Max was breathing at least twice his normal speed. “No,” he murmured back. “That’s not it. The sky’s all wrong. Just like the ground is. Where are we?”
A small hand prodded Susan’s. She squeezed it. Kate.
Susan’s eyes began to adjust, and she could see the shape of Nell, a foot or so away. It looked strangely humped and bulky until she realized that Nell had retrieved her blanket from the ground and wrapped it around her shoulders despite the warmth of the night.
“This has to be a dream,” Nell said. “But it doesn’t feel like one. Does it?”
“Is it usually this dark in dreams?” Jean asked. Her voice came from next to Max.
“Maybe we’re drugged, or sprayed with some gas that makes you see things. They can do that, you know,” Max said.
“They?” Susan asked. She could feel the damp in the grass soaking through her sneakers. “Who’s they?”
Max sighed. “I don’t know. But if this is real, we just fell out of our house into summer.”
None of them said anything for a long minute.
“Ouch!” Max yelped. “Jean! Did you just pinch me?”
“Maybe.”
“You did! You pinched me!”
Jean’s voice was a little smaller than usual. “I thought you can’t get hurt in dreams.”
“Where do you get this stuff, Jean? Of course you can get hurt in dreams! You might be lying on the corner of a book or something. Your brain would make up a story where you got pinched, when really you’ve got a hardback jabbing you!”
“So maybe you’re just lying on a book, then.”
Max growled in exasperation, and Susan saw him lean over in the dark and pull a strand of grass, then put it to his mouth.
“I don’t know. Can you taste in dreams? I can’t remember.”
Susan knew she’d never had a dream as vivid as this. She could smell the dusty aroma of tree bark and hear the faint hum of crickets.
“What should we do?” Kate wanted to know. “If we’re dreaming, I want to wake up and go home.”
She squeezed Susan’s hand, and Susan squeezed back.
“Me, too,” Nell said. She slapped her own face. “Wake up!” She paused, then grunted in dissatisfaction. “I’m still here. And for your information, Jean, you can get hurt in dreams.”
“So you’re saying this is a dream,” Max said.
“Yes,” Nell answered. “Maybe. I don’t know!”
Susan touched the rough trunk of the tree. The smell of grass and heat and wood hung in the air. In the distance, an owl hooted, low and long. No, she thought again, dreams couldn’t possibly feel like this. Kate pressed herself close, and Susan tried to think what to say. She was the oldest by a few minutes, but in emergencies, she never forgot it. Now she could only think to try to keep the younger ones calm while she and Max figured out what had happened.
“We need to go to sleep, and then we’ll wake up,” she told them, using her most sensible tone of voice. Sometimes, she knew, when all else failed, it was best to return to routine. Maybe if they acted as if things were normal, the world would take the hint.
She released Kate’s hand. “Nell, give us your blanket,” she said.
Nell hesitated, then unwrapped the coverlet from around her neck and handed it over.
Susan spread it beneath the tree.
“If we all lie down together, close our eyes, and forget all this, we’ll wake up in the morning and be back home.”
Max, still staring up at the star-drenched sky, didn’t answer. But the little girls lay down, and Susan tucked their dolls beside them. Even Nell, after folding her arms long enough to show she didn’t take orders, especially concerning bedtime, finally joined them, and Susan found a spot next to her. As the others’ breathing slowly deepened in sleep, Susan held still, wide awake and watching. In the tree, the whistling of the crickets dwindled. The moon rose, and at last Max crouched beside her.
“It’s only half,” he whispered. “And at home it was full. Do you think it’s a dream?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed the moon before. But maybe morning will tell.”
At last, with nothing left to do, Max stretched out on the other side of the blanket. Together they lay there, staring at the vast, strange sky, as overhead, the too-narrow moon climbed to its distant midnight perch.
