The Changeling Read online

  Even in the dim light, it was obvious that the person standing so quietly just inside the grove was small, much too small. When she moved forward into the grove, Martha could tell for sure that it was a very little girl. A little girl with long dark hair in heavy braids and thin legs under a short skirt.

  It was Ivy. It had to be. But not a sixteen-year-old Ivy. Not even the Ivy Martha had last seen over two years before. This little girl seemed, unbelievably, to be the Ivy of years and years ago.

  Crazy impossible explanations flashed through Martha’s mind. She sat motionless, staring, with both hands pressed against her mouth, while the shadowy figure stood still, too, with its face turned toward Martha. After an endless time it moved again, forward, and a small quavering voice said, “Martha? Are you Martha?”

  Martha jumped to her feet, laughing with relief.

  “Josie!” she shouted. “It’s Josie.”

  “Are you Martha?” Josie asked again.

  “Yes,” Martha said, laughing. “Yes. Don’t you know me, Josie?” She ran to Josie and hugged her, but Josie pulled away, staring.

  “You look different,” she said.

  “So do you,” Martha said. “I thought you were—I hardly knew you at first. You look just like Ivy.”

  Josie smiled at that. “I know it,” she said. “I am just like Ivy.”

  The night wind was rising now, and suddenly Martha began to shiver. “Why are you here alone, Josie?” she asked. “Where’s Ivy?”

  Josie’s smile drooped. “She’s gone away,” she said. “She’s gone to live in New York.”

  It was as if a rock, dropped from a great height, had crashed through Martha, landing with a sickening thud somewhere near the bottom of her stomach.

  “New York,” she said, almost angrily. “She can’t go live in New York. She’s not even sixteen yet. How could she go to New York?”

  Josie looked startled at Martha’s reaction, but after a moment she nodded again, firmly. “She did,” she said. “She went to learn to be a ballet dancer. See, Aunt Evaline died, and we went to Harley’s Crossing because my dad thought that Aunt Evaline was going to give her house and everything to Ivy, and then he could have some of it. But Aunt Evaline’s house was sold already, and the money was just for Ivy to go to dancing school. Nobody else could have any of it for anything.”

  Martha could only nod, struggling against a hot lump in her throat and burning eyes.

  “My dad was awful mad,” Josie said, looking more cheerful.

  “I’ll bet,” Martha said with a weak giggle. But the giggle was a mistake. Somehow it made a crack in Martha’s defenses, and the tears broke through. She turned her back on Josie and walked away. At the edge of the stage she sat down with her face in her hands. She cried for quite a while before she realized that Josie was sitting beside her. She tried to smile at Josie, and then she cried again because she saw that Josie cried the way Ivy used to—silently and without real tears—only with great liquid eyes and wet satin eyelashes.

  Finally Josie said, “Ivy says that as soon as she’s eighteen, she’s going to get her own place to live and I can go live with her. She has to stay with some people Aunt Evaline knew until then. But as soon as she’s eighteen, she’s going to send for me. Maybe you can go, too.”

  Martha sighed and smiled at Josie, but she didn’t wipe her face. She didn’t want to because the tears were for Ivy, and they had been very real and painful.

  “Maybe I can,” she told Josie. “Anyway, it’s great that Ivy’s getting to go to ballet school. It’s what she wanted more than anything.”

  Josie nodded. Suddenly she looked around the grove uneasily. “I have to go,” she said. “It’s almost dark. I have to get home before it’s too dark. Good-by.” She turned to go and then turned back. “Wait! I almost forgot. I have a letter Ivy wrote for you. She told me to put it in the secret box. That’s why I came here—to put it in the secret box.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled envelope.

  “The secret box is right here,” Martha said. “I was looking at it just before you came.”

  “Well, I guess I don’t have to put it there, since you’re already here,” Josie said. She shoved the letter into Martha’s hand, hugged her so quickly that Martha barely had time to hug her back, and turned and ran.

  The darkness was almost complete, and Martha could barely make out her name written in large letters on the envelope. She started for home, but after a few steps she stopped. Going back for the secret box reminded her of the candles and matches that it held, so she took it instead to the bench at the back of the stage. The first two matches wouldn’t strike, but the third one did; and spreading the letter on her knees, she began to read.

  Dear Martha,

  Tomorrow I’ll be in New York, and DANCING, the way I’ve always wanted to. Aunt Evaline did it all before she died. I’ll be living with the people Mrs. W., my old teacher, used to know.

