Read The Door for Free Online

was transformed. It wasn't black, as I'd seen it before, it was violet, and ablaze from end to end, as if fires had been lit between the clouds. Thunder rolled across, the noise almost burst my eardrums, but I filled the mug and ran back to where they had been, looking for those little blond heads, because when I'd looked back I hadn't seen them, only the lightning as it struck the tree beside them.
    "By the time I had staggered over to where they were, smoke was pouring out everywhere. By then they were both dead, but I didn't realise it, because they looked like nothing you would consider human. Then the storm broke. The downpour clung to me like sweat. I stood there beside my little brother and sister, staring at the two black stumps. If they looked like anything at all it was charred logs of firewood, only smaller and more gnarled. I stood there stupidly, turning my face this way and that. Where were the little blond heads? Those strange things in front of me couldn't possibly be my siblings.
    "So, are you surprised that my mother threw herself down the well? It was all she needed, a sight like this, and my hysterical screaming. I was screaming so loud that when the storm stopped I could be heard as far away as the main road, and of course the house. Mother ran out, barefoot and still in her nightgown. She hurled herself at me, and beat me. She had no idea I'd been running away from her tears and bad temper, her endless worrying and complaining. She didn't know what she was doing. In her despair, she wanted to hit out and destroy, to strike the nearest living thing as a way of striking at life itself. Then she saw the twins and realised why I had called her. For a second her face blazed, then she flashed past me and sped away in the rain, her wild hair trailing along the ground behind her, screeching like a bird.
    "I saw what she was going to do, but I couldn't move. I stood there, next to the tree and the corpses. The thunder and lightning had stopped. If I'd run for help at that moment they might have saved her. Our house was right by the main road — the threshing yard was just beyond the garden — but I stood there as if bewitched, my mind blank. My brow was dripping wet, but my brain had gone numb. No-one could love the way I loved those two little ones. I stared at the stumps. I still couldn't make myself believe I had anything to do with them. I didn't cry for help. I stood there gaping, and then began to wonder vaguely what my mother was doing all that time at the bottom of the well. What was she up to? What could she possibly be doing? The poor woman had fled from me, from the terrible sight, from her fate. She'd had enough of everything. It's like that, sometimes. Suddenly you want to end it all.
    "I gazed around for a short while, looking at this and that, then walked away at a calm, leisurely pace. There was no-one in the house, so no point in going there. I stood beside the main road and called out to the first person who passed by, to come and speak to my mother, because she'd gone into the well, and my brother and sister — the ones with the yellow hair — had disappeared from under the tree, and there was something black there instead. The neighbour had been strolling by, and now he ran to her, and in the end he sorted everything out. They left me with the headmaster while someone went for my grandfather. Grandfather took me away, but he didn't let me stay with him, only my little brother Józsi; and when the gentlemen came from Budapest looking for a maidservant, he handed me over at once. They took me away as soon as the funeral was over. I didn't understand a thing about the funeral, though I did see my loved ones again, because both coffins were open, my mother in one and the twins in the other. The sight of my mother there was just as puzzling as that of the twins. Their golden hair seemed to have melted away — there was nothing on their heads, in fact their heads were no longer there. They were