Welcome to sleep stories with Steph your go-to podcast.
That offers you a calm and relaxing transition.
Into a great night's sleep.
It is time to relax and fully let go.
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Close your eyes.
And feel yourself sink into the support beneath you.
And let all the worries of the day go.
Drift away.
This is your time.
And your space.
Take a deep breath in through your nose.
And let it out with a long sigh.
That's it!
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Happy listening.
Chapter 1 The House in the Hollow The house in the hollow was a mile from anywhere,
So Maywood people said.
It was situated in a grassy little dale,
Looking as if it had never been built like other houses,
But had grown up there like a big brown mushroom.
It was reached by a long green lane and almost hidden from view by an encircling growth of young birches.
No other house could be seen from it,
Although the village was just over the hill.
Ellen Green said it was the loneliest place in the world.
And vowed she wouldn't stay there a day if it wasn't that she pitied the child.
Emily did not know she was being pitied and did not know what lonesomeness meant.
She had plenty of company.
There was Father and Mike and Saucy Sal.
The Wind Woman was always around.
And there were the trees,
Adam and Eve and the rooster pine and all the friendly lady birches.
And there was the flash too.
She never knew when it might come and the possibility of it kept her a thrill and expectant.
Emily had slipped away in the chilly twilight for a walk.
She remembered that walk very vividly all her life.
Perhaps because of a certain eerie beauty that was in it.
Perhaps because the flash came for the first time in weeks.
More likely because of what happened after she came back from it.
It had been a dull,
Cold day in early May,
Threatening to rain,
But never raining.
Father had lain on the sitting room lounge all day.
He had coughed a good deal and had not talked much,
Which was very unusual.
Most of the time he lay with his hands clasped onto his head and his large sunken dark blue eyes fixed dreamily and unseeingly on the cloudy sky that was visible between the boughs of the two big spruces in the front yard.
Adam and Eve,
They always called those spruces.
Because of a whimsical resemblance Emily had traced between their position.
With reference to a small apple tree between them.
And that of Adam and Eve in the Tree of Knowledge in an old-fashioned picture in one of Ellen Green's books.
The tree of knowledge looked exactly like the squat little apple tree,
And Adam and Eve stood up,
Either side as stiffly and rigidly as they could.
As did the spruces.
Emily wondered what father was thinking of.
But she never bothered him with questions when his cough was bad.
She only wish she had someone to talk to.
Ellen Green wouldn't talk that day either.
She did nothing but grunt,
And grunts meant Ellen was disturbed about something.
She had grunted last night after the doctor had whispered to her in the kitchen.
And she had grunted again when she gave Emily a bedtime snack of bread and molasses.
Emily did not like bread and molasses.
But she ate it because she did not want to hurt Ellen's feelings.
It was not often Ellen allowed her anything to eat before bed.
When she did it meant for some reason or another she wanted to confer a special favour.
Emily expected the grunting attack would wear off overnight,
As it generally did.
But it had not,
So no company was to be found in Ellen.
Not that there was a great deal to be found at any time.
Douglas Starr had once,
In a fit of exasperation,
Told Emily that Ellen Green was a fat,
Lazy old thing of no importance.
And Emily,
Whenever she looked at Ellen,
Thought the description fitted her to her hair.
So Emily had curled herself up in the ragged,
Comfortable old wing chair and read The Pilgrim's Progress all afternoon.
She loved the pilgrim's progress.
Many a time has she walked the straight and narrow path with Christian and Christiana.
Although she never liked Christiana's adventures half as well as Christian's.
But one thing,
There was always such a crown with Christiana.
She had not half the fascination of that solitary,
Intrepid figure.
Who faced all alone the shadows of the dark valley in the encounter with Apollyon.
Darkness and hobgoblins were nothing when you had plenty of company.
But to be alone.
Ugh,
Emily shivered with the delicious horror of it.
When Ellen announced supper was ready,
Douglas Starr told Emily to go out into it.
I don't want anything tonight.
