Underground by Jean Ferris

Author:Jean Ferris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2007-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

THE NEXT NIGHT WE WENT BY OUR LITTLE LESSON ROOM, and kept on going. I looked back at it like I was saying goodbye to an old friend.

We walked on a path for a while, and then we got off it, climbing over some rocks, squeezing through a tight place (scared me to death thinking I could get stuck there), bending round sharp corners, going deeper and deeper in.

It was dark in a way it never got dark outside. No matter how long you waited for your eyes to get used to that dark so you could see something without the lamp, they never would. You never could see in there by yourself. And it smelled old. Old and deep, somehow. And quiet, like sounds hadn’t been invented yet. Every now and then I had to shiver just thinking on it.

“Are we almost there?” I asked him.

“Almost. When we get near, I want you to close your eyes so I can surprise you.”

I was already feeling surprised and not sure how many more surprises I wanted to have. But when he told me to, I shut my eyes, and he took my hand and led me somewhere. Then he said I should stand there while he got something ready. Good thing I trusted him like I did, or I’d have been worrying there was some kind of trick coming my way—like I would have if it was Nick instead of Stephen.

When I finally got to open my eyes, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. We were in a room all white and glittery, and it looked like white and glittery flowers were growing all over—on the walls and the ceiling and some on the floor, too. Or like somebody had just been throwing snowballs all around. Stephen put his two lanterns down on the floor so we had plenty of light, and it just glowed, like being inside stars.

“How did you do this?” I whispered.

“I didn’t. God and the cave together, they did it. I just found it like this.”

“It doesn’t seem real.” I kept turning round and round, looking at it all.

“I thought maybe you’d like to write your name on one of these white walls. Maybe here, in this hidden place.” He showed me a spot where the glittery wall bent, making a fold that would be hard to see into unless you were holding a lantern right up to it, the way Stephen was doing.

I put my hand on it, and it was rough and scratchy. “How can I write on that?” I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. It seemed wrong to make a mark on all that whiteness. But at the same time, I wanted to see how my name looked on what was the prettiest, most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

“You can smoke it on. I brought candles. You know how that tallow smokes. You can do it that way.”

I liked that. Smoke seemed a better way to write on that kind of wall than anything else I could think up.

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