Raven's Mountain by Orr Wendy Page A

it.
    Blackness.
    Blackness and peace.
    Blackness, peace . . . and warm breath against my face.
    I’m staring up at the bottom rail of the fence and into the deep brown eyes and white face of the horse nuzzling my neck. His rubbery lips move along me to find a pocket.
    â€˜You think I’ve got an apple for you?’ I ask him, except I don’t feel strong enough to say it out loud. ‘I wish I did! I wish I had a whole bag of apples and carrots and sugar lumps, and you could share them with me.’
    Apples are juicy and crunchy. I like apples. Apples are sweet and juicy, not like nubbly make-you-throw-up oats. If there’d been apples in the barn I’d be knocking on the house-door now instead of lying under this fence. But there weren’t, so I go on lying there and thinking to the horse.
    â€˜What else do you like?’ I ask. The horse doesn’t answer   – but some smarter, knows-it’s-got-to-survive part of my brain does. Get up and get to the house!
    Except it’s so peaceful lying here, staring up at the sky and the white horse, that I really can’t be bothered.
    That’s okay, soothes Jess, you deserve a rest.
    Don’t be stupid! shouts Amelia. You can’t quit now!
    That’s the voice that makes me roll out from under the fence and pull myself up again. It’s the voice that makes me keep on walking towards the house on my wobbly legs.
    They get slower and wobblier as I get closer. Not just because I’m wondering whether these people will be the sort of strangers who want to help a lost girl rescue her sister, or strangers you shouldn’t talk to. It’s more because I need their help so badly I can’t bear it not to be true, and the closer I get the more afraid I am that it’s not true.
    The house is definitely real   – if I were imagining a house right now it would be Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house with candy on the roof and icing dripping down the walls, and I would nibble, nibble like a mouse. This is a rambling, run down old farmhouse with a weather-beaten porch and a tyre swing in a big maple tree.
    It’s just the people who mightn’t be real. I can’t see anyone moving around inside.
    Maybe they’re asleep.
    I’ll have to wake them up, and that might make them so angry they won’t want to help.
    I lean on the door, catch my breath, and knock. Quietly.
    Nobody answers.
    I pound louder and louder, until I’ve walked right around the house hammering on every door and shouting below every shut-tight window, and no one has come out to see why. And they’re not going to: there’s no car in the driveway. There’s no one home.
    The doors are locked.
    So are the windows.
    I pee behind a tree, even though no one would see me if I’d peed right on the front lawn. Even my raven and the bears have given up watching me.
    Then I climb into the hollow of the tyre swing, and cry and rock till I nearly throw up. My head is so fuzzy and my legs so limp that I don’t know if they’re going to remember how to walk.
    But that’s what they have to do. That’s their job: to walk until I get help. It’s not something I have to think about or decide, it’s just the way life is. Just keep on walking. Back to the barn and down the driveway; at the end of the driveway there’ll be a road, and the road will somehow lead to help. Just keep on walking.
    Now even the barn looks so far away I can hardly see it, infinitely farther than it was when I came out of it this morning. That’s what infinite means: however far I walk, there’ll always be another kilometre before I get to help.
    There’s got to be another way.
    I stand on tiptoe to look through the kitchen window. It’s clean and tidy. There’s nothing on the table or the benches. It hardly looks as if anyone lives there.
    They’ve got a tyre swing: they’ve got kids. People with kids