The Silver Crown, page 3
She did not know how late it was, nor how long she had been asleep, when she was awakened by a loud squealing of brakes, a long and frightening screech of the tires; the car swung fiercely from side to side as it skidded, and then stopped so abruptly that she was thrown forward and hit her head hard on the dashboard. Ahead of them, just a few inches from the headlights, a truck had run partly off the highway; it lay at an odd angle, its left rear wheels up in the air like a tilted elephant’s feet, its front wheels in the ditch. The trailer’s rear doors had sprung open, and there were boxes and cartons lying all over the road. The trailer itself was blocking half the highway, and they had come within a foot of crashing into it.
Ellen scarcely glanced at all this. When she bumped her head, the blow made her see at first a bright flash of light. It vanished, but there still remained a softer light directly in front of her eyes, and now she saw why: She had struck her head on the button that snaps the glove compartment shut. It had fallen open, and a small light had turned on, illuminating its interior.
When Mr. Gates saw this he reached over very quickly and slammed it shut. But not before Ellen saw lying inside the compartment a pistol with a long barrel she recognized instantly, and a shimmering green hood with two eyeholes staring vacantly up at her.
CHAPTER SIX
The Flight into the Forest
MR. GATES’S long arm reached out as Ellen opened the car door; his hand clawed at her as she slid from the seat; it closed so hard that his thumb and fingers met through the paper wrapping of the loaf of bread, which was all that he caught. Ellen was out of the car and into the black pine woods.
The forest was a bottomless lake of the blackest India ink. Ellen ran with her hands outstretched in front of her face. She slithered, slid, and scurried, heading uphill, diving around the great scaly trunks when her fingers touched them. Her feet slipped on the carpet of pine needles, which muffled her footsteps and kept her progress secret. They did the same for Mr. Gates, however, who was instantly through the door in pursuit.
In this deadly race Ellen soon realized she had one advantage: She was short. The pine branches spread horizontally from the holes beginning at about five feet; the top of Ellen’s head, at fifty-five and a half inches, cleared most of them neatly. Mr. Gates, who was much taller, would have to bend forward. This evidently threw him off balance, for Ellen heard him falling occasionally, and sometimes crashing into tree trunks. Within a few minutes he was panting so loudly that she could hear quite easily where he was all the time. He had run farther to the left than she had and was now, she guessed, a couple of hundred feet away.
She ran a little farther and then stopped. If she could hear his breathing, then he would hear hers, if she ran too hard. She lay down on the ground and pressed her face into her hands and into the soft pine carpet, trying to breathe as gently as possible. After awhile Mr. Gates seemed to realize he was giving his position away; at any rate she no longer heard him crashing about, and in a few minutes his puffing stopped. In all the dark woods there was not a sound. Even the wind had died.
She lay absolutely still, hoping that the forest was big enough so that he would miss her. Was he standing still, listening, or was he searching, silently now, creeping through the dark?
A few minutes passed and then she heard a noise, a dry rasping like two dead leaves rubbing together. It was Mr. Gates’s hand, touching the piney scales of a tree trunk as he felt his way forward. Now she heard his breath again, very softly, Like the faintest of whispers. He could not be more than six feet away. It was too late to get up and run; instead she tried to make herself completely rigid, and she held her breath. The whisper came closer. She heard a muffled footstep, and then his hard, heavy shoe came down on her ankle, crushing it so that she thought it would snap, and the pain shot all the way up to her face. Still she did not move, nor breathe, and for once there was an advantage in being thin, for Mr. Gates either did not feel her small bone underfoot, or, more likely, thought it was only a pine bough. In a second or so he lifted his foot, took another step, and crept on.
When he had passed she let the air from her lungs out slowly and inhaled again, working hard not to gasp. Just as she did this he began calling, very gently. He was perhaps twenty feet away.
“Ellen?” And again: “Ellen?” He said it sweetly, affectionately, as if she were his own daughter, lost in the night. His voice was so high it sounded as if he were singing.
“Ellen, please come out,” the clear voice called. “I’m not going to hurt you. We’ve got to go on to Kentucky now.”
A pause. No sound at all. Then once more: “Ellen, don’t you want to see your Aunt Sarah? I’m going to take you right to her house. You can be with her tomorrow morning. We’re almost there. Please, Ellen, let’s go on. You can’t stay here alone in the woods.”
All this was spoken in the kindliest, most concerned voice, but there was one very odd thing about it. Ellen was almost certain that she had never told him her aunt’s name. Yet how else could he possibly have known? She lay still, pressed against the ground.
Something must have moved, however, or at least Mr. Gates thought something did—perhaps some small animal, frightened by his calling.
In any case he gave a shout, and she heard him pounce and crash to the ground. Then he was off again, running blindly through the woods, chasing something he thought was Ellen, but moving now away from her, down the hillside. She took advantage of the noise to move, carefully and quietly, another hundred feet in the opposite direction, up the hill.
After a few minutes Mr. Gates stopped again, quite far away, so that she could hardly hear his panting. Once more he shouted into the woods, but this time in the strangest way, saying things that made no sense to Ellen at all. There was nothing sweet about his voice now. He was screaming.
