Outcast of Narnia

Chapter Two: Revisiting the Wood

Susan felt herself rushing upwards through water, towards a dim green light. She thrashed her legs and arms but she could go no faster. Just when she thought her lungs would burst, the light grew brighter and her head broke the surface. She opened her mouth and found herself sitting up, hair heavy with sweat.

She took several deep breaths and looked around her. A bar of moonlight lay across the bedroom floor. Everything was quiet in the Marsh house. She lay back on the white lace pillows, trying not to think of the row she’d had with Peter the day before.

He’d dreamed up some daft idea of going to look for Lucy with the magic Rings. It had been two weeks since her sister had disappeared from the sanitarium. Lucy and the Narnian dress and her mouse were gone.

Susan had to admit that there wasn’t much else they could do. They had spent days putting up “Missing Persons” notices in the towns near the sanitarium. The police had no clues. The Head thought Lucy had run away and would turn up eventually. Susan’s friends were sympathetic but Sylvia had said, “She always was a little odd, though, don’t you know. Even before the accident.”

It was Peter who had insisted that Susan attend a meeting of the Friends of Narnia. The group was smaller than it had been the previous year. Edmund was on a walking tour in Scotland with a college friend. Jill and Eustace were visiting America.

Aunt Polly and Uncle Digory welcomed them both to Polly’s comfortable sitting room. Polly said she knew Susan hadn’t always believed in Narnia but that she, Polly, had always believed in Susan.

“I don’t know whether our Narnia games were real,” said Susan. “But if they have taken my sister away, it will really be too much.” She looked down quickly, blinking suddenly, and refused the tea with honey that Aunt Polly offered.

“I say,” said Peter. “If Lucy did go to Narnia, she’d be back by now. Our trips there always took no time at all. How can we explain an absence of two weeks?”

“Well, she can’t have gone to Narnia, now can she?” said Susan, looking nervously at the watch pinned to her embroidered pocket. “Didn’t you say that Aslan told all of us we couldn’t go back? So if she has gone somewhere by magic, it’s got to be another world.”

And that had brought him to the magic Rings. When Polly and Digory first got into Narnia, before the Pevensies were even born, they had gone through the magical Wood Between the Worlds. After putting on magic rings, Polly and Digory had been whisked out of our world and come up out of a pool of water in the Wood. They looked around them and noticed that, stretching as far as the eye could see beneath the trees, were other identical pools. They discovered that each pool led to a world of its own when Digory, who had only picked up a ring so as to bring back Polly, suggested they try jumping into a different pool than the one they had come out of. And that had led to all of the other adventures in Narnia.

“That’s why the Wood is the key,” said Peter. “There are many pools, and each one could take us somewhere else.”

“How many of these pool thingeys are there?” asked Susan.

“Many, many,” said Aunt Polly.

“If you can believe anything of what Lucy said when she woke up in hospital,” said Peter, “there may not be a Narnia to go back to.”

“Yes,” said Aunt Polly thoughtfully. “Aslan did tell us that worlds could end. We saw the dry hollow where the pool of Charn had been. But I didn’t think Narnia would end in my lifetime,” she said, wiping a tear from one eye.

“If only we could remember,” said Digory. “We had that strange visitation from a Narnian king. And then all got on the train to go and meet you with the Rings, and were lucky to get out of it alive.”

“We don’t know that Narnia has ended,” said Peter. “None of us remembers this visit to Aslan’s country that Lucy talks about. If Narnia is no more, then what are we looking for?”

Peter continued quizzing Aunt Polly about how the magic Rings worked. Aunt Polly had told them what it would be like: “You’ll feel like you’re floating in water, but you’ll be able to breathe normally if you let yourself. And then you’ll see light, and you’ll feel like you’re moving upward, and you’ll pop out, right there in the wood.” After that it will just be a matter of figuring out which world Lucy has got to.”

“Not an easy task,” said Peter. “An endless number of pools, and each pool leading to a different world. And there is no way to tell them apart?”

“Not that I can recall,” said Aunt Polly thoughtfully. “Digory marked one by cutting up a piece of turf but it must have grown right back over. It was such a rich place,” she said, sighing and closing her eyes. “Everything alive and growing.”

“If Aslan wants us to find her, we’ll find her,” said Peter firmly. “We have to try.”

The magic Rings were an obvious choice for finding Lucy. The previous year, he and Edmund had dug up the Rings, after the friends of Narnia had been surprised by a ghostly visit from King Tirian. Aunt Polly had showed them where they were buried—in the garden behind the old house where Digory had been living when they had first gotten into Narnia. Also in that garden had been planted the seeds from the apple that Digory brought back from Narnia.

Later, after the tree had come down in a storm, he’d had it made into the famous wardrobe that originally brought Lucy into Narnia. When Peter and Edmund retrieved the Rings, they had worn thick gloves, not wanting to be whisked off into another world unprepared. But as it turned out, they never used them. Peter and Edmund had been carrying the Rings as they waited on the train platform that dreadful day. The plan was for Jill and Eustace to use them, and they had been on the train with Lucy, together with Digory and Polly. For quite a different reason, and in a different car, were traveling the Pevensie children’s parents, who were going to Bristol.

After the accident, Lucy had been in a coma for weeks, and when she came out, she’d been telling stories about Narnia again and refused to believe their parents were dead. “We’re all alive together now,” she had insisted. “All except Susan, who didn’t care about Narnia.”

Peter thought it was important for Susan to go with him. “It’s silly to try this alone, and you’re the only other one of us close by.” He looked at her earnestly. “If you don’t think the magic will work, why won’t you at least try it?”

“It’s a waste of time,” Susan said. “Begging your pardon, Aunt Polly and Uncle Digory, but we ought to be knocking on doors and going house-to-house, looking for a little girl with a mouse in her pocket!”

“We would go ourselves, you know,” said Aunt Polly, as if she hadn’t heard Susan. “But Digory and I are entirely too old for magical travel between worlds.

“At least our bodies are old,” said Digory. “But our souls will soon be returning to the stars. That may be where your sister has gone too; you realise that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought…” said Peter.

“Think back,” said the old professor, only mildly irritated. “It’s all in Plato, after all.”

Susan looked at her watch again. “Peter, if only father were here. He could make you see reason!”

“Su,” said Peter, looking her in the eye. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll go door-to-door with you—in the rain, if you like!” Susan had reluctantly agreed, and left as quickly as she could.

Now, sitting up in her bed after that vivid dream of travel between the worlds, Susan looked at the clock. In just five hours, she was to get up and catch the tube over to Aunt Polly’s.

She thought again about Lucy’s story. How much of it was made up? Lucy seemed to be saying that the railway accident was all part of Aslan’s plan to bring them home to His country. But that plan hadn’t included Susan. She had been spending too much time with Sylvia and her friends, and hadn’t wanted to talk about Narnia any more.

Hadn’t Aslan once told Lucy that they would meet him again in their own world, here, and yet they hadn’t. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep again. Barely a few minutes later, she thought she was awakened again, but perhaps it was only a dream, because she heard the rich, warm voice she hadn’t heard in a year, her father calling her name. She was afraid to open her eyes.