Short Fiction - Dialogue With Snakes pg 5[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] Kit was halfway down the hill before she realized it. I'm doing it, she thought, and the realness, the vitality, filled her. She reached the entrance to the site, the place where the path entered the woods, took one deep breath, and stepped forward. It was dark inside, but warm. The shapes seemed familiar, the feather-dress trees, the path, tidy and regular with square cobbles, the lengths of pipe fence on either side marked by tall stone posts, boulders like gravestones on the slope leading into the trees. Nothing in the photographs, however, had prepared her for the scale of things. She had an impression of being indoors the moment she had passed under the first set of trees overhanging the path, like being in a huge gothic cathedral. Looking up, the night was invisible, no hint of the sky above. Would it be dark in here during the day? Kit didn't think so. Even without moonlight able to break through the branches over her head, the path was softly, dimly lit, just enough to distinguish shapes. It would be enough. She wished she had a flashlight, then laughed at herself. Fear of the dark wasn't what made people fail in their quest to gain passage through the Endless Forest. It had to be something else. Feeling suddenly impish, she bent down and unsnapped her purse. The cobbles under her knees were perfectly dry. She found a pad of post-it-notes, some gaffer tape, and a half-knawed pencil - all things no assistant stage manager was ever without - and scribbled a quick message. See you on the other side - Kit. She taped it to the first cobble on the path, not trusting the stickiness on the back of the paper to keep it in place. There. Al could just wait and worry. Replacing everything in her purse made her stop, look at the bag, and a thought struck her. She wasn't going to need anything in it for the duration of her journey. In fact, it was likely to be a hinderance. She found a hollow behind the nearest fence post and dug in a little ways to the dried leaves covering the forest floor, hiding the purse away. Much better. It's not like there would be anyone around to steal it. And it was one less thing to worry about inside. Then, straightening, she brushed the leaves off herself and centred her feet in the middle of the path, looking into the twilight shades of shadow stretching down as far as she could see, falling away to obscurity in the distance. Now or never, Kit, she told herself, and began to walk. The cobbles provided a slightly uneven surface under her runners, but there were no holes in the pattern, no weeds in the cracks, no broken stones. Whoever was in charge of upkeep on this place was doing a fabulous job. What was more, there were no leaves on the walkway, no signs of decay in the even cover of leaves off to the sides, no dead branches, no staining on the rocks of the path like one might expect, just an expanse of the same shell-coloured, evenly spaced squares. I wonder if this unnerves people, Kit thought. It was funny, actually, in a place that felt like the inside of a big room that you wouldn't expect housekeepers to be at work. It was nature, she supposed, no one expects cleanliness from the outdoors. Al. Her conversation with him that evening, slid through her mind, there just long enough to think about what it would have been like to roll around with him for a bit on the wet ground - laughable. Nature wasn't that preoccupied with human standards of neatness. Did that mean the site was artificial, unnatural? Jumping to conclusions, Kit, she told herself. Don't be dumb. It's dark. Things aren't as perfect as you think. She deliberately focused her eyes ahead and up, on the canopy of shaggy leaves almost obscuring the woven branches. I'm a snake in a basket, she told herself, waiting for the man with the flute to lift the lid off and begin to play. She danced a little way down the path, laughing at herself as she did so. So much for the solemnity and fear this place was supposed to instill. I'm conquering the Endless Forest without even trying, she thought. Time - how long had she been inside? Only a couple of minutes. Even at a good pace, she would probably need an hour to get through, and that only provided the path was as straight as the reports suggested. How far did most people get before turning back? She was tempted to look back herself, just to see how far away the entrance was, but no. None of that. She wasn't here to concentrate on how far she'd come, or how far she had to go. She was here to conquer the Forest, and the only way to do that was the old fashioned way, one foot in front of the other. One foot, and then the other. Kit turned it into a little song running in her head. One foot, then the other. Look up at the canopy, and then far down the path. A glance to the side, and she stopped. The gravestones boulders and cairns like crypts that had sat thickly on both sides near the start were thinned, infrequent at best in the area she could see ahead. Were people so scared of tombstones and granite markers that many of them turned back before they even got this far? That seemed a little too easy to be believe. She tilted her head down, eyes rolling up to meet her lids, making what Al called her "Look out, I'm a mean bitch techie" face. This place was trying to freak her out. Well, damned if she was going to fall for such a feeble attempt. So the stones had almost disappeared. Good. Big deal. She wasn't afraid of change. back to jenstuff
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