Starfish_ A Novel - James Crowley [22]
It soon became dark, but Ulysses continued to climb. occasionally he would throw back his head or nip gently at the children’s feet to wake them, as if he could tell when the children were slipping while they slept. Beatrice began to cough sometime in the night, and Lionel thought about when she had been sick. The captain had told Lionel that it was possible that Beatrice might never be able to leave the infirmary. But Beatrice had showed them. Beatrice always showed them.
The snow stopped falling sometime near morning. Lionel woke and looked above them at the clearing clouds and the ink black night with its sparkling array of stars now clustered overhead. Beatrice continued coughing in her sleep, so Lionel stayed awake, taking in the landscape that surrounded them. Light soon filled the morning sky, revealing a world that was entirely new to him. Lionel had grown accustomed to the wide-open space of the boarding school and the reservation. Here in the mountains, he couldn’t see more than a hundred paces before the dense snow-covered trees or large white-dolloped boulders blocked his view. They continued on, and soon Lionel fell back asleep.
Chapter Thirteen
A CROOKED LODGE • LIONEL TAKES CARE OF BEATRICE • “WE MADE IT”
LIONEL FOUND himself staring into the tangled mess of Ulysses’s tousled mane. He looked around, trying to fully wake up and get his bearings. He discovered he was in a small, dilapidated, open-sided barn. Ulysses was tearing at an empty burlap grain sack, attempting to get the last of its remnants into his big mouth. Beatrice was still asleep.
Lionel rubbed his eyes and wondered for a moment if it hadn’t all been some kind of dream, and he was actually back at the school about to be in trouble for sitting on Ulysses’s back. His body ached, and he was cold.
He crawled from beneath the buffalo robe, carefully, so as not to wake his sister, then dropped to the frozen dirt of the stable and collapsed. Lionel’s legs and feet still hadn’t woken up. He sat for a minute and saw that Ulysses’s deep tracks followed the stream across a small, open, tree-lined meadow. Mountains loomed above them on all sides.
Lionel looked up at his sister. She slumped forward with her arms sprawled across the horse’s neck. Lionel had never seen her sleep this much and decided to leave her while he investigated their latest stop.
He left the shelter of the stable and stepped out into the deep snow of the meadow. It came up to his waist, and after only a few steps he had to stop to catch his breath. He had never seen this much snow in his life. Though the surroundings seemed peaceful, he could not shake the feeling that they were not alone. Something was watching them.
Lionel scanned the tree line to find that a large raven, so black it looked almost blue, was sitting opposite him on a spindly winter branch, calmly observing the small valley’s newest inhabitants. “Hello,” Lionel called, but the bird just spread its large wings and took to the air.
Lionel watched the raven fly its way to the tops of the nearby trees, but as he did, he caught something else out of the corner of his eye. There, at the far corner of the meadow, nestled back and surrounded by a small stand of pine, birch, and aspen, sat a long, lonely log cabin. Despite its size, Lionel almost missed it, as the building seemed either to have sprung from the earth or to be in the process of being taken back into it.
The chimney stood like a stone giant that had lost its balance, fallen, and then leaned on the lodge, pushing the entire structure to one side and collapsing the roof on the farthest end. The remaining roof was covered by four feet of snow. Lionel thought that it looked like frosting on top of a cake or, more accurately, the frosting on a cake that someone had dropped.
Lionel returned to the stable. Beatrice was still sleeping, so he took Ulysses by