The Silver Crown

Aladdin Paperbacks

Chapter One

Otto was gone all the next day. He returned just before dark, empty-handed except for berries, gloomy and rather preoccupied. He built a fire as usual, but only for warmth and whatever cheer it might bring. There was nothing more to cook. Their supper was a cold one; it consisted of the last few scraps of bread and some berries. They had reached the end of their food.

There was only one cheerful thing. Ellen's ankle continued to improve; she had, in fact, walked without her crutches all the way to the brook and bathed it, and herself, in the cool, dark water. She had barely made it back, however, and afterward the ankle ached quite a lot. Yet she was sure she had done it no harm. She did not tell Otto that it hurt. Her stomach, after the small meal, felt empty and uncomfortable; she was sure that Otto, having hunted all day, must be far hungrier than she. Yet he did not complain; at least, not exactly.

"When we get out of here," he said, "when we get to the highway, I hope we come out near a hamburger stand. I'm going to order six hamburgers with ketchup, rolls, onions, potato chips, and Cokes. And pie. Chocolate pie, and eat them all. I don't care if I can't pay. I'll eat them before they find out."

"I can pay. I still have more than a dollar."

"Yes, but you'll want some, too. A dollar isn't enough."

"They'll arrest you."

"I don't care. They have to feed you in jail. And you and Aunt Sarah can come and bail me out."

"If only I can find her. I hope she's there."

For some reason, thinking about Aunt Sarah made something in Ellen's mind roll back, and she suddenly remembered the dream of her father. She described it to Otto.

"And the strange thing about it," she said, "is that I didn't feel asleep at all, and when it ended, I didn't feel as if I were waking up."

"Maybe it wasn't a real dream. It doesn't sound like a dream. Maybe it was telepathy."

"How could it be?"

"He might be still alive. I bet he is."

"He isn't alive," Ellen said. "He couldn't be. The fireman said so. Anyway, you didn't see the house."

"Then you must have seen heaven. Maybe when you put the crown on, you can see heaven."

"Heaven wouldn't be so dark." She lay down and pulled the blanket around her. "It was only a dream." With that she was asleep.

When Ellen awoke the next morning, Otto was not there. She was not particularly surprised, since there was nothing for breakfast except a small pile of berries left over from the night before. She assumed that he had awakened earlier and gone hunting, or at least gone to gather some more berries. He had told her that early morning was the best time of day for hunting.

So she ate the berries, and then, without using her crutches, walked quite easily down to the brook to get a drink of water and to wash her face. Of course she was wobbly, and she limped, but she did not hurt. After she washed, she went back to the cave and waited for an hour or so, expecting Otto any minute - she hoped with a rabbit in each hand, but at least with more berries. But he did not come. All day she waited.

By nightfall he still had not returned, and she had begun to worry. Could he have gotten lost? She could hardly believe that, knowing how easily he found his way in the woods. Had he just hunted, hungry as he was - hungry as they both were - much farther than usual, not realizing how far he had gone? If so, he should be back soon, since he could not hunt in the dark.

Suppertime came and went. She was hideously empty, and there was not so much as a green berry left. Since Otto was not there, she built the fire herself; she kept it small, because the wood supply was low. It would be easy enough to build it bigger if he came back with some game. She felt thoroughly miserable, a little frightened, but most of all worried about Otto himself. For a dreadful suspicion had begun to work its way through her mind.

Eventually she fell asleep, and into her sleep crept a repeating nightmare that woke her up trembling each time she dreamed it. Each time she woke she looked through the dim firelight at Otto's blanket, and each time it was still empty.

In her nightmare Otto was lost, not in the woods but wandering in an endless maze of dark corridors of stone, inside the black castle. He could not get out, for all the doors were locked. At the end of each dream he turned a corner, and there before him stood a tall figure in black, wearing a green mask. And it was Otto's voice, calling for help, that woke her up.

In the morning Ellen knew that the time had come to stop worrying and start thinking. She was sure now that Otto was not coming back, and she was quite sure she knew why. She went over in her mind some of the things he had said when they talked about the castle, or prison, or whatever it was. "I could get in," he had said, and, "Wire fences are easy to climb." And then almost immediately he had talked about food. Ellen could put two and two together. She realized of course, that she might be wrong.

