“We did it!” Suri exclaimed, jumping back.
Minna abandoned her grooming and got to her feet. The two watched as a giant stone slab slid sideways. A brilliant green glow emanated from inside, and for a moment, Suri wondered if she’d done the right thing.
I don’t really want to go back to Nog.
Suri didn’t think it would be so bad if Minna came with her, but Tura would wonder where she’d gone. It wouldn’t be right to not say anything. She considered just taking a peek, and only going in for a few minutes, but that was how all the stories started. A visitor would enter for just a moment or two, but upon returning home, they’d find that a hundred years had passed. As it turned out, Suri didn’t need to worry. The door didn’t lead to Nog.
Behind the slab of stone was a room. Not much larger than their cottage, but a lot less cozy. It’s difficult to squeeze homey out of rock. The place was cold and hard, but that was the nature of stone. The room was round with a domed ceiling—just how Suri imagined living under a mushroom cap might be. Thick stone pillars set in a circle held up the dome. Decorating the walls were strange markings. In the center, a giant glowing green ball that was mostly submerged in the floor gave off an eerie light that filled the place with a disturbing radiance. Because light normally came from the sky, having anything lit from underneath seemed unnatural; add to that the sickly green color, and the chamber appeared absolutely creepy.
The room wasn’t empty. Chests and boxes formed shadowy figures in the dim light, and what might be a water well was near the back. A five-foot-high stack of deadwood was piled pretty much in the center of the room. The heap covered most of the glowing stone, making it look like the whole thing was the smoldering embers from a magical fire.
Suri smiled with delight. Tura often sent her off to find wood for their fire, but the process was arduous. In summer, plants hid the fallen branches, and in winter, the snow made it impossible to locate anything dry. Suri had come upon a treasure, a surplus of sheltered dry and seasoned wood.
Looking closer, though, she needed only a few seconds to realize her mistake. The pile wasn’t wood at all. She was repulsed to discover a huge stack of white bones. The skulls around its base were what gave away her oversight—hard to mistake a pair of eye sockets and a row of teeth for a log.
“Bones,” she said to Minna. Neither one had set a single toe in the room. They both stood at the doorway, Minna’s white fur turned emerald by the glow. “What do you think this is?”
The wolf lifted her nose and sniffed, then presented the sour expression she put on when she didn’t find her supper appealing. Suri didn’t like the smell of the place, either. The odor was similar to a fetid pond or an abandoned deer kill.
The chamber clearly wasn’t Nog, so after checking to make certain the door wouldn’t close behind her, Suri had Minna wait while she crept in. Moving carefully, she circled the pile, and she immediately noticed two things. The first was that being in the room was drastically different from being outside. It felt like she’d gone underwater. There was a terrible muffled sensation as if she’d entered a bubble, or someone had put a bag over her head. Suri felt strangely cut off from the rest of the world in a way she never had before. She repeatedly looked toward Minna, reassuring herself the exit was still clear. The thought of being trapped in such a place pushed her courage to the limit.
Grit yer teeth, spit in its eye, and challenge your dread to an arm wrestle. All that was easy to say in a sunny garden with daffodils all around, not so simple—
That’s when Suri noticed the other thing. All the skulls on the pile were facing out.
They’re watching me.
The question—the conundrum that caused Suri to lose her arm wrestling contest—was: Were they always facing like that?
She couldn’t remember, and in her confusion, she knew that they were indeed watching. Each pair of empty eye sockets was trained on Suri, and not one looked happy or welcoming. Most seemed to have sinister grins, although some had no lower jaw at all. In another moment, Suri was positive one would try to talk. The idea of a skull without a jaw struggling to speak was several running jumps past disturbing. The certainty that it would shriek in some horribly high-pitched way set Suri running.
Her foot caught part of the pile and sent bones skipping across the floor. Once outside, Suri slammed the bump on the wall and set the door to closing. She knelt and squeezed Minna. There was no better remedy for fear than hugging the soft fur of a wolf.
When the door clicked shut, the light disappeared, and the smell vanished. Suri could breathe again. She let go of Minna and was moving to stand when she touched something cold. For a brief instant, she glared at the foot-long bone, thinking it had chased her. Then Suri realized this had been one of those she kicked, and the only one lucky enough to clear the doorway and escape. Outside the room, away from the green glow, the bone was ordinary, good-sized, and clean. She picked it up, surprised at how light it was.
Hollow , she guessed. Must have been a really big bird. I could make a flute out of this.
Tura had many flutes. Some were made out of hollow sticks, but a few were created from the wing bone of a turkey or the leg bone of a lamb or deer. None were as big or as hefty as this one. Given Suri felt cheated out of her treasure of deadwood, she wanted to take away something from the adventure. A flute—her first flute—would be just the thing.
Why a pile of bones had been hidden inside a secret stone room was a question best sealed behind the now closed door.
“Found a bone, did ya?” Tura asked as Suri and Minna returned.
The old mystic was perched on the Sitting Rock, just outside the door of their cottage, weaving a basket from a pile of willow branches. She had on her summer linen, belted with the long leather strap that wound around her half a dozen times and still the end dangled down to her ankles. This always made Suri wonder if Tura had been much bigger long ago. Perhaps she was once a giant or had been born a bear and grown into a woman.
What will I be when I grow up? And with such endless possibilities available, why did Tura chose to be an old woman?
Suri would have chosen a swift, a finch, or perhaps even a hummingbird—definitely something that could fly. Old women, with their sagging skin and brittle white hair, wouldn’t even crack the top one hundred.
Suri held up her prize and smiled. “Yep. Found it under the waterfall. Thought I’d make a flute of it. You can show me, right?”
Tura took the bone and turned it over and back. As she did, her eyes narrowed. “Found this in the pool?”
“No, ma’am.” Suri shook her head and grinned at Minna. “We found a secret room, behind the waterfall.”
Suri expected shock, surprise, excitement, and imagined Tura responding with: How in Elan did the two of you find such a marvelous secret as a hidden place?
Tura merely nodded. “So, there’s one under there, too?”
Disappointed, Suri frowned. “There’s more than one?”
“Two that I know of. Father showed me the first. I discovered the second on my own.”
Tura’s father was a topic Suri was long interested in, but which the old mystic rarely spoke of. Suri only knew that ages ago, he had brought Tura to the forest from a settlement in the south, and the two had lived in the wood in the glen for years and years before Suri had appeared. By then Tura’s father had left. Where he’d gone, Tura never said, making Suri think Tura didn’t know.