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by Davide Mana
In the dim amber light of the gas lamp, the words had been looking like small ants marching across the snowfield of the page for a few minutes now.
Alice shuddered, snapped up her head and looked at the window.
The air in the room was unhealthily hot, the sounds from the outside muffled.
The cat was sleeping on the stuffed chair.
And something was moving in the garden.
Slipping silently from under the covers, Alice went to the glass pane, cupping her hands to see through, the latest issue of the Sexton Blake Library forgotten on the bed - and she was not supposed to read a boy's magazine anyway, and was doing it out of a curiosity that had so far gone unrewarded, so there.
In the darkness outside, she spied a hunched form softly treading on the snow, vaguely resembling a stone satyr she once saw in a garden in Exham, leaving the cover of a bramble edge and going in the general direction of that big, old tree on the hillside that was stamping its silhouette on the face of the full moon.
It looked downright strange.
Alice was sure she had never seen such a big, positively huge moon in the sky.
The snow under her bare feet did not feel as cold as she thought it should, and with this came the realization that somehow she had, evidently, opened the french window and gone on the trail of the mysterious visitor.
"My feet are doing the thinking instead of my head", she thought, as she climbed the hill after the homunculus - or whatever that was - that was panting white clouds of warm breath, not twenty yards in front of her, and mumbling something about being late or what else.
The black tree was by this time casting its shadow on her, looking like a strange taloned appendage protruding from the ground and pointing at the sky.
Her quarry disappeared at the base of the tree.
"Now this is strange", she told herself, and hurried up the incline, treading on the small rounded imprints that the hunched figure had left behind.
The roots of the tree were exposed in a way she had never noticed before - not that she spent much time on the hill these days, of course, but with the hill being just out of her room window and all that, she sometimes cast a distracted glance in that direction. And never she had noticed such a huge hole under the tree, such a black gaping opening through which a warm, moist, slightly perfumed breath of air came forth.
A faint echo of descending steps was barely audible in the dark.
Alice followed.
* * * * *
* * * *
* * * * *
She had been descending the spiral stair for quite a while now, led by the clicking of mysterious steps in front of her, when a sign appeared hanging in the air above her head.
The Seventy Steps of Light Slumber, read the sign - which was plain nonsense as , in primis, she had been walking forever and seventy was nothing close to the actual number of steps she had descended so far, and secondly, light was the last thing available thereabouts, she having to squint in the penumbra just to be sure not to put her foot down badly and hurt her ankle - and all things considered, probably a sprained ankle was a lighter curse than the horrible wrinkles that all this squinting around would surely end up placing around her eyes.
"As for Slumber", she mused "whoever he might be, he is downright rude with his guests, forcing them to walk all this way to his door."
The stair kept spiralling down, and Alice with it. The clicking sound in front of her was gone by now, and she was beginning to feel dizzy, reflecting that Asenath - that was her cat, a tabby - had once again shown a superior form of common sense by staying well put, when she came to a landing and to an impresive set of doors blocking the way.
Each massive door was covered in uncanny bas reliefs, depicting people and animals, and strange creatures, engaged in a variety of activities which Alice was not always able to name or recognize but nonetheless interested her greatly. So much so that when the gates swung open noislessly in front of her, she felt almost disappointed that such great a work of art was no longer on display.
Beyond the doors a vast cavern opened, and if this was natural or man-made Alice could not tell.
A huge flame burned in the center of this space, while shadowier niches in the walls kept statues and idols of a kind that Alice did not feel like investigating at the moment.
Pillars sculpted so as to resemble columnar fires supported the ceiling above her, from which hung massive stone cones - she believed these were called stalags or something equally unappealing - while the floor was of a polished black stone like the beads in her grandmother's mourning necklace, without any joints or cracks.
There were two ancients walking around, silent, dressed for a pantomime and with the air of eccentric Oxford dons out for a lark - she had met a few, thank you - and she decided, as they seemed to ignore her going about, to keep things that way and make as if they were not there.
Other things interested her more: doors were visible along the walls of the hall, all of them closed and - as she had way to experiment directly - locked.
"Now this is annoying," she said aloud, without pausing to marvel at the hall's absence of echo, nor thinking that this could attract the two old jockers. "Why place all these doors here if then you do not let people through any of them?"
Her opinion of the mysterious Slumber that lived in this place fell another pair of notches.
Some of the doors had keyholes, thankfully. Not that you could see much through them, mind you, but at least there was some hope of finding a key or, missing that, some other way to gain entrance. Alice inspected the place once again, deciding that if she really wanted to go somewhere, she had to push back pride and take a closer look at the statues in the niches.
The first ones she did not understand. One looked like a kind of amorphous blob, like a piece of melted rubber. The second was a kind of tripod surmounted by a squid's tentacle - revolting - followed by a kind of flame made of some strange glass that changed shape every time you took your eyes off it. Each had a key in front of it, but she did not care to touch them.
Finally, in front of an obese stone teddy bear sticking his tongue out at the world she saw a rusted old key that looked innoquous enough, if not downright inviting, so she pocketed it with a mocking courtsey to the idol, and ran to find the right door for it.
Once found, she opened it and started descending again, paying small heed at the sign on the door.
The two old men watched her as she went, shaking their heads in unison.
[to be continued]
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