Beyond the Firefly Field (19 page)

Down by the Lake

K
ast guided Penny through tunnels and rooms where her family lived.

“This is so cool!” Penny exclaimed as she entered Kast's bedroom.

Like the other rooms Penny had visited, piles of fairy light illuminated it brightly, and the walls glistened with the same polished, waxy surface evident throughout the tree. Flowery woodland scenes were carved into the walls.

A bed, dresser, and table had been intricately carved into the walls of the room, and a chair was the only moveable furniture. The bed was crowned with four ornately carved corner posts curving high to the center of the bed near the ceiling. Penny could almost touch the ceiling with her raised hand. Thin, silver netting draped from the posts and looked like it had been woven by spiders. The inside of Kast's room sparkled like a jeweled egg. Decorations mimicking fairy clothing garlanded the walls, with feathers and sparkling gems reflecting the light. Jewel-toned glass mosaics dangled from the ceiling and sparkled with luminous energy.

Penny noticed a few knives mounted on a wall and thought them strange in the beautiful surroundings. “Do you throw knives, too?”

“No, I'm too young.”

“How old is too young?”

“I'm two hundred and eighty-four years old. In one hundred and sixteen years, I can start throwing. SeeLee, or maybe my cousin DarLan, will teach me.”

Penny's jaw dropped when Kast said her age, and again when she learned that SeeLee could throw knives. She walked to the bed, where the netting was folded back, and sat on the overstuffed mattress. An intricately detailed quilt was folded neatly over the mattress and felt wonderfully warm and soft.

“This place is so pretty and cozy, I don't know why you would ever leave it,” Penny sighed, feeling so relaxed as the bed called to her. She decided stretching out for just a minute would surely put her to sleep, encouraging frightening dreams about knife-throwing fairies, so she didn't dare give in to her closing eyes.

“I have to leave my room, or I wouldn't be able to get new things to make it even prettier,” Kast explained.

“Your whole house is pretty. There is so much pretty, you're covering up pretty with more pretty, and it doesn't need to be any prettier,” Penny countered as she watched Kast open a cupboard carved into a wall. She took a small cup from a shelf, then pumped water into the tiny cup from a small faucet. She carried the water to the dresser and dumped it on a mossy plant growing from a corner in the dresser top.

“Everything can always be prettier. We make everything wonderful so that beauty is the first thing we see every morning and the last thing we see every night when we cozy down to sleep. Then we are more able to spread beauty and happiness every day with each other,” Kast explained, as if it was only natural to be surrounded by loveliness at all times.

Penny got up from the bed and went to the dresser. “Does this dresser have hidden compartments?”

“Of course, every piece of furniture has them. See if you can find the ones hidden in this piece.”

After discovering a few hidden compartments, Penny knew why the boys were drawn to the furniture. As she explored the dresser, Kast arrived with another cup of water.

“That sure doesn't look like any water coming from Marsh Lake,” Penny said as she watched the clear liquid pour over the strangely beautiful mossy plant.

“It's not from Marsh Lake. It's from the lake at the bottom of the tree.”

“There's a lake at the bottom of the tree?” Penny asked in disbelief.

“With an island in it, too,” Kast reaffirmed. “That's where the Old Ones stay. They live in a village by the shore. It's really beautiful down there, and it's hard to get any of them to ever leave. My grandfather just came out of the tree, though, and I got to see stories in his wings.”

“Did you see the scary one?”

“No, my mother took me away after a few stories. Anyway, the island is the most beautiful place in the whole fairy tree, and everywhere you look there's something so beautiful you want to stare at it forever,” Kast explained.

“I know the feeling. Can we see the lake now?”

“Yes, I can take you to see it,” Kast answered and returned the cup to its shelf.

Penny wondered if Clayton knew she had left the furniture factory with Kast. This was the first time they had been apart since arriving at the tree, and now she was going to wander off even further from her brother. Then, a sense of adventure overwhelmed her, and Penny jumped to her feet to follow as Kast closed the cupboard door.

As Clayton closed the cupboard door on a piece of furniture he had been exploring, thoughts of Penny popped into his mind. He surveyed the room behind him, looking for Penny and Kast, but he didn't see them anywhere. Then he realized he probably wouldn't be able to see them if they were sitting. He shrugged his shoulders and walked back to the table, hoping his uneasy feelings would settle.

With envy, Clayton looked at the pieces of furniture he had yet to explore, and imagined his friends having fun discovering their secrets. The twins had unfolded two chairs and a table from a tall kitchen hutch. Now they were standing on the chairs to look for hidden compartments near the top of the hutch. He looked across the fairy-filled room and decided certainly no harm could come to Penny with all the activity going on.

He looked for SeeLee, then saw her chatting with friends in the middle of the room. MarJoReAn was also in the room, walking and talking with fairies as she helped the young ones. They both seemed completely unconcerned that anything could go wrong. The fairies were preoccupied in making their surroundings beautiful, happy, safe, and serene, so Clayton decided Penny would be perfectly safe.

