Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,20
apparent satisfaction and continued walking, he hurried after her.
His chronometer told him he had just under five hours to go until he had to be back on Aquila and ready for descent. The walk was not a terribly long one, but he preferred to be sure he had an extra-large window. Even without the incentive of being cannibalized, he knew he couldn’t stay long.
Their passage eventually brought them to a large, warm, homey kitchen. The table was tall, enough so that he had to stand on his toes to look over the edge. The old woman pulled a chair from a corner and tapped it with a gnarled finger. “Sit here,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
He pulled himself up onto the enormous wooden chair and watched as she muttered some words over the great wood stove. A blue flame jumped to life, and she placed a kettle full of water on top of it. Reaching into a cupboard to the right of the stove, she pulled out one cup and was about to get a second, hopefully smaller one, when they both heard the door slam, if possible even louder now than it had sounded when Jack had stood right next to it.
The floor began to shake, the chair Jack sitting in shimmying in horrible syncopation to the thumping that was increasing in volume with every second. On the table, Jack watched with horrified fascination as a vast porcelain sugar bowl jumped and fidgeted across the surface, spoon inside clinking against the edge and little white granules of sugar jumping from the bowl in a manner that reminded Jack of rats leaping from a sinking ship.
“It’s my man!” hissed the old woman. “Quick! You must hide, or you’re meat on the table for certain!” Jack jumped from the chair and watched her with increasing panic as she cast about for a suitable hiding place. After a few seconds of turning this way and that, she finally opened the door to the oven and gestured at it. “Inside here, you.”
Jack mutely shook his head, the motion making him feel for all the world like an intransigent child. The burner on the stove was still lit, and all this talk of being eaten didn’t endear him to hiding in there. He quickly looked around the kitchen before pointing to the breadbox, a blue and yellow thing that looked large enough for him to be fairly comfortable. “In there,” he said.
She nodded and lifted him up to the countertop, and he scrambled into the box and sat on his rear, knees drawn up close to his chin and backpack resting against the rear of the breadbox. Beside him lay a few slices of heavy rye bread, flat and dark and pungent. Hopefully the ogre would have no desire for a sandwich.
The lid to the box did not close completely, and by leaning forward just a bit and turning his head one way or the other, Jack could see most of the kitchen. He watched the old woman as she poured the now-hot water into a teapot and then turn to greet her husband the ogre.
He came marching down stairs that came from the back way, feet stamping so hard that everything in the kitchen not bolted down was hopping or shaking. His entrance was even louder, a great flurry of grunts and bellows and snorts, followed by his flinging a huge canvas bag, an axe and a spear into a corner of the room. The bag, Jack noticed, had a dark, blackish-red stain slowly growing along one side and the bottom.
Tearing his eyes away from that grisly sight, Jack turned his attention back to the ogre. He was taller than his wife by a good meter or more, and wore a floppy cap that appeared to have been stitched from the skin of dead humans. The ogre’s clothes seemed relatively benign otherwise, but his features were certainly anything but. His face was fierce and scowling, pockmarked with scabs and boils and furrowed with wrinkles and lines so that his whole visage appeared to be a series of monstrous red and yellow hills and brown and black chasms, interrupted only by a snarling mouth full of sharp, yellow teeth surrounded by thin cracked pink lips, a flat pug nose with wide dark nostrils, and rheumy eyes that looked like they might shine like red-hot coals in a dark room.
“You’re back early, dear,” said the old woman. “Good luck hunting today?” She took