SWNOVELS Chapter 16
It was nearly midsummer. The days were long and the nights were short. Mia liked to leave her curtains open when she went to bed so that when she woke up in the morning her room was filled with light. But today it wasn’t the rising sun that woke her, it was something else that startled Mia into wakefulness. She heard a sound and opened her eyes and caught sight of something spinning on her bedroom floorboards. She lifted her head to see more clearly. In the dawn light it looked like a wooden disc, the magpie talisman. Eventually it lost momentum, wobbled and fell flat. She sat up trying to make sense of what she’d seen.
Her eyes drifted to her table, the magpie token that she and Safi had found was exactly where she’d left it the night before. If the token was on her table what was that on the floor? As she sat up she noticed other tokens on her bedroom floor. She counted them. One, two, three and the one she’d seen spinning made four.
Mia moved to the edge of her bed and stared at the four tokens on the floor. Everything was silent. Mia was confused. The air in her room bristled momentarily as if energized by an electrical current and then gave way to a cool morning chill. Mia felt her heart pounding. She wanted to call her Nan, she opened her mouth but no words came out.
The birds singing outside brought Mia to her senses. She pulled back the covers and stepped out of bed. Kneeling down she gazed at each of the discs. They were roughly the same size and shape as the one she and Safi had found by the willows. On the side facing up, each was carved with a picture of a bird, a magpie. They were all similar but not quite the same, as if each were made by a different person. ‘By a different boy…’ Mia whispered out loud. She slowly turned over one of the tokens. Her hand was shaking. On the other side was the initial ‘D’. She lay it back on the floor with the letter side up. ‘Dennis Gregory’, she said. Then she turned over the other tokens one by one.
As she turned each one over she said the name of the boy whose initial was displayed. ‘Paul Marshall, Colin Keyes, Gerald Manders’. She stretched up to her table and took the original token and placed it on her bedroom floor with the others. ‘…Tommy Bassett.’ Mia stared at the tokens. What did they mean? Where had they come from and why her?
Suddenly the whole room was filled with a flash of light and an explosive clap of thunder shook the house. Mia was startled and looked up, a few gentle spots of rain tapped against her window. Then out of nowhere the heaviest of downpours fell from the sky. The rain turned to hail and large marbles of ice hammered against the glass. Mia thought it would break her window. She stood up and looked out across the field. In the distance she could just make out a figure walking away from the cottages. She held her breath. It stopped and stood still for a moment as if whoever it was knew Mia was watching. And then slowly, very slowly it turned around.
Mia pressed her face against the window but the heavy rain made it difficult to see and she wondered if it was just her imagination. There was so much that she didn’t understand. She picked up one of the five magpie tokens. It was as real as her hairbrush. She tried to understand where they could have come from. Was it magic? Was it a ghost? She put the tokens in her old pencil case and put it into her back pack. She had to show Safi.