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by Davide Mana
There were seven hundred steps, snaking their way down the cliffside, some of them wide as croquet fields and no higher than an inch, more landings than steps, actually, and some so high that she had to negotiate them by sitting down on the ledge and letting herself drop to the following one.
Alice knew they were seven hundred exactly because she counted them, aloud and deliberately, in a peevish nasal voice she had learned to make at school and that she knew made her sister mad.
Seven hundred steps and finally she was standing on a small stone platform, a small landing surrounded by an iron handrail, holding a table of gray stone with three curly legs of hammered iron. On the table there were a big fat book and a gourd stopped with a cork.
A sun had risen from somewhere as she was climbing down the cliff, and now, low on the horizon, it was trickling a pale sickly light on the trees and hills she could see by leaning on the rail and looking down.
"This must be the way a raven sees the forest as it flies", she reflected, surprised at how much the treetops crowded below her looked like a green counterpart of the rolling thick clouds filling the sky above her.
She scanned the horizon, trying to see some sign of human activity, or some sight of some import anyway, to no avail. The treetops waving under her, uninterrupted and monotonous, soon bored her solid, and there being no other way to turn, apart for the long climb back - seven hundred steps - Alice took an interest in the book and the gourd.
The book was heavy, bound in leather and closed by a metal clasp.
On the cover, thick letters read READ ME.
Quite a nice title, she imagined, one that did not try to lure the reader with some strange promise, nor to impress her with some erudite Greek or German wordage.
Simple, direct, peremptory.
The gourd was heavy, and produced a splashing sound when lifted and shaken slightly.
Alice had often seen farmers and other workers of the land carry one of those in the field during the first warm autumn days for refreshment, and the long walk down - seven hundred steps in all - suddenly made her feel downright thirsty. The words DRINK ME were engraved on the surface of the vegetal bottle, and she needed little more invitation.
The first gulp burned the tip of her tongue, fizzing down her throat and expanding in a pleasantly warm cloud in her tummy. She felt like all her toes together were suddenly drumming on the stone floor, and a short chuckle bubbled out of her.
Not bad at all.
But probably not water.
Time to take a look at the book.
Being a girl with little time to waste, Alice undid the clasp and opened the tome at random.
The words, dark brown on the yellowed crispy paper, swam for a few heartbeats in front of her eyes, before they settled down to some plain typeface.
She read aloud.
"In his house in R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming"
She shuddered, not knowing why.
One of those boring Russian novels, most likely, by the sound of it. Nothing she could not wade through, of course, being a well-read and articulated young woman, but the help of another sip or two was certainly required.
That felt better - DRINK ME indeed and all that.
She looked around for a place to sit down, as her knees were feeling all warm and stuffed with cotton, and not feeling like going back to the steps - she had done too much walking in her bare feet already - she sat with a supple jump on the table itself, the open book in her lap and the gourd under her arm, legs kicking in the air.
Let's try again.
"Ph'nglui lies waiting in Cthulhu's R'lyeh fhtagn"
That did not sound right, somehow. Her tongue was acting on its own accord.
She took another sip and, tired of chasing the words drifting in and out of focus on the page, browsed through the volume, looking for pictures. She had always been partial to books with pictures.
The first she found, a two full-page-job in monochrome, was too dark and doodly for her tastes, much like one of those lithographs she had seen in Doctor Hawkins' book, but with a far less sympathetic dinosaur in it. Or was it something else, maybe a mammoth - that after all she had heard were wont to be found around in the Russian countryside quite often, tusks and all.
Those curly things arching towards the sky could well be tusks, after all, she reflected.
Further partaking of the spicy wine made her more responsive to some of the other illustrations, adding a glowing confortable patina of seductiveness to some of the strangest looking gods - she was pretty sure they were gods, as Russians had a thing about religion - so that she enjoyed the ride through the tome enormously. Smoothing the way with more fizzing drinks, she therefore took great delight in each and every picture, and expecially in the one about a supposedly fearful Shoggot - whatever that caption might mean, some Russian word impossible to render, undoubtedly - that really looked like the time her bubble bath went out of control one evening, spilled in the corridor with a resounding splash and sent the maid screaming for help.
The memory of poor Maggie running babbling down the stair, her long feet tapping on the steps, suddenly seemed much more funny as an idea than it was in actual reality, so that Alice let go of the book, and, clasping her hands to her sides , fell on her back laughing and rolled over a side, with tears in her eyes, spilling the remaining wine on her nightgown front.
The poor maid running, the skirts hoisted up for haste, with the foam chasing her like an hungry animal.
It was beyond words.
Shaking with laughter, she fell from the table.
