Читать книгу Foxlowe - Eleanor Wasserberg - Страница 14

Once I asked Freya about the Spike Walk, and she said there was a story for it, only we didn’t tell it often, because it was clear as a summer sky what the Spike Walk was for. She told me the story anyway, and I told it to Toby, then to Blue when she asked, so it wouldn’t be lost.

Foxlowe existed before the Family did. Many years ago, before long Solstice days, before the house brimmed with the smell of wine and candlewax, before home, Foxlowe stood alone. The Standing Stones slept on the moor with no one to imagine what they meant or to care for them. Every Summer Solstice the sun path lit up through the Stones, all the way up to Foxlowe’s walls, and the sun set twice. No one saw it, or cared, or did things in the proper way. Freya was carrying her old name, and living in far away, concrete places, and only just beginning to understand how very wrong things were. It would be a long time before she and Foxlowe found one another.

Then Richard came, and Liberty, carrying their old names, and others with their old names too, people who lived at Foxlowe before the home we know. Foxlowe welcomed them with warm light and the blue stained glass made puddles on the wood for them to play in, and sunlit dust flurried in abandoned rooms. Richard knew the house from a long time before. He said the garden was full of things to eat but they had rotted away, swollen and burst, because no one had been there to enjoy them. They had to live for a little bit like the outside, paying money for all the food. But soon the paintings were taken down, and the furniture hauled away, and Foxlowe began to look like itself: the chickens, the vegetable patches, the fruit trees.

Most of the paintings were high up, and left squares of dark wood behind, in the way covered skin stays white in summer. In the Spike Walk, though, the nails stuck out low, and when you walked past them, they bit at you, snagging clothes and skin. In the first years, talk was of taking the nails down, and smoothing the wood with sandpaper and fresh varnish, but other jobs were more important, and everything had to be learned.

When Freya came, she said, —Leave them up. We’ll call it the Spike Walk. No one knew why, but as in all things, they did as Freya said. Then many Solstices later, the children came. They were afraid of the Spike Walk and the ghosts at the end of the corridor. Freya understood that if the children got the Bad in them, you could get it out by making them walk up and down the Spike Walk until the skin bled a little. And then the others understood why Freya had told them to leave the nails where they were. Sometimes Freya’s wisdom wasn’t revealed for a long time.