Free Night Gate by Isobelle Carmody Page A

Bear’s lips, but she did not growl or groan.
    Rage drew out the long, sharp thorn with dismay.

The road wound along companionably with the river, sometimes going right along the edge of the bank, other times turning away to avoid a thick clump of trees. Late in the morning, they came upon a group of little stone houses between the road and the water, but they had clearly been abandoned long ago.
    “We could stay a night here,” Mr. Walker said. Rage could see he was attracted to the smallness of the houses.
    “We don’t want to stop again so soon,” Elle said firmly, striding ahead.
    “Probably those little houses are so old they would fall on our heads and squash us flat,” Goaty said.
    Rage glared at him, wondering if this was what came of being around Mr. Johnson, who always saw the worst side of things first. Mam used to say that you could show Mr. Johnson a pretty wisp of cloud and he would see the end of the world.
    “Like Grandfather?” Rage had asked.
    “Like Grandfather.” Mam’s eyes had grown sad.
    Rage remembered that this conversation had happened on a train. Mam loved trains. “They’re so much gentler than cars. They don’t roar through cities; they wind politely around them. They stop to let people in and out. People exchange newspapers or talk or just sit together. People sleep in trains and walk in them. They drink cups of tea and eat scones in them. Trains are for sharing.”
    “I like trains,” Rage had said earnestly.
    Mam laughed. “Imagine a city where all of those roads were turned into green paths. People could stroll and eat their lunches. Imagine looking out of a high building and seeing paths with big trees growing along them, fruit trees with masses of blossoms and huge cedars. There’d be no car noise, no pollution from the engines. People could lie under trees or watch buskers or just read. You wouldn’t feel like you were in the city at all.”
    Mam had been like that. She would have an idea about something, and suddenly it would turn into a much bigger idea. Everything would be sucked into her idea and turned into something better. After they came to Winnoway, they had taken few train trips. There were no more talks or sing-alongs, no more stories or laughing tumbles together. Mam had become silent and distracted. She went on long walks alone, or she sat for hours gazing out the window. Sometimes she had smiled at Rage without really seeming to see her.
    Rage shivered, remembering what Mrs. Johnson had said about Grandmother Reny growing more and more silent until she had just faded away, and the cold seemed to go inside her bones.
    She tried to think about something she and Mam had done together after they shifted to Winnoway, something that they had really enjoyed, but she could think of nothing except those wonderful train journeys before they had come to Winnoway. Rage was startled to discover that Winnoway Farm, and even her own bedroom with its lilac wallpaper, was hard to picture. The farm seemed as if it belonged in someone else’s world, in a story.
    Did people in stories feel themselves to be real? How would she know if somebody had made her up? Then she wondered if maybe all that had happened was a story she was telling herself.
    Thinking like this made her feel dizzy, as if she were turning round and round on the spot. She grinned, remembering how she had done that while holding Billy when he was a puppy. He had sprawled and lurched and sat down hard when she put him on the ground.
    She looked at Billy and found him watching her.
    “You were smiling,” he said.
    “I was remembering how dizzy you were after I swung you round and round when you were a puppy.”
    He threw his head back and laughed. “I thought the ground was jumping under me. I felt so sick in the stomach.”
    It occurred to Rage that what she had done was cruel.
    Seeing the look on her face, Billy said, “It was no worse than when a puppy bites his brother or sister too hard on the