* * * * *
* * * *
* * * * *
It was about one full minute before she realized, the laughing fit somehow past and her mind somewhat clearer, that fallen though she was, she had not yet hit the platform.
A good thing, as she remembered it was made of stone, and rather hard at that.
Curiously, Alice felt incredibly light, and for this she blamed the wine - she had read about some French bubbly concotions acting that way on young women, in London's Soho expecially.
Disreputable, sort of, which did not feel half bad, she reflected.
And yet, this was mighty strange.
The first treetop zipped past her, a strange multi-coloured large bird poised there doing a wide-eyed double take as the girl in the flapping wet nightie hurled headlong by without a by-your-leave, and plunged towards the darkened ground.
By now, tree limbs where whizzing past her all around with an ominous sound, the sky and the sun were forgotten under the cover of the wide dark green leaves, and the ground seemed no closer with each passing minute, but Alice knew that this condition would probably not last perpetually.
And as always with her, the fear of the unknown was drowned by the curiosity about the outcome.
Even if, to be completely honest, there was not much unknown in her current predicament, nor in the final outcome at hand, as a fall through a forest from a sky-high cliffside platform was not likely to end - even in a young woman's mind - with any significant event other than an unpleasant crunching sound and then nothing.
So the splash came really as a surprise.
* * * * *
* * * *
* * * * *
Alice resurfaced from the oily dark depths of the bog, her hair clinging to her face and something unpleasant and snakelike caressing the sole of her left foot.
She made a strangled noise and splashed with her arms, going under once again and and erupting out with a rasping breath, sucking in great gulps of fresh humus-scented warm air. The snake-ish thing departed, or subsided, or whatever it was that snakelike things on the bottom of bogs did at this time of the day.
Alice tried to remember what her sister had shown her the last time they had been in Blackpool, as it seemed to be directly in relation to her current predicament, pool, blackness, flotation and all.
She spread her arms and legs and tried to be much more buoyant than she felt.
That was when the drifting log hit her in the head.
Not a nice way to offer some help, but she climbed aboard nonetheless, after a short debate with herself to decide if it was better to sit astride the thing or assume a more proper amazon-style riding position.
She sat on the bark, her feet and calves still immersed in thedense liquid, gained some balance and pushed her hair back from her face. There was a rat-badger thing crouching at the other end of the floating log, looking at her shrewdly and waving its tentacles.
Which, for a change, was downright strange and then some, since she had never, ever seen, in all her books and magazines, nor in the Science Museum, a ratty-looking badger - or a badgery-looking rat, for that matter - that was provided of short, worm-like tentacles over its mouth, like some kind of comedy mustache, and yet, there it was.
This thing clearly could not be, she told herself, as Alice had gone more than once through the Wind in the Willows, which featured, and prominently, both rats and badgers, and never had she noticed anything like this. Now, good master Grahame would never commit willingly such a blatant descriptive and taxonomic error, and therefore Alice was forced to conclude that either the renowned author had been led astray by unscrupolous or malicious advisors, or this thing facing her was not, after all, a badger, or a rat.
She decided to ask, as the thing looked intelligent enough to be able to talk.
"Excuse me if I intrude upon you, dear... ehm, dear friend, but are you perchance an exotic animal?" she ventured, being very polite and with an attempted curtsey that, she being seated and all, did not seem to make such a great impression on the animal, which - perhaps taking offence - did not answer.
It watched her with unblinking eyes that glowed slightly in the dark.
A further attempt to establish a dialogue in French came equally to nothing but left the girl quite well pleased with her pronunciation of the rather deceptive diphthong 'eu'.
The strange furry creature kept looking at her through its small cunning eyes, the tentaclets waving under its nose and the tail oscillating rithmically this way and that.
Which was just the way Asenath's tail went when the cat was measuring up a prospective toy or tasty morsel, a fact this that Alice did not fail to notice. The idea of such a smallish rat-badger sizing her up for a bite was rather ridiculous, she reflected.
So ridiculous in fact that, coupled with the intelligent glint of the beast's eyes, she found it slightly unsettling, if not downright scary.
Awkward minutes went by, as the two passengers of the log faced each other, silent, and the log drifted along in the otherwise uncannily silent forest. The sun rose in the sky, and a green tint was cast upon the scene, and large dragonflies started cruising low on the reflective surface of the pond, producing an unpleasantly halting buzz but keeping well away.
Then, just as the situation was becoming definitely unnerving - sustaining the thing's gaze was much worse than being under scrutiny by some old maiden aunt, Alice thought - the log mercifully touched terra firma, and the tentaculated rat-badger, with a final appreciative glance at the girl, jumped on land and in a few more leaps was out of sight among the shrubbery.
With a sigh, Alice stepped off the log and tried to get her bearings.
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