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By Root 1256 0

nymph that I had pursued as though bewitched through the length and breadth of the forest, was not a child at all. She was neither fairy nor wood nymph but a sardonic-looking, almost elderly woman. A midget. A little hunchbacked. From close up her face had something of the look of a crooked-beaked, beady-eyed raven. To me she was frightening, dwarfish, shrunken, with a wrinkled old neck and hands that she suddenly opened wide and extended toward me, with a terrifying low laugh, like a witch who must be trying to touch me so as to trap me, with bony, wrinkled fingers like the claws of a bird of prey.

Instantly I turned and fled, breathless, terrified, sobbing, I ran, too petrified to shout aloud, I ran, screaming a choked scream inside me, help, help me, I ran crazily among the rustling tunnels in the dark, losing my way, becoming more and more lost in that labyrinth. Never before or since have I experienced such terror. I had discovered the terrible secret that she was not a child, that she was a witch disguised as a child, and now she would never let me escape alive from her dark forest.

As I ran I suddenly fell into a small entrance, with a wooden door that was neither open nor shut; in fact it was not a full-sized door but just a low opening like that of a dog kennel. I dragged myself inside with my last breath and there I hid from the witch, cursing myself, why hadn't I closed the door of my hiding place behind me? But I was paralyzed by horror, too frightened to emerge even for a moment from my shelter, too petrified even to reach out and close the door behind me.

And so I curled up in a corner of this kennel, which may have been no more than a storeroom, a kind of enclosed triangular space under a staircase. There, among some vague twisting metal pipes and crumbling cases and piles of moldy cloth, shrunk and curled up fetus-like, my hand covering my head, my head burrowing between my knees, trying to blot out my very existence, to withdraw inside my own womb, I lay trembling, perspiring, afraid to breathe, careful not to let out so much as a squeak, frozen with panic because of the bellows-like breathing that would soon give me away since it must surely be audible out there.

Over and over again I fancied I heard the tapping of her heels, "traitor die, traitor die, traitor die," getting closer, she was chasing me with her killed fox's face, here she was now right on top of me, any moment now she would catch me, drag me out, touch me with fingers that felt like a frog's, groping at me, hurting me, and suddenly she would stoop over me laughing with her sharp teeth and inject some terrifying magic spell into my blood to make me too turn suddenly into a killed fox. Or into stone.

After seven years somebody went past. Someone who worked in the shop? I stopped breathing and clenched my trembling fists. But the man did not hear my pounding heart. He hurried past my kennel and on the way he closed the door and inadvertently shut me in. Now I was locked in. Forever. In total darkness. At the bottom of a quiet ocean.

I have never been in such darkness and quiet either before or since. It was not the darkness of night, which is usually a dark blue darkness where you can generally make out various glimmers of light, with stars and glow-worms, lanterns of distant wayfarers, the window of a house here and there, and everything that punctuates night darkness, where you can always navigate from one block of darkness to the next by means of the various glimmers and shimmers and flickers, and you can always try to grope in the darkness at some shadows that are a little darker than the night itself.

Not here: I was at the bottom of a sea of ink.

Nor was the silence that of the night, where there is always some faraway pump pounding away, and you can hear the crickets and a chorus of frogs, dogs barking, dimly rumbling motors, the whine of a mosquito, and from time to time the wail of a jackal goes right through you.

But here I was not in a living, shivering dark purple night, I was locked into the darkest darkness. And silent