The Giant's Almanac, Andrew Zurcher [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

She was still smiling as he stepped into the well. She didn’t protest, or move to stop him.

He had assumed he would hit the water instantly. He was braced for it, for the chill promised by the rising mist that had played invisibly on his skin and in his nostrils. It would engulf his shoes, his trousers and his shirt, but he would feel it on his hands and face before the shock of it penetrated his clothing. He was petrified, but his fear he could sacrifice.

He didn’t hit the water. Nor did he have time for confusion, alarm, fear or regret before he hit something else entirely. It was five seconds, ten seconds, even fifteen before, in the well-night dark as pitch, tearing through the thick vapour rising in shreds and clouds all around him, he realized what had broken his fall – what continued to break his fall as down he dropped, scything through black, through cold, and through his own surprise.

Arms. Bare arms, arms in sleeves, in coats, dirty arms, clean arms, strong and skinny and hairy arms, arms bent and straight. Countless, endless, cradling arms.

It seemed to Fitz as he fell on and on down the shaft, tumbling through a forest of outstretched arms, that it might just continue forever. It didn’t hurt at all – in part because he leaned into the slap and scrape of skin against his body by curling or sitting down into the impact, in part because he began to fall ever more slowly as the web and lattice of arms continued to ease his descent. But if he fell more slowly, still he fell, on and on, ever downward, ever through a mass of arms.

And then, at last – when he had forgotten to expect it – his feet hit water, and he plunged into the well. At once, like a coiled spring, in a spasm of reflex his body extended – his feet kicking down in search of purchase, his right arm thrusting into the misty air above him. The water on his skin was warm and salty, like a bath of tears, and Fitz had just time to notice its strangeness before his hand, groping in the open as he sank, closed on another hand. As he had fallen the arms sustaining him had dropped away like leaves before drops of rain. Now this fist, finding his, grasped and held him, but had strength only to halt his further fall, not to lift him clear of the water. Fitz thrashed his head, still submerged, and fought to bring it clear of the surface. His body writhed, groundless, as beneath the hot sorrow of water he struggled to fight down the panic in his chest and the tumult in his ears.

No. No. No. Not again.

Then, moving with the tentative tapping tread of a spider, another hand sought out his arm and, finding it, took hold of it – then another, and another, and more, until his arm like the under-hull of a seasoned boat was crusted up with clinging – and in a concerted moment they lifted Fitz gasping clear into the dank and heaving air. Now he began to fall upward again, each hand to a hand handing him and hand by hand rising. The socket of his shoulder seemed to tear with pain, but into the tangle of wrists and gripping he managed to push his second arm; instantly a dozen other hands closed round it, and Fitz felt himself roughly but surely dragged towards the glow that, as his blinking eyes cleared against the shifting damp and drops, revealed itself at last as the Hall of Lanterns, and the last hand upon his was Dina’s. He kicked out his foot, finding the jewelled ledge. She pulled him clear of the well.

Fitz found himself on his knees. The rough rock of the well’s edge had crunched into his shinbone as he crawled clear of the swirling cloud of vapour, and now he collapsed round his legs, the adrenaline that had been coursing through his body spent, and every corner of his skin coarse and raw.

Having hauled him from the well head with surprising force, even with ease, Dina had relinquished his hand almost as if it were a soiled thing. Now, while Fitz rubbed his shin to no purpose, all the while – equally vainly – struggling to make sense of the succession of physical sensations he had just experienced – she took a step back from him, as an artist might, while painting, to get a better view of the canvas.

‘Why did you do that?’ she asked him.

His awareness of Dina had been jostling in his consciousness with attention to himself. Now he stared at her. All the pain in his legs seemed, suddenly, to have been an illusion.

‘In the well – there are –’ He was going to say that there were people. It would sound ridiculous, and he checked himself before the word formed on his lips. ‘There’s –’

‘A lot of water, by the look of it,’ said Dina. ‘Why did you throw yourself into the Sad King?’

As if Dina’s words were flies buzzing round his face, Fitz pinched his eyes and shook his head to clear it. ‘No, there’s more than that. Not just water. I mean, before the water – there are arms.’

As he looked up at her, around Dina’s head thousands of lit lanterns glowed, in such a way that her face seemed to emerge from the great brightness around and beyond it, at once into a clarity and a darkness.

‘People’s arms,’ Fitz said. He started to push himself up. ‘There were –’

But Dina’s eyes had hardened. All the horizons of sky they had contained she now compressed into two tiny balls of crushed glass.

‘Don’t be crazy,’ she said. ‘You fell in the water.’

Dina pulled him to his feet and clapped her hands to his shoulders, as if she were knocking sense into him, or stamping out some