CHAPTER V: DON'T BE RIDICULOUS!
The path bent sharply to the right, heading uphill at a slant. Another stone came into view among the treetrunks, and beside it the path straightened itself again.
"You know, I believe that this path originally followed this line of stones," Lindy said. She thought back to all the turns she could recall.
"If you think about it, every time the stones stand way off to the right or left, it's because the path turned. I think the stones are in a straight line! But the path always comes back, sooner or later, to the way the stones mark out."
Bud snorted. "You can't say that for sure. You'd have to be a bird and look down from above. Still, they do stick together most of the time. We keep running into them, that's for sure." He paused and wiped his forehead.
"Here, let's stop for a bite to eat. This looks like a good place."
It did, for there was another small glade, quite round except for one side that butted against a small hill. From the top of the hill an oak swept its boughs wide, shading the grassy plot at its foot.
The grass was warm and sweet. They dropped into the shade of the huge tree and opened their satchel, taking out the packets of sandwiches.
The two had walked a long way since breakfast. It wasn't yet noon, but Lindy felt a hollow sensation in her middle that she knew was even worse inside her twin. Bud had an appetite that would have done for two small boys.
He opened the wrappings and looked inside. "Nice thick sandwiches," he said with satisfaction. "And lots of cookies."
He bit into a thick slab with a dreamy expression on his round face. Food was his great love, beyond bicycles or b-b guns.
Munching a ham sandwich, Lindy leaned back against the steep slant of the little hill. The sky was blue today. Mama said that it wasn't every year that England had weather as clear as it had been so far this summer.
Lindy was glad of that. Long dreary winters sounded horrible, and long dreary summers would be much worse.
Suddenly she heard something scritching and scratching behind her head, inside the hill. A mole? She sat up and turned to Bud.
"There's something in the hill, underground. Listen!" She pushed his head down until his ear touched the grassy spot where hers had rested.
"Of all the silly ... " His ear pushed against the sandy grass, and a look of astonishment crossed his face. "I do hear something! Maybe there are chipmunks in there, in a burrow or something."
"Maybe." Lindy backed away, getting the entire area into her range of vision. There was the neat shape of the hill, with roots from the tree thrust out at intervals, holding the sides like dark fingers.
Tufts of grass and runnels from the rain tracked the ground. A rock was tipped into one side, roughly oval. It reminded her of something she had seen. Recently ... and then she had it.
"The door! That's the door in Uncle Clifford's drawing for his book. You remember--come here and look!" She dragged Bud to her position and pointed.
"See how the top arches? And there is the shelf of dirt that makes a little porch and a step. This is that very same door!"
Bud squinched his eyes, as he usually did when he was disgusted with her fantasies. "Don't be ridiculous! This is a rock lying on a hill.
"That was a nice neat wooden door, with a knocker and everything. It even had, like Badger's door, a scraper. It was not a gritty, sandy old stone in a perfectly natural hill!" He ran forward and rapped his knuckles sharply against the pale rock.
Lindy sighed. Her twin had no imagination, just like Mama. She and Daddy got the entire ration for the family, Grandma always said.
She opened her mouth to tell him so for the fiftieth time, but before she could speak the door pivoted neatly on an invisible hinge and a small, gnarly face looked out.
"Yes?" it asked, in a voice like the hum of many bees. The tiny bright eyes stared wildly for a moment. Then the voice said, "Oh, my gracious! It's those! It's them! It's the very ones!
"Jessica! Jessica! Come here at once!"
There came to Lindy's ears the skittering of impossibly tiny feet, in the space beyond the stone. Another face, like one of Grandma's turnip carvings, appeared beside the first.
Lindy and Bud, despite their manners and their astonishment, began to laugh.
Those two sets of eyes were like little jet beads, sparkly with light. The two noses, side by side, were just alike, except that where the first bent left-to-right, the second bent right-to-left.
The faces were long, with crooked chins beneath the final loops of the noses. The first of the little people was totally bald and wore spectacles with silvery metal frames. He was dressed neatly in a smoking jacket and black trousers with feet like those in the pajamas made for little children.
The other one was just as bald, but on the very top of her pinky-tan head rested a dainty lace doily, with a rosebud embroidered in its middle. Her trousers were red (also with feet) and instead of a jacket she wore a tunic with a shawl collar, fastened down the front with butterfly-shaped loops and buttons.
They were so like Uncle Clifford's Turnipins come to life that neither twin could hold in the laughter.
A double whinny joined their chuckles, and Lindy realized that the pair on the doorstep were as amused as she and her twin were. The little man leaned against the front door and guffawed until he had to pull out his microscopic pocket-handkerchief and wipe tears from his eyes and off his glasses.
