A Gypsy Song (The Eye of the Crystal Ball - The Wolfboy Chronicles) (10 page)

“I don’t know,” Sara said. “I guess I just sensed it.”

“I think you have a connection with animals,” Manolo said. “That might be one of your many gifts.”

“I don’t know…”

Manolo stopped and squeezed her hand.

“Of course you don’t. You are still just a child. But your gifts will be stronger as you begin to use them.”

Sara smiled not knowing what to say. She had always felt strangely connected to animals, sometimes even feeling she could hear their thoughts. And there was the neighbor’s cat that she was certain had talked to her a few times. But she had just thought she was being weird, like people told her that she was.

 Now she sensed something again. It was like all of her other senses were strengthened since one wasn’t working.

She heard things more clearly and therefore she now knew for certain that something was indeed following them. She heard it run, she heard it stop, she even heard it breathe.

She stood still facing its direction, smelling it and listening to its heavy breathing.

“What do you think it is?” she whispered to Manolo.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But let us hurry up before it catches up with us.”

Sara agreed, and hand in hand they started walking as fast as they could, even sometimes running.

But no matter how fast they went, the thing following them kept up with them, but it still seemed to keep its distance. It ran when they ran. It stopped when they did.

And they never saw what it was.

Later that day the trees suddenly ended. They had reached the end of the forest and the bright sunlight embraced them and gave them the warmth back. All they had left to do before they could leave the valley was to go through the narrow passage called the Canyon of Confusion,  the passage between two mountains, which Manolo told her had  glasslike sides.

“I am not scared of that,” Sara said.

“No, but it is not ordinary glass. No one knows exactly what it is made of. The glass will trick you or confuse you. It will try and make you go in the wrong direction. Once you go in there they say it is like there is glass all around you and after a while you get confused as to which way you should go. If you go in the wrong direction you will never get out again. It is like a labyrinth.”

“I am still not afraid,” Sara said and moved forward thinking only about her little brother.

“I’d better go first,” Manolo said.

She felt his hand in hers and then he pulled it.

They walked for a while and Sara felt like they were doing fine. Manolo was quiet and focused on the task. She let him take charge since he was the only one who could see which way they had to go, but soon she felt like something was very wrong. She heard him curse (which he never did!) and moan and she felt like they had been walking forever. Several times he walked right into the glass and hurt himself thinking that was the right way. Then they would turn and go in another direction.

“It is like we are not even getting closer to the exit,” Manolo suddenly said. “I mean I can see it, but we are definitely not getting closer.”

“But we have been walking for hours,” Sara said.

“I know.”

Manolo’s hand had gotten sweaty.

“It is like the glass is moving, what was a path before is no longer there,” he continued. “I keep ending up in dead ends and when I go back, trying to remember where I came from, the path is changed.”

“Try again,” Sara said.

So he did. She felt him pull her hand and lead her forward. Again they walked for a couple of hours before she heard him moan.

“We are not getting anywhere. We are almost back to where we started from.”

”Maybe I should try and lead,” Sara said.

“You? But you can’t even see?”

“Exactly. It seems like it is your eyes that are deceiving you. I will be able to use all my other senses to get us out of here.”

Manolo was quiet a second before he answered.

“Okay, let’s try it.”

So Sara started walking. She put her hands on the glass walls and felt her way. Slowly patting and feeling before every step she took. When there was a glass in front of them, she turned and when there was none she kept walking, feeling her way through with the palm of her hands. Manolo walked right behind her and stayed quiet. His eyes kept telling him to go in different directions but he resisted the urge to believe what his eyes were seeing and instead followed Sara. In the end he, too, closed his eyes to avoid the confusion that the glass made. He just grabbed Sara’s hand and let her lead him out of the labyrinth. When they reached the exit and stood on the other side he finally opened his eyes again.

“You did it!” he said.

“I told you I would.”

Manolo smiled. Sara didn’t see it, but she knew.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we leave the canyon and …”

Manolo didn’t get any further with his explanation before they both heard that horrific screaming again. They both instinctively looked up, even though Sara still couldn’t see anything. But the high-pitched screaming didn’t come from flying wild witches on brooms like last time. No it came from a giant spider web above them, it was stretched between the two mountaintops with its sticky threads that were as thick as ropes. Never had Manolo seen such a web. He would have thought it quite magnificent if it wasn’t for the gigantic spider sitting in the middle.

“What is it?” Sara asked. ”Is it those witches again?”

“No. It is much worse than that.”

“What is it then? Tell me what it is.”

“It is Orael.”

“The wild witches mother? The one that put the blind spell on me?”

“That’s the one.”

The gigantic spider laughed at them and started to move down towards them hanging from a string of spider web that seemed to come out of its back.

Manolo was glad Sara couldn’t see it. But she did sense Manolo’s fear.

“You are afraid,” she said.

“She is kind of scary,” he answered.

“Tell me what she looks like.”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

Sara nodded while the spider-witch slowly came closer. Manolo took Sara’s hand and tried to pull it to get away before the spider reached them, but the four wild witches from the previous night blocked the exit while they screamed and laughed.

They couldn’t escape.

“Well she is big … very big …”

“How big? Like the size of me?”

“Bigger … more like the size of a caravan.”

“Wow, that is big,” Sara said with a small concern in her voice.

“She has the face of a witch, with human like eyes, but the body of a spider,” Manolo said as the giant spider-witch landed on her eight hairy legs in front of them with a huge bump. Again she uttered a scream that went straight through their bones.

Sara remembered her father’s words to her. Never show fear, he had said. Don’t let them know you are afraid.

The spider-witch laughed at them and spoke: “Little children, they are.”

One of the wild witches answered.

“But tasty, I am sure.”

