This is an ongoing serialization of an unfinished novel I wrote and Carson illustrated in 2001. New chapters will be published every Friday at 10 a.m. Read: Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, and Chapter Four.
Chapter Five
“Hello?” Ruthie called through the keyhole, “Masha? Papa? Hello? Hrrmmph. What’s keeping them?” She plopped down on the floor and put her chin in her hands, her brow firmly fretted. She couldn’t imagine that her transgression was so great that her sentence would exceed one night. She had once spilled an entire jar of paint in her father’s briefcase, many years ago, an accident which had cost M. Baumbaum several months of work and for which Ruthie spent a night in the gunshed, but Masha had been at the door promptly at sunrise to fetch the girl the following morning. Now there was absolutely no sign of her and it must have been getting on eleven o’clock, Ruthie figured. She propped herself up on her knees and peeked through the keyhole again, trying to get a good view of the house, though it was mostly obscured by trees.
As far as she could tell, there was no sign of movement about the house aside from a llama which had somehow freed himself from the pasture and was now wandering about the rose bushes, merrily chomping at the fresh buds, exulting in his newfound liberation. “How can this be?” Ruthie thought to herself, “Pyotr would never support that! Why, if a llama should so much as look at those rose bushes, Pyotr would have him on the chopping block straight away! Something is terribly amiss!” She shouted again, “Papa! Masha! Pyotr!” but she received no response, save a curious look from the llama, who briefly paused from his gormandizing. “Fiddlesticks!” cried Ruthie. Nonplussed, the llama returned to munching on the flowers.
Ruthie began pacing about the small cramped room, mumbling to herself. “This is preposterious,” she said, pronouncing the words as she had heard her father speak in a similar mood, “I won’t stand for it! What I have done is in no way deserving of such a punishment. Why, I haven’t had my breakfast and it’s nearly time for lunch. What could possibly be keeping them?” She stopped for a moment in front of the wood stove, staring absently at the smoldering ashes in the hearth. “Perhaps they’ve forgotten me! Perhaps they’ve been so caught up in that funny man’s history that they’ve all but forgotten that I am out here in the barren cold, without food or water, or even a clean set of clothes! I will never ever, ever disobey my father’s orders again, I swear. I promise on my poor mother’s grave, I promise, promise, promise! Just please somebody come and get me!” She stopped short, expecting that her pleas would garner some sort of response, as if Masha had been waiting outside the holding cell, waiting for her to vocally acknowledge her wrongdoing, but all she heard was the whistling of the wind against the walls of the shack.
“Fooey!” she exclaimed, kicking at the earthen floor, “This is impossible!” She looked down at the floor where she had kicked and noticed that a significant divot had been removed from the ground by her foot. She kicked again, and sent another sizable chunk of dirt skittering across the floor. The ground, it seemed, was not so resilient as one would think. She walked over to the part of the wall where she had seen the mouse escape the evening previous and gently scraped her toes against the ground, creating a small trench and exposing a small gap between the floor and the wall where a few flakes of snow fell. She stood back and reflected. “Necessarily,” thought Ruthie, “It would not be that difficult to dig my way out of here—this is true. The question is, how would it be received, my waltzing into the house having freed myself of my own volition, rather like a convict newly escaped from jail stopping by the constable’s for a cup of tea. If they have forgotten me, perhaps they will celebrate my ingenuity. If they haven’t, well, I certainly shall be put back here for another evening. And, if they’ve forgotten me or no, I’m bound to be here for a while, so I may as well do something in the meantime!” And with that, she kneeled down on the floor and began digging furiously. Within the span of an hour or so, Ruthie had dug herself a sizeable pit against the wall of the gunshed and she laid down on her stomach and set about squeezing her little body through it to freedom.
Immediately, she could feel her nose hairs grow stiff as her face met the cold of the outside air. Still half in the gunshed and half without, Ruthie surveyed the wintery landscape: there were no signs of Masha or Pyotr or her father, no footprints marred the velvety cover of snow on the ground, the Chateau sat unresponsive against the bleak gray skyline. The liberated llama which had previously been munching vaingloriously on the rose bushes had stopped his chomping and, curious about the commotion, had begun wandering over to the gunshed. Ruthie, in mid-escape, hissed at the wandering animal, but the sound only served to pique the llama’s curiosity; he ambled over to Ruthie’s prone form and began sniffing at her hair, intrigued at the oddity of a house sprouting a human head. “Go away!” shouted Ruthie, but the llama seemed to almost revel in her helplessness and began licking her face affectionately. In desperation, Ruthie freed her hands that had been pinioned against her sides and swatted the llama’s face away, sending him scurrying back to the rose bushes. “Idiot beast!” she swore under her breath, and finished pulling her body from underneath the wall of the shed.
