Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [15]
Step through the door. Two hands touch two doors, and find the timber to be, in fact, a stable brown smoke. The hands sink into the surface; the smoke curls above the pale skin like stirred-up silt. The moment passes when they might choose whether to stay or go, and they step through.
And they are in a wood, a dim, cold, motionless wood. The trees are poles of indigo with maybe foliage, maybe cloud, on high. The light is blue; the ground is covered with drifts of snow.
They see each other, the one in her white nightgown and wrap, the other in her dance-dress, the hothouse orchid still in her hair. Each gives a cry of relief, and they run together.
‘I’m so glad you’re here, sister!’
‘Where are we? In a dream?’
‘I’ve never known a dream so cold!’
They clutch arms and look around.
‘There, look! Is that a fire?’ For warm yellow lights move, far off among the trees.
‘It must be! Let us go and warm ourselves!’
They set off. Bare or in thin embroidered slippers, their feet are soon numb with cold. But the ground under the snow is even, and the strange trees are smooth and sprout no projections to catch their clothing or otherwise hinder them. Music floats to meet them, music such as they’ve never danced to, beguiling, rhythmical, minor-keyed. Their minds don’t know what to make of it. It seems ugly, yet it attracts them. It is clumsily, grossly appropriate. It is a puzzle, and to solve it they must move closer and hear it more clearly.
Apart from this music the wood is like a large and silent room. No bird flies through it; no wind disturbs the air. The chill rises like a blue fume from the snow; it showers with the grey light from above.
The music deepens and brightens as they stumble on; various hummings as of rubbed wet crystal, and many different pitches of tinkling, or jingling, adorn its upper reaches. It grows other sounds that are nearly voices, uttering nearly words, words the two daughters want to hear, are convinced they must hear, if they are to understand this adventure. A deep, slow, sliding groan travels to them through the ground.
‘It is!’ says the older girl, peering around a tree. ‘It’s a carousel! An enormous one! Beautiful!’
‘Oh, I’m so cold!’
They hurry now, and soon are in the clearing where the magnificent creation revolves. The music is rosy-fleshed arms gathering them up in a dance; the horses rise and fall with the rhythm, the foxes too, the carriages and sleighs, the swans and cats and elephants. The lightbulbs are golden; the mirrors shed sunlight, the carven faces laughter; the revolving makes a breeze that flows warmly spring-like out into the daughters’ faces, that lifts the manes and tails and furs and feathers of the carved animals, that brightens the horses’ flanks until the older girl is convinced she sees galloping muscles move, until the younger would vow on a bible that she saw a fly land on that bay’s shoulder, and be shaken off by a flesh-tremor.
And they would swear that, for a moment, the creatures and sleighs carried figures: pretty girls in their detailed fashions, fine-figured young men waving their hats, all with such joyful expressions, all with such eagerness in their bodies and gestures, that the daughters’ single impulse is to join them, to be in among the throng, so warm in colour and mood, to be swept up and a part of that strange heavy-lively crystalline music —
Which winds, with a spirited suddenness, to a triumphant flourish and stop. There is no one on the carousel. Only the creatures stand in the golden light, a hoof raised here, a head lowered there. Then the hoof strikes the wooden floor, the head lifts and the lips whiffle; an ostrich turns and blinks at the daughters down its beak. Life, minor life, entrances each girl’s eye.
‘Look, the eagle! His wings are like fire!’
‘So beautiful! So warm! I wish that music would start again.’
They stand in