The Silver Crown, page 11
Finally, she let go the crutches and sank to the ground, puffing a little but pleased with herself for having learned to use them.
“Now I’ll rest awhile. Then I want to see the surprise. How far is it?”
“Just a little way—around on the other side of that boulder.”
“I can’t climb over it. I’ll have to go in the stream.”
“That’s all right. It’s only about three inches deep, and the bottom’s flat.”
Wading through a stream over a slippery bottom on homemade crutches is not the best therapy for a sprained ankle. Ellen had to stop and rest eleven times on the way; once one crutch slipped away, but Otto’s shoulder was there to grab, and they got the crutch back somehow before it floated away downstream. And, then they were around the boulder, and Ellen was back on dry land.
In front of them was the cleft in the rock wall they had seen from above. Otto, who had already been through it, led the way impatiently as Ellen labored along behind him. She made her way slowly, one small step at a time, up the slight incline that led from the streambed. The cleft looked like a doorway in a Gothic cathedral, and it was just wide enough for her crutches. She went into it, and found herself in a magic room.
It was a cave, but like no cave she had ever heard of, for it was lit with flashing diamonds.
She gasped in delight, while Otto hopped around her on one foot.
“I told you I had a surprise.”
The cave had a front door and a back door. The back door, which they had just entered, faced east and led to the stream, an inexhaustible water supply. The front door faced west and led, after a rocky climb, to the forest, an inexhaustible wood supply.
Through this western door poured a gay shaft of late afternoon sunlight. It struck the inside wall of the cave and shattered into a thousand spears of brilliance—mostly white, but mixed faintly with blue, red, orange, and yellow. For the walls of the cave, made of sandstone, had become mixed with another kind of stone—tiny crystals as clear as glass, not really diamonds, but almost as shiny. Ellen could even remember their name; her father had told her once when she found a piece of this same kind of stone in the country.
“Quartzite.”
“What?”
“Quartzite. That’s what those shiny stones are. Aren’t they beautiful?”
“I knew you’d like it. And it’s got three rooms.”
Not really three rooms, but the cave floor was split into three levels, like some modern houses. As you walked from the back door to the front you came to a ledge of stone, waist-high, and when you clambered up that you stood on the second level, looking down at where you had just been. Farther along was another ledge and a third section, higher than the second. So it had the effect of three rooms, even without partitions. All in all, the cave was nearly as big as a small house. It was dry and cool, and because of its shining walls, astonishingly light.
Otto went back and got their rucksacks; then he moved the stack of firewood to the cave, since it was nearly suppertime. They discovered there was a perpetual draft, a whisper of air so slight you could feel it only faintly on your ears when you stood in either doorway. It blew in the front door and out the back, keeping the atmosphere from getting the dank smell that most caves have.
And it meant that the place to build the fire was inside the cave near the back door; all the smoke blew out as neatly as if it were rising up a chimney.
Otto got it lit just in time. As the sun sank in the West, the shaft of light through the front door climbed higher up the wall, shrank to half its size, then a quarter, and then flicked out altogether, as if someone had turned a switch. And they were in the dark: There is no twilight in caves.
The fluttering firelight illuminated only the lowest level of the wall, and that only dimly in a deep ruby red. Beyond the first ledge the cave was dark; at the far end they could barely make out the faint gray silhouette of the front door, and that was all.
Otto still had to go out into the woods to get some bedding, for the floor of the cave was hard rock, and unlike the walls, coal-black except for some patches of gravelly sand. What he wanted was a flashlight, but they had none. He was getting ready to grope his way through the blackness into the outer twilight when he had an idea.
“A pine knot,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“For a light. They’re as good as lanterns. My mother uses them to start the fire.” In the stack of firewood he found a knobby pine branch shaped like a club, with a cluster of knots at the thick end where branches had once grown out. He thrust this end into the fire, and when he pulled it out he had a fine flaming torch, good for perhaps half an hour. Holding this high above his head he set off through the cave, casting monstrous leaping shadows on the walls.
* * *
In the morning, when the sunlight stabbed through the back door and the cave was light again, they had to face two hard facts: Ellen’s ankle seemed no better at all, and their food was running low.
The night before, after Otto had come in with a huge armload of soft-needled pine boughs for bedding, they had cooked and eaten almost half of their meat.
Now they took the food they had left and divided it into little piles, each one representing a meal. It did not come out even: By splitting the meat into very skimpy portions, they had enough for two dinners, whereas there was quite a lot of hardtack—enough for five or six days; there were three eggs apiece—three breakfasts; there were three ears of corn and two carrots.
“I wish it would get better,” Ellen said, looking at her misshapen ankle, which was as big around as a grapefruit, and which she could not move at all without a pain worse than a toothache.
“Don’t worry. It will.” Otto was acquiring a bedside manner. “The only thing is, we don’t know how soon.”
“We should put some more compresses on it.”
They revived the breakfast fire, and Otto went shirtless again. They really worked hard and seriously at it for more than an hour, at the end of which the ankle was no smaller at all, but had turned a very bright red. Was that a good sign or bad? They did not know.
