Free Figgs & Phantoms by Ellen Raskin Page A

withdrew it. Her journey might be a long one; she needed one more wish.
    Closing her eyes, she wished for a horse, a big, black stallion to carry her over the boundless desert. Then she opened her eyes. Before her limped a formless black mass with flowing mane, a misshapen body on misplaced legs.
    Mona quickly erased the hideous animal from sight and tried again to picture a horse. Straining her memory, she tried to visualize where the eyes were in relation to the nostrils, how the head joined the neck, where the legs met the body. It was hopeless. Mona had looked at many horses, but she had never truly seen one.
    She would have to travel on foot, tomorrow. Another frowning night was blinding the desert, still burning under a darkened sun. Again Mona closed her eyes, recited the Blake poem, and opened them to a full moon—and words, suspender in space.

    â€œI won’t, I won’t go back,” she shouted.
    An ominous cloud crept over Mona’s moon, shrouding her in blackness. The sign vibrated like a banged sheet of tin and shattered. Its drumming echoes bounced off the wall of night.
    â€œUncle Florence, where are you?”
    The answer was a deafening thunderclap that rocked the ground. A bolt of lightning tore the sky and set fires dancing in a circle around her refuge.
    Sobbing in defeat, Mona stumbled back toward the distant palm, her path lighted by the apple tree burning behind her.

2. THE GREEN DUNGEON
    T HE PINK-ORANGE PALM had multiplied into a green jungle. Orchids burst from mossy trunks; a cockatoo called. Mona stood in awe before the nameless fruits and perfumed flowers. She had never seen such wild beauty, not at home, not in books ... and then she remembered the words Uncle Florence had written in the diary:
    ... a gentle world, peopled with good people and filled with simple and quiet things.
    This exotic paradise had not been created by Uncle Florence. Terrified, Mona spun around. Her way was barred by a thicket of tortured mangroves. The green dungeon was guarded by strangler vines and domed by a web of locked branches.
    Mona was trapped in someone else’s dream!
    Triangles of apple-tree fire flickered through giant ferns; a parrot mocked her sobs. Suddenly something grasped at Mona’s ankle, and she fell among the tangled vines. Among the writhing roots. Among the snakes.
    Choking with terror, she felt the snakes creeping, crawling over her legs.
    They were creeping,
They were crawling,
They were creeping, creeping—
Crawling!
    Mona looked down at the vines twisted around her ankle. Vines, not snakes. The snakes had been the reflection of her own fears, the distorted memory of her parents’ duet.
    Trembling uncontrollably, Mona laughed and cried in a confusion of emotions. Her blood drummed in her ears in time with the distant tapping. At last she lay back, limp and silent.
    How strange that her fears were stronger than her dreams, she thought, the snakes more real than the unrealized horse. Mona looked about her. Perhaps the jungle, too, was painted out of fear. Closing her eyes, Mona willed the vines and the trees and the ferns to disappear.
    The jungle remained, and she remained its prisoner, shackled by vines, watched by a pair of gleaming eyes.

    Someone or something was near. Slowly Mona raised her head. A strangled cry escaped from her lips as she stared into the unblinking eyes of a leopard crouched on an overhanging limb.
    Straining at her vine-bound ankle, Mona tried to will the animal away as another incarnation of her own fear. The leopard hunched forward, ready to spring.
    The phantom of a leopard was about to savage the phantom of a young girl.
    â€œBut I’m not alive,” Mona shouted, convincing herself of her own invulnerability. “I am dead and can’t be harmed. I am in Capri!”
    The leopard eyes narrowed in anger. From somewhere, from everywhere, a thundering voice replied:
    â€œWhere all life dies, death lives,
and Nature