911, but suddenly the phone jumped from his hand. It flew through the air and cracked against the philosopher bust, as if it had been snatched up by a powerful gust of wind. When Dr Walker retrieved it, it wouldn’t turn on.
“Dad, who was it?” Brendan called, but instead of his father, Dahlia Kristoff stepped in. He froze.
“My God,” Mrs Walker said, “what are you doing here? How dare you barge into our home—”
“How dare you consider this your home?” Dahlia shrieked, and then the transformation began.
Brendan backed up against the driftwood-legged coffee table, watching it all in slow motion. It was like IMAX 3-D but way better (and way worse). The old crone threw her hands up. Just as he’d suspected, her right hand ended in a knobby stump. Dahlia arched her back, stretching, stretching, as if to crack the bones in her spine, and then two grey wings sprang from the neck of her dress!
Brendan was terrified, stunned, and amazed all at once. His world had just got a lot bigger. But all he could think was: I’m not gonna let this freak hurt me. And I’m not gonna let her hurt my family.
Dahlia Kristoff’s wings unfurled behind her to spread across the room. They weren’t like angel wings; they were dusty and greasy-looking, filling the air with the stench of sulphurous rot.
“Mum, what’s happening?” Eleanor cried.
“I don’t know, honey,” Mrs Walker said, grabbing her youngest with one hand and the cross around her neck with the other. Dahlia laughed – a breathy cackle, a skeleton’s laugh.
“Get out!” Dr Walker yelled, crashing into the room, but the crone swung a wing and slammed him across the back, knocking him into the piano with a cacophonous dong. On TV, Groucho Marx slid down a fireman’s pole.
Brendan tried to run for a weapon, but now Dahlia was flapping her wings, whipping the air up in the house, keeping him off balance. He stared at her. Something horrible was happening to her face. The fine blue veins under her old pale skin, which had been notable to begin with, rose to the surface, bulging as her wings beat. Soon they were joined by her red arteries, protruding from her face like lines of bark on a tree. Brendan thought she might explode and drench them all in blood.
“You!” Dahlia said, turning to Cordelia. “You stole from my library!”
“I was just – borrowing—” A gust of wind knocked Cordelia against a wall. The contents of the room were swirling in a spiral now – a pizza box, cups of soda, a Pino’s menu, the TV remote. Brendan had to clutch the couch to stay upright.
“For the honour of my father!” Dahlia Kristoff howled. “For all the evil done upon him by the Walkers! For the disturbance of the great book! For the craven consultation with Dr Hayes! For Denver Kristoff, who lives again as he lives always! A life for a life, the Wind Witch has spoken, let a page torn be a page reborn!”
Slam! The shutters closed on the living-room windows. Brendan heard them slam in the kitchen and library too. Then the glass coffee table rose and hurled towards him. He ducked, but it spun towards Mrs Walker. She was kneeling, praying. It smacked her in the head.
“Mum!” Brendan yelled. His mother hit the floor, covered in broken glass, bleeding from her forehead.
“Get down!” Dr Walker screamed to his children as he lunged towards his wife. But the Chester chair got him – the same one he’d been sleeping in that afternoon – hitting his skull with a nauseating crack. He slumped over. For some reason Brendan flashed to his mother asking Diane Dobson Is the furniture for sale? and Diane saying Everything’s for sale.
The Wind Witch – that’s what she had called herself; the Wind Witch has spoken – blew Mr and Mrs Walker into a corner. They lay unconscious against each other. Brendan, Cordelia and Eleanor were far away from them, by the piano.
The foundation of Kristoff House began to shake.
Brendan wondered if it would tip over and slide into the ocean. The television tilted up and flew at him, the Marx Brothers looking demonic until the cord came out of the wall and they disappeared. The TV shattered on the wall behind him, sending shards of plastic and LCD whirling around – “Nell, close your eyes!”
Brendan’s younger sister was curled into a ball. Books were flying into the room now from the library, clobbering Brendan and his sisters, attacking like those terrible birds in that Hitchcock movie Brendan had seen once. Each time a book neared him, its pages open and fluttering, he heard voices inside, gibbering in aged accents, demanding to be released.
“Deal!” Brendan called. All he cared about was surviving – and making sure his family survived. His parents were unconscious on the other side of the room; he couldn’t help them at this moment. But I’m supposed to protect my sisters.
He couldn’t see Cordelia. The wind was all-consuming; the debris blinded him to everything. He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed them, and forced them open. Right in front of him floated three books, leather volumes that suddenly seemed to grow, expanding from hardcover-size to almanac-size to encyclopedia-size. Impossible!
Brendan screamed, but he could no longer hear himself, and then he saw that the room was larger, the ceiling now twenty metres from the floor and rising every second, as if the house were warping and stretching. And then, while the Wind Witch rose to the ceiling and stared down from a towering height, like an avenging angel sent by the wrong side, one last thing entered the room: the bookshelves from the library. Massive, sickeningly heavy even without the books, they slid in one after another, levitating higher and higher, swirling to an apex above and crashing down – and then all was black and silent.
Brendan came to in a pile of rubble that used to be his new living room. He struggled out from under the heavy shelving that lay on top of him and checked himself for crippling injuries. He felt like he’d been put in a bag of rocks and shaken, but aside from cuts and bruises he was OK.
He looked around the living room. It was like the pictures he’d seen of that horrible tsunami in Japan, where a slew of debris was thrown across the land. What used to be individual chairs and tables and books was now a foot-deep pile of scrap. The shutters were still closed.
“Mum?” Brendan called. “Dad?”
He saw part of the pile move. It looked like a mound with an earthworm underneath. Brendan ran over as Cordelia reached an arm up and dragged herself out.
“Deal! Are you OK?” Brendan asked.
“I think… I blacked out. What about you?”
“I blacked out too… after a lot of insane stuff. These books grew in front of me – they were massive – and then that… I don’t want to say her name…”
“Witch. Wind Witch,” said Cordelia. “That’s what Dahlia called herself.”
“Right, fine. That Wind Witch flew up to the ceiling and knocked me out. Where are Mum and Dad?”
Cordelia’s eyes got very big. She started to call desperately: “Mum! Dad!”
Brendan joined in: “Mum! Please!
