Текст книги "The Mystery of Drear House"
Автор книги: Virginia Hamilton
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4
SHE WAS DWARFED BY the cabin and the hill rising behind it. Great-grandmother Jeffers wasn’t more than four feet seven inches tall. The whole world and Thomas were taller.
Great-grandmother held herself tall, shoulders high. Her face was awash with happiness. She peered at Thomas and his papa as though trying to see above a sunrise. Her hair was swept up in a ball at the top of her head. Thomas was shocked to see that it had turned almost completely white.
“I knew it was you!” she exclaimed to them. She came forward gingerly, as though she were walking a tightrope. She wore a new coat and a dark blue dress and shoes to match. Her small, neat hands were clasped before her. “Heard the car winding ’round the hills. Great goodness, knew it was you, too!”
“Grandmother Rhetty!” Mr. Small exclaimed. He was out of the car, coming around the front. He folded her close. She felt breakable. Her arms, so thin. “You look well,” he said, gently patting her shoulder.
“Oh, I’m fine, ’cept for some slowness.”
Thomas came forward. “Great-grandmother Jeffers, hi!” he said.
“Well, Thomas, you come back.” He lowered his head to her shoulder as she folded him in. “Wasn’t expecting you. Now, I remember, your mama say on the telephone you’d be coming, too.” She kissed his cheek warmly. She hugged him tightly, then held him at arm’s length a moment to look him over. “Getting to be a big old boy! Missed you!”
“Uh-huh, missed you, too, Great-grandmother,” he said.
She looked far into his eyes. “So,” she murmured, “that Dies house, is it? You all had yourselves a something! I had my chicory roasting, don’t you know? It takes care.”
She believed that chicory had the power to ward off calamity. It must’ve, too, Thomas decided. For almost everything had turned out all right in the North.
Great-grandmother’s property came right up to the laneside. There sat her blue mailbox on its post as they turned in the yard. There wasn’t a walkway, just three or four stepping-stones, placed at points where the ground became soft after a hard rain.
Thomas took note of it all. That faded blue of the mailbox. It reminded him of something—that old gate of hers he used to paint. It was nowhere to be seen. Must’ve fallen down. He breathed deeply of the fresh country air. “Oh, it smells so good out here!” he said.
Great-grandmother Jeffers smiled. The smile was sad somehow. Then Thomas understood. He bowed his head.
“Not easy at all, leaving all this,” Great-grandmother Jeffers said softly.
“Will you see it again?” Thomas asked.
“Oh, I plan to see it again. I won’t get rid of it.”
“You didn’t sell it?” he said.
“I would never sell land like this,” she said.
“Well, that’s good. I thought you had.”
“She’s rented it, Thomas,” his papa said.
She took hold of Thomas’s arm for support but stood her ground. She was not yet ready to give up the view. It was her pride and joy.
“And you never minded staying out here all by yourself?” Mr. Small was saying, marveling. He loved the mountains, but he had always been ready to leave them when he had to. College. Work. Advancement.
Great-grandmother pursed her lips and said, “You know, after supper, couple times a week, I walk on over there to the Beau Chesters, my old friends.”
Thomas remembered them.
“Silva make a pie every so often, from apples she picks just in season and keeps in the cellar,” Great-grandmother went on. “That pie’s most still warm by the time I get there. We set down and have it. Then Beau and me, we walk to a mountain. Silva can’t walk these days, but she don’t mind we do. And we climb some of the mountain, me and Beau.”
She nodded eagerly. “Me, holding Beau’s arm, and not a word need be spoken between us. Two old folks! It won’t even matter to us if we can’t make it back one time. Because of what you can see after supper! What you can just see!”
That made Mr. Small laugh outright in amazement. Here was his grandmother, near ninety, and she still could climb a mountain in order to see the beauty around her. “Then you walk back here after that?” Mr. Small asked.
