Читать книгу The Farthest Away Mountain - Lynne Banks Reid - Страница 8

“Shhh!”

Now it was almost as dark as night, and the grumbling and roaring was right outside the window, sounding as thunder would sound if it were right next to your ear. It stopped for a moment, and then a deep, rumbling voice shouted down the chimney:

“Croak! Who have you got in there?”

“Don’t speak!” muttered Old Croak hoarsely. “He’s very stupid. If we don’t speak, he may go away.”

“I heard that!” roared Drackamag, and the vibrations made the lily-pads rock like cockleshells on a rough sea. “Stupid, am I? We’ll see who’s stupid one of these days when I put my foot right down on this little house of yours, wait and see if I don’t!”

Croak cowered down as if expecting the cabin to be crushed over his head at any moment.

“Come on, you ugly little lump of nothing! Who’s in there? I heard someone laugh. Horrible! Frightened me out of me wits. No one’s laughed on this side of the wood since – well, not for two hundred years, eh, Croak? We can’t be having that sort of thing, it might lead to anything! Birds singing, bees humming – dangerous, dangerous, Croak! Eh? Eh?”

“You shouldn’t have laughed,” whispered the frog to Dakin in a shocked tone.

“Why not?” asked Dakin, feeling suddenly braver. If the simple sound of a laugh could frighten the terrible Drackamag, he couldn’t be such a monster after all, however big he was.

“I heard a girl’s voice!” exclaimed the thunderous voice outside. “She sounded happy! If you’ve got anybody good in there, Croak, I’m warning you – Madam won’t like it! Now, send her out this minute, or I’ll go and wake the old girl up and ask her if I can crunch your house down!”

Dakin stood up. Her legs shook a bit, but not too badly, considering.

“Don’t go out!” hissed her friend frantically. “Let him do what he likes!”

“I’m not going out,” Dakin assured him loudly. “I’m just going to laugh.”

“No! NO! Not that!” howled the voice outside, and now the lily-pads danced so wildly that Old Croak fell into the water with a splash.

But Dakin was already laughing, and didn’t notice. It wasn’t any too easy to laugh, as there was nothing very funny about the situation; but it was important, so Dakin did it. She remembered the time Margle, her brother, had scoffed at the calf who fell into the mud-hole and immediately afterwards fallen in himself. She thought of the expression on the face of the hen when the chick she’d raised turned out to be a duck, and had hopped into the pond. She recalled the hornet-fly that wanted to sit on the Pastor’s nose last Sunday in the sermon. New laughter bubbled up in her with each thing she thought of, and soon the mere idea of the dreadful Drackamag being frightened was enough to keep her going.

Her laughter rang out, peal after joyful peal, until the crest of the mountain seemed to echo it back to her. But at last she was so tired, and her tummy ached so much, that she couldn’t laugh any more, and she sat down on the floor, too exhausted by her effort to make another sound.

She looked round. The first thing she noticed was that it was light again: the sun was shining in through the dusty window. Dakin realized that the sun hadn’t really gone in, but that Drackamag’s body had shut it out, like a black cloud. Birds outside were singing and all the sounds of a sweet summer noon-time were pouring down the chimney like music. Drackamag and his fearful roaring voice were, for the moment, gone.

She looked for Old Croak, and finally found him huddled behind a plant with his eyes tight shut and his pads in his ears. She tried to make him hear her, but of course he couldn’t, so at last she gently touched him.

He leapt clean into the air with fright, landed on the ground and did a beautiful swallow-dive into the pond where he vanished, leaving only a bubble to show where he’d gone.

Dakin was alone again.