Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody Read Free Book Online

locked her out when the Carnies came hunting. The smell of the books made her feel sick and she wondered again why the boy collected them.
    Belatedly, Anna realised she had not found anything to eat. She hammered a long time before the woman responded.
    The cellar bar slid open with a wooden rasping sound, and she waited a moment before descending the metal steps. As usual, the woman had retreated into the darkest corner of the cellar in case it was not Anna who knocked.
    â€˜Food?’ the woman asked in a guttural half-grunt.
    Anna shook her head and tilted her face so the light showed her lips. ‘I’ll find some. Tomorrow. I saw that boy again.’
    â€˜Carnie,’ the woman snarled, coming slightly forward.
    â€˜No. I spoke to him . . .’ Anna began, then lifted her fingers to make the finger-talk. She told the woman about the boy and the picture in her mind of bringing the boy to live with them, of talking in low voices and hunting together. He was small and skinny but she would teach him the way of killing silently to protect himself. And maybe they would try to find a way out of the city.
    â€˜Carnie,’ the woman repeated.
    Anna opened her mouth, but before she could utter a word she heard the sound of a footfall, and whirled to see a bare foot touch the first step.
    The woman made a long keening sound that made Anna’s hair stand on end, and time seemed to slow as the boy jumped into the cellar. In the grey light falling from above he seemed bigger, his face an inhuman plane of angles and hollows.
    The girl heard a distinct clicking sound that told her the woman had her terrible gun-weapon. She waited for the sneezing cough that meant it had spat out death at the boy.
    The boy’s head tilted and then was still as he spotted the woman in the shadows. His lips moved.
    The woman stepped hesitantly into the light, her bone-white face strangely still. She lifted one hand and the fingers flicked out a question.
    Anna pressed her fingers into the woman’s palm. ‘He says, “Are you Mother?”’
    Though her legs were numb the woman did not move for fear of waking the children whose heads lay in her lap.
    The girl had often slept that way when she had first come to the cellar, but in recent times she had seemed to withdraw into herself.
    No, the woman thought with wry honesty. She drew away because I pushed her away.
    She shook her head, wondering that her mind was so clear.
    Very gently, she laid her hand on the girl’s head, and spoke the name of her dead daughter. The one who wore her name now was tough and violent, yet still a child for all that.
    She looked at the boy and shook her head. He looked about eight or nine, but he might be older. He was nothing but skin and bone and that made it hard to tell.
    The woman remembered her own childhood, long before the red dust came, in the lost world of yesterday. She had been frightened to sleep with the wardrobe door open for fear of what might come out of that dark space. Queer that she could recall so easily the terror of lying rigid on her back, waiting for morning to come and drive away the night terrors. She stroked the boy’s matted hair and wondered that he slept so trustingly. His trust made a calmness in her, so that the long terrible years since the dust came seemed like shadow years.
    It occurred to her that she had made the cellar into a kind of wardrobe all these dark years of hiding – both a place of refuge and of writhing terror.
    I climbed into the wardrobe with my nightmares, she thought.
    The cellar door was unbarred and moonlight shone obliquely through the opening. The air was cold on her arms where the blanket had slid from her shoulders, but still she did not move.
    She looked at the boy again. He had spoken of Gordy. How queer that their paths had knitted together again. She had thought him eaten, but he must have escaped at the same time she did, and found the boy as she had found her