“Well, I’ll have it if you don’t want it,” Jenna replied.
“No, no. I love
Aunt Zelda’s stuff,” said Septimus, draining the witches’ brew in one gulp and chewing the toffee gratefully, as it took the bitterness away.
While Ullr finished off the bones and fish heads, they packed their backpacks and looked at the map.
“I figure we’re here,” said Septimus, pointing to a drawing of a hut beside a wiggly line that Snorri had helpfully labeled STREAM.
“We’re getting near the edge, then,” said Beetle, running his finger along the margins of the hole in the middle of the map.
Septimus nodded. “I hope when we get out into the light we’ll be able to see something. Maybe even the House of Foryx—whatever that looks like.”
It was hard to leave the warmth and safety of the hut behind and open the door into an unfamiliar world. In fact it was a lot harder than they had expected, as the door would not budge. Septimus and Beetle leaned all their weight against it but it would not shift. “It’s the snow,” said Beetle. “Look how much it’s piled up against the windows. We’re snowed in.” He gave the door another hefty shove. “Oof! It’s no good. It won’t open. We’re stuck.”
“Let me try,” said Jenna.
“Okay, come help us, Jen, but I don’t think it will make any difference,” said Septimus.
“I’ll try it on my own thanks, Sep.”
“On your own?” said Septimus and Beetle.
“Yes, on my own. Okay?”
“Okay.” Septimus and Beetle shrugged and, clearly humoring Jenna, they stepped aside.
Jenna took hold of the latch and pulled the door. It opened with a rush and a pile of snow tumbled in. She grinned. “It opens inward,” she said.
Beetle was right about one thing: it had snowed so much during the night that the hut was very nearly completely covered with snow. It lay where the wind had blown it, piled up against the sides of the hut, a great heap of the stuff barring their way out. Beetle fetched the shovel from the smelly little outhouse and began digging the snow away very energetically, as if to make up for the embarrassing door episode. After a few fast shovelfuls had been thrown to the side, Beetle suddenly stopped.
“Need a break?” asked Septimus.
“No! I mean, no thanks, I’m fine. Only just got started. But there’s something under the snow…something soft.”
Carefully now, Beetle prodded at the snow with the shovel and began to gently scrape it away.
“Look!” Jenna gasped. “Oh no, look.”
Soaked and heavy with snow, a scarcely visible white woolen cloth lay exposed by Beetle’s digging. “Someone’s under here,” muttered Beetle. He dropped to his hands and knees, and along with Jenna and Septimus, quickly scraped away the snow.
“Ephaniah!” Jenna exclaimed. “Oh no, it’s Ephaniah. Ephaniah, wake up!”
39
UNDER THE SNOW
I t took the combined strength
of all three to haul the soaked and frozen figure into the hut. He lay on the floor taking up the entire space between the bunks, a great bulky mass of sodden white robes clinging to his strange rat-man shape. Ullr arched up, hissing, the fur on his tail sticking out like a bottlebrush and shot out of the hut. Jenna did not even notice.
“Oh, this is awful,” she said tearfully, dropping to her knees beside the rat-man. “That scratching last night was Ephaniah. We ignored him. And he couldn’t even shout to tell us he was there—freezing to death. Oh, Sep, we’ve probably killed him.”
Septimus thought Jenna might be right. Marcia had taught him to Listen for the Sound of Human Heartbeat and he could hear only Jenna’s and Beetle’s—both beating fast. But, thought Septimus, as he threw some logs into the stove and got the fire going once more, he didn’t know if the Listening
worked for the sound of rat-human heartbeat as well. It wasn’t something he had thought to ask at the time.
Jenna looked at Ephaniah in dismay. He had lost his glasses and his eyes were closed, the long dark lashes stuck together with flecks of ice. His small amount of visible human skin was bluish-white and his sparse, short brown hair was caked with snow and plastered to his skull, which was surprisingly human in shape. Jenna knew she ought to unwind the cloth from his rat mouth and listen for sounds of breathing—or at the very least put her hand on him to check for the rise and fall of his chest—but she found herself very reluctant to touch the rat-man. She thought that maybe it was the nearness of his bulk, which was suddenly overwhelming in all its ratlike strangeness. When Ephaniah was conscious his humanity shone through, and Jenna hardly noticed the rat in the man—but now she found it hard to see the man in the rat. She glanced up at Beetle; he was standing in the doorway staring at Ephaniah. “Do you think he’s still alive?” she half whispered.
