providing dynamic stories of adventure, humor, history, mystery and fantasy.

  Trust Yearling paperbacks to entertain, inspire, and promote the love of reading in all children.

  Rage Winnoway sat under the big, untidy shrub that grew beneath the window of the next-door neighbor’s kitchen. Mr. Walker was curled on her lap, asleep, and Bear lay alongside her. From time to time Rage caught sight of Elle and Billy through the leaves as they romped together. The shrub was a round shape, with gaps where she could hide. Sometimes she pretended that it was a giant tree in the depths of a dark, greenish forest filled with wet, mossy smells. She imagined the whisper of raindrops falling around her, blotting out the babble of thoughts in her mind.

  Today, however, she did not imagine rain. Instead, Rage felt so tense and heavy that a storm might have been gathering in the sky overhead, all boiling gray and churning purple fury.

  Bear gave a snuffling sigh, lifted her misshapen head, and rested the weight of it on Rage’s leg. The huge, loose mouth and pushed-in nose gave the old dog a ferociously ugly appearance, but to Rage she always looked wise and sad, as if she knew too much.

  Elle pushed the branches aside and dropped a soggy green tennis ball at Rage’s feet. Rage reached over Bear to pat the bull terrier. “Poor wooden dog. You don’t think enough about anything to be sad, do you?” That was what her mother had called the sleek tan-and-white dog when she brought her home from the pound: the wooden dog. Elle was so stiff-legged that it seemed she must be made of wood. Sometimes Rage wondered if Elle’s head were made of wood, too. She was terribly brave but not very smart. Most people were afraid of her because bull terriers had been bred to fight one another in pits while men watched and made bets on the winner. Mam always said the men who trained the dogs to fight were the real beasts.

  Rage threw the ball and watched Elle hurtle after it. There was nothing vicious in her nature, despite her long, sharp teeth and hoarse cough of a bark. She wasn’t even the boss of the dogs. Bear was. For all Mr. Walker’s yapping and nipping, Bear had only to look his way to silence him.

  On summer nights Rage and her mother often sat on the back step and watched the dogs, the way other people watched television. They didn’t have a television set. Mam said it was chewing gum for the eyes. She wasn’t like other mothers. She was much younger than most of them and, being very small, looked even younger. Her black hair was short and spiky like a schoolboy’s. She never used makeup, wore her own homemade perfume, and only dressed in black, moss green, and purplish crimson. People seeing Rage and her mam together couldn’t believe they were mother and daughter. “Night and day,” Mam always laughed, and told people that Rage took after her grandmother Reny, who had also been a cream-skinned blonde. The only thing Rage and Mam had in common was their amber eyes. Mam said all the Winnoways had eyes that color, even Grandmother Reny, because she had been a distant cousin to Grandfather. Not that anyone saw Mam’s eyes much, since she always wore dark glasses.

  Rage thought of her mother lying still in a hospital bed, her soul hidden behind her closed eyes all these weeks. But it was only an imaginary picture. Everyone agreed it was better that she didn’t see Mam.

  Water gurgled down the pipe behind the shrub, which meant the tap at the kitchen sink had been turned on.

  At the same instant, down at the far end of the yard, Rage saw a flash of color—orange and molten red, like the embers that glow underneath burning wood in a campfire. Rage squinted and saw it again, this time in the orchard, flying over the ground. Not fire after all, but some kind of animal. Maybe a fox?

  Now it was streaking up the side of a tree. A cat?

  Mr. Walker woke as Rage leaned forward to see better, and gave a suspicious growl. That was enough to set Elle off. She abandoned the ball and began barking wildly, racing down to the end of the yard. Above Rage the kitchen window slid open with a protesting rasp.

  “Now you quiet down, you dogs,” Mrs. Johnson cried in a tremulous voice. “I can’t hear myself think in all that noise!”

  Elle was earnestly sniffing the wind, lifting her head up high to catch hold of any smells that might try to slip by her. She turned toward the orchard, shivering with excitement. Mrs. Johnson’s goat had scaled the brick wall and was trying to reach the upper branches of a fruit tree. Elle put her front paws up on the wall and barked at the goat.

  “Oh, those dogs,” Mrs. Johnson sighed through the window.

  Rage patted the tan Chihuahua in her lap until Mr. Walker settled back to sleep, tucking his little dark snout under his feathery tail.

  “You’re too old for all of this, Rose,” said a younger, sharper voice.

  Rage grimaced. It was Mrs. Somersby from the town. Mrs. Busybody, Rage’s mother called her.

  “We’re neighbors,” Mrs. Johnson was saying.

  Mrs. Somersby made a snorting noise. “Where is the girl now?”

  “Out somewhere by herself, sitting and brooding, I suppose,” Mrs. Johnson answered with another sigh. “She’s been like this ever since the accident, poor little mite.”

  “You mustn’t indulge her. Youngsters should not be allowed to wallow.”

  “Surely it’s natural for her to be upset,” Mrs. Johnson said reproachfully.

  “That girl is slow. I always said so.”