Deprived of the comfort of human voices, the exile had learned to hear the sounds of the mountain. Not merely the mumbling danger of the valley, but the melody of birds and wind, buzzing insects and small animals. And the steadiness of these sounds as they rose and fell, chittered and hummed and sighed in their unconscious conversation, offered a comfort of its own, its steady backdrop a reminder that life went on.
And then, one night, the sounds stopped.
From within the cottage, the exile rose and sought the darkness outside. Beneath the stars, the world had gone silent. Even the valley, far below, seemed mute in the pause. And then something stirred. A strange breeze, a new wind. A moment more, and the world let out its breath — as if all the small animate members of the night’s chorus had sensed the new and made it welcome.
Susan opened her eyes to a haze of dew rising toward a pink sky. It would have been beautiful if she’d seen it through a car window or from inside her own house. But she was lying on a clammy blanket in a strange field on a summer morning, when it should have been winter and had been, just last night. Despite what she’d said, they’d slept, and woken, and if this were a dream, it was real enough to leave the blanket damp and smelling of grass. She closed her eyes again and wished herself fiercely into a different morning, but the sound of birds twittering in the tree told her this place was immune to wishes.
On the other side of Nell, Kate sat up and looked around. “We’re not home,” she said. “You said we’d be home!”
Pretending to be asleep struck Susan as her best option, but her heart betrayed her. It was pounding so hard, she could feel her shirt move.
On the other side of the blanket, Max groaned and sat up. “Kate,” he said. “Calm down.”
“But we’re supposed to be home!”
“I didn’t say that. Susan did.”
Criminations! It was the last little push Susan needed to force herself into the day. She sat up.
“I said maybe, is all. Maybe we’d wake up home. But we haven’t. So we’re going to need to figure something else out.”
“You did not say maybe,” Kate said. “You said we would.”
Her tight curls had gone frizzy in the humid morning, and they stood out in several directions. She pushed them out of her eyes and frowned deeply.
“That’s true,” Max said. “You did.”
Susan glared at him. “Fine, maybe I did. But we’re not home. Sue me.”
Kate looked around at the steaming grass, the dark border of woods that ringed the field, the hard knot of the rising sun swimming up into a candy-colored sky, and began to cry.
“Kate! Kate, it’s okay!” Susan leaned on Nell and grabbed Kate’s hand. “We’re going to figure this out! We will!”
Nell woke with a grunt and shoved Susan off her. Meanwhile, Kate nodded, trying to swallow the tears as her curls bounced crazily on her head. Jean sat up, looking groggy.
“We’re still here,” she said.
Max sighed loudly and rubbed the back of his neck. “We’ve noticed. But don’t worry, we’re working on it.”
He nodded to Susan, who attempted a half-hearted nod back.
The little girls looked from one to the other of them expectantly, and even Nell tilted her head, waiting.
“Let’s think about this scientifically,” Max said.
There were days when Susan hated having a twin brother. Today wasn’t one of them. Just hearing Max talk in his usual Max-like way made Susan breathe better. Max’s scientific ideas were sometimes harebrained, but he never ran out of them.
“What would we do if we got lost a
t home?” he asked.
“Find help,” Susan said.
“Right. So let’s go find it. We’re somewhere. Let’s find out where.”
Trees ringed the field on all sides. To the west, where a sheen of purple still glossed the sky, a herd of deer meandered from the wood and began to graze. Jean tapped Kate and pointed, and Susan raised an eyebrow. At least twenty soon ambled out, including several speckled fawns.
Just then a hawk screeched from the western wood, and Susan looked up to see it dive over the deer and yank a rabbit from the grass. Kate yelped as the herd bolted back into the trees.
“Well, not that way,” Max said, frowning. “Doesn’t seem like that many deer would be wandering around civilization.”
“Civilization?” Jean asked him. “That’s what we’re looking for?”
“Yup,” he said. “It’s got to be around here somewhere.”
He nodded eastward, as Jean and Kate retrieved their Barbies and Nell shouldered her blanket. “That way, then.”
