Page 29 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

the dark, at once vast and smothering. He felt his face going white. Heart

sprinting, he cocked his ear, held his breath.
“Father?” he whispered.
Silence.
Panic began to mushroom deep in his chest. He sat perfectly still, his body
erect and tense, and listened for a long time. He heard nothing. They were alone,
he and Pari, the dark closing in around them. They had been abandoned. Father
had abandoned them. Abdullah felt the true vastness of the desert, and the world,
for the first time. How easily a person could lose his way in it. No one to help,
no one to show the way. Then a worse thought wormed its way into his head.

Father was dead. Someone had slit his throat. Bandits. They had killed him, and
now they were closing in on him and Pari, taking their time, relishing it, making
a game of it.
“Father?” he called out again, his voice shrill this time.
No reply came.

“Father?”
He called for his father again and again, a claw tightening itself around his
windpipe. He lost track of how many times and for how long he called for his
father but no answer came forth from the dark. He pictured faces, hidden in the
mountains bulging from the earth, watching, grinning down at him and Pari with
malice. Panic seized him, shriveled up his innards. He began to shiver, and mewl
under his breath. He felt himself on the cusp of screaming.
Then, footsteps. A shape materialized from the dark.

“I thought you’d gone,” Abdullah said shakily.
Father sat down by the remains of the fire.
“Where did you go?”
“Go to sleep, boy.”

“You wouldn’t leave us. You wouldn’t do that, Father.”
Father looked at him, but in the dark his face dissolved into an expression
Abdullah couldn’t make out. “You’re going to wake your sister.”
“Don’t leave us.”
“That’s enough of that now.”

Abdullah lay down again, his sister clutched tightly in his arms, his heart
battering in his throat.
…