Shining On by Lois Lowry

Must say, they've done a good job.” Sadie sniffed, her nose wrinkling. “Pity they couldn't have done something about the cats.”
    “Perhaps they come with the house.”
    They both laughed, although Jules's words were truer than she knew.
    It was like the old lady had just stepped out. The hand-painted signs were still there. An old raincoat hung in petrified folds; umbrellas, their cloth tattered like crows' feathers, rusted in a worm-eaten stand; a pair of perished wellington boots lay keeled over in the corner, as if they had tired of waiting for an owner who had walked out years ago and never come back. Pots of geraniums and pelargonium were ranged along the windowsill: a jungle of writhing stems and straggly blooms raining the last of their red petals like showers of blood. They filled the stuffy space with their peppery, lemony scent, and behind that was a strong smell of cats.
    “You don't have to come round with me.” Sadie sensed her daughter's reluctance as she opened the front door.
    “What's that?” A last shaft of sunlight, striking low through the porch windows, showed a circle divided by more circles to make a looping petal pattern scratched into a wooden panel. Jules put out a finger to trace it. “It looks like the hex symbols that we saw in America.”
    “A witches' sign? Put at the threshold to guard the house?” Sadie bent forward to take a closer look. “Could be. Why does this house need protecting?”
    Jules shivered. Sometimes the signs were not to keep something out, but to keep something in.
    They continued down the passage into the Great Hall.It was late in the afternoon and high windows made it as gloomy as a cave in here. The chill room smelled of freshly applied beeswax polish, but underneath that was a distinct, dusty tang of ancient coal fires. The white dust sheets, shrouding the furniture, glimmered in the half-light. Above their heads, the threadbare colors of some long-forgotten regiment stirred and fluttered. The banners were cobweb thin and probably disturbed by their coming in, although the draft of air seemed to come from above, as if the house, or something in it, was stirring, waking to their presence.
    Mother and daughter drew closer together.
    “I don't think we have to explore any more, do you?” Sadie said. Jules shook her head. “Let's go back to the flat and put the kettle on, shall we?”
    Jules settled in reasonably well. The flat was comfortable, the fully modernized conversion tastefully done. She liked her new school and made friends quickly. She would have been quite happy with her new life if it hadn't been for the house. And the cats. She didn't mind cats in general; in fact she quite liked them, or had done until now. She was in charge of feeding them: Aloysius, the big amber tom; a gray female; a white and ginger; a tortoiseshell; and two black ones, the smaller one almost a kitten. They were a vicious crew, milling round, spitting and snarling, tails whipping, ready to start on her when they had finished theWhiskas. Jules just emptied the cans and ran. They were not allowed in the house, although that prohibition didn't seem to stop them. They had the run of the place.
    There had always been cats, Susan, one of the girls on the school bus, said. They went with the house. They'd be-longed to the old lady. “They've tried all sorts,” she said. “They just come back. She was a bit of an old witch, by all accounts. Maybe she put a spell on them.”
    Susan laughed, but Jules couldn't see what was funny.
    A maze filled one half of the garden. Four paths led through archways and then branched out into a pattern that had been cut into the turf. The paths turned in circles in and out of each other. It was hard to see from ground level, but from Jules's window the pattern looked very like the witch mark scratched on the panel in the hall of the house. A circle of huddled topiary stood at the middle of the maze. Each bush was clipped, but it was impossible to