At lunchtime Ellen said, “We’ll have to go on starvation rations.”
“I guess so.”
“Let’s say that my ankle won’t heal for two more days.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t you see? We have to plan as if it might not. Because otherwise, if it doesn’t we’ll run out of food.”
Otto thought this over rather gloomily. “All right,” he said. “But I wish I didn’t get so hungry.”
“We had meat for dinner last night, so tonight we won’t eat any. We’ll have some for tomorrow night, and still have enough left for one meal after we start again.”
After lunch Ellen felt sleepy. Her inflamed ankle and all the hot compresses had made her feverish, and her head ached. She lay in her blanket on the pine needles and fell asleep. She slept a long time, for when she awoke the sunlight through the front door was already beginning to climb the wall. Otto was nowhere to be seen, and nei ther was his rucksack, though its contents were there, dumped in a heap beside his pallet.
He must have gone for wood, Ellen thought. But why would he take his rucksack? She pondered this for a moment, but could think of no answer. Then she thought of her own rucksack, with her handbag in it, and the silver crown. She had not even looked at it since she left Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s house.
The bag lay within reach. She opened it, took the crown out, and saw to her astonishment that it had changed. The little blue stones set in the silver, which formerly had sparkled and twinkled like stars, now glowed with a steady blue-white light. It was a calm sort of light, as unwavering as an electric bulb, and many, many times brighter than before.
Ellen looked at it dumfounded. Could it have something to do with the light in the cave? She turned to the bright sunspot on the wall, now a third of the way up to the ceiling. It was, as always, glistening, dancing and flickering with a thousand shifting spears of light. And that should, if anything, make the crown sparkle all the more in its reflection. No, that could not be the cause.
The glow seemed almost as if it came from some sort of energy, like a battery. From radioactivity, perhaps? Or was the cave charged with electricity?
Ellen tried an experiment. She got back on her pallet with the crown in her hand, and pulled the blanket up over her head. Under the cover, completely dark, the stones still glowed steadily, looking brighter than ever, turning her hand and even the underside of the blanket faintly blue. So it was not reflection from the cave. She could think of no explanation at all.
She threw back the blanket and, slipping the crown over her wrist like a bracelet, hobbled with her crutches over to the ledge that led to the central section of the cave. With some careful maneuvering she managed to seat herself on this, facing the door—the back door—her feet dangling not quite to the floor. Then she put the crown on her head.
The effect was magical. She could feel the glow of the stones, or whatever power was causing them to glow, pass through her head—through her brain. It would have been frightening, except that it was so obviously, so surely, so beyond question, good.
It was, she thought, like a gentle comb going through her mind, straightening out the thoughts and undoing the tangles. She had a feeling of serenity and strength, of sweetness and sureness, that she had never known before. It did not make her ankle any better at all, nor her stomach any less empty, but it made her feel that hunger and a sore ankle are, after all, not so important; they will pass eventually. They became, somehow, remote.
It turned the cave into—what? Not a castle, but a chapel. The sunlight on the wall was a stained-glass window, and through the pointed doorway would come, in a few minutes, an archbishop in a tall medieval hat, or perhaps a saint with a golden halo. The wash of the brook behind the door reached her ears as faint music, a hushed, gained chord sung by a far-off choir.
She was suddenly aware of Otto standing in front of her, staring at her entranced but also frightened.
“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.
She took off the crown and the music stopped.
“Yes, I’m fine. Only hungry.”
“You looked so funny. Sort of pale and, well… hypnotized.”
“Did I? I felt that way, too. Not pale, I mean, but strange. It’s the crown that does it. Here, you try it.”
But when Otto put the crown on, it had no effect on him. He felt its light weight on his forehead, but nothing more.
“It doesn’t work with me,” he said sadly. “I didn’t think it would.… Look at the stones!”
“I know. They’ve changed.”
“They look electric. Like a radium dial.”
“Radium dials aren’t electric.”
“You know what they really look like?”
“What?”
“Lightning bugs, only they don’t turn off.”
And that was, in fact, an apt description of the light the stones gave off, though they were much smaller than a lightning bug.
“It’s got something to do with this place,” Otto said.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean there’s something funny about this whole part of the woods. When I went out, I climbed some trees to look for birds’ eggs. They’re good to eat if you can find fresh ones. And you know what? There aren’t any birds here at all. No birds, no nests, no eggs.”
And they both thought of Richard. They had not seen him—beak, claw, nor feather—since they came down the crevasse.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Otto the Provider
IF there were no birds, there were no eggs; but with no birds to eat them, there were berries in fantastic abundance. Otto’s rucksack was loaded with them. He dumped them out carefully on a clean rocky part of the floor: blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, wild cherries, and even some wild grapes, which were, however, too green to eat.
“They don’t fill you up much,” he said, “but they’re good for dessert.”
Otto did not think highly of starvation rations, and he had several plans to do something about them. He said no more at the moment, but the berries were only a beginning. Still, they helped to make bearable the meatless and meager dinner, and there was a big pile left over for breakfast.