She shook her head. “Silva ride me back in the pickup. We go slow, and we talk. And the night is falling,” Great-grandmother said. “Silva puttin’ on the lights. I most wait for that part, coming back.”
“When she puts on the headlights?” Thomas asked.
Great-grandmother Jeffers gave him a long look as though there were but the two of them, the way they had been together months ago. “It’s what gets caught in the headbeams,” she said, spoken gently. “Ghosts rise at dusk.”
“Grandmother,” Mr. Small said.
“I—I know that,” Thomas said. He realized he did believe that. The Indian maiden! He knew dusk to be a time of caution, when what was supernatural could enter the mind.
Mr. Small cleared his throat as if to change the subject. Not knowing what to say, he remained silent. They stood there, surveying the cabin and the hill that rose sharply behind it. Beyond the hill, mountain faces and folds stood out from the silence as bold as thunder.
Words couldn’t describe mountains planted forever just there, Thomas thought. It came to him that mountains had a talent for size, hugeness, just as he did for whittling. He smiled, daring to compare himself to them. Mountains were carved out of nature, as he carved from what was natural. Not too different, that mountain and me, he thought.
Thomas realized he was holding something. It was the carving. He’d had it in his hand the whole time. It was finished, and he hadn’t realized.
“Great-grandmother, here,” he said, and gave it to her for a present.
“Well, I’ll be!” she said, taking it. “Who is it? Mr. Dies Drear?”
“No, it’s a boy like me,” he said. “Name of M. C. Darrow, called Macky.”
“M. C. Darrow. Macky,” she said. “Well, I’ll be. He’s your friend?”
“He’s ... a big boy,” Thomas said.
She turned the carving over in her hands, feeling it and smoothing her fingers along its facets. “Heard about Darrows from your mother,” she said.
Thomas nodded. “They’re the ones caused us trouble,” he murmured.
Great-grandmother Jeffers and Thomas both stared at the carving as she turned it over and around. It was a perfect rendering of Macky’s head in miniature. “It’s a fine portrait, I can just tell,” she told her great-grandson. “Thank you, Thomas. I will cherish it,” she said. “And I want to meet this Macky and his family one time.”
“You do?” Thomas said. He stared at her, an idea dawning.
“Of course, I do,” she said.
“That might prove difficult,” Mr. Small said.
Great-grandmother smiled sweetly. “And I want to hear all about everything on the way to the North.”
She slid the carving into her coat pocket and put her arm around her great-grandson. “Let’s go on inside now,” she told him. “I got everything ready.”
Inside, it was the same place of old. Thomas had played here, slept here, so many times. Things were pulled apart now, but the house was still what he remembered. Great-grandmother had a few boxes full of things. She had furniture, bedding, and her mattress all ready to go. She had her best clothes on hangers, lying on the settee. There were two suitcases and a lamp she couldn’t part with. His papa started taking her brass bedstead apart. After that was done, they loaded everything in the U-haul.
Great-grandmother Jeffers would take all the items that were special to her, such as the framed photographs she had kept for more than half a century. And she took her senior’s walker, as she called it, which was a three-sided lightweight aluminum support. She used it to lean on when she had to.
Thomas and his papa worked fast and hard, going in and out of the house, back and forth. It was a strenuous exercise. I’m not any little kid, not anymore, Thomas thought. It felt good to be big and strong.
Then, all at once, they were finished. Thomas brushed his hands off. “That’s all,” he said.
Great-grandmother Jeffers nodded. “That’s all that I’m taking,” she said.
“It about filled the U-haul up, too,” Thomas said.
She crossed the room and opened the door. She stood there, waiting for Thomas and Mr. Small to go out of the house. She meant to close the door herself on all that had been. She stood there, so tiny in her old cabin. And yet she was made large by this last moment’s recollection of a lifetime.
5
“SEE” THOMAS SAID, EXCITEDLY. “It just goes up and up. Very high up. Straight up.”