Dusting the dirt and snow from her nightgown, she stood up and looked about her. She still could discern no sign of activity from the Chateau. Whispering an oath, she walked towards the house, her eyes darting about in search of a recognizable human form. The cold northern wind blew steadily across the yard as Ruthie walked barefoot through the snow, and she wrapped her arms about her in defense against the brutal chill. “Pyotr?” she called, hesitantly, “Masha? Papa?” There was no response. She finally reached the front door of the house and entered, her hands freezing on the metal of the doorknobs. The front hall was barren and silent and as she entered a plume of snow followed her and left a small trail behind her on the marbled floor. She had never seen the house so quiet and undisturbed, the candles on the banisters still aflame and melted down to nothing. She called the names again, the sound of her voice echoing through the halls, but still she received no reply. “Where could they be?” she wondered aloud to herself. She turned to her right and walked down the central hall to the doors of the dining room and, heaving them open, walked into the deserted chamber and around the large, oblong dinner table still impeccably set with the house’s signature china and silverware. The family portraits that lined the room stared down at her ominously as she wandered, and she occasionally flinched as she looked up at the leering eyes of her grandfathers and great-grandfathers. At the head of the table sat a bowl, still sullied with food from the night before, possibly a late night snack of her father’s or Pyotr’s. Ruthie drew a finger along the inside of the dish, feeling the dryness of its contents. Obviously, it had sat for quite some time. This was extremely shocking to Ruthie, who had never known a dish to go unwashed for longer than a few minutes. Fastidious Masha was a stickler for cleanliness, a champion of hygienic discipline, and it was anathema for something to sit at table for so long without being whisked away to the kitchen for a sturdy washing.
Walking back into the foyer, she tread softly across, her slippers heavy from the mud and snow which had become caked to her soles. She momentarily feared the repercussion of her tracking dirt across the immaculate marble and began to consider cleaning the bottom of her slippers when she noticed that the door to her father’s study was wide open. This was odd as well, as her father was always very insistent on keeping those massive doors shut. She shuffled towards the open doorway and peered in, her heart beating rapidly against her chest. There was no motion in the study, save for the slight flickering of a candle wallowing in a sea of wax on her father’s desk. The ledger books and papers still littered the surface of the desk and an errant sheet of vellum had fallen to the floor. She hesitantly walked in, half expecting her father to come around the corner, and began exploring the empty room. The quilt which Masha had given the soldier was lying unused on the armchair which had the night before cradled the ailing stranger, and his cup of tea sat on the endtable, still half full with tepid lemon water. It was becoming more and more apparent to Ruthie that some sort of immediate exodus had occurred that had required everybody in the house to leave the premises very hurriedly indeed. Contemplating this, Ruthie threw herself into the armchair and wrapped the quilt around her. ‘Perhaps they escorted the soldier to the his headquarters so that he might reveal his news,’ she thought to herself, ‘It may have well required immediate action. But why didn’t they wake me? Why wouldn’t they tell me they were leaving?” She noticed that she was beginning to cry a little bit and she wrapped the blanket around her even tighter. “That’s what it is,” she said aloud, “The news just simply could not wait. They should be back later this afternoon, Masha, Pyotr, and papa, and will be very apologetic indeed. O I shall throw a fit! ‘How could you have left me in there all afternoon?’ I’ll say, ‘Why, I was beginning to chew on my fingers I was so famished!’ She smiled a little through her tears at that thought and curled her knees up to her chest so that she sat in a little, taught ball in the cushions of the armchair, and waited.
And waited.
A wind blew through the hall and pushed against the doors of the study, causing them to emit a deep creaking noise that reverberated against the walls, startling Ruthie from her reverie. She cast her eyes about her dazedly, realizing that she had nodded off to sleep in the chair. She felt a pang in her heart as she saw, through the room’s half-lit gloom, that she had slept for several hours and the sun had already begun to set, its pallid rays barely illuminating the lines and shapes of the room’s interior. A kerosene lamp which sat next to the chair on the end-table was the only source of light aside from that of the setting sun and it flickered weakly in its chamber, the lamp’s wick barely touching the surface of the oil. Ruthie could feel the ghostly remnants of dried tears on her cheeks and she cautiously shifted her body in the chair. The candle on her father’s desk had extinguished itself in it’s own wax, having covered a good portion of the desk with its fleshy remains, enveloping papers and pens in its wake. Ruthie decided that at that point the only thing she could do was cry. She took a deep breath and waited for tears to come to her eyes, but none came. She closed here eyes and willed them, letting out a few contrived sobs, but still she could not cry. She heaved a heavy sigh and quickly stood up in the chair, that she might completely survey her surroundings but no sooner had she done this the chair, overwhelmed by the sudden change in weight, tipped backwards and sent her spilling on to the floor.
“Oh, bother!” she cried, all arms and elbows, sprawled out on the floor. She began to gather herself together to stand when she noticed something glint briefly in the dying sunshine underneath the end-table. On her hands and knees, she crawled slowly over to the table, and, feeling about in the half-darkness, felt a small metallic object reach her fingertips. Picking it up and pulling it close to her face she saw that it was a small brass key.
“A key?” thought Ruthie, suddenly overcome with curiosity to the point that she almost forgot her present predicament, “Why is there a key on the floor? And what does it open?” She thought for a moment and then it occurred to her: “The soldier! Of course! He must have set the key down on the table and forgot about it! This,” she thought, turning the key about in her fingers, “is the key to the chest on the ship that is frozen in the ice!” The gravity of this struck her to the very marrow, her mind casting her back to the soldier’s story: the icebergs, the mutinous crew, the valiant Captain Shtiva. “But why,” she thought, her recognition drifting into a more serious realization, “Why doesn’t he have it now?” She shifted up onto her knees, still staring at the object in her hand. “Why, he most certainly would have taken it with him if he were going to his headquarters,” she said. “It would be very, very foolish to leave it behind! Pish! This is all very disconcertating. Very disconcertating indeed!” And suddenly, without any pre-meditation, and without any forced sighs or simpering, she began to cry, softly and deliberately, her chest heaving to the weight of her sobs until she was curled up with her arms around her knees and her tears pouring down her cheeks into a great pool on the floor.