Heaven Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

down. I felt the mud gathering around me. I felt the great contentment that might come if I just let go, if I sank here, if I just let myself go down to her, if my mouth was filled with mud, if my eyes and ears were filled with mud, if there was nothing but mud surrounding me, encasing me.
    And then I heard her: “Erin. Erin.” I felt her hands holding me, preventing me from sinking. “Erin,” she whispered. “Keep moving. Don’t let go.” She helped me drag my body free. She held me up as I continued. I stretched forward as I slithered and crawled. And at last I touched drier, firmer ground. I hauled myself onto it. I knelt there and sobbed and couldn’t speak. The others called for me. I heard the terror in their voices. I pulled on the rope. It tightened. “It’s all right,” I called. “I’m all right.” I told them to come after me, to follow the rope. And when they gripped the rope and hauled themselves, they too slithered through the mud and darkness. We shined our flashlights onto each other. We were black glistening trembling things, like creatures formed from water, earth and blackness a million millionyears ago. We clutched each other, held each other tight. An age might have passed before we came out of our horror and released each other. Then January spat and cursed.
    “The bloody raft,” he said. “Got to drag it in.”
    He glared at us.
    “Didn’t make it to lose it on the first bloody trip. And didn’t make it to get no further than the bloody Black Middens.”
    So we pulled on the rope. We grunted and cursed. We slowly slowly dragged the raft back to us. We hauled it onto the dry land. We lay there, exhausted.
    Then I felt her hand on my shoulder. I heard her voice. I turned and saw her face for the first time, her pale beseeching eyes gazing into mine.
    “Is you my sister?” she asked. “Is these mine brothers?”

T HERE WERE WEBS stretched between her fingers. Her face was moon-pale. Her eyes were moon-round, watery blue. Her voice was high and light and yearning.
    “Is you? Is you?” she said.
    Mouse squealed. January gripped his knife in his fist. We backed away. We stepped back into the black wetness. She reached out to us.
    “Do not go back into them Middens, my long-lost sister, my long-lost brothers.”
    We felt the mud sucking us into itself.
    She wept.
    “Do not go back again!”
    “Oh, hell,” sobbed Mouse. “Oh, hell. Oh, hell.”
    I slithered back to the dry land. Mouse and Januaryslithered back. We crouched together. January and I shined our flashlight onto her.
    “You must come with me,” she said.
    She rested her webbed fingers on my arm again.
    She sighed.
    “What is your name?” she said.
    “Erin.”
    “Ah. Such lovely naming of a sister.”
    She beamed with delight.
    “I has waited that long, Erin. Now you must come with me to Grampa. I did tell him I did see you. Now you must come and show yourself to him.”
    We didn’t move. Mist flowed through the flashlight beams.
    “He is waiting,” she said.
    “Who?” said January.
    “Grampa. My Grampa. Look.”
    She turned and the mist lightened. The flashlight beams showed the figure behind her, watching. He was tall, black as the night and the mud. He wore shorts and heavy boots. He carried a bucket in one hand, a huge shovel in the other.
    “Here they is, Grampa!” she called. “Didn’t me tell you? Here is my treasures come out of the black Black Middens.”
    His eyes glittered as he watched us. He coughed and spat.
    “Push them back into the runny water, my little one,” he said.
    “Oh, Grampa.”
    He took a step toward us with his shovel raised.
    “Let me dig them back into the mud,” he said.
    “Oh, Grampa!”
    He stood still and watched her.
    “They are nothing to you,” he said.
    “Grampa. Mebbe true these is my treasures come at last.”
    He clawed mud from his face, threw it back down onto the Middens. The fog rolled back across him.
    “Bring them to me,” he said. “And we will