I'll just lie here and rest,
" he said.
And when you come again,
We'll have a real talk,
Elfkin.
He smiled up at her with his old beautiful smile.
It had love behind it,
And Emily always found that so sweet.
She ate her supper quite happily then.
Though it wasn't a good supper.
The bread was soggy and her egg was underdone.
But for a wonder she was allowed to have both Saucy Sal and Mike sitting,
One on each other's side of her.
And Helen only grunted when Emily fed them wee bits of bread and butter.
Mike had such a cute way of sitting up on his haunches and catching the bits in his paws.
And saucy Sal had her trick of touching Emily's ankle with an almost human touch when her turn was too long in coming.
Emily loved them both,
But Mike was her favourite.
He was a handsome dark grey cat with huge owl-like eyes and he was so soft and fat and fluffy.
Sal was always thin.
No amount of feeding put any flesh on her bones.
Emily liked her but never cared to cuddle or stroke her because of her thinness.
Yet there was a sort of weird beauty about her that appealed to Emily.
She was grey and white.
Very white and very sleek with a long pointed face.
Very long ears and very green eyes.
She was a redoubtable fighter and strange cats were vanquished in one round.
The fearless little spitfire would even attack dogs and rout them,
Utterly.
Emily loved her cats.
She'd brought them up herself.
They'd been given to her when they were kittens by her Sunday school teacher.
A living present is so nice,
" she told Ellen.
Because it keeps on getting nicer all the time.
But she worried considerably because Saucy Sal did not have kittens.
I don't know why she doesn't,
" she complained to Ellen Green.
Most cats seem to have more kittens than they know what to do with.
After supper,
Emily went in and found her father had fallen asleep.
She was very glad of this.
She knew he'd not slept much for two nights.
But she was a little disappointed they were not going to have that real talk.
Real talks with Father were always such delightful things.
But next best would be a walk,
A lovely all by your lonesome walk through the grey evening of the young spring.
It was so long since Emily had had a walk.
You put on your hood and mind if you scoot back if it starts to rain.
Or Dellen.
You can't monkey with colds the way some kids can.
Why can't I?
Emily asked rather indignantly.
Why must she be debarred from monkeying with colds if other children could?
It wasn't fair.
But Ellen only granted.
Emily muttered under her breath for her own satisfaction.
You're a fat old thing of no importance.
Then she slipped upstairs to get her hood,
Rather reluctantly,
For she loved to run bareheaded.
She put the faded blue hood on over her long heavy braid of glossy jet black hair.
And smiled chummily at her reflection in the little greenish glass.
The smile began at the corner of her lips and spread over her face in a slow,
Subtle,
Wonderful way,
As Douglas Starr often thought.
It was her dead mother's smile.
The thing that had caught and held him long ago when he had first seen Juliet Murray.
It seemed to be Emily's only physical inheritance from her mother.
In all else,
He thought she was like the stars in her large purplish-gray eyes with their very long lashes and black brows.
In her high white forehead,
Too high for beauty.
In the delicate modelling of her pale oval face and sensitive mouth.
In the little ears that were pointed just a wee bit to show she was kin to tribes of Elfland.
I'm going for a walk with the wind,
Warm and dear,
" said Emily.
I wish I could take you too.
Do you ever get out of that room,
I wonder?
The wind woman's going to be out in the fields tonight.
She's tall and misty with thin,
Grey,
Silky clothes blowing all about her,
And wings like a bat's.
And you can see through them.
And shiny eyes like stars looking through her long,
Loose hair.
She can fly,
But tonight she'll walk with me all over the fields.
She's a great friend of mine,
Is the Wind Woman.
I've known her ever since I was six.
We're old,
Old friends.
We're not quite so old as you and I,
Little Emily in the glass.
We've always been friends,
Haven't we?
Then with a blown kiss to the little Emily in the glass,
Emily out of the glass ran off.
The wind woman was waiting for her outside,
Ruffling the little spears of striped grass that were sticking up stiffly in the bed under the sitting window.