The next day passed, and the second day began, with no sign that Ellen would be able to walk that day, or even soon.
They had breakfast early, and as soon as it was done, and the dishes cleaned up, Otto climbed the steep rocky path out of the crevasse and into the woods.
Ellen, watching him leave, was worried. In a few minutes she would put the crown on her head, and then, she knew, her troubles would become quite small and remote. But for the moment she felt she ought to worry. If their situation was not quite desperate, it bordered on it. Their meat was completely gone now, and while there was still a fair amount of bread left, with nothing else to eat it could not last long. And then what?
The worst of it was the knowledge that it was all her fault. Otto had gone down the crevasse wall easily and fearlessly—easily because fearlessly. But she had been a coward; her nerve had failed; her terror had made her lose control, and now they were stuck—three days already, and who could say how many more?
She worried about her Aunt Sarah. She must have received the postcard long ago. Or had she ever received it? If she had, was she searching for them? Not them—Aunt Sarah could know nothing of Otto. And how could she search, without the vaguest idea of where to look? Or had she even been at home when the postcard arrived? She might have been traveling—she might still be traveling—without any idea that Ellen was in trouble.
And last—what about the man in black, and the green hoods? They might, even now, be surrounding the cave, closing in from the woods, moving stealthily up the crevasse. She did not really think this was likely, however; the valley was so vast—and if their tracks had been found, surely they would have been caught before now. Each day that passed made discovery less likely. Or so she must hope.
She got her crutches and her crown, limped over to the ledge, and sat down facing the door. She put the crown on her head.
* * *
When Otto returned just before lunchtime she was still sitting there. This was the third time he had found her this way: sitting without any movement at all, a rapt, trancelike expression on her face, not smiling but pale and serene, staring at the sunlit cleft of the back door, and listening to some beautiful sound he could not hear.
When she saw him she took the crown off, and Otto smiled broadly in anticipation. He was holding both hands behind his back. Now he held them out. In one he had, by the ears, a rabbit; in the other, by the tail, a squirrel.
Ellen touched the rabbit with one hand; it was still warm, soft, and furry. She did not touch the squirrel, which was rather bloody.
“Poor little things,” she said. “Are they dead? How did you catch them?”
“ ‘Poor little things’ will make us four good dinners. I got the rabbit with a deadfall. I got the squirrel with my knife.”
“What’s a deadfall?”
“A trap. You prop up a rock with two sticks. One holds it up. The other one is the trigger. I learned it from a hunting magazine. I put a little bit of carrot on the trigger stick. Rabbit tries to eat the carrot—whump!—down comes the rock. I’ve another one set, too.”
“It’s lucky we didn’t eat the carrots.”
“I took them a couple of days ago—just in case. You never even noticed. I’ve still got most of them left. You only need a little bit for bait.”
Ellen still felt she should protest killing the small, furry creatures. But the thought of having meat to eat again weakened her conscience, and a half hour later when the rabbit, cleaned and skinned, was sizzling on a spit of green wood over the fire, the smell killed whatever qualms she had left.
It tasted like chicken.
“Only better,” Otto said.
“And tougher,” Ellen added.
So their food supply was replenished, temporarily at least. They had no assurance, of course, that this would continue. And indeed for the next two days, though he went out morning and afternoon, Otto came back empty-handed. To his annoyance, some bigger animal, probably a groundhog, raided one of his deadfalls, ate the precious bit of carrot, and managed to struggle out from under the rock. Otto took to roaming farther and farther as he hunted.
Ellen’s ankle was now definitely improving. The swelling had gone down noticeably, but more important, she could wiggle her foot from side to side without its hurting so much. By the afternoon of the seventh day she was actually able to half hop, half walk a few steps without the crutches. But a few steps were all, and she had to crawl back on her hands and knees. She felt extremely proud of herself, and waited impatiently for Otto to come back.
He had been away since morning, hunting; this day, for the first time, he had not even returned for lunch, but had taken a scrap of cold meat and a piece of bread with him. Ellen had sat for hours wearing the crown, listening to the strange, distant music it produced in her mind, feeling the peace it brought her.
Once during this time, while she was wearing the crown, she had a strange vision. Perhaps it was a dream; possibly she fell asleep as she sat motionless on the ledge, half hypnotized by the bright doorway and the flickering sparkle of the wall. She felt, suddenly, that she was looking at her father, straight into his eyes, and he was looking back at her, but not seeing her. She could see his face only dimly, for it was in shadow, in a dark room, but she could not mistake his eyes. She thought she saw him speak, but could not hear what he said. Then, without wanting to, she looked away, at another part of the room, and she realized that she was seeing through someone else’s eyes, for she could not control the direction in which she looked. She thought she could perceive other figures in the room, and, high up in the dark ceiling, a very small, very dim light. Then she was looking back at her father again, so close she could almost touch him. She tried to call out, but the instant she did the whole vision flickered and vanished, as if she had tried to cry out in a dream and woke herself up instead.