“Ellen.” High and shrill. “You must come out. I order you to come out. The King has commanded me to bring you to him. The King himself has ordered it. You must come.” Then, like a chant: “You will come. You will come. You will come. If you don’t come now, you will come later.” More silence, and then the same again. “You will come, or we will be punished.”
But when he spoke again, for the last time, he was no longer talking to Ellen, but to himself, in a whimper. “I will be punished. They will put me in the…” Was it machine he said? Or screen? Ellen could not be sure, for at the word his voice broke entirely and turned into a weak, bubbling wail. Mr. Gates was hysterical. Still wailing, he blundered his way down the hill and in a little while she heard the car start in the distance; the engine roared, the tires screamed terribly, and he drove off.
Ellen climbed a little higher up the mountain, found a level spot, and sat down. The night was cool but not cold; the pine carpet under her gave off warmth it had collected during the day, and was as soft as a mattress. In a few minutes she lay back and fell asleep from exhaustion.
She was free of Mr. Gates, but free she knew not where, in a wilderness with no food or drink. She had only her pocketbook left, looped fast around her wrist.
While she slept, she had a nightmare. She stood in the throne room of her castle, which she recognized instantly although it had been changed. The dais where the throne used to stand had been made much larger and higher, and turned into a stage. Onstage there was a hideous performance going on. Twenty boys and young men, all wearing green hoods, were attacking a policeman, who stood defenseless, dressed in blue, in the center. First five from the left, armed with clubs and knives, would dart in and circle the policeman like Indians, stabbing and beating viciously. Then, all together, they would slink away and another five (from the right) would take their places. It was gracefully and swiftly done, like a ballet, but all in complete silence. The policeman, she finally realized, was not real. He was a dummy, a sort of practice policeman, hung from the ceiling by a rope around his neck, so that his head dangled off to one side. Now she saw that in a pit in front of the stage there was a director, positioned so low that only the top of the back of his head was visible. He wore a crown exactly like hers, except that it was black.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Otto the WreckerI
ELLEN was awakened by a flock of crows sitting in a circle in a treetop high above her. They were talking. From having lived for many years in the country, Ellen knew that crows can say a great deal more than just “caw.” That raucous cry, in fact, is only a warning signal; it means “watch out,” or, in a different tone, “help.” But left to themselves on a quiet morning, crows will conduct whole conversations in quiet voices, talking one at a time. That is what these were doing now, and Ellen thought she could even distinguish the leader-crow, setting forth the plans for the day,
Anyway, it was a gentle way to wake up, and when Ellen moved, a squirrel scurried up a tree a few feet away, darting around to the back side of the trunk to hide from her. Like most squirrels, he did not know how long his tail was, and left it sticking out, so she was able to watch that much of him all that way up until he vanished into the thick green pine needles.
Above the needles the sun was shining, but down at the bottom of the forest only a few bright spears found their way, moving like slow searchlights across the ground as the sun rose higher.
Ellen sat up. She was terribly thirsty; she was also hungry, but in a battle between thirst and hunger, thirst always wins. Her forehead was bruised where she had bumped the dashboard, and the ankle Mr. Gates had stepped on was sore and swollen a little. But mainly she was thirsty.
Somewhere in this woods, she thought, there must be a brook; and suddenly the idea of a brook with cold water running over stones seemed like the most delicious thought she had ever had. It made her twice as thirsty as before. But it also occurred to her that a surer way to find water might be to find the highway again, because somewhere along the roadside, sooner or later, there would be a house where she could knock on the door and ask for a drink.
She was sure she could find the road. Since in leaving it she had run uphill all the way, to find it she had merely to walk downhill. So she set off, keeping a sharp eye out for a brook and another for Mr. Gates, though for some reason she felt quite certain he was really gone.
She walked for perhaps ten minutes, limping slightly, thinking about Mr. Gates. When she had seen the gun and the green hood, she had known immediately that he was the one who had shot the store manager and poor Officer Drogue. There was, she realized now, something about the way he moved that should have reminded her of the murderer immediately. But she had been so eager to get the ride to Kentucky that she had not paid attention.
She wondered, too, about his knowing Aunt Sarah’s name. Perhaps she had told him, but she did not think so. And then there was that strange thing Officer Drogue had said before he ran off—“another green hood.” It all added up to a puzzle she could not solve.
She saw no brook, and the road seemed farther away than she had thought. But suddenly, right in front of her, she saw something she recognized.
It was not the road, but it was from the road. It was a stack of brown cardboard cartons, piled neatly behind a very large tree trunk. And behind another trunk nearby stood another stack. They were, she was quite sure, some of the same cartons that had fallen out of the wrecked truck the night before. There must have been ten or more of them piled up. But how had they gotten here?
She walked over to one of the stacks and looked at the top carton. Stencilled in black letters on one end were the words, BLUE RIDGE APPLE JUICE—ONE DOZ.
Apple juice. She loved it, and right now she felt she could drink the whole box. She was pulling the carton off the pile when the thought struck her, it’s not my apple juice. It belongs to somebody. I can’t just take it. And then she thought, I’ll just drink one bottle, and I’ll wait here; when the owner comes I’ll pay him for it from my money. If the owner did not come soon, she could simply leave a quarter on top of the carton. That would surely be enough for one bottle.
