Green Boy by Susan Cooper

Author:Susan Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

NINE

I found myself sliding down some kind of chute, very steep, very dark, with a sour smell. It swung sideways, and then I fell in a heap, out in light again, floundering in a pile of sheets and clothes. The others came tumbling down after me. An empty sleeve flapped round my neck; I saw Lou lying on his back in a white nest like an unmade bed. We had come down a laundry chute; we were all in a great heap of dirty laundry. If I hadn’t been so scared, I would have laughed.

And then the men were tugging us out, the older one with Lou under his arm again, and we were outside a door and in cooler air, on a dark street.

It was a narrow street with uneven paving, like round stones set into dirt. The men hurried us down it and turned into a side alley, and then another; it was so dark, I don’t know how they knew where they were going. The alleyways seemed to run between tall stone buildings with no windows, like a black maze. This was totally different from anywhere else we’d been in Pangaia.

Then we were out again in a wider street lit by the occasional dim lamp, and through a brown haze you could see battered doors and unlighted windows, some of them broken. The men paused at an entryway with two huge closed wooden doors, and pushed open a smaller door set into one of them. We stepped up and over, and found ourselves in a kind of courtyard, with the dark sky overhead and a blur of voices from all around. It was like a hollow apartment building. On both sides of the courtyard, iron stairways went up to a balcony, and then again to another balcony above that, and the doors of the apartments led off the balconies, three on each side of the square. The walls were scarred and peeling, the iron rusted. This building wasn’t in good shape.

We clattered up a stairway and past open doors on the first balcony. A spicy smell of cooking came from one of them, and another must have been a toilet, and smelled terrible. There were holes in the floor, here and there, though not big enough to fall through.

A woman’s voice called softly from a lighted window, “A rescue, Steven?”

Our older man called back, “A rescue!” in a kind of loud whisper, and the woman clapped her hands.

Then we went through a door and a stuffy carpeted entryway, and into a room filled with light and people, all sitting round a table, and at the head of the table was Annie, smiling like sunup, with the girl Gwen sitting beside her.

They gave us such a welcome, it was as if we’d come back from the dead. They’d been eating, and they gave us bread and cheese and fruit—apples and cherries, things that don’t grow on Lucaya—and a sort of spicy chocolatey drink. Gwen made room for me next to her, with Lou on my other side next to Annie.

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