Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

by little, before she could identify what it was, the smell changed. It seemed at first wrong, and then very sad and nostalgic, for she was smelling, faintly in the stagnant air, the rich odors of leaves and earth, the warm, alive smell of autumn. But she knew that outside it was February, the frozen month; she had entered the stone passageway from a world of ice.
    In that world she had left behind were her family and her home; with every small step she took she was leaving them. If the warm smells and the increasing warmth of the air were now more kindly to her, it was all too strange and distant from the land she had left behind. She wanted to turn back, feeling that at any moment it might be too late ever to find her family again.
    Then, far ahead, she saw the faintest gleam of light. She had begun to wonder if her eyes worked at all, they had been straining so hard in the utter blackness and finding nothing, but now came that faint gleam of light, some kind of daylight, certainly, so she went on a little faster. She began to hear strange noises, small squeaks and soft flutters that grew in intensity as she felt her way toward the light. It was almost as though she felt the high squeaks rather than heard them. Something else was happening, too; the cool wall of stone she had been feeling as she went along turned away from her, away from the distant light where she wanted to go, and as the million piping squeaks grew louder, she knew by the echoes of her footsteps, and by the soft velvety flutters that were an invisible cloud all around her, that she had entered a great room.
    She could see nothing, just hear the high clamor and feel a puffing sort of wind that came from above. She went on, trembling, one foot feeling ahead, then the other. The light grew larger and began to have shape. It must be a hole in the stone, a tunnel; it must be a way into daylight. Something soft was under her feet now, like an inch of soft mud, and a smell rose that reminded her of the chickens they had last year, before the red fox got into the coop one night and stole them all.
    Then, as if the distant hole of light were a great eye, it winked out, glimmered, opened again and winked out, till it was black as the rest of the space she teetered in, with nothing to hold on to. She grew dizzy and nearly fell into whatever the soft stuff was beneath her feet, and when she got her balance back, in that vast absolute dark, she had no idea where the light had been. It was like a game she and Arn used to play, where one would shut his eyes and twirl and then not have any idea where anything in the room was. But now she thought of Arn and her mother and father, all of them together in the warm cabin, with the fire blazing orange and silent, and here she was, lost in the mountain she had been told never to go near, surrounded by blackness and a high clamor of noise. If she tripped, or fell or gave up, she would fall into something soft and gooey that smelled like the earth beneath the chicken roost. She could not stand there, teetering on the edge of the unknown. She would be lost forever.
    The light came slowly on again, not where she thought it had been before, but then her mind said no, that was where it was before. The whole black world turned gradually around, remorselessly, making her feel sick. The squeaking and the fluttering were less intense, now, and she realized that those sounds had been draining away in the darkness all the while the hole of light was black, as if they had drained out through the hole itself. This was still going on as she walked as fast as she dared toward the light. The sounds swept by her, flutters and squeaks and puffs of air. She could see them now, black specks against the light, thousands of them flowing out through the hole, dimming it, letting it wink open when their flowing numbers thinned, then closing off the light again. She came closer, to where the wind grew into a high rush and the piping became one constant