By Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
Chapter Seven "Big! Wind!"
The storm that the radio had predicted that morning had arrived in full force.
The music of the leaves was enhanced by the pattering of drops. And there was a thin, cold voice floating high behind the entire scene. Sarah opened her eyes to a world of grey catastrophe.
The wind was surging through the branches, rocking the trees as easily as if they were saplings. Sarah was soaked. Her skirt clung to her as coldly and closely as the wind. But Sarah didn't feel it. What she felt instead, as she arose from the ground, was a sort of exultation--a surging shake of strength and dim purpose rolling from her feet to the very top of her head.
Sarah felt as weightless as a suit of clothes on the washline. The cold, thin song wrapped her in itself. The grass shone with the wet, slick as a patch of fur. The sky was full of boiling clouds, small lightning shifting through their bulk in the distance. Everything was alive with energy.
Sarah put a hand out to steady herself, and felt the edge of the well. It seemed both smoother and more cut, more carven than usual. The voice in the wind gained some unusual strength, and Sarah turned around to face the well itself.
The well hunkered darkly before her, squat, detailless. It was as round, definite and truncated as an amputated limb of the hill. Her fingers traced the grooves in the surface of the well that seemed more than the random marks of the rock. Again, the voice intensified, growing from thin to girlish.
A flash of lightning made Sarah jump back from the well. But it was in that brief flash, with the water enveloping and simplifying the stones of the well into a single surface, like wet concrete, that she was able to see that very definite letters were carved into the side of the well. All around the rim of the well, as a matter of fact. It wasn't mere pattern or decoration, but letters and words. But words of a language, and letters of an alphabet that Sarah couldn't guess at.
"Aetheldonablescroothallygyllethalsoome."
Sarah said the words all together as they ran. They were the same as the letters on her brother's silver runestone necklace. She put her hand over her heart and felt the inscription. Some of the letters were the same. Sarah squinted and tried to say what she could read around the rim of the well.
"Aetheldonablescroothallygyllethalsoome," she said, or sang, rather. For now Sarah realized that the voice she had been hearing before was her own. She had woken up singing, and now her voice, as it sang through the strange words in the ancient script, grew stronger and fuller. And a second voice, hooting and hollow, but deep, began to come very definitely from inside the well itself. This wasn't just the wind hooing, this was a song rising from the well.
The words of the ancient script continued to come from Sarah's mouth. She had no idea how she was able to say them, but she did. Sarah looked out across the well into what was now a sturdy downpour descending on a darkened land. The rain was as thick as a sheet, and there across from her, on the other side of the well, it looked like tall figures of men were coming through those sheets of rain. Or that they were made of the rain, the rain running off their forms. They had a dire aspect to them, grim and tall. Sarah couldn't make out their garments, but they seemed to be wearing some kind of headgear and held long poles in their hands. It may have just been a trick of the lightning, and Sarah's exhaustion, but an irrational conviction told her that it was somehow real. And that frightened Sarah.
"Aetheldonablescroothallygyllethalsoome," she sang, louder and stronger than before, as if to ward away her fears, and keep the watery men at bay. She must seem unbowed before this weird vision, she knew.
The voice in the well swelled like the baying of a pack of hounds, and Sarah's attention shifted from the strange, halflit men, who at least were not moving, to the well itself again. A glow seemed to be reaching up from the belly of the well. And in the side light cast from that glow stood the flat shadow of another figure with a stick. It was the crone who had had Sarah by the throat! And the long stick she held disappeared into the mossy light of the well, stirring the depths.
"Sing," the shadow crone commanded.
Sarah wasn't sure if the crone was addressing her or the well, but both obeyed. A sinewy duet developed from their voices--Sarah's as high and tense as a struggling bird's, the well's as low as a freighter's fogblast, but tuneful, a sort of roaring song.
"Aetheldonablescroothallygyllethalsoome," they sang together. The figures in the rain started to shift and become solider, as if they would step from the rain that composed them and into the clearing. Watery horses now pawed the ground behind the men, their wet manes a-shake.
Sarah felt in the grip of some terrible tension, as if she were being held by iron bands, and the only hope of escape she had was through her voice. She sang with her need, and with the wild hope that the watery knights appearing before her, for that's what they were she was now sure, their chain mail swaying from their shoulders to their knees, would help her escape the crone.
The men's faces were starting to appear in the wet dark of the rain, and when another stroke of lightning blasted the woods, Sarah could make out the grim determination of their features. She had never seen such men, such hardness in a face--despite their still being formed of no more than raindrops.
"Sing," the crone commanded. Although such a command was needless now. Sarah couldn't remember a time when she wasn't singing. All the sounds of the world, wracked with rain and lightning, seemed to be a song--vivid and electric. Sarah watched the crone stirring the well, and leaned up against the edge herself to look in. Her face was underlit by the wan blue glow emanating upwards from the interior of the well.
As Sarah looked down into the well again, her voice faltered. "Sing," repeated the crone. But what Sarah saw in the pit of the well held all of her fascination for a moment. There, down in the silver center of the well, as plain and bright as daylight, Sarah saw her reflection. But it was not her entirely as she was, for her reflection bore a steel cap, and ringlets of chain mail flowed from her shoulders, silvery as a fish's scales. Sarah fell back from the well's edge, her voice singing on, but more torn from her that thrust from her now. What Sarah had seen in the well both stirred and disturbed her. And it seemed that a toothless gap broke into the shadow across from her, the same horrible grin that Sarah had seen before.
"Big! Wind!"
A black shape rocketed into Sarah's knees from behind her, sending her rolling to the ground, and cutting short her song. An instant, songless silence enveloped the hill, and only the crashing of the trees, the rain and the wind remained.
"Big! Wind!"
Dar's flat voice shouted across the greensward. In a moment, Abbey and Dar were at Sarah's side. Abbey was pushing her wet hair from her face and looking up at Sarah.
"Come on," Abbey yelled through the storm. "We don't know how to get back to the house from here. We need you."
Abbey took another look into Sarah's eyes. "Are you all right?"
Sarah had no idea if she would ever be all right again. "The men! The crone! Watch out! You must run!"
Abbey looked at her quizzically. "What? I can't hear you. What are you talking about? What men? What bone?"
Sarah sat bolt upright. She stood up as fast as she could. She spun around, looking for the solemn rain men. There was nothing there but the rain, and the suggestive shapes of the ash trees on the other side of the clearing.
Sarah shook her head in disbelief. Had it all been her imagination? What about the dark shape that had bowled her over?
Sarah felt a hard shove at her back, insistent. Was this the crone shoving her with her long stick? Sarah turned menacingly, ready to strike.
"Roanie!" she cried in surprise. It was her father's hound, big and real and welcome as a hot cup of apple cider.
"He's the one who found you!" Abbey explained loudly, holding her little brother's hand. "We followed him!"
The storm was too noisy to talk now, and Sarah felt a kind of relief--a relief she didn't really understand, to see Abbey and Dar and their normal, soaked clothes.
"All right!" Sarah managed. "Let's go!"
END OF CHAPTER SEVEN