They set out in the direction of the rising sun, scattering butterflies feeding on flowers and sending a surviving rabbit hurtling from a thicket of onion grass. Near the place where the clearing met the wood, the land dipped and they found a brook bubbling along through stones and moss. Overjoyed, Max said that water led to civilization — people, and commerce, and cities. Jean stooped to drink, but Susan pointed out that water could lead to typhoid, too, so Jean let it be and they walked along the bank, following the water as it flowed glibly over rocks and through small cracks, beneath a split tree, and on as the wood grew tangled and the heat rose.
Having read countless fairy tales, Susan looked for a forest trail, good for walking. But there were no mossy paths here, no faint track left by kind hunters or red-hooded girls who brought fresh bread to their grandmothers. There was no path at all. Nets of slim green vines, narrow as string, obscured rocks underfoot; tall stalks coated in sharp, translucent hairs grew knee- and waist-high; and bristling shrubs the dusty color of evergreens grew so wide and dense, they could not be pushed aside and had to be circumvented.
“This isn’t that much different from a hike I took with the Boy Scouts,” Max said reassuringly. “We’re okay.”
Susan rolled her eyes.
Nell pushed back her moist bangs. “Didn’t you come home with a concussion from one of those?” she asked him. “And poison ivy?”
Susan flicked her sister’s arm, trying to get her to be quiet, but like Max, Nell was immune to suggestion.
Instead, she told Susan not to be so annoying, and they stomped along in silence for a while as Susan counted the ways they irritated one another.
As far as annoyances went, from Susan’s point of view the long walk was full of them. Four times they had to stop when Jean or Kate lost her Barbie in the weeds. The fifth time Susan found herself fishing a doll out of a knot of prickly, looping vines, she jammed both Barbies into the backs of the girls’ waistbands and yanked their shirts over the offending dolls so their plastic hands and hair would stop catching in the undergrowth. Nell, meanwhile, had tied her blanket round her like a belt and kept snagging on broken twigs and low-hanging branches. Jean refused to use a tree for a bathroom until she was so desperate she was hopping, and Kate remembered suddenly that Nell had once told her your teeth fall out if you don’t brush them, which made her frantic until Susan explained hyperbole to her. Nell then marched ahead in a huff — “I never exaggerate!” And despite his Boy Scout comment, Max kept mentioning how strange some of the fauna was and surmising that this must be some kind of winter heat wave, because who falls out of a window into a new season?
And then, every once in a while, the underbrush would rustle as if something bigger than a rabbit was pushing through it and Susan would catch sight of a hulking dark shape streaking through the trees.
“You don’t think there are any dangerous animals around here, do you?” Nell whispered to her.
Susan shook her head. “Probably more deer. They’re fast like that, right?”
She said it as much to convince herself as Nell. She’d had only the briefest glimpses of the thing, but it had seemed far taller than a deer. Susan picked her way through a thorny patch, her winter shirt clinging to her damp skin, and tried to think what she’d read about being lost in the woods. Stay put — that was the rule. Make a lot of noise. That last she knew couldn’t apply here. Not with that flicker of darkness in the trees.
“I think there are bears here,” Jean said. “And bears eat people, right?”
Nell fanned herself with one hand.
“There aren’t any bears here.”
“But I think I saw one.”
“Shut up, Jean.”
“Max! Nell said shut up!”
“Shut up, Nell.”
The day wore on, and there seemed no end to the thick woods. Eventually the brook they were tracking branched in several directions, and then the trickle they followed dwindled until it was no more than a small gush of water over stones. Finally the earth took it, leaving only a shallow depression in the ground where rain might find its way. Still they walked on, keeping east, until Susan began to feel that she was full of holes — a gaping emptiness in her stomach and a hollow, fear-chewed spot in her chest. Every so often Kate took her hand, until their palms were so grubby they lost their grip on each other.
“We’re almost there, right, Susan? We’re going to find someone soon?” Kate asked her.
