Play Dead by John Levitt

Author:John Levitt [Levitt, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Epic, Fantasy, Fiction, General
Publisher: ACE CHARTER
Published: 2011-01-25T05:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

ON OUR WAY TO THE HIDING PLACE, WE PASSED fields of what Malcolm said were wheat and barley, with insects buzzing a pleasant chorus that made me want to stretch out and take a nap. Plenty of insects, but no biting flies and no mosquitoes. Richter’s world might not be totally consistent, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Jackie chatted easily with me, acting as if the night before had never happened. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to remember any of it, not even the parts that I did. Malcolm pointed out various things of interest, playing tour guide.

“Remember I told you Richter was friends with Jacob Grimm?” he said.

“What of it?”

“No one seems to know what’s guarding the book. But given the fairy-tale aspect of this place, it might well be ogres or trolls or something else from folklore.”

“Even a witch,” Jackie said. “I don’t mean a Wiccan; I mean a broomstick type.”

“That, we could handle. A witch is just a type of practitioner when you get right down to it. Has anyone ever seen anything?”

“No,” said Malcolm, “but that’s not surprising. There are plenty of stories about those who have gone to collect the book, but no stories of those who returned. I don’t think there have been any. I think whatever is guarding the book will turn out to be powerful and unusual. Richter was no simpleton.”

After an hour without seeing anyone, we passed a big barn close to the road. A guy on the roof was hammering nails, but the sound was out of sync with the motion of his arm, as if he were a mile away. We were getting close to the singularity edge. As we crested a small rise, I looked into the distance and saw mountains, and they had the telltale blurring that indicates the limit of a singularity. Out on the edges, singularities start to unravel, losing internal integrity. Which also meant we were near where we needed to be, since we couldn’t go much farther.

By this time the fields to the east had been supplanted by rolling woods, which grew thicker the longer we walked. About a quarter mile past the barn a path angled off into the woods. The day was bright and sunny, but the woods were dark and tangled, with trees that had grown into fantastical shapes, taller than trees should be. Fairy-tale woods. Out here on the fringes, reality was thinner.

Lou looked at the path leading off into the woods and immediately sat down. Not a good idea to go in there, he was telling me, as if I needed to be told.

“It’s exactly the way it was described to me,” said Malcolm. “This path leads into the heart of the woods, and then there’s something in the middle. That’s where the book is.”

“Something?” I asked.

“Since no one who went into those woods ever came back out, no one could tell me exactly what’s in there. A house, maybe. A cave. A hollow tree. Something.”

I looked down the path leading into the dark forest.

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