Little Lantern, Deep Darkness by Sakiv Koch

Author:Sakiv Koch [Koch, Sakiv]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

The horn squalled rudely and woke him up. His heart changed the rhythm of its beating as he looked at the majestic wrought-iron gates being opened inwards by two uniformed sentries. His eyes developed magical fingertips, so that they could touch everything they saw. His blood began to warm in his veins as he effortlessly remembered things that he had never seen or heard of before. It’s the home my father built, he thought with a stab of unbearable pain, a pulse of electric joy. It’s my home. My home.

He was conscious of Sona watching him hawkishly, but he neither erased the grimace nor guarded the smile that came to live as unlikely neighbours on his face. He loved everything that he saw; he spoke to the constituents of the house and they spoke back to him.

The compound wall, dressed in black granite, stretched to at least a hundred feet on either side of the gates. The pathway leading to the main building of the house, set about a hundred-and-fifty feet back from the street, was paved with a green stone.

Groves of flowering trees populated the landscaped gardens on both sides of the driveway. A slender, chuckling stream wended its way from the western garden, crossed the driveway under a wooden bridge, and threw itself into a pond in the eastern garden.

A round structure, made out of wood and glass, stood at the pond’s shore. When he saw it, Smast sat up with a jerk. He rubbed his eyes to clear away a film of moisture that had suddenly formed over them. Sona laughed softly and asked the chauffeur to stop the motorcar.

She and Smast got out of the vehicle and it rolled on with Pintu still fuming silently in the front seat. “That place is something special — an emperor among kings,” she said with what sounded to Smast like a thief’s pride in her loot. “I’ll show it to you at the very last.”

He wanted to go into the embrace of that room straightaway, instinctively knowing it to have been an extremely fond dream of his father’s, but he did as Sona asked, following her down the driveway, the tin-box tucked under one arm, his crutch — Pintu’s bane — punctuating his drunkard’s walk. He drank in the overwhelming beauty, natural and man-made (Father-made, as Smast thought of it), cocooning him on all sides.

They stepped onto the ornate wooden bridge that spanned the stream. Smast lingered upon it for a long minute, absorbing the music that water made beneath its weathered planks. The last thirty feet of the driveway curved a little, so that the main building of the mansion remained veiled behind wealthy boughs brimming with fragrant blossoms.

When he finally saw it, the building’s white-marbled grandeur snatched a half of his breath away. The other half, lodged in the hollow of his throat, made a curious sound as it escaped his gaping mouth. Sona looked at him with the same fraudulent satisfaction she had exhibited earlier, as

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