Assuming that she was right - then what? She could not stay here; she would starve. But could she walk well enough to leave? She tried a few steps and decided that she could. She should be able to make a few miles each day, at least. She wondered how long a person could keep walking without food - or without any food but berries.

Having thought this far, the next question was: Where should she go?

Finally, she worked out a plan; and having decided what to do, she wasted no time starting. She was terribly hungry, and at least she could eat some berries along the way.

She packed her rucksack with her own things and discovered - since there was no food to pack - that she had room for Otto's blanket, too, so she put that in just in case. She was careful to take all the matches; there were not many left, and she filled the water bottle from the brook. When everything was ready, she put the rucksack on and climbed up the first ledge, then the second, and walked toward the front door.

But just before she reached it she stopped, as if she had remembered something. She looked around her, considering. Then she walked over to one side of the cave, in the shadow, studying the ground. She dug the toe of her shoe into a gravelly part of the floor, pushing the gravel to one side, still thinking. She slipped off the rucksack, knelt down, opened it, and took out the crown. Using her fingers and then, when the hard stones tore her nails, a knife from her rucksack to help, she dug a hole six inches deep. She folded the crown into the smallest possible shape, placed it at the bottom of the hole, and buried it. She smoothed the gravel carefully over the top, so the hole became instantly invisible. Then she took the knife and on the wall directly over the crown she scratched a small "X" to mark the spot.

Outside the front door of the cave she saw the rocks where Otto had climbed in and out of the crevasse. They were not so formidable as she had feared; it was rather like climbing the steps of a pyramid - you could take them one at a time. Depending more on her knees than her feet, she scrambled to the top easily enough and found herself in the silent, birdless forest.

But the rest of the way was like a bad dream, and got steadily worse. Within a half mile she knew that her ankle was not nearly as strong as she had thought. Perhaps part of the trouble was the extra weight of the rucksack. Her limp deteriorated into a painful hobble, and she had to stop and rest, leaning against a tree, after every few steps. Still she kept going, a few yards at a time, and she did find some berries and ate them.

The rain came on not as a storm but as a slow, chill, foggy drizzle that ran down her neck, soaked her shoes, and made her slacks stick wetly to her legs. It turned the ground slippery underfoot, slowing her progress still further. Worst of all, it hid the sun, which she needed to guide her. In order to keep from getting completely lost, she had to stay near the edge of the crevasse, forcing her way through thickets rather than detouring around them. By noon she felt close to despair; she wanted to give up and go back to the cave. There at least she would be dry; she could sit before the fire and get warm. But if she did that, if she gave up, she would starve. She went on.

By midafternoon she could walk no farther. She slumped down on a fallen log under a huge oak tree, hoping that its branches would keep off at least some of the rain. Her hair hung lank and wet around her temples; her clothing dripped, and after she had sat still for a few minutes she began to shiver. The only warm part of her was her lame ankle, which throbbed and ached and burned.

She should, she knew, build a fire. But how build a fire when every leaf, every twig was soaked and soggy? Then another thought came to her. If she could not light a fire, she might at least make a shelter from the rain: She had two blankets; she would make a tent of one and roll up under it in the other.

She remembered how she and David, when they lived in the country, had made blanket tents. The easiest way was to find a long, low tree limb parallel to the ground, hang the blanket over it, and put a stone on each corner.

So, after a minute or two, she got painfully to her feet and started around the big bole of the oak tree to see if, by luck, it had such a branch. And then she discovered, to her relief, that she did not need to make a tent after all. Halfway around the tree she found that the trunk, as big as a dining room table, was hollow - or at least more than half hollow. An opening like a wide door led into it, and the floor inside was deep with brown oak leaves. She stepped in and felt the dry warmth of the tree enclose her like an embrace.

She spread one blanket, folded double, over the leaves. Then she pulled off her wet slacks, shirt, shoes, and socks and spread them beside it to dry. She rolled herself in the other blanket and lay down. In ninety seconds she was asleep.