  “Not slow…”

  “But what else can you expect, with the upbringing she’s had? A flighty, irresponsible mother and no father to speak of.”

  “A lot of children have only one parent. I read in a newspaper article that it’s far better to be the child of one good single parent than of two parents who hate one another.”

  “What a child needs is a strong parent. You can hardly call Mary Winnoway that. Look at the way she ran off when she was just fifteen and came crawling back with a child.”

  “Hardly crawling. She came back to nurse her sick father, which is a credit to her, given what he was like. If you ask me, Mary ran away as much to find her brother as to escape her father.”

  “Well, she found someone,” Mrs. Somersby said nastily. “A girl has no business running away like that. It’s different for boys. And what did she have to run away from, anyway? A bit of discipline never hurt anyone. It wasn’t as though her father hit her.”

  “He did worse than hit. He crushed her and everyone around him, though I don’t like to speak ill of the dead. I knew Mary’s mother when she was a girl, and she was like a bright little bird. Adam Winnoway married her, and she lived in his shadow for the rest of her short life. I always feel as though she faded rather than died. After I married my Henry
I came to live here, and I just watched her get paler and quieter every year.”

  Rage shivered. She had no memory of Grandmother Reny, who had died before she was born, but it was a cold thing to imagine a person fading like a blot of disappearing ink.

  “Fanciful rubbish!” Mrs. Somersby snapped. “Reny Winnoway was weak-minded, and so were her children. Rage is the same. She has no idea how to fit in with people. Do you know that she has no friends at school? Not a single one!”

  I do have friends, Rage thought. I have old Bear and Elle and Mr. Walker. I have Billy Thunder. It’s not friends I want. It’s Mam. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “She’s right, Rose.” Mr. Johnson’s crackly voice broke in. “All she has are those damn dogs. Four of them, for heaven’s sake. It’s ridiculous. It was mad, bringing home abandoned strays the way she did. They could turn on you at any time.”

  “Now Henry, you know those dogs are as sweet as pie with Rage.”

  “That mean old dog of her granddaddy’s growls at me every time I walk in my own yard!”

  “I don’t suppose the poor thing had much kindness in its life, with him keeping it chained from daylight till dark. Besides, Bear’s old, and that makes some folk mighty cranky,” Mrs. Johnson said pointedly. “There’s no harm in the dog except for someone who would hurt Rage. All of them are devoted to her, especially that pup of Bear’s. That Billy Thunder.”

  When Mrs. Somersby spoke again, her voice was sulky. “All I’m saying is that the child might just as well be told that her mother is unlikely to wake up and come home. Knowing a hard truth is better than bearing false hope.”

  “Where there is life, there is hope,” Mrs. Johnson said firmly.

  “My sister’s a nurse at the hospital. She said Mary Winnoway will die if she doesn’t snap out of this state and exert some will to heal.”

  Snap, Rage thought, turning the word around in her mind and feeling sick with dreaminess. Snap, crackle, and pop.

  “We’ve done our neighborly best,” Mr. Johnson said piously.

  Rage looked down the yard to where Elle and Billy Thunder were playing. They were barking, but the wind was carrying the noise away from the house now. It was like watching the television with the sound turned down.

  “They’ll have to go, of course,” Mrs. Somersby said.

  “It will break her heart,” Mrs. Johnson sighed.

  “If you ask me, we might as well get rid of them right now and be done with it,” Mr. Johnson said briskly.

  “Maybe we could advertise them in the paper, but I don’t know what good it will do. Someone might take the little dog, and maybe even Billy. For all his size, he’s not much more than a pup, and I never saw a sweeter-natured animal in all my born days. But I don’t know about Bear or Elle. Bear’s too bad-tempered for anyone to want, and Elle is so strong and so aggressively friendly.”

  “If the police find that brother of Mary’s, he can take them,” Mr. Johnson said.

  Rage took a deep, shaking breath. What she had overheard told her what she had already sensed. If they were talking about getting rid of the dogs, time must be running out for her mother. Rage was sure Mam would get better, if only she could find a way to see her. But when she had asked, her words had been brushed aside as if they were a bit of spilled flour.

  Don’t ask, whispered an urgent little voice into Rage’s ear. Just go.

  Rage shook her head automatically. She couldn’t just sneak away without telling anyone and make her way alone through the hills to the hospital in Hopeton. It would take days, and she’d certainly be caught before she got there. She would get into terrible strife. Mam always said to make sure she didn’t cause anyone any trouble.

  But she can’t say anything, the little voice urged. She needs you.

  The thought that her mother could need her scared Rage—that was not how it was supposed to be. But she could not get the urgent voice out of her mind. She needs you. A picture of Mam smiling flashed into her mind, and something in Rage’s chest twisted hard and seemed to tear free.

  She gave a gasp and suddenly felt half suffocated by the shrub, the dogs, the voices inside and outside of her. She pushed Mr. Walker to make him get up and crawled out from under the branches.