It was dark out by the time they got home. They’d had a long and pleasant ride. Thomas talked all the way, telling Great-grandmother everything.
She had fallen asleep once, just a light dozing. She didn’t think she had missed much. Darrow people with river names. The mother, an invalid. She’d heard that much. She recognized no division among peoples; no enemies. Problems were solved through clear understanding. This one felt one way; that one, another. It was the way with folks. No need to take sides.
“Well, what do you think?” Thomas asked her.
“About what?” she said back, teasing him. She knew what he meant. She chuckled and patted his knee. The car headlights gave them a fine view as they climbed the snow-covered driveway up to the house.
“Thomas, it’s a grand old house,” she said, finally, as they took her by the arms and gently helped her from the car.
Thomas grinned. “Wait until you see everything,” he told her, guiding her to the porch. “These veranda steps have the tunnel to the kitchen under them.”
“So these are the ones,” she said, and watched her feet as she climbed up.
The front door swung open. There stood Mrs. Small and the twins.
Great-grandmother Jeffers hollered when she saw her granddaughter-in-law. “Goodness! Goodness! Martha, it’s been too long.”
“Oh, Grandmother Rhetty!” Martha Small said. They hugged and kissed, laughing and nearly crying. Great-grandmother Jeffers patted her granddaughter-in-law as she patted everyone whom she loved.
Billy and Buster peeked around Mrs. Small with solemn eyes.
“Hello, babies!” Great-grandmother Jeffers exclaimed, bending low to hug the boys. “Which one is which one?” she said, not expecting an answer. The twins backed away from her, and she followed, right into the large entranceway.
“Look at us, standing here with the door wide open,” Martha Small said. “Brrr! It’s turning cold.”
“Turnin’ cold,” the boys said in unison.
Great-grandmother studied them, amused. “Do they do that?” she asked. “Say the same thing at the same time?”
“They do it a lot,” Thomas said.
“Don’t you remember your grandma?” Great-grandmother Jeffers said to the boys. “The piney woods and my cabin? Remember how you loved my cotton patch? Hmm? Boys will be boys!”
It was Billy who first grinned from ear to ear. “Boys be boys!” he and his brother said.
Great-grandmother Jeffers opened her pocketbook and rummaged around in it until she found the ball of cotton she had brought in a silk handkerchief. She carried it as a good-luck charm.
It was Buster who reached for it and crushed its softness against his cheek. His eyes lit up. Both boys giggled. Quickly they came into Great-grandmother Jeffers’s outstretched arms. “Gray-grahma!” they exclaimed, snuggling in.
“Yes, indeedy,” she said, “and big as life! You remember me.”
They remembered.
It took time getting her coat off, getting her situated in the parlor, getting her warmed up and relaxed after such a long, stiffening ride. Great-grandmother Jeffers smoothed her hair back and looked around the long room at the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Who’s going to clean such windows? Is that why you wanted me here?” she said.
They all laughed at that.
After a while they went into the kitchen.
“I knew I smelled fresh paint,” Thomas said. “Look at that!”
The kitchen was painted the warmest yellow. “Looks just like spring!” Great-grandmother Jeffers said, beaming.
“I did it,” Martha Small said proudly. “Mr. Pluto mixed the paint for me and set up my ladder.”
“Bet you could get a good hourly wage for work like this, if you wanted,” Mr. Small said, joking.
“I bet I could, too.” She joked back.
They eased in around the kitchen table as Thomas set it for the supper his mama had prepared. Mr. Small served their plates from the stove and counter. The twins had already eaten, Martha said. But they enjoyed being at the table, climbing down and playing around, accepting hugs from their great-grandmother.
It took time to eat, to sip tea, and there was pie for dessert.
Time to catch up and to hear about the things that could not be spoken of over the telephone. Great-grandmother propped her arm on the table, resting her chin in her palm. “I want to see you-know-what-it’s-called,” she said. She meant the cavern of treasure. “I want to see everything, but best not to speak about that.” She looked all around. “Do the little fellows know about you-know-what-it’s-called?” she asked.
