Stile Maus by Robert Wise Page A

in the French countryside there were no gargantuan mountains, nor were they inhabited by enormous trolls.  In this case however, Emile thought of the task as the impossibly high mountain and of her family as the lumbering beasts that roamed its rocky cliffs.  They wouldn’t devour her over a roasting fire but they might cause quite a stir if she was discovered to be snooping around where she shouldn’t be.  Whatever her Uncle was up to in the early hours of the morning was obviously something that he and her Father didn’t want anyone else knowing about.  She couldn’t prove it yet but she knew it had to be linked with the hushed conversation that took place after supper last night.  Emile’s knee hit the grass as she fumbled loose the shoe lace on her left shoe, pretending to amend the scraggily fabric into a firm knot.  As she hunched Emile glanced up, scanning the yellow fields and ivy meadows.  Explosions of white cloud launched across the skies of perfect sapphire, stretching further than her eyes could see.  The sun was warm but threatened to hide behind the breeze of oncoming clouds and cast the farm and all of its budding meadows within a shadowy gloom.  The figure of her Father shimmered in the distance.  His stooped form trudged behind a great bulk of steal that he ploughed across the land, coming to a brief halt every now and then to swipe at the irritating mask of sweat that had gathered upon his brow.  Her Uncle Pierre was nowhere to be seen.  Across the lawn of blossoming green and quaking dandelion heads, sitting upon a slight rise of grassy slope sat the old barn.  It was a stable structure, built with dark timber that had undergone a harsh discolouring within the winter months.  A memory sprang to mind.  She sat on the dusty rafters of the first floor, tying shards of hay into knots and throwing them down onto the ground below.  Her Father scampered across the whining floorboards, scattering buckets under each rain soaked beam.  His urgency was in no way surprising.  It was a night of lightning and deafening thunder.  Rain had attacked the roof, dribbling through its weakened boundaries with no regard for the contents which lay within.  The main priority was obvious to everyone.  Beneath the leering balcony of the first floor sat her Father’s most prized possession.  An instrument used in a previous life, a life which was in fact not that long ago.  Her Father’s motorcycle (the motorcycle that he had famously pulled around the corners of Paris before zooming to triumph in front of speechless locals) sat on the underside of a thick dust sheet hidden within one of the darker corners of the barn.  His memories lined the walls, black and white photographs framed in silvery gold that bore the dust of a forgotten age.  His racing career had finished just before Emile was born, courtesy of a fall that threatened to take his life.  Emile didn’t know much about it, although she did know that the front wheel of the motorcycle was crooked, bending slightly to the left and missing a host of spindles.  Scratches tore into the paintwork, black and grey, stretching across its thin body like a cluster of shooting stars.  Before her curfew had been introduced, Emile would sneak into the barn regularly, sneaking lengthy peaks inside each of the many boxes that had been thrown into the darkness by her Father.  It was obviously a part of his life that he wished not to revisit, however Emile could not help herself from trying to unearth the mysteries and memories that lay within the dusty confines of each box.   
    The memory fizzled away and Emile chose to skulk around to the side of the cottage, rubbing shoulders with the red brick.  A large forest lay towards the back of the land, its bellowing oaks and reaching willows almost spilling onto the wicker fixed roof of the cottage.  Emile knew she couldn’t just stroll up to the barn and walk right in.  No.  She would sneak into the