  Rage found herself heading for the gate in the fence that led to Winnoway Farm. Mr. Walker ran down the yard to join the other dogs, but Bear followed Rage as she went into her own front yard and up the back step. Fortunately, the homesteads on both properties were close to the fence line that divided them, so it was a short walk. Her hands shook as she used the spare key under the mat to get inside, and they shook harder as she opened the hall cupboard to get her good long coat and her hiking shoes with the rippled soles. She dared not think about what she was doing. It was too frightening. Who would have thought that being bad would feel so dangerous?

  Once she had changed, she went to her bedroom and took her mother’s pink-gold locket out of her jewelry box. She hardly knew why, except Mam cherished it above everything they owned. It had been the last present given to her by her own mother.

  Opening the locket, Rage gazed at the photographs inside. There was one of Grandmother Reny looking sweet and vague, and one of Uncle Samuel, taken not long before he had run away. He had been only a few years older than Rage was now. He had dark, unruly hair like Mam’s and a wild, hurt look on his unsmiling face. Had he been thinking of leaving when the picture was taken? Everyone always said it was different for boys. Perhaps that was why Mam had come back to Winnoway, while Uncle Samuel had never returned. He had written a single letter to Mam, which she kept in her handbag.

  Rage wondered if the precious letter had been burned up in the car crash or if it had been rescued along with the locket. Pushing the locket deep into her coat pocket for safety, she went out the front door and closed it quietly behind her.

  “Maybe they’ll let her keep one of the dogs, though how she’ll choose which, I don’t know.” Mrs. Johnson’s voice floated on the air as Rage and Bear walked down to where the other dogs were playing.

  The dogs stopped when they saw her, wagging their tails and crowding at her, making themselves into a warm, furry barrier. She bit her lip hard. “I have to go and see Mam,” she told them, but saying the words out loud made her feel as if she were too close to a high cliff edge.

  She hesitated and thought about putting the locket back. Billy licked her hand and whined a little. Rage looked into his warm brown eyes and felt like crying. Worry for the dogs was mixed up with fear for Mam. If only there were someone to tell her what to do.

  At that moment the goat stopped eating the fruit tree and jumped down from the brick wall and into Mr. Johnson’s backyard. Seeing the poor, bedraggled thing climb so easily over the barrier seemed like a sign to Rage. After all, she wouldn’t be running away. She was just going to visit her mother in the hospital, and no one had actually forbidden it.

  She pushed through the dogs to the gate, shooing them away. But when she slipped through, they surged past her as if they had been waiting for the chance to escape. Rage stared after them, horrified.

  Opening her mouth to cry out, she realized that she couldn’t, because then Mr. Johnson would come out and the moment for going would be lost. She closed her mouth and the gate, heart beating fast. The dogs would have to come with her. She did not know what she would do with them once they reached Hopeton, but the fact that she would not be making the journey alone lightened her heart.

  They cut across the property alongside Winnoway Farm and kept away from the roads, because that was where the police would go when Mr. Johnson rang them. He would not call the police until he was certain she was gone, and it would take time for him to be certain. Maybe he would even wait until morning.

  “We have to get as far as we can before that,” Rage told the dogs.

  She could see the water glimmering ahead and wondered if the reservoir behind the dam really was bottomless, the way some of the boys at school said. It was important to k
eep in sight of the shoreline, because it would bring her to the little gorge leading into the next valley. It would save hours of climbing, and it led to a track that cross-country skiers used in winter. That would take her all the way to the outskirts of Hopeton, and there were huts along the way where she could sleep.

  The dead trees looked more and more like claws sticking up out of the flat water as the sun fell toward the horizon, and Rage walked faster, spurred by the thought of what the dam would look like at night, under the moon.

  Rage had a sudden vivid memory of Grandfather Adam standing at the fence bordering Winnoway Farm and staring over at the dam with a blank expression that had frightened her with its emptiness. She knew the whole valley had once been Winnoway land. It had been divided between Grandfather Adam and Great-Uncle Peter when their father died.

  “What happened to Great-Uncle Peter?” Rage had asked Mam once, imagining another cold, hard man like Grandfather. Mam had shrugged, saying he had left after the government forced him to sell his land for the dam project. Grandfather Adam had pleaded with his brother to use the government money to buy land in the next valley, but he had refused.

  “Did Grandfather want him to stay?” Rage asked, surprised.

  “I think he wanted him to stay very much,” Mam had answered.

  “Why did Great-Uncle Peter go, then?” Rage was old enough now to know that had been a bad question, because it reminded Mam of her brother running away.

  “He had to do what was right for him,” Mam had answered in a low, sad voice.

  Remembering this, Rage decided that she did not believe people should do what was right for themselves without thinking about what was right for other people as well. No doubt Uncle Samuel had left Winnoway because that was right for him, but his going had not been right for Mam.

  Rage realized she must have missed the opening to the gorge because she was still climbing and she had long passed the end of the reservoir. Now she would have to go to the top of the ridge to get her bearings. It would be a hard climb, but she knew she would be able to see the bleary arc of light given off by Hopeton.