Young Fredle - Louise Yates [8]
Looking up, Fredle saw that the pale wall was also close over his head.
Then a new floor slid under the wall, and moved toward him. He backed away. The strange floor scraped over the wood of the pantry floor and Fredle kept backing up until the wall stopped him and he was forced to step onto the sliding floor. It was cool under his feet and hard as glass, but it wasn’t glass. It was metal but like glass it was too smooth for his nails to grip, so he slid forward along it until his nose bumped against the opposite wall.
Sliding, thumping, he felt the floor rising up beneath, lifting him. This felt like falling but it was the opposite of falling. Could he fall up? Fredle wondered. As far as he knew, no mouse had ever had this happen to him. Was this went?
Without moving, he was moving; he could feel it. The trap—if this was some new kind of trap—was gliding along smoothly and he could see shadowy shapes moving by, beyond the pale wall. He heard a sound like a door closing, but the movement continued.
Then the floor was falling away and he was falling with it, then stopping, stopping and falling, stopping and falling. Fredle couldn’t catch his breath, for the fear and the feeling sick. Finally the floor swooped down—carrying Fredle with it—until he almost fainted from the speed and steepness of the descent, and then a sudden landing.
What—
The cool, smooth metal floor slipped out from under him, the mysterious trap rose up and disappeared, and he huddled in a light even brighter than the one when the pantry door had opened. This was a light so bright that it hurt to see. He squeezed his eyes shut.
From above him he heard Missus say, “I don’t know. I hope you …” And then she was gone.
In the darkness of his closed eyes, Fredle felt warm air and he smelled wetness and something else, something entirely strange to him, coming from a floor the likes of which he had never before set his paws on. Keeping his eyes tightly closed, from the brightness and from fear, too, Fredle slid his feet, cautiously, gently, back and forth on this not-floor. It was cooler than wood and not nearly as smooth; also, it was soft. His nails slipped into it. His stomach still felt sick, felt overfull and angry.
Even so, a sharp smell penetrated his senses—a smell of something that made him want to eat it, sick as he was. How could that be? Fredle wondered. How could he possibly think of eating anything? But this was like wanting a drop of the cool water from the pipes under the sink, something different from hunger. He opened his eyes.
Even if he’d never seen anything like them before, Fredle knew without a doubt that the narrow green strips standing tall all around him were what he was smelling and what he wanted to be eating. Without thinking, he took a bite.
It was stringy and watery and tasteless as a dog’s brown chunk. It also took a lot of chewing, but he persevered. He forced it down his throat and waited, to find out how his stomach would react. When he was sure his stomach didn’t feel any worse, and because he still wanted more, he ate his way through a whole long stalk of it.
While he was chewing, Fredle looked around. He had to squint against the brightness, but it took so long to make a bite swallowable that he had time to notice lots of things. He noticed how very many of those tall green stalks there were, all around him, and he noticed that straight ahead, hidden behind the stalks, was a dark space, protected by a white wall with holes all over it. He noticed, although without really noticing, that he was seeing colors that were bright and clear, not dim and dark. He noticed, too, that his stomach didn’t feel as sick as it had, and he went on chewing.
When he’d had enough, Fredle made his way cautiously toward the bright white wall. He pushed his way through the stalks, trying not to let his nails dig into the soft floor, because how could he know that his feet wouldn’t sink so deeply into the softness that he’d be trapped? He trod as lightly as he could—and, being a mouse, that was very lightly—until he arrived at a wall