Shining On by Lois Lowry Page B

town. She called us back. She kept us as cats, but we prefer to be children. She's gone now.” Her mouth pouted in momentary sadness, then settled in a thin determined line. “So we need another grown-up to look after us. Someone who
won't
go away. Ever!”
    “Soon! Soon!” one of the little ones cooed. “Soon we will have a mummy!”
    Lavinia frowned. “Shut up, Sammy!”
    Jules didn't stop running until she reached the flat. From the window, she could see darkness at the center of the maze, a pool of shadows taking on shapes, now children, now vague huddled humps like the surrounding topiary. The outlines lost their fuzziness and gathered like inky mist, blacker than the surrounding darkness, forming and reforming into things malignant and horrible.
We have
been here a long time, we will be here forever and you will join us,
the shapes seemed to tell her, before they coalesced into a line of cats and slid off into the graveyard.
    Jules was nervous about visiting the graveyard, but she knew that she would have to go. She chose a sunny day when there were no cats about. She found a row of little graves, all with the same date: 21st December, 1929. Jules went back to the kitchen and looked at the calendar. It was halfway through December now. It would happen on the twentyfirst. That was the date that they'd chosen, Jules just knew. It marked the solstice, and their special anniversary. That was when they would want their new mother. The only way to get her was to kill her.
    Jules had no idea how they would do it, but they were clever and malevolent. They would find ways. Jules didn't go into the great house, but her mother did. The lighting was subdued, so as not to damage delicate wall coverings and fabrics; in some places, in the upper stories, there was no electric light at all. The stairs were tall, twisting and narrow, easy to lose your footing on—tripped by a cat, for example. The road leading to the house was steep—perilous in icy weather, and no gritters came out here. She had to get Mum away. The sooner the better.
    Jules went through the possibilities. The truth was not an option. Sadie didn't believe in ghosts. A full-on “I don't like it here” would get a dusty “Neither do I, but we've got to get on with it.” She could try: “I hate the school. I'mbeing bullied.” But her report was going to say: “Julia has made lots of friends and fits in well.” Anyway, Sadie would say, “See how it goes in the New Year.” Except there wouldn't
be
a New Year. Jules could feel their malice accumulating like the fog that crept along the valley. Whatever she did would have to be quick, but every plan she came up with came to nothing, or had a great big hole in it. Even if she and Mum did get away, they weren't too fussy about who was going to be their
mummy;
they'd soon find someone else. Monica, for example. She'd have to come and feed them…. Monica might be all kinds of a cow, but Jules wouldn't wish that on her. And she had a daughter, Katie…. No. There had to be another way.
    Jules watched from her window, trying to see if there was a pattern in their behavior. They came out as cats in the morning, streaming in a line down the path from the graveyard to be fed. They went back in the evening, disappearing through the little gate, tails in the air. A plan began to form in her mind.
    Now came the scary bit. Jules steeled herself to do it, following them as closely as she dared, dodging round the hunched humps of the topiary, keeping to the shadows. Their sinuous shapes slithered like eels round the gray wood of the gate. She waited, counting the beats of her heart, giving them time to get “home.”
    Aloysius. He was the most dangerous. She'd start with him, and then move on to Lavinia. She squatted downabove the short oblong, marked out in stone, which contained his bones. Her hand shook as she scratched the circles onto the headstone with a chisel.
Keep them in as well as out,
the words chanted in her