She lifted the heavy box to the ground, pulled the top open, and took out a bottle. Sure enough, there was the juice, gurgling deliciously inside the brown glass. But how was she to get the top off without a bottle opener? She picked up a stick and pried at it, but the stick broke. She stood up and looked around for a better tool—a pointed rock, maybe.
Not six feet away, a small boy stood, barefooted, watching her with wary brown eyes. In his hand he held a very large hunting knife. He held it out to her politely, handle first. He said: “Here. Open it with this.”
“Is it yours?”
“Yes. That is, it fell off a truck. When they hauled the truck away this morning, they left these boxes. But you can have some.”
“Why didn’t they take them?”
“I don’t know. I guess they were in the ditch where they couldn’t see them.” His eyes looked away. “They were in a hurry to move the truck.”
Ellen took the knife and pried the top loose. She drained half the bottle without stopping.
“Gee,” said the boy. “You must be thirsty.”
“I am. I’ve been thirsty ever since yesterday.”
“Do you want some water? Water’s better when you’re thirsty.”
“I know. I couldn’t find any.”
“I know where there’s some.”
“Where?”
“Right up here. Come on.”
He led the way, and in a few steps, just out of sight of the boxes, they came to a large, flat-topped boulder, over the top of which trickled the clearest, cleanest, coldest looking spring in the world. It ran down the side of the rock into a tiny pool, from which someone had raked away the pine needles, leaving a sparkling bed of rock and sand.
She lay down and drank the icy water until she felt dizzy.
“You don’t want to drink too fast when you’re thirsty,” the boy warned.
“I know. I’ll stop now. What’s your name?”
“Otto. There was a man up on the hill last night, chasing somebody.”
“I know. He was chasing me. Did you hear him?”
“No, I was asleep in bed. I saw his tracks. I saw yours, too. You were here all night?” He really did not mean it as a question; he knew. “Where’d the man go?”
“He drove away. I guess. At least I heard his car.”
“That’s what I thought. I saw where he ran back to the road. He sure fell down a lot.”
He certainly seemed to know a great deal, considering how small he was. He was dressed in worn-out gray trousers, ragged at the ankles, patched at the knees, and a faded cotton flannel shirt which had once been blue plaid. His coal black hair was cut straight all around. But except for his bare feet, which were stained brown, he looked clean and rather nice. Ellen liked him.
“How old are you?” she asked.
He looked embarrassed. “About eight and a half, I think.”
“You mean you don’t know?” Ellen asked in amazement.
“Well, not exactly. My mother says I was born in the fall, she thinks maybe October, but she can’t remember for sure. She’s so old, she forgets lots of things.”
“But your birthday…”
“Oh, I have a birthday, all right.”
“Well, when is it?”
“When we get stuff for a birthday cake, in the fall, then we have my birthday,” he said patiently, as if he were explaining something simple to a simpleton. He clearly disliked the whole subject, so he changed it.
“What’s your name?”
“Ellen Carroll.”
“How old are you?”
“Ten. My birthday was yesterday.” She started to tell him about the crown, then decided against it, but felt her pocketbook to make sure it was still there. It was.
“What’s in the pocketbook?”
“Oh, things. Doesn’t your father know when your birthday is?” Ellen changed the subject back again.
“I don’t have any father.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Ellen said. “Did he die?”
“No. He just left. We didn’t care. We didn’t like him anyway. We don’t want him back.”
He stood up. “I’ve got to take these boxes up to my house.”
“All of them?”
“Well, not all at once.” (Patiently again.) “I carry one at a time.”
“Where’s your house?”
“Up there.” He pointed. “About a mile. It takes all day to get a bunch like this up there. I got eleven this time.” He had an afterthought.
“Are you lost?”
“No. At least, not really.” But the truth was, Ellen realized for the first time, she was lost. “That is, I don’t know where I am.”
“Then you’re lost. That’s what being lost is.” He added: “Look, you better come with me. You can talk to my mother.”
When Ellen thought about it, she realized that she had little choice. She had lost her food and her road maps; she had no idea how far Mr. Gates had driven her, nor even, really, whether he had gone toward Kentucky at all. Otto’s mother, being a grown-up, would know where she was and in which direction Kentucky lay.
“All right. I’ll carry one of the boxes,” she said.
They set out. Ellen carried the carton of apple juice. Otto lifted another to his shoulder. It said, DRIED SPLIT PEAS—2 LBS.—1 DOZ.
Both boxes were heavy, but Otto carried his lightly; his small shoulders were straight and sturdy. But Ellen had trouble. In a hundred yards or so the hard cardboard surface of the carton had found a knuckle in her shoulder bone and was rasping it unbearably. She put it down, switched it to the other shoulder, and then trotted through the trees to catch up with Otto, who had not paused. In a few minutes the same thing happened to the other shoulder. Then she tried carrying it like a baby, in both arms, and that was better except that, unlike a baby, it was slippery and kept sliding down. Also, the extra weight made her sore ankle hurt.