As these thoughts raced through his head, Clayton found himself standing in front of a very unusual piece of furniture, which he couldn't resist the urge to explore. He was having too much fun to worry. He ran his hands along the rough bark to see if any part would move.

Getch was feeling around the rough bark, exploring the door he had woven together to cover his escape hole in the tree root. He needed to be sure no part of it would move or fall off, exposing his exit effort. He had already gathered the loose pieces scattered on the floor; he couldn't leave any clues behind for the fairies to find. He tried the door several times, opening and shutting it from both outside and inside the tree root. Once satisfied no pieces would fall off, he went back to watching and being bored.

The entire time Getch had stationed himself outside the tree root, no creature, much less a fairy, had used the tunnel. Feeling brave, he moved into the fairy tunnel, dimly lit by a glowing fungus covering the walls and low ceiling. He cautiously shuffled a couple of steps to the middle of the tunnel and turned to his right. The tunnel curved and rose slightly. He could see only fifty yards before it curved out of sight to the left. Looking in the other direction, the tunnel slanted downward and curved out of sight to the right fifty yards away. He turned again to the rising part of the tunnel and sniffed the air. It smelled musty, but so much better than the foul cave air. Suddenly, a familiar scent crept up his nostrils as he sniffed the downward slope. He could smell water, lots of water.

In the underground prison where the fairies had trapped his species, there was very little water. It oozed from rocks and was just enough for drinking. Stronger tribes of his kind had claimed caves with small pools or streams running through them. The caves with streams were the best. Fish and other water creatures made food plentiful. The streams always flowed out of sight into dark tunnels, and took the smoke from the glow fires with them. Those tribes were healthier and flourished in captivity, but his tribe wasn't so lucky.

Getch was always dirty and thirsty, his skin always dry and itchy, and his claws were brittle and easily broken. Without consciously making a choice, his feet had instinctively taken him several paces down the tunnel in the direction of the water before he stopped to wonder if he should go there. He reasoned the risk of being caught lessened in this seemingly unused tunnel, and the prospect of finding water for his tribe urged him on. He listened for noise up and down the tunnel, but heard only the sounds of his pounding heart.

Heading down the tunnel, he ran as fast as he could, but being careful not to make a sound. He stopped frequently to keep from becoming giddy from the rich air and to listen for any hint of discovery. He had traveled quite a distance from the safety of his escape tunnel, and he thought about what might happen if he was trapped.

He encountered other small chambers branching off the tunnel as he rushed along. Some were dark, while others were brightened by the same fungus that lit the tunnel. The gloomy rooms would offer excellent places to hide if the need arose, so he proceeded with renewed confidence.

Shortly, another tunnel joined the one in which he was exploring, and he was forced to stop to see if the new channel was also deserted. After a few minutes of silence, he cautiously ambled down the adjoining route a short distance and sniffed the air. No water. He went back to the tunnel he had chosen to follow and continued on his way. The scent of water drove him at a quickened pace.

Getch wondered if he was becoming woozy from breathing the rich air. The tunnel ahead seemed to be growing smaller, but when he reached where it appeared to change size, all was the same. Dismissing this sensation as an illusion, he continued his frenzied search for water. The curve of the tunnel had favored the right but suddenly curved sharply to the left and descended steeply. The tunnel floor became uneven before turning into a series of crude steps. Then he saw the tunnel's end and froze in his tracks.

Beyond the tunnel's end, a chamber appeared, much darker than the tunnel illuminated by the glowing fungus. The only light coming from the chamber was a faint, comforting orange radiance emitting from the right of the dark opening. The strange light added to the sense of urgency as he became obsessed with finding the water source. With magnetism never felt before, Getch was drawn out of the tunnel into the chamber. He was filled with fear and couldn't move, except for his legs, and they wouldn't stop. His feet had taken several steps into the immense chamber before caution could stop him from moving

To his left, walls and ceilings were lost to darkness. The chamber's floor was black and smooth. To Getch's right, a thin shaft of reddish-yellow light descended like a spotlight from high in the ceiling, dispersing its warmth on a generous rock formation protruding from the smooth, glassy floor. Several rock formations protruded from the floor, each bristling with large pieces of quartz. Spectrums of color escaped from the jagged facets of quartz, but the orange light piercing from above was the most pronounced. In the center of the large cave, off in the distance, a white glow teased, but it was too far away, so he paid it little attention.

The intoxicating scent of water was so strong, but he couldn't sense its source. No worries, though. He had a single-minded determination to find it. He took a half-dozen steps forward until he was standing on the glassy floor—or rather, in it. He looked at his feet in astonishment to see ripples of water spreading away from them, and he realized the cave floor was water. Water, water, and yet more wonderful water! More than anyone thought could ever exist. With a pang of panic, he heard a voice in the distance cry, “Oh! How beautiful!”