Tossing the big bowels of Adam and Eve.
Whispering among the misty green branches of the birches.
Teasing the rooster pine behind the house.
It really did look like an enormous ridiculous rooster with a huge bunchy tail and a head thrown back to crow.
It was so long since Emily had been out for a walk,
She was half crazy with the joy of it.
The winter had been so stormy and the snow so deep,
She was never allowed out.
April had been a month of rain and wind.
So on this May evening she felt like a released prisoner.
Emily loved the spruce barrens away at the further end of the long sloping pasture.
That was the place where magic was made.
She came more fully into her fairy birthright there than in any other place.
Nobody who saw Emily skimming over the bare field would have envied her.
She was a little,
Pale,
Poorly clad little girl.
Sometimes she shivered in her thin jacket,
Yet a queen might have gladly given her crown for her visions and her dreams of wonder.
The brown frosted grasses under her feet were velvet piles.
The old mossy,
Gnarled,
Half-dead spruce tree,
Under which she paused for a moment to look into the sky,
Was a marble column in a palace of the gods.
The far dusky hills were the ramparts of a city of wonder.
And for companions,
Emily had all the fairies of the countryside,
For she could believe in them here.
The fairies of the white clover and satin catkins,
The little green folk of the grass,
The elves of the young fir trees,
Sprites of wind and wild fern and thistle down.
Anything might happen here.
Everything might come true.
And the Barrens were such a splendid place in which to play hide and seek with a wind woman.
She was so very real here.
If you could just spring quickly enough around a little cluster of spruces,
Only you never could,
You would see her as well as feel her and hear her.
There she was.
That was the sweep of her grey cloak.
No,
She was laughing up in the very top of the taller trees.
Then the chase was on again.
Until at once it seemed as if the Wind Woman were gone and the evening was bathed in a wonderful silence.
Emily stood and looked at the moon with clasped hands.
And her little black head upturned.
She must now go home and write a description of it in the yellow account book.
Where the last thing written had been.
Mike's biography.
It would hurt her with its beauty until she wrote it down.
Then she would read it to father.
She must not forget how the tips of the trees on the hill came out,
Like a fine black lace across the edge of the pinky green sky.
And then for one glorious supreme moment of glory.
Came the flash.
Emily called it that,
Although she felt the name didn't exactly describe it.
It couldn't be described,
Even to father,
Who always seemed a little puzzled by it.
Emily never spoke of it to anyone else.
It had always seemed to her,
Ever since she could remember,
That she was very,
Very near to a world of wonderful beauty.
Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain.
She could never draw the curtain aside.
But sometimes just for a moment.
A wind fluttered.
And then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond.
This moment came rarely,
It went swiftly leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it.
She could never recall it or summon it,
Never pretend it.
But the wonder of it stayed with her for days.
It never came twice with the same thing.
Tonight the dark bows against that far off sky had given it.
It had come with a high,
Wild note of wind in the night,
With a shadow wave over a ripe field.
With a grey bird lighting on her windowsill in a storm.
With the singing of Holy Holy in church.
With a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she'd come home on a dark autumn night.
With the spirit-like blue of the ice palms on a twilight pane.
With a felicitous new word when she was writing down a description of something.
And always when the flash came to her,
Emily felt that life was a wonderful,
Mysterious thing of persistent beauty.
She scuttled back to the house in the hollow,
Through the gathering twilight,
All agog to get home and write down her description,
Before the memory picture of what she had seen grew a little blurred.
She knew just how she would begin it.
The sentence seemed to shape itself in her mind.
The hill called to me and something in me called back to it.
Emily found Ellen Green waiting for her on the sunken front doorstep.
She was so full of happiness she loved everything at that moment,
Even fat things of no importance.
She flung her arms around Ellen's knees and hugged them.
Ellen looked down gloomily into the rapsittle face where excitement had kindled a faint wild rose flush.
And then she said with a ponderous sigh.
Do you know your pa has only a week or two more to live?
