Stacy--Part Forty-Nine

Splog # 182

Forty-Nine

 Stacy took two steps upwards and then she heard a whirring sound and turned around. The seat she'd ridden up on was descending to her companions. She looked up a little and saw that the two ropes that the wooden seat hung onto were slowly unwinding as the branch they were attached to rotated. She decided that what she'd taken for a branch must really be an artificial rod of some sort, although in appearance it did look exactly like a branch. It even had smaller branches sprouting from it, and leaves scattered about on it. She was trying to get a glimpse of where it connected to the trunk when, suddenly, Lane was standing on the step beneath her and motioning with her hands for Stacy to move on.

 "We don't want to be standing here when Johnny arrives. He'll mow right past us and probably knock us clean out of the tree as he does."

 Laughing at the image of the two of them cartwheeling through the air as Johnny passed by in a blur of speed, Stacy headed up the short stairway to find herself on a small wooden platform with a railing around it and a longer flight of stairs leading off to her right. She looked down to see Johnny sitting on the swing and rising to join them. Lane stood beside her and said,

 "There are three more levels, depending on how high you're comfortable going."

 "You forget," laughed Stacy, "that I was flying on the back of a butterfly last night, and that didn't bother me at all."

 "Then let's go," said Lane. But just as they turned toward the stairs, Johnny burst past them and headed up the second flight, two steps at a time.

 Lane looked at Stacy, raised her eyebrows and shook her head. "What do you say we ascend in a civilized manner?" she asked in a haughty tone.

 "Oh, by all means," said Stacy through her nose and they headed up the stairs.

 From the second platform, which was wider and unpopulated by teenage boys, Stacy could see what looked like a shack in the distance and in another direction a tree very like the one she was now visiting. "Is that..."

 "A cell," Lane finished with her. "There probably isn't much in it anymore. All the foodstuffs will be dried out or infested with bugs."

 The stairway they headed up, again off the right side of the platform, was even longer and steeper than the last. When they reached the top, before she even looked around, Stacy asked,

 "Who built all this?"

 "I guess the Doolins did. No one ever talks about it much. They brought us out here a few days after we moved here. You should see it on a starry night." Lane faded into a reverie leaning on the rail and Stacy took a good scan of the landscape. Far away she could see occasional objects that couldn't be clearly discerned. Probably other cells and trees, she figured. And then she thought she could see a line in the grass. Her hand reached out to touch Lane's arm. 

 "Is that..."

 "C'mon, you can see it better from the top."

 She was glad the next staircase had a railing because it was so steep that it was next door to being a ladder. Lane seemed to be directly above her so she couldn't tell how far they had to go to get to the top. She found it getting quite dark as she climbed and she was starting to feel winded when Lane moved aside and Stacy found herself coming up right through the center of the top platform in the tree. This one wasn't much bigger than the first one she'd reached. There only seemed to be room for six or seven people to stand around the center hatch she'd emerged through. It wasn't at the very top of the tree but it was fairly close. The trunk rose up quite thin on one side of the platform, reaching about ten feet above it, and there were a few branches shooting thin arms here and there. The view was quite magnificent even though there was little to see. Lane pointed to the thin line she'd seen from the platform below. From here she could see a definite path that weaved back and forth and made unusual curves and angles and didn't seem to be headed anywhere in particular.