The twins were at once alert, knowing they were being talked about. Walter Small shook his head. “That’s another thing. They’re growing the way kids do.”
There was a pause. “We keep them here around the house,” Martha said. “But they will get away from you. I’m going to find a play school for them.”
“Not to change the subject,” Great-grandmother said, “but which is the wall in this kitchen that rises?”
Walter Small got up from the table and went over to a cabinet across from them. Beneath the cabinet was a panel that housed the machinery for the moving wall. He fiddled with the controls, picked up an object from one of the cabinet drawers, and added it to the mechanism. At once the kitchen wall silently slid up. The twins held on to Great-grandmother Jeffers on either side. The three of them stared. Before them was the black, gaping tunnel opening that led around to the front steps. Thomas found himself clutching the table edge.
Great-grandmother Jeffers leaned forward. She found the opening quite extraordinary. A tunnel of ages, she thought. Used by slaves, fugitives.
The dank air at the tunnel entrance seemed unsettled. She held her head cocked to one side as though she were listening to something.
“What is it, Grandmother Rhetty?” softly asked Thomas’s mama.
Great-grandmother Jeffers shook her head. “Must’ve been nothing,” she said. “There’s sure nothing there.”
“I’ve never liked that escape route,” Mrs. Small said. “Never liked a wall that could slide up and down.” Lightly she touched each twin on the head. Just then Billy disengaged himself from Great-grandmother and walked over to the cabinet with the panel. He began to fiddle with it.
“Hey! Don’t touch that, Billy,” Walter Small said. “Now, you’re not to touch this panel, you hear?”
Great dark eyes shifted from his father to his brother Buster. Buster left Great-grandmother’s side and toddled over to Billy to put a comforting arm around his brother.
“Look at that,” Great-grandmother said, chuckling. “They are as cute as they can be!”
“Oh, they’re cute all right,” Martha said. “Cute into everything.”
“Well, you have me now. They won’t get by me,” said Great-grandmother. “It’s something, though. Big rooms. Moving walls and steps … What else moves around here besides them and you folks?” She laughed.
“The mirror in the front hall has a tunnel behind it,” Thomas said.
“Well, you know, I just barely noticed that mirror out the corner of my eye as we came in,” Great-grandmother said. “So, the kitchen, the steps, and that mirror as you come in,” Great-grandmother said. “Any more secret—” She stopped herself, at once knowing that she should not have asked.
Martha cleared her throat while Walter busied himself at the counter with the panel. The wall came sliding down.
“Papa …” Thomas began to speak.
“Now, Thomas,” Mrs. Small said.
“Papa? There are more secret places?”
“I talk too much,” Great-grandmother murmured.
Mr. Small sighed. “I suppose there are more secret tunnels and things,” he admitted. “I haven’t had the time to go checking, what with my job at the college and inventorying the you-know-what. I never had the complete plans of this house. I don’t know if a complete set of drawings exists.”
“You mean, there are other ways in here we don’t know about?” asked Thomas. “I thought you knew everything about this house.” I thought you were taking care of things, was what he really was thinking.
“You never know everything about a house this old,” his papa answered.
“How are we going to sleep at night—” Thomas broke off. He knew he would have a hard time sleeping from now on. “I don’t see how we’re going to live, with strangers wandering in and out of our house,” he muttered. All at once he felt letdown, anxious.
“We’ll just have to secure the periphery,” his father said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Thomas said glumly.
“Your papa means,” Great-grandmother told him, “that if you take care of what is going on on the outside, you don’t need worry about anything coming or going on on the inside.”
“That’s right,” his papa said. “We took care of the Darrows. I don’t think it’s likely they’ll bother us again.”
