Perhaps...maybe...I might be in love. Could it be that I had found that person I had been thinking of looking for before I had to stop Alpin from shooting Grandpa Foo Ling? And when I found myself in my mum’s rose bower, I let a laurel branch encircle my temples, bent over a particularly gorgeous blossom and cupping it with my hands broke into song like a bird.
“O Love, wrapped in red petals!
Say! What is in the heart
of the rose?
Powdered gold that will
torment my fragile breath
Or a throne where my desire already doth
repose?”
“Nuts!”
shouted Alpin. “That’s what you are! Get away from those flowers before you
start sneezing! You allergic fool! How can you fall in love with someone you’ve
never really seen? How can you tell that inside that red cloak there isn’t a
monster plotting to eat you alive? Things like that can happen in forests.
Fairy tales give warning!”
But nothing Alpin could say would dissuade me. For
once, I was not the prudent one of the pair.
“I’ll have time enough to fall out of love if I
don’t like what I find. It’s decided, I’m entering the depths of the forest in desperate
search of my true love. I will cut through bushes and briars, braving thorns
and whatever else tries to stop me and I won’t leave a stone unturned until I
find her.”
Since I could not be dissuaded, Alpin
accompanied me, but, he said, only because the cucullati might have left more
free food around.
“When you find your sweetie,” he said, “do me a
favor and ask her to be so kind as to leave a salt shaker among the hard-boiled
eggs they give out. I didn’t see one there. I’m not happy about having to
remember to bring one with me. Plus I hate carrying things. If I take one from
your mum’s kitchen, will you carry it for me?”
I agree to do that and we plunged into Minced
Forest. This time we moved in silence. We went deeper and deeper inside, so
deep we were shin deep in dead leaves and bearded with spiderwebs.
In a
whisper I asked Alpin if he was scared of spiders and Alpin said that not since
he had learned most were edible.
I realized that was why he was so quiet. He was
swallowing whole the ones that crawled into his mouth.
As we advanced, it got darker and darker. It
was noon and the day was sunny, but it could have been midnight, so black was
it where we were at. I wished we had brought lanterns with us. Our skin itched
and swelled in the many places where we had been scratched and bitten. It was a
horrible experience, but then I didn’t mind. It seemed like something that had
to be done to deserve true love.
Then we saw a weak light, a beam through the thick
trees. It came from a fresh table cloth with a large hamper full of food on it.
There were also maps and a first aid kit and a couple of torches, one already
lit. I thought Alpin would go directly to the hamper, but saw he was staring
beyond it.
“Do you think it is made of chocolate?” he
murmurred.
What had attracted his attention was a sort of stone
dome that looked like an Easter egg lying half buried on the ground. It was
covered with colourful graffiti of
strange symbols, black and green and
turquoise and red, that made it look like it was gift-wrapped in metallic paper
and yes, there was a something edible about it, but I said no, I didn’t think
it was chocolate.
“That has to be the bunker of the hooded
geniuses. Or at least the entrance to it,” I ventured.
We couldn’t see a door. Of course, we could try
to walk through the walls, but it seemed rude not to knock first. I gave a
symbolic knock on the dome though I
didn’t think anyone would hear.
But someone did.
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