going down and see what happened? Sandrine hated the idea of giving up and going backward. She levered herself upright and resumed her descent with stair number one hundred and two.
At stair three hundred she passed through another spasm of weepy trembling, but soon conquered it and moved on. By the four-hundredth stair she was hearing faint carnival music and seeing sparkly light figments flit through the darkness like illuminated moths. Somewhere around stair five hundred she realized that the numbers had become mixed up in her head, andstopped counting. She saw a grave that wasn’t a grave, merely darkness, and she saw her old tutor at Clare, a cool, detached don named Quentin Jester who said things like, “If I had a lifetime with you, Miss Loy, we’d both know a deal more than we do at present,” but she closed her eyes and shook her head and sent him packing.
Many stairs later, Sandrine’s thigh muscles reported serious aches, and her arms felt extraordinarily heavy. So did her head, which kept lolling forward to rest on her chest. Her stomach complained, and she said to herself,
Wish I had a nice big slice of sautéed giant bug right about now
, and chuckled at how crazy she had become in so short a time. Giant bug! Even good old Dad, old L.L., who often respected sanity in others but wished for none of it himself, drew the line at dining on giant insects. And here came yet another proof of her deteriorating mental condition: that despite her steady progress deeper and deeper underground, Sandrine could almost sort of half persuade herself that the darkness before her seemed weirdly less dark than only a moment ago. This lunatic delusion clung to her step after step, worsening as she went. She said to herself,
I’ll hold up my hand, and if I think I see it, I’ll know it’s good-bye, real world; pack old Tillie off to Bedlam
. She stopped moving, closed her eyes, and raised her hand before her face. Slowly, she opened her eyes, and beheld … her hand!
The problem with the insanity defense lay in the irrevocable truth that it was really her hand before her, not a mad vision from gothic literature but her actual, entirely earthly hand, at present grimy and crusted with dirt from its long contact with the wall. Sandrine turned her head and discovered that she could make out the wall, too, with its hard-packed earth showing here and there the pale string of a severed root, at times sending in her direction a little spray or shower of dusty particulate. Sandrine held her breath and looked down to what appeared to be the source of the illumination. Then she inhaled sharply, for it seemed to her that she could see, dimly and a long way down, the bottom of the stairs. A little rectangle of light burned away down there, and from it floated the luminous translucency that made it possible for her to see.
Too shocked to cry, too relieved to insist on its impossibility, Sandrine moved slowly down the remaining steps to the rectangle of light. Its warmth heated the air, the steps, the walls, and Sandrine herself, who only now registered that for most of her journey she had been half paralyzed by the chill leaking from the earth. As she drew nearer to the light, she could finally make out details of what lay beneath her. She thought she saw a strip of concrete, part of a wooden barrel, the bottom of a ladder lying on the ground: the intensity of the light surrounding these enigmatic objects shrank and dwindled them, hollowed them out even as it drilled painfully into her eyes. Beneath her world existed another, its light a blinding dazzle.
When Sandrine had come within thirty feet of the blazing underworld, her physical relationship to it mysteriously altered. It seemed she no longer stepped downward, but moved across a slanting plane that leveled almost imperceptibly off. The dirt walls on either side fell back and melted to ghostly gray air, to nothing solid, until all that remained was the residue of dust and grime
At stair three hundred she passed through another spasm of weepy trembling, but soon conquered it and moved on. By the four-hundredth stair she was hearing faint carnival music and seeing sparkly light figments flit through the darkness like illuminated moths. Somewhere around stair five hundred she realized that the numbers had become mixed up in her head, andstopped counting. She saw a grave that wasn’t a grave, merely darkness, and she saw her old tutor at Clare, a cool, detached don named Quentin Jester who said things like, “If I had a lifetime with you, Miss Loy, we’d both know a deal more than we do at present,” but she closed her eyes and shook her head and sent him packing.
Many stairs later, Sandrine’s thigh muscles reported serious aches, and her arms felt extraordinarily heavy. So did her head, which kept lolling forward to rest on her chest. Her stomach complained, and she said to herself,
Wish I had a nice big slice of sautéed giant bug right about now
, and chuckled at how crazy she had become in so short a time. Giant bug! Even good old Dad, old L.L., who often respected sanity in others but wished for none of it himself, drew the line at dining on giant insects. And here came yet another proof of her deteriorating mental condition: that despite her steady progress deeper and deeper underground, Sandrine could almost sort of half persuade herself that the darkness before her seemed weirdly less dark than only a moment ago. This lunatic delusion clung to her step after step, worsening as she went. She said to herself,
I’ll hold up my hand, and if I think I see it, I’ll know it’s good-bye, real world; pack old Tillie off to Bedlam
. She stopped moving, closed her eyes, and raised her hand before her face. Slowly, she opened her eyes, and beheld … her hand!
The problem with the insanity defense lay in the irrevocable truth that it was really her hand before her, not a mad vision from gothic literature but her actual, entirely earthly hand, at present grimy and crusted with dirt from its long contact with the wall. Sandrine turned her head and discovered that she could make out the wall, too, with its hard-packed earth showing here and there the pale string of a severed root, at times sending in her direction a little spray or shower of dusty particulate. Sandrine held her breath and looked down to what appeared to be the source of the illumination. Then she inhaled sharply, for it seemed to her that she could see, dimly and a long way down, the bottom of the stairs. A little rectangle of light burned away down there, and from it floated the luminous translucency that made it possible for her to see.
Too shocked to cry, too relieved to insist on its impossibility, Sandrine moved slowly down the remaining steps to the rectangle of light. Its warmth heated the air, the steps, the walls, and Sandrine herself, who only now registered that for most of her journey she had been half paralyzed by the chill leaking from the earth. As she drew nearer to the light, she could finally make out details of what lay beneath her. She thought she saw a strip of concrete, part of a wooden barrel, the bottom of a ladder lying on the ground: the intensity of the light surrounding these enigmatic objects shrank and dwindled them, hollowed them out even as it drilled painfully into her eyes. Beneath her world existed another, its light a blinding dazzle.
When Sandrine had come within thirty feet of the blazing underworld, her physical relationship to it mysteriously altered. It seemed she no longer stepped downward, but moved across a slanting plane that leveled almost imperceptibly off. The dirt walls on either side fell back and melted to ghostly gray air, to nothing solid, until all that remained was the residue of dust and grime
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