When he got himself under control, he straightened to his full height. "Do forgive me," he hiccupped. "We seem to forget, from century to century, how very comical you of the Larger Sort look.
"Let me introduce myself. Cyril Cairnbracken, at your service. This is my spillip, Jessica." The lace doily bobbed at them, but Jessica was busy wiping her own eyes and said nothing.
Lindy plumped onto the ground, putting herself almost on eye level with the pair. "I am Lindy Craig, and this is my twin brother Bud. Please ... what is a spillip?"
Cyril blinked rapidly, seeming to think hard. "Spillip? Oh, my gracious! I'd forgotten. You of the Larger Sort adopted our custom a long time ago, but I seem to recall that you call it something else. What is that quaint term, Jessica?"
"Wife," she said. She straightened her doily and composed her face. "And their term for spall, if you will remember, is husband.
"Rather ridiculous sounding, but there you are. No matter how sensible the customs they copy from us, the Larger Sort seem to have a genius for silly, not to say downright awkward, terminology.
"Start them as young as we can, still they will go to great lengths to corrupt the human language. A pity, but too true." She squinched up her tiny mouth and looked sad.
Bud squatted down beside his sister. "How is it that you talk human talk? Surely you have your own language." His eyes were almost glazed, for this was not the sort of situation he found it easy to deal with.
Cyril blushed, his crooked face growing quite pink. "We are the humans. The original and only. You of the Larger Sort are, we have decided after long and painful consideration, a mistake of the evolutionary variety.
"Yet you do have your endearing moments, at times. Especially those as young as the pair of you. How many winters have you seen, by the way?"
"Winters?" Bud stared blankly at Lindy, who was as puzzled as he.
Jessica pushed her spall aside. "How old are you? that is what he means. He does tend to get entirely too technical at times."
Lindy nodded, understanding at last. "Eight and a half. Almost." Bud spoke in unison with her words.
"Just the right age, exactly. Not a moment too young and far from too old. Granemmy was correct, as always." Cyril stepped down and sat on his packed doorstep.
"And just in time, too. The Mechanical Sort are plotting our downfall again. Only last week, two came through the wood, carrying their three-legged instruments and that awful spyglass they use when they try to run straight lines. Another held a long rod." He sighed and stared down at his pajamaed feet.
"That always spells trouble. And only one of their own sort can stop anything they plan. No matter how many delegations we send into their Houses of Parliament, no matter how they plead for us, no adult of your kind can believe we are real at all, far less that we are people.
"We have given up trying with grownups. We have quite a list of conversions to religion and not a few oaths of abstinence to our credit, over the centuries, but we have never succeeded in getting what we need."
"If you know so much about us, you know that they don't listen to kids," Bud said.
"Young goats?" Cyril asked, his face a study in bewilderment.
Jessica whispered into his ear. He nodded, brightening. "Oh, I see. The young of their own species. Yes, we learned that the difficult way, I fear. But we have devised the Magic, with the help of our Granemmy. She is such a comfort to us, even in her present condition."
"Magic?" asked Lindy. She felt her eyes growing wide. "Real, true magic?"
Jessica sat beside Cyril on the doorstep. "It works using obscure and little known properties of nature and the elements," she said. Her small face was very serious.
"We do not, whatever mythologies have grown up about our kind, break the laws of nature. But there are a great number of those that the Larger Sort has not yet learned to recognize, and that causes the confusion."
Bud was looking mulish again. "But what do you want us to do? We don't know any magic at all, and we don't know any natural laws except gravity."
"That is Granemmy's concern. She is busy at work, this minute, on the problem." Cyril cocked his small head toward the door behind him.
"One who is invigilated has a different sense of time, however, from those who are still among the living and ambulatory."
"In ... vi ... what?" asked Lindy.
Jessica frowned. "Your academics derived that term from our usages, but they have distorted its meaning dreadfully. To them it means monitoring those who are involved in taking an examination.
"On the contrary, among us it is the condition we enter once we cease to breathe and to move about. At that point, we begin to watch the universe, as well as our surroundings, and to learn to use what we know.
"In effect, as observers we have the time to gain understanding."
"What is it that you understand?" asked Bud.
Cyril smiled suddenly, his wrinkled and twisty face becoming very cheerful.
"Everything," he said.
There came an abrupt sound of scritching and scratching from inside the house in the hill. This time it was quite plain even to ears that were not laid against the ground. Jessica jumped to her feet and tugged at Cyril's arm.
"Come," she snapped. "No time to lose! Granemmy is ready to Consult."
She turned and stared up into Lindy's eyes. "Wait here for us," she commanded. "We shall return very soon, and then we shall see ... "
Her voice dwindled away, and she hustled Cyril into the house. The stone door closed behind them, leaving Lindy feeling as if her world had suddenly tilted sideways and almost spilled her off.
)
