Amberville - By Tim Davys Page 0,77

partially calmed them, but sometimes the stillness seemed unnaturally mute. At one point Sam thought he’d seen something moving far away, but he kept that observation to himself, afraid that Snake would use it against Eric.

But not even Snake was saying anything anymore.

“We’ll go down here,” whispered Eric, pointing toward the road.

The others nodded. It felt good that the bear seemed to know where they should go, seemed to know what he was doing. Carefully they started climbing down toward the Left-hand Road. It went easier now, not just because they’d become more used to balancing on the treacherous trash, but also because it was downhill.

When they’d made it all the way down, they discovered that the cliff that rose on the other side was much too steep to climb; it was a vertical wall that stood before them.

“We’ll try walking a bit,” whispered Eric to Tom-Tom, who stood closest, and the bear nodded eastward, in toward the dump.

The four started walking, happy to have solid ground under them again. The moonlight that had guided their way up on the mountain couldn’t reach into the narrow valley path that was the Left-hand Road, and they walked in a blackness that forced them to walk even more slowly. After a few hundred meters the precipice on the north side grew higher and higher, and they were now surrounded by steep, sheer walls of trash on both sides. Here and there objects were sticking out which they tried to avoid.

Then a voice was heard.

Thin and faraway but quite distinct. The four stuffed animals stopped in their tracks. Then the noise broke loose.

The sound which unexpectedly broke the silence in an explosion caused the ground below them to shake. Tom-Tom fell down on his knees with his wings covering his head. Sam ran to the edge of the road, pressing his back against the trash wall while, not moving, he gazed in the direction of the explosion. The snake wriggled as fast as he could in the other direction, away from the boom that still continued. Eric stood completely still, trying to understand what was happening.

And despite the fact that he saw it with his own eyes he had a hard time understanding. A torrential stream of trash was sliding down the trash mountain’s south face. Metal and wood, plastic and plaster, twisted objects and forms that he couldn’t make out, all running in a single thick-flowing porridge down the mountain and quickly filling in the road behind them. And when the bear understood what was about to happen, he turned around. In front of them a similar avalanche of odds and ends and muck was flooding down onto the road. It was a trap. It had happened so quickly that not even Snake had time to wriggle out.

Then it became silent.

Eric could hear the sound of his own breathing, like a rushing rapids in a deserted landscape, but otherwise nothing. Snake was ten or so meters farther ahead, Tom-Tom stood right next to him, and Sam a few meters to the right.

“Now?” a clear voice was heard to say somewhere in the night.

Instinctively the four companions turned around. It was completely silent. Then the sound of a large number of paws and claws was heard, running on the south side of the ravine. Eric twirled around and stared up toward the southwest.

“We wish no one harm!” shouted the bear.

He tried to see some of those he’d just heard, but the mountain walls were too steep and too high.

“Hello!” he shouted.

Now there seemed to be stuffed animals moving everywhere up there. Snake as well as Sam had made their way in toward Eric and Tom-Tom in the middle of the road, and all of them were standing tightly together, staring up toward the night sky, where stars were shining.

“Hello!” Eric shouted again. “We have come to speak with your queen!”

The words produced no response. The stuffed animals running around on the sides of the ravine didn’t take any notice, they were still moving around, taking up positions. For what?

“Hello!” Eric shouted a third time. “I am Eric Bear. I have come to speak with Rat Ruth.”

Slowly silence descended over the ravine. Sam Gazelle stood quite close to Eric, and he whispered in the bear’s ear. “It’s over now, isn’t it? Are we going to die?”

Eric didn’t reply. He didn’t have the answer.

CHAPTER 20

They lifted Eric out of the ravine.

Down from the sky came a chair in slow motion. It was an absurd experience,