When she awoke it was still light enough to see, though just barely, and she heard a small rustling in the leaves near the entrance to the hollow. She lay still, moving only her eyes to look. It was a chipmunk, a gay little animal hardly bigger than a mouse, striped brown and white and black. He, too, had come in out of the rain. He sat up on his back legs like a squirrel and nibbled something he held in his forepaws. It looked like a piece of bread. Bread? In the forest? How could it be? Then, as Ellen watched, the chipmunk finished the bit he was eating, darted out the door, and came back in a minute with a bigger piece - a mushroom.

Ellen rolled over so she could see better. The leaves rustled under her. The chipmunk looked at her, made a tentative hop toward the door, and waited, watching her. He did not want to go back out in the rain unless he had to. Ellen moved again, slowly. The chipmunk stayed where he was. Gradually she inched herself to where she could see out the door; the chipmunk, quite calmly, began to eat again. Obviously this big, sluggish creature was not going to hurt him.

Through the door Ellen could now see where he had found his meal. Back perhaps thirty feet stood a broken off tree trunk, a tall, jagged stump. And out of it, sides and top, grew a small forest of the white, crescent-shaped mushrooms. What had her father said, long ago? "The white ones that grow on stumps are ..." She could not remember. But they were, he had said, good to eat. How to be sure these were the same? She pulled her blanket around her, stepping softly, skirting the chipmunk, and walked barefoot into the rain.

They looked the same. She broke off a crumb and tasted it ..."oyster" ... That was the name - "oyster mushrooms." They had a faint oysterish taste, but they were really more like meat, or like meat and bread mixed. She broke off another piece. It was delicious. She knew that some mushrooms tasted all right but were nonetheless poisonous. Still, the chipmunk was eating them. Could they poison people and not chipmunks? She doubted it. She picked a double handful and took them back to the hollow. As night fell, she ate them all, and went back to sleep feeling warm, full, and reasonably content.

The next day her walking improved, and so did the weather. Though it stayed cloudy and chilly, the rain stopped, and the ground dried out underfoot. She limped along quite nimbly all morning, though without the sun to guide her she still had to stay within sight of the crevasse. She had taken with her enough mushrooms to last the day - in fact, she had taken them all, except a few she left for the chipmunk.

Early in the afternoon, something began happening to the crevasse. With each few hundred feet she progressed, it grew narrower, until, except for her ankle, she could easily have jumped across. She went to the edge, lay down, and peered into it. As far as she could tell, it was still as deep as ever, and she was quite sure she could see the brook still running below, now covering the whole bottom.

She walked on, keeping closer than ever to the edge, since now she could scarcely see it at all. And then it disappeared entirely. The edges simply met, like the end of a long piece of pie; and from there on, the trees grew right across it. She walked back to the last bit where a crack was still visible and stared down again. She could see nothing but blackness. The brook continued somewhere down there in a tunnel of its own. But she had lost her guideline.

For the next few hundred yards or so she could continue in the direction the crevasse had been running. After that, when it was out of sight for good, there would be no way to tell which way she was going. People who walk in the woods with nothing to guide them, she had read, always ended up walking in great circles, getting nowhere.

But as it turned out she need not have worried. For she had hardly gone out of sight of the crevasse when she came, abruptly, to the end of her journey.

The castle rose before her like a black thundercloud. There was the high fence, just as Otto had described it, enclosing a grassy courtyard as big as a village. Through it, crisscrossing it like a gridiron, ran the strange black paths, shiny as wet asphalt, but curiously metallic in appearance. And just as Ellen arrived, a group of people came walking down one of them, heading toward her.

As they came closer, she saw that they were all boys, dressed in black. There were perhaps fifty of them, marching four abreast, not in step but in a sort of pathetic, shuffling disorder. They were all very careful to stay on the path, however.

Then, as they came directly in front of her and the column began to turn to her right, she saw that the boy nearest her in the second row was Otto. As he turned, his eyes looked directly into hers, but they were as blank as the eyes of a sheep.

Continues...
Excerpted from The Silver Crownby Robert C. O'Brien Copyright © 2001 by Robert C. O'Brien. Excerpted by permission.
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