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#20- Into The Home
I blinked in surprise. Her home? Whitey-chan’s grandmother lived in an abnormally large tree? That was erratic but fantastic at the same time. The tree looked so homely and welcoming now when I looked at it. I estimated it to be over a thousand years old. Whitey-chan looked at it without much surprise. In fact, he looked at it like he’d seen it a million times. I assumed he had been living here with Ahisutah ever since he found me. I wondered how it felt like to be living in a tree.
Ahisutah turned began walking towards the small head-sized knothole on the stump of the tree. I watched her go and began, myself, to inch closer to the knothole cautiously. I didn’t know if something was going to pop out of it and attack me but I didn’t want to find out either. Whitey-chan let go of my sleeve and ran carelessly to Ahisutah’s side.
Ahisutah seemed to be murmuring something under her breath. They were words of another language I could not understand. It had a lot of curls with the tongue. Her eyes were closed as if concentrating. She seemed to be performing some sort of spell.
I observed the knothole and to my astonishment, the knothole was growing larger. I didn’t know if it was merely a trick of my eye or if it really was happening but the knothole was growing larger and larger by the centimetre. Before long, it was large enough for an average man to walk in without bumping his head to the top of the hole.
Whitey-chan took a quick glance at me and then left Ahisutah’s side to enter into the knothole, flashing a smile at me as he disappeared into it. I couldn’t see where he was going because he faded into the darkness of the hole by the time he entered. Ahisutah was watching him enter and turned her attention back to me as he disappeared into the hole.
“Come quickly Ayumi,” she called, “the knothole must be re-sealed immediately once we all enter. The spell does not hold it open for too long.”
I startled by her words and quickly scampered over to her side and hesitated, thinking the hole was going to close on me, before shaking away the fear and entering into complete darkness.
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