Thomas stared at his father. Would the Darrows have learned their lesson? And would the great treasure-house stay secure? He wasn’t at all sure.
Great-grandmother Jeffers yawned. “Ooh! Now I know it’s not that late,” she said, smiling all around.
“You must be tired,” Martha said. “Here, let’s get you settled in your room. I put you next to Thomas, a little farther down on the opposite side of the hall from Billy and Buster.”
“Anyplace will do me just fine,” Great-grandmother said. “Please, don’t fuss about me. I don’t want to cost anything extra.”
They all went to her room with her, surrounding her going up the wide old staircase.
“A fine house,” she murmured. She laughed her high, mountain laugh.
Thomas couldn’t get over the sweet sound of it.
6
THEY SAY DARK, GHOSTY things walk haunted houses. Deep in the night, when the weather falls, the creeps come out and walk about the old Drear house, so the townsfolk say. They are half joking, but the children are quick to believe. Yet this night the house was quiet within its hidden places. Martha and Walter, the twins never awoke. Thomas slept. In her sleep Great-grandmother Jeffers rubbed her hands together, smoothed them, pressed them, until a dull aching faded. She awoke long enough to think: Barometer going down, my arthritis. Snow is not finished yet.
Outside, the wind rose, building a blizzard from out of the darkness. It soon raged against the house. Drear house shuddered but stood its ground. The night was blinded snow-white. Animals dug deep for safety.
Blasting wind swept the fields clean. Snow drifted four feet high against fences and treelines. But this storm couldn’t last. It came and went in an hour, a preview of the hard winter to come. The night settled down in a snow light, bright as day. Huge, silent flakes came down abundantly. The little animals sniffed the air and crept about.
Thomas had burrowed deep beneath his covers. He awoke the instant the blizzard hit. He felt the house tremble and lift itself. He listened as the harsh drone of the wind filled his brain. He got up to look out of the window, and he was still half asleep. The windows were frosted over. He could see little. The wind roar filled every space inside him. He got back in bed. The place he had been beneath his covers was still warm. He burrowed again, a little animal himself. He had no thought of tunnels, intruders, or sliding walls. He was gone to sleep. No specter, no shadow of stealth invaded the Drear house this night.
Nothing so certain could be said of the cave on the other side of the hill from the Drear house, where Mr. Pluto lived.
Pluto underground. It was a large cave, one wall of which was false, but no one would ever guess that it was. Behind the false wall was the secret entryway down to the great cavern of treasure deep within the hillside.
Mr. Pluto had enjoyed the day, helping Mrs. Small with her kitchen painting. He went in and out of the house for her, fetching paint from the shed in a corner of the backyard—turpentine, paint thinner. Women always thought that paint came in small portions, a pint or two high, was his smug opinion. Women never saw a full can. His late wife never had. He had given her half a can of paint to work with long ago, the way he had done for Mrs. Small today. He enjoyed mixing the paint for the womenfolk.
And those little boy twins—they were two pistols! Calling him Mist Blue-doe, Mist Blue-doe, it sounded like. He had watched out for them while Mrs. Small carried on with her kitchen painting. He bundled them in their snowsuits and took them outside. Gave them brushes to paint the shed. He’d gone back to help Mrs. Small. And by the time he remembered to check on the boys, they had painted their snowsuits, their faces, and their hair. They had rolled in the yellow. Well, a good thing Mrs. Small used water-based paint. It wasn’t hard to clean up the boys and launder their suits. And he’d gotten them all clean, all fixed up. Had their snowsuits washed and dried in the big new washer and dryer the Smalls had got. Mrs. Small said he could even bring his own clothes over for the washer. But he preferred the clothesline right inside his cave. His wife and he long ago had hung the clothes in the cave in winter.
And hurrying out to the shed some more for Mrs. Small. Mixing or pouring more paint. Dry walls do take the paint!
