Excerpt from BLUE MOUNTAIN TROUBLE
by Martin Mordecai
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For Pollyread and Jackson, walking down to school around the same time each morning was the same and slightly different. The twins lived in Top Valley, a village high in the Blue Mountains. “On God shoulder,” Mama said. Mornings sometimes, when cloud and mist were all around, there you’d be on God’s shoulder and you couldn’t see his face or his feet. (“Only his belly button,” Pollyread said once, looking around for Mama, shocked at her own boldness — and never said it again.)
They looked down the path they were walking, and where a moment ago there was Stedman’s Corner and Marcus Garvey Primary, then Cross Point, then Cuthbert Bank and Content Gap, in steps that a drunk giant might take to the hazyblue sea far below — now all of a sudden there was only cloud, thick as Mama’s soup, slicking the grass and tones with moisture and making the path where they walked all their life mysterious and new, and sometimes dangerous.
This Tuesday morning the whole wide world seemed to be moving. The clouds played hide-and-seek with the sun in the steep valleys. You could almost hear them laughing as they twirled around like sails. Pollyread in front, they went carefully down the steep, winding path, walking around the larger boulders, stepping over the gleaming stones. Mama would not forgive them for slipping and getting their uniforms dirty.
Around them, hilltops, stones, sometimes single trees thrust like fists or fingers through the swirling clouds. All of them familiar, all of them, this morning, new, different.
And this morning, out of that green-and-white mystery of stones and floating trees, out of this perfectly normal Tuesday morning came the goat.
One moment there was just the clouds and the rocks and the bush, the next moment it was there. Huge, its dark head with grandpa beard unfurling a pair of horns like Jericho trumpets.
There, floating I the path, in a pool of brightness from an unseen sun. The twins could only see a huge head, with a billowing beard and horns like they had never before seen, on a goat or any other creature. It was like a mask, of a size that would’ve had a body as big as a minibus carrying it. Unsupported, it floated next to a big round rock — just where they would walk.
The twins stopped dead. There was no way around it. The goat’s eyes pinned them, flashing dark fire. The eyes seemed sightless but seeing everything too, down into the very darkest corners of their terror.
From Blue Mountain Trouble. Copyright © 2009 by Martin Mordecai. All rights reserved.
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