“Yes, yes, yes! So very tasty,” another wild witch replied.

 Then they all burst into witch-like laughter.

The spider-witch hushed on them. She walked closer to Manolo and Sara on her long crooked legs.

“Not much meat on the bones though,” she said, studying them. “But they will do.”

Sara thought about her brother again and felt a pinch in her heart. She had to make it back with a cure before it was too late. In fact, she had no time to be eaten by a giant spider and her witches. So Sara stepped out and stood in front of the giant spider lifting her fist in her direction (which she could only guess where were from what she had heard.)

“Leave us alone!” Sara yelled. She sensed Manolo was getting ready to do something and was sure that he would fight the big spider-witch with all his powers. Maybe throw another fire ball at them or something.

Everything was quiet for a while. Then they burst into another big laughter.

“Heeheeheeheehee. A feisty little one,” one of the wild witches said.

Then all of a sudden, before Manolo could move, the spider-witch threw a spider web at him and rolled him into it so he couldn’t move his body or even talk. And Manolo used his mouth for more than talking. If he couldn’t open it, he couldn’t make fire.

Sara couldn’t see what had happened but she heard it, and had a pretty good picture of what had been done to him.

She took a step backwards but again remembered her father’s words. So she stood up for herself but it was too late. The spider-witch threw another line of web and the sticky web was tied tightly around Sara’s hands and feet and she fell to the ground. Then she heard the spider-witch release another load of the web and soon her face and body was tangled into it and she could no longer move.

She felt her body being lifted up and carried away. It felt like they went upwards. She guessed that they went back to the giant web that Manolo had told her about. That had to be the spider-witch’s home. Then Sara felt like she was falling and she hit something that felt soft. Everything was quiet. Too quiet, she thought.

As Sara lay still in the spider’s nest, she thought about a lot of things. Mostly she thought about her brother and parents back at the camp side. Were they worried about her by now? Were they mad at her for leaving them like this? She had left a small note, but had not explained where she went, just that she had gone to find a cure for Marius. She thought a lot about him, too. How was he doing? Had the fever come down a little or was it still the same? Had he gotten worse? She hoped not. And most of all she hoped that it wasn’t too late for her to save him.

She thought about her old life at Mr. and Mrs. Schneider’s and how she had promised to come and visit them one day. And she thought about school and her many books. In one of them she had read about spiders, in fact. She remembered it very clearly now, how the book described the spider and that most ate insects. Web spiders would use their silk to wrap an insect in a cocoon. The insect was paralyzed, and the spider would save it for later. She also remembered reading that spiders used fangs to bite their prey. The fangs were tucked away under the mouth and would not be used until the spider was hungry.

Sara swallowed a lump in her throat. She had a hard time breathing in the cocoon. She kept going over the information from the spider book again and again to see if there had been something in it she could use to get herself out of this mess.

But she could think of nothing, and as the time went by, she lost her hope little by little. She listened for Manolo, but there was nothing; not even the spider-witch herself made a sound. Sara couldn’t figure out if she had gone. Every once in a while Sara tried to move her body or just a hand, but she couldn’t. She felt drowsy and had hard time thinking. And little by little she dozed off only waking up from time to time when she forced herself to.

Suddenly, she heard a sound. It came from close to where she was. She forced her eyes to open but she still had no sight. She felt someone was outside of her cocoon. Someone was touching it. And now she was moving again. Her cocoon rocked and swayed and she felt like she would fall as her cocoon was carried downwards by someone or something. Then she heard voices. Tiny little voices that were talking. It sounded like mice or something.

Now they were at the ground, she felt. They were no longer moving downwards. But she was still being carried. Where were they taking her? And what about Manolo? Sara felt even more dizzy now from the lack of air in her cocoon, and after a few minutes she lost consciousness.

Very, very slowly Sara awoke to the world. For a second she thought she was still in the cocoon, but soon she realized that she was in an entirely different place. She saw nothing but a tiny face bent over her, that of a small animal of some sort. Its face was no bigger than a fist. It had a pointy nose and two small, black close-set eyes. It had a spiky fur with a long tail and was no more than like five inches tall.

Sara sat up but bumped her head on the ceiling of the small cave she was in. There were two of the small animals next to her.

“Where am I?” she asked and then she realized something. “I can see again,” she yelled.

The two small animals looked strangely at each other and shook their heads.

“Now why, why, why, would she yell like that?” one of them said with a small squeaky voice that Sara recognized from just before she passed out.

“Why, why, why, would she do that?” the other one replied.

Sara looked at the two small animals and smiled.

“Did you bring me here and cure my eyes?” she asked but the small animals didn’t seem to be listening. They kept wandering around in the cave saying the same thing over and over again.

“Why, why, why?” one of them said looking at the other.

“Why, why, why scare us like that?” the other replied.

“Why do such a thing?” the first one said.

“Why do such a thing?” the other repeated.

Sara felt a little tired in her head and looked to see if there was an exit to the cave somewhere. She had to get back and find Manolo.

She found a small tunnel with light in the end and started crawling outside when she heard the voices behind her.

“Now where is she going?”

“Now where is she going?”

“Why would she go?”

“Why would she do that?”

Sara shook her head and crawled out. The sun had almost set outside and the light was getting dim. As she crawled, she sensed that they were near water since the ground was moist and muddy.

She stuck her head up from the cave and then she smiled and jumped out.

“Manolo!”

There he was lying in the grass by the mountain stream where the small animals had built their cave. He was chewing on a straw of grass, watching the sun set behind the mountains. He looked at her as she yelled and threw herself in his arms.

“Easy there,” he said and hugged her.

“Where are we? How did I get my sight back? Was it those cute small animals that saved us?”

 Manolo looked at her with a smile.