“Don’t speak!” muttered Old Croak hoarsely. “He’s very stupid. If we don’t speak, he may go away.”
“I heard that!” roared Drackamag, and the vibrations made the lily-pads rock like cockleshells on a rough sea. “Stupid, am I? We’ll see who’s stupid one of these days when I put my foot right down on this little house of yours, wait and see if I don’t!”
Croak cowered down as if expecting the cabin to be crushed over his head at any moment.
“Come on, you ugly little lump of nothing! Who’s in there? I heard someone laugh. Horrible! Frightened me out of me wits. No one’s laughed on this side of the wood since – well, not for two hundred years, eh, Croak? We can’t be having that sort of thing, it might lead to anything! Birds singing, bees humming – dangerous, dangerous, Croak! Eh? Eh?”
“You shouldn’t have laughed,” whispered the frog to Dakin in a shocked tone.
“Why not?” asked Dakin, feeling suddenly braver. If the simple sound of a laugh could frighten the terrible Drackamag, he couldn’t be such a monster after all, however big he was.
“I heard a girl’s voice!” exclaimed the thunderous voice outside. “She sounded happy! If you’ve got anybody good in there, Croak, I’m warning you – Madam won’t like it! Now, send her out this minute, or I’ll go and wake the old girl up and ask her if I can crunch your house down!”
Dakin stood up. Her legs shook a bit, but not too badly, considering.
“Don’t go out!” hissed her friend frantically. “Let him do what he likes!”
“I’m not going out,” Dakin assured him loudly. “I’m just going to laugh.”
“No! NO! Not that!” howled the voice outside, and now the lily-pads danced so wildly that Old Croak fell into the water with a splash.
But Dakin was already laughing, and didn’t notice. It wasn’t any too easy to laugh, as there was nothing very funny about the situation; but it was important, so Dakin did it. She remembered the time Margle, her brother, had scoffed at the calf who fell into the mud-hole and immediately afterwards fallen in himself. She thought of the expression on the face of the hen when the chick she’d raised turned out to be a duck, and had hopped into the pond. She recalled the hornet-fly that wanted to sit on the Pastor’s nose last Sunday in the sermon. New laughter bubbled up in her with each thing she thought of, and soon the mere idea of the dreadful Drackamag being frightened was enough to keep her going.
Her laughter rang out, peal after joyful peal, until the crest of the mountain seemed to echo it back to her. But at last she was so tired, and her tummy ached so much, that she couldn’t laugh any more, and she sat down on the floor, too exhausted by her effort to make another sound.
She looked round. The first thing she noticed was that it was light again: the sun was shining in through the dusty window. Dakin realized that the sun hadn’t really gone in, but that Drackamag’s body had shut it out, like a black cloud. Birds outside were singing and all the sounds of a sweet summer noon-time were pouring down the chimney like music. Drackamag and his fearful roaring voice were, for the moment, gone.
She looked for Old Croak, and finally found him huddled behind a plant with his eyes tight shut and his pads in his ears. She tried to make him hear her, but of course he couldn’t, so at last she gently touched him.
He leapt clean into the air with fright, landed on the ground and did a beautiful swallow-dive into the pond where he vanished, leaving only a bubble to show where he’d gone.
Dakin was alone again.
Well, it was time to be on her way. But there was one more thing she could do. Opening her knapsack, she took out the toffee, and laid it in the fireplace at the foot of the chimney. Almost at once, a fly who happened to be passing overhead saw it and buzzed down to investigate. Then came another, and another. Old Croak would find a feast awaiting him when at last he had to surface for air.
Getting out of the chimney, Dakin discovered, was a different matter from getting in, and for a while it seemed she was doomed to stay there for ever. But in trying to draw herself up, she accidentally touched a rough place in the bricks and a little rope-ladder suddenly fell out of the inside rim of the chimney-pot and dangled before her. In no time at all she was sliding down the sloping roof, and clambering down the ladder into the sunny meadow again.
The meadow was wide, and as long as she was out in the sunshine she felt strangely safe. Could it be that whatever dark forces held the farthest-away mountain in their spell were as afraid of the light as they were of the happy sounds of laughter and birdsong? If so, then Dakin felt she might have discovered a very helpful secret in Old Croak’s cabin.
But no meadow stretches forever and, quite abruptly, the grass stopped and she found herself walking on rocks, not the smooth, well-worn kind in the green river at home, but spikey, sticking-up rocks, like sharp teeth or knives. Her feet slipped between them and she had to wrench them free. Sometimes a piece of rock she hadn’t noticed would trip her up. She knew if she fell she’d hurt herself badly, and it really did seem, after a while, as if the rocks were alive and doing their utmost to make her stumble and fall in amongst them.
Whenever she looked ahead the jagged teeth, like the spears of a vast army, seemed to stretch for miles, ahead and on both sides; and even looking back, she couldn’t see any sign of the meadow. The sun had really gone in now and the sky overhead was grey and threatening. She grew more and more weary, but there wasn’t one friendly flat surface to rest on, just the endless, treacherous sea of spikes. It was no good turning back, she could only go on. It was worse than the wood.
At last Dakin grew so tired she knew that very soon she must either sit down and rest, or fall down. Her head had begun to whirl and she realized she must be terribly hungry. Even without the little troll, her knapsack felt like lead, and her heart felt almost as heavy.
As she staggered on she felt a lump come into her throat. First she told herself it was just tiredness, then, as it grew bigger, that it was hunger, but despite all her efforts to deceive herself, two big tears bloomed slowly on her lower eyelashes and made two wet, crooked paths down her brown cheeks.
They met on the end of her chin, and fell with a small splash on a particularly spiteful-looking point of rock.
What happened next would have surprised Dakin if she hadn’t already had more surprises that day than she knew how to deal with. The rock on which her tear had fallen began to melt, like a fast-burning wax candle. First the sharp point disappeared, then the thickening column beneath it sank and sank with a faint hissing sound, until it had quite melted away and there was nothing left but a flat place – exactly the size and shape of Dakin’s foot.
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