“I hope you’re not going to ask why I’m doing all this, are you, Liv? It’s simple: I’m not stopping until you feel worse than I do. Why should you keep your friends when I’ve lost mine? Why should you have a happy relationship when I can’t?”
A flash of lightning shot out of the storm clouds on the horizon, and soon after that there was a loud rumble of thunder. Leaves whirled through the air. The sheep had disappeared, and the birds seemed to have gone into hiding somewhere as well. I’d heard enough, and I turned to go.
But I didn’t get far, because the ground broke apart in front of me, and within seconds I was facing a broad, deep pit.
“An earthquake!” cried Mia, reaching for my hand.
Hot vapors rose from the pit. By now the sky had clouded over entirely.
“It’s not an earthquake,” I said, looking furiously at Arthur. “Oh, really, Arthur! The apocalypse? Couldn’t you think of anything better?”
“I like it.” Arthur laughed. “Particularly because it’s a lot of fun for me to watch you fail. And this is only a dream. Think how helpless you’ll feel if you lose your sister in real life. If she gets up one night to throw herself in front of a moving car. Or…”
The pit was getting broader and broader. An apple tree crashed down into the chasm, taking with it the washing line complete with the picturesque white garments drying there.
“Oh, wait a minute. You want it apocalyptic, right?” Arthur snapped his fingers, and a huge yellow snake crawled out of the pit. Mia screeched.
“Stop it,” I said to Arthur, and concentrating as hard as I could, I turned the snake into a brimstone yellow butterfly. It flew away, lurching through the air.
Arthur laughed briefly and made two more snakes crawl out of the pit. This time I didn’t manage to turn them into something else. Mia was clinging to me in terror. By now there were more cracks in the ground, too wide for us to jump over them.
“You needed something personal, though, didn’t you, Arthur?” If I couldn’t control Arthur’s imagination, at least I could distract his mind. I tried to breathe calmly, which wasn’t so easy, because snakes came right after spiders on my personal horror scale, and they were winding their way straight toward us, even if slowly.
Arthur’s eyes lit up. “That was simple!” He raised his hand and showed us a glove with a pattern of gray spots.
“Oh!” said Mia, her mind taken off the scene for a moment. “My favorite gloves! I wondered where I’d lost one.” But that was as far as taking her mind off it went. She pointed frantically to the snakes. “I think those are yellow tiger pythons. Why don’t we climb a tree? Or could they climb up after us?”
“Lost it? I took it out of her coat pocket.” Arthur smiled at us. “And I’ve been wearing it almost every night since then in my sleep.”
“Yuck!” said Mia. “That’s kind of … perverse, if you ask me.”
Another fruit tree sank into the depths of the pit, with loud creaking and groaning and splintering noises, and sparks flew over the meadow where we were standing.
“You’re welcome to wake up,” I told Mia, while I feverishly wondered what I could do. Maybe make a bridge grow over the pit so that we could run to safety in the cottage? Or even better, turn myself into a huge bird of prey so that I could pick up Mia and …
“You’re not so good under pressure, Liv,” said Arthur, making another crack in the ground appear, this time running right between my legs. “I’m almost disappointed in you.”
I jumped aside, but it was no use. With a growl like thunder, the crack was growing all the time, and the place where we stood was getting smaller. Any moment I would be bound to fall into the abyss, dragging Mia down with me.
And then the light was brighter. The storm clouds had gone away as quickly as they came, and the sun was shining down from the sky again.
The cracks in the ground slowly began closing, one by one.
A muscle in Arthur’s face twitched; I saw him concentrating, and for a moment everything seemed to stand still. Nothing moved. Even the snakes froze where they were.
Then they weren’t snakes any longer, but fluffy yellow baby chicks cheeping as they ran over the meadow, while the sides of the pit came closer together again, and the grassy ground closed over them as if they had never existed.
“Oh, how cute!” squealed Mia as I looked around with a sigh of relief.
“Henry!” growled Arthur.
“Henry!” I repeated. I couldn’t help it, I had to say his name, and that in itself made me feel much better. I could have hugged him as he stood there on the path bordered by flowers with his hands in his pockets, as if he’d had nothing to do with it. He smiled at me. I really could have kissed him for those baby chicks. Which of course would not have been a good idea.
“It was Arthur. The whole time it was Arthur,” I said instead, and Arthur imitated my accusing tone of voice at once.