Beetle nodded slowly. “Yeah…” he said, moving his timepiece from hand to hand—a nervous habit he had when he was worried. He thought he saw the rat-man’s eyes flicker open for a moment, but he said nothing.
The fire in the stove was blazing now. Steam was rising from the white woolen robes and a musty, unpleasant smell began to fill the hut.
“He must have followed us,” said Septimus, staring down at Ephaniah. “That must have been what I saw…”
“You saw him?” asked Jenna. “Why didn’t you say?”
“Well…I wasn’t sure.”
“Poor Ephaniah,” said Jenna. “He’d be camouflaged—like the Snow Foxes in the Lands of the Long Nights.”
“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t just that. I didn’t want to say because it felt…Darke.”
“Ephaniah felt Darke?”
Septimus shrugged. “Well, I—”
Beetle had been staring at Ephaniah intently. Now he spoke. “Sep.”
There was something in Beetle’s voice that sent a chill down Septimus’s spine. “What?” he whispered.
Silently, Beetle pointed to his own left little finger and crossed the first and second fingers of his left hand—the sign scribes used for the Darke. Now Septimus understood—but Jenna did not. Frightened, she glanced at Septimus. “Get out,” he mouthed.
“Why?” asked Jenna, her voice sounding horribly loud in the silence.
No one replied. The next moment Septimus was beside her and before she knew it she was on her feet being propelled out of the doorway and over the pile of snow.
“But—” Jenna protested to no avail.
“Shh!” hissed Septimus. “You’ll wake it.”
“Wake what?”
Silent and fast, Beetle closed the hut door. Jenna watched as Septimus placed both hands on the door, just as he had done the night before, and muttered something under his breath. Then he gave a thumbs-up sign and scrambled over the snow. The next moment Jenna found herself grabbed by Septimus and Beetle and running from the hut as though it were on fire with Ullr bounding behind.
They headed down the valley, leaping over the snow and dodging through the trees like a trio of terrified deer. To their right a steep cliff reared up through the treetops and when they reached the base of the cliff, they stopped to catch their breath. They looked back up the valley, searching out the hut, which—if it had not been for the lazily rising wood smoke that was drifting up through the trees—would have been almost impossible to see.
“It’s okay,” said Beetle. “I can’t see it. Of course it might be hiding behind the trees, but I don’t think so.”
“It?” asked Jenna. “What do you mean—the hut’s following us? Are you crazy?”
“I mean Ephaniah,” said Beetle. “Except it’s not.”
“Not what?” asked Jenna.
“It’s not Ephaniah,” said Beetle. “It’s a Thing.”
“A Thing?”
“Yep. The one from the Manuscriptorium. The one that came with the kid who got me fired and took my job.”
“No. No, I don’t believe it. It’s Ephaniah.”
Septimus glanced back up the valley anxiously. “Come on, let’s get some distance between us.”
They set off again, following the steady downward slope of the valley, keeping into the shadows of the cliff face. Every step that took them away from the hut made Jenna feel as if she were betraying Ephaniah. At last she could stand it no more. “Stop,” she said in a deliberately Princessy voice. “I’m not going any farther. We’ve got to go back.”
Septimus and Beetle stopped. “But, Jen,” they both protested.
Jenna pulled her wolverine cloak around her as if it were a royal mantle and stubbornly stuck out her chin—just as her mother had done on the rare occasions her advisers had dared to disagree with her. “Either you two tell me exactly what’s going on or I am going straight back to the hut. Now,” she told them.
Septimus took a deep breath. He was going to have to make this good, he could tell. “Jen, last night the scrabbling at the door stopped after I did an Anti-Darke Incantation. And that only affects Darke stuff. It wouldn’t have stopped the real Ephaniah.”
“Maybe that was coincidence. Maybe he was getting exhausted or his hands were too frozen…” Jenna stamped her feet through the snow in frustration. How could Septimus be so sure?