“Right,” Susan said, trying to make herself sound sure.
“Right really, or right, you think so?”
“Right really.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
But how could she be sure? She could only try to sound it, because as usual Kate heard every microsecond of hesitation in conversation, took note of the smallest wrinkle between her eyes, and caught that almost frown she was about to make in annoyance before she stopped herself. Kate’s watchfulness drove Nell absolutely batty, and to be honest, that was one of the things Susan liked best about it, usually. But not here, not now. Now Susan needed to be unafraid and sure.
She was neither.
The stone wall was so overgrown, they nearly smacked into it before they saw it. Long ropy vines crisscrossed the stones and bloomed in the crevices, but it was a wall, man-made and very old by the look of it.
“Civilization!” Max said. “I told you!”
They moved around it, trying to find a way in. The wall stood at least eight feet tall and cut through the woods in a wide, unbroken curve.
“Let’s climb it,” Nell said. “Look at these vines! They’ll hold us!”
She grabbed one and hoisted herself up, jabbing the tip of her shoe into the stonework.
The rest of them followed her, groaning and nearly losing their grip, but the growth was so thick, it held.
“Wow!” Nell called when she reached the top. “Max, wait until you see this!”
On the other side, an orchard of peach and plum trees spread out in genteel rows.
Susan swung over the wall, eased herself down to the other side, and dropped to the ground. It was covered in moss and clover studded with round-headed white blossoms. The trees in the nearest row were full of peaches.
She grabbed one and tugged. It dropped into her hand, red and orange and perfect.
“Here!” She tossed a fruit to Kate, then another to Jean. Soon the juice was slipping down their chins and making their hands sticky.
“Civilization.” Max sighed. “Finally.”
“Civilization tastes great,” Jean said. “I never knew.”
Susan picked several extra peaches and shoved them into her skirt pocket.
“We’d better look for the owners,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll find some people now.”
The aroma of hot peaches clung to the air beneath the trees. They walked along, and Max peered up at the branches. He shook his head.
“I don’t think peach trees are this big at
home,” he said. “Fruit trees are usually shorter.”
Susan tried to ignore him. She didn’t want this place to be odd or puzzling. It was an orchard, and that meant people, and help, and getting home soon.
And yet the place was strange. Whoever had done the planting had definitely neglected the harvest. Flies lit on mounds of rotting fruit. Wormy peaches littered the space between the trees.
She reached the end of the row and saw why. Past a short clearing full of white clover and moss stood the ruins of what must have been a huge stone house. Only the outer wall remained, and only the lower half of that. It framed a square full of charred gray stones half covered by climbing weeds. The children stepped through a space that might have once been a back door and walked among the jumbled remains.
“Guess they had a fire,” Nell said. “And left it.”
Susan bent and ran a finger across a mossy stone.
Max examined the ground.
“But how long ago?” he asked. “There’s nothing but stone left. No wood, even. A house would have probably had some wood in it.”
Kate and Jean had climbed to sit on the half wall and rest their legs. Nell slouched to a seat beside it, her head against the stones.
“How old can it be if the trees are still so full?” she asked. “Wouldn’t some of them have died or something?”
None of them had an answer for that. Susan sank to her knees and tried to fold her arms across the wall. She only wanted to rest a minute, but the stones were too hot against her bare skin. She sighed and leaned back onto her heels.
“Hey,” Kate said suddenly. “Is that singing?”
Susan raised her head. “Where?”
Her sister pointed at a line of plum trees on the far side of the orchard. “That way. Can’t you hear it?”
For a moment, Susan heard nothing but a chorus of enthusiastic cicadas. Then she caught the sound of a girl’s voice.
Swiftly, she climbed over the short wall and headed back into the trees. The others followed. The voice petered out, but Jean and Kate ran ahead in its general direction, and the rest of them were right behind. Halfway down the row, they heard the girl take up her song again from somewhere up among the plums.
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