Later he sat down at the kitchen table and had soup with the boys. Mrs. Small stopped her work. “That’s a good time to stop,” she had said, “soup time.” And she had heated up the homemade soup. She had given the bowls over to Buster to set up the table. And the whole time Billy watched, holding on to Mr. Pluto’s knee. The first taste of the thick vegetable soup had made him shiver, it was so good.
It was a fine afternoon in the Drear house, Pluto thought on the way home. Halfway up to the hilltop, where there were woods, he thought to turn around.
He didn’t know why he turned, but maybe he had heard something. And there were the little fellows– Buster, first, with Billy coming on fast behind him. They had sneaked out of the house, without one sweater on between them. They looked as full of mischief as when they had painted themselves.
His heart had gone cold. For behind the boys someone had been stalking, like some stealthy beast of prey. He’d almost seen who it was, too. Almost, but not quite. Well, he was not as quick as once. His eyesight was not as good. The little boys had no idea someone was there. By the time he’d turned, whoever it was was already gliding away off the path, fading away in the trees. Pluto stood his ground, listening to the air, it must’ve seemed to the little boys.
“What am I going to do with you boys?” he said finally, easily setting the pace back toward the house. They held on to his big, leathery hands.
Pluto took them clear back inside, into the kitchen. He knew the back door should stay locked. Neither he nor Martha Small had locked it. Mrs. Small had been upstairs but on her way down.
“Stay put a minute,” he had warned the boys, “just until I get away from here, and I won’t tell on you.”
They understood. Billy and Buster had stood holding hands. He had spoken softly to them. “Now, don’t you ever run off again, you hear? Or I’ll have to tell your mama.” And he left them there, hating to leave them, but he had his own business to attend to.
He had been halfway home the second time. At the top of the hill where the woods began, he thought about the someone who had been following. He’d eyed each side of the woods along his way but saw only trees. It wasn’t the boys someone was stalking. Someone is spying on me, he’d told himself at the time. Waiting for him to let down his guard.
At eveningtime Little Miss Bee had come by to go into the great cavern with him. It was the name he had given Petsy Darrow. Long before the Small family moved here, he and the child had shared his secret. It was a dangerous business, keeping such great wealth. But Little Miss Bee was a child of trust. Trust the child never to be seen slipping away from home! He and she would sit down among the treasures like granddaughter and grandfather. And after, he would lead her most of the way home; she would slip inside the house again, unseen and unheard.
“Best we not visit at night,” he told her lately, sensing something troubled, unsettled about her. “Best you stay close to home in the evenings, Miss Bee.”
And she had said, “See you tomorrow then.”
“Remember,” he’d warned her as she left never to tell the secret.
“I always remember” she whispered, and left him.
Pluto underground in the blizzard night, dreaming his dream. It was not a nightmare. The dreaming did not terrify him after the first shock. Seeing the dead. Dreaming his dream of old. He did not wake from it in a cold sweat.
Dies Eddington Drear came to stand at the foot of his bed. He told Pluto whether he was close to finding the treasure.
But why keep dreaming this dream? Pluto would think when he awoke. I have found the treasure. Mr. Small, he taken care that the treasure is safe. But maybe it’s not so safe. Something going on. Somebody got their eye on me. Following. Little Miss Bee, so unsettled.
His own cave where he lived. Why the cave, why live that way? the townsfolk asked, oh, years ago. And why not? he had replied. It was the old way, the way of fugitives, escaped from bondage.
Now the cave was as secure from weather as he and nature could make it. From within, the sound of the night’s blizzard that had awakened Thomas was faint. No hint of any change to the falling, silent snow. Two great, thick wood plank doors secured the cave opening. A heavy bar locked it from inside.
There was a tunnelway that led from his cave to another chamber to an underground stable he had made into stalls. There his horses ate and slept in foul weather. In the cave proper there was a fire banked for the night in the fireplace. No red embers showed, but the gray-black coals still held heat. The heat took away what chill moisture crept in from outside.
