01_-_The_Alchemyst

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“There is something very wrong with this house.” Sophie strode into
her brother’s room, holding her expensive cell phone up to her face. “I can’t
get a signal anywhere.” She moved around the room, watching the screen, but
the signal bar remained flat.
Josh looked blankly at his sister. “Wrong with this house?” he repeated
incredulously. Then he spoke very slowly. “Sophie, we’re inside a tree! I’d
say there’s something wrong with that, wouldn’t you?”
When Hekate had finished speaking with Flamel, she had turned and
disappeared into the woods without saying a word to them, and it had been
left to Flamel to bring them to the goddess’s home. Instructing them to leave
the car, he led them down a narrow winding pathway that cut through the
overgrown woods. They had been so intent on the strange flora—huge
bruise-colored flowers that turned to track their movements, vines that
slithered and squirmed like snakes as they followed them, grasses that had
not existed since the Oligocene era—that they failed to notice that the path
had opened out, and that they were facing Hekate’s home. Even when they
looked up, it took them several moments to make sense of what they were
seeing.
Directly ahead of them, in the center of a broad, gently sloping plain
sprinkled with vast swathes of multicolored flowers, was a tree. It was the
height and circumference of a large skyscraper. The topmost branches and
leaves were wreathed in wisps of white cloud, and the roots that burst from
the ground like clawing fingers were as tall as cars. The tree itself was
gnarled and twisted, its bark scored and deeply etched with cracks and lines.
Long vines, like huge pipes, wrapped around the tree and dangled from the
branches.