  I got the letters you wrote to me a long time after you wrote them, but they were good letters and I was glad to know that they found out that we didn’t do it. I wanted to write to you but I couldn’t then, and I wanted to come to Rosewood to see you before New York, but there wasn’t time.

  Josie will deliver this letter, and I told her to look for you sometimes in Bent Oaks. I hope you still go there. And I hope you can look after Josie a little until I’m old enough to have her come stay with me.

  I’ll write to you, hundreds of letters, when I get to New York.

  Love,

  Ivy

  P.S. About what I said the day I went away—about changelings and everything. I guess you know already I didn’t mean it. I know now I was right about being a changeling. I had to be. But lots of people are changelings, really. You might be one yourself, Martha Abbott. I wouldn’t be surprised.

  LOVE—LOVE—LOVE ivy

  Martha folded the letter and put it with the candle and matches back into the secret box. Then she climbed up to the hiding place and put the box away. On the way back down, Martha stopped on the ledge above the cave.

  From the ledge Martha could see way down over Rosewood Manor Estates where the lights were on, now, in most of the houses. The lights were in patterns, square and uniform, window-shaped, and every lighted yard was neatly framed in a dark border of hedge or fence. Around each block the streets made wider boundaries, studded with street lamps like planned and patterned electric stars, for a planned and patterned world.

  Further up the hill the lights ended, except for a glow from a strange orange moon that sat just on the edge of the far hills and cast vague restless moon-shadows behind every tree and bush. Up there, near the top of the hill, the wind seemed warmer, but much stronger. It rushed in battering gusts against Martha’s face and sent her hair flying and whipping behind her head. She raised her face, liking the feel of it. Liking the wild push and pull of the darkness that flowed around her.

  After a while she started smiling. “You know what, Martha Abbott?” she said out loud. “I wouldn’t be surprised, either.”

  A Biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Zilpha Keatley Snyder (b. 1927) is the three-time Newbery Honor–winning author of classic children’s novels such as The Egypt Game, The Headless Cupid, and The Witches of Worm. Her adventure and fantasy stories are beloved by many generations.

  Snyder was born in Lemoore, California, in 1927. Her father, William Keatley, worked for Shell Oil, but as a would-be rancher he and his family always lived on a small farm. Snyder’s parents were both storytellers, and their tales often kept their children entertained during quiet evenings at home.

  Snyder began reading and telling stories of her own at an early age. By the time she was four years old she was able to read novels and newspapers intended for adults. When she wasn’t reading, she was making up and embellishing stories. When she was eight, Snyder decided that she would be a writer—a profession in which embellishment and imagination were accepted and rewarded.

>   Snyder’s adolescent years were made more difficult by her studious country upbringing and by the fact that she had been advanced a grade when she started school. As other girls were going to dances and discovering boys, Snyder retreated into books. The stories transported her from her small room to a larger, remarkable universe.

  At Whittier College, Zilpha Keatley Snyder met her future husband, Larry Snyder. After graduation, she began teaching upper-level elementary classes. Snyder taught for nine years, including three years as a master teacher for the University of California, Berkeley. The classroom experience gave Snyder a fresh appreciation of the interests and capabilities of preteens.

  As she continued her teaching career, Snyder gained more free time. She began writing at night, after teaching during the day; her husband helped by typing out her manuscripts. After finishing her first novel, she sent it to a publisher. It was accepted on her first try. That book, Season of Ponies, was published in 1964.

  In 1967, her fourth novel, The Egypt Game, won the Newbery Honor for excellence in children’s literature. Snyder went on to win that honor two more times, for her novels The Headless Cupid and The Witches of Worm. The Headless Cupid introduced the Stanley family, a clan she revisited three more times over her career.

  Snyder’s The Changeling (1970), in which two young girls invent a fantasy world dominated by trees, became the inspiration for her 1974 fantasy series, the Green Sky Trilogy. Snyder completed that series by writing a computer game sequel called Below the Root. The game went on to earn cult classic status.

  Over the almost fifty years of her career, Snyder has written about topics as diverse as time-traveling ghosts, serenading gargoyles, and adoption at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, she lives with her husband in Mill Valley, California. When not writing, Snyder enjoys reading and traveling.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved © 1970, 2004 by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  978-1-4532-7197-1

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  EBOOKS BY ZILPHA KEATLEY SNYDER

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