and little streams bubbling down smal waterfal s into clear, deep pools.
It was al wonderful, Bonnie thought, experiencing the story as if she were watching a movie al around her, but a movie that included the sensations of touch, taste, and smel . The paradise was a bit like Warm Springs, where they sometimes had picnics back at home.
In the story, the boy and girl kitsune had to go to "the top of the world"where there was some kind of fracture in the crust of the highest Dark Dimension - the one Bonnie was in right now. They managed somehow to travel down, and even farther down, and passed through various tests of courage and wit before they got into the next lowest dimension, the Nether World.
The Nether World was completely different from the Dark Dimension. It was a world of ice and slippery snow, of glaciers and rifts, al bathed in a blue twilight from three moons that shone from above.
The kitsune children almost starved in the Nether World because there was so little for a fox to hunt. They made do with the tiny animals of the cold: mice and smal white voles, and the occasional insect (Oh, yuck, Bonnie thought). They survived until, through the fog and mist, they saw a towering black wal . They fol owed the wal until final y they came to a Gatehouse with tal spires hidden in the clouds. Written above the door in an old language they could hardly read were the words: The Seven Gates.
They entered a room in which there were eight doorways or exits. One was the door through which they had just entered.
And as they watched, each door brightened so they could see that the other seven doors led to seven different worlds, one of which was the kitsune paradise. Yet another gate led to a field of magical flowers, and another showed butterflies flittering around a splashing fountain. Another dropped to a dark cavern fil ed with bottles of the mystical wine Clarion Loess Black Magic. One gate led to a deep mine, with jewels the size of a fist. And then there was a gate which showed the prize of al flowers: the Royal Radhika. It changed its shape from moment to moment, from a rose to a cluster of carnations to an orchid.
Through the last door they could see only a gigantic tree, but the final treasure was rumored to be an immense star bal .
Now the boy and girl forgot al about the kitsune paradise.
Each of them wanted something from another of the gates, but they couldn't agree on what. The rule was that any party or group who reached the gates could enter one and then return. But while the girl wanted a sprig of the Royal Radhika, to show that they'd completed their quest, the boy wanted some Black Magic wine, to sustain them on the way back.
No matter how they argued they couldn't reach an agreement. So final y they decided to cheat. They would simultaneously open a door and jump through, snatch what they wanted, and then jump back out and be out of the Gatehouse before they could be caught.
Just as they were about to do so, a voice warned them against it, saying, "One gate alone may you twain enter, and then return from whence you came."
But the boy and the girl chose to ignore the voice.
Immediately, the boy entered the door that led to the bottles of Black Magic wine and at the same instant the girl stepped into the Royal Radhika door. But when each turned around there was no longer any sign of a door or gate behind them.
The boy had plenty to drink but he was left forever in the dark and cold and his tears froze upon his cheeks. The girl had the beautiful flower to look at but nothing to eat or drink and so under the glowing yel ow sun she wasted away.
Bonnie shivered, the delicious shiver of a reader who had gotten what she expected. The fairy tale, with its moral of
"don't be greedy"was like the stories she'd heard from the Red and the Blue Fairy Books when she was a child sitting on her grandmother's lap.
She missed Elena and Meredith, badly. She had a story to tel , but no one to tel it to.
Chapter 12
"Stefan. Stefan!"Elena had been too nervous to stay out of the bedroom for longer than the five minutes it had taken