Pluto lay on his bed asleep. He was a thin elderly man, straight and long, but somehow fragile beneath old Indian blankets. His eyes moved under their lids, and then they opened in a dream delirium. His arms lifted, pointing in front of him to the foot of the bed. Someone was there. He saw the abolitionist standing there. Drear’s beard was as long and as white as Pluto’s.
Dies Drear of the great eastern family of money. He had saved poor fugitives from certain recapture. He loved freedom. To Drear those who practiced slavery were heathens, doomed for eternity.
And dreaming, Pluto waved his arms and made his point. He murmured, talking nonsense. He and Drear were arguing.
“I’m taking the treasure,” Drear was saying.
“You can’t take it, it’s not yours to take!” Pluto shouted.
“It is mine, I brought it here. I saved it. I have someone to give it to.”
“Who!” cried Pluto. He felt as if there were a fire within him. “Who are you giving it to? It belongs to slaves! You can’t take my forge.” He meant the treasure. He was dreaming of his forge, where he heated, hammered, and shaped iron, but it was the wealth of the cavern he had meant to say.
“I can and I will take it,” Drear said. “But I forgot where I put it. Tell me where I put it, Mr. Pluto.”
Pluto felt such fear and anguish. He squirmed, suddenly sick of the dream turned to nightmare. He tried to wake himself. He sat up, blinking, feeling as if his shoulders were bars of ice.
The figure at the foot of the bed was a solid form. Pluto couldn’t be sure who or what it was.
He fell back. The dark at the foot of his bed hadn’t moved. Pluto stared at it, panting. He felt chills shaking his body. A thin layer of sleep was ground fog on his brain. Slowly he sat up again. “Who?” he murmured. It hurt him to sit up and lie down so much. Hurt his back.
“It’s Drear,” the dark form said. “I misplaced it. Where did I put that treasure?”
Suspicion was like something Pluto could wrap around him. Like the great black cloak he wore to protect himself from old age. Somewhere deep down he knew he must avoid even dreaming anything that might give away the wealth that was hidden.
“I quit this dream,” Pluto said out loud, dreaming. “Quit it!”
The form wouldn’t go away. Its voice had reminded Pluto of someone, someplace. He had no idea what Drear’s voice would be like. But dreaming, he knew that this voice was too ordinary to be the great man’s.
“Huh? Wha—Huh?” Pluto said, rising out of bed.
The specter came around the bed, heading for the passage from the room on the side. It was almost there, but so was Pluto. Pluto leaped for it before he knew what he saw might be real. In dreams he did such things. In dreams he was always youthful and strong.
He and the form struggled. Is this real? It can’t be Dies Drear! It was not as long and as tall as Pluto. What it wore was dark and soft, cool as night rain. It had more than enough strength to subdue two old men. Whirling, breaking away, it knocked Pluto to the cane floor. Pluto grabbed its foot. Barefoot? No, slippery, rubbered foot, wet with icy cold. This can’t be a dream! It kicked out, caught Pluto under the chin. A perfect clip it gave old Pluto. Stunned, he thought he heard the thing sigh with despair at what it had done. He passed out.
Then it was dawn and gray cave light. Impossible to tell how the morning got into the cave. Pluto found himself on the floor. How’d I get here? he wondered. “Must’ve fallen out of bed,” he said out loud. “Cold.” His throat was sore and raspy. “Dreams.” He knew he had dreamed. Drear had been in his dreaming. For the thought of the old abolitionist was still with him. What was it about this time? He could not clearly remember. What more else could it be about?
“Been dreamin’ all night,” he murmured. “I’m tired. Thought I got rid of all such dreams.” Carefully he moved his legs and arms and moaned, got back into bed. He moved his jaw around, but it seemed to be in one piece. How did it get to be sore?
A cold shiver of fear climbed his back. He shook it off, shrugged it away. He would not allow himself even to think that anyone could invade his cave.
