Wake Up and Say Goodnight

Odin pressed his hand into the cool, crumbly moss. It was colder than it had been at lunchtime. Pip pushed his nose into the same spot and sneezed. Grey fog lay over the whole valley like a thick wool blanket. The ferns had folded themselves shut. The big dinosaurs stood as still as trees, with their eyes closed. Nobody had hummed the goodnight hum yet. Odin looked down at Pip. "They went to sleep too early," he said.

Pip's ears went up. He trotted off between the ferns, and Odin followed with his hands in his sleeves. At the bottom of the slope they found footprints, deep and round, filled with water. Odin crouched and dipped one finger in. The water was warm. Steam curled off it and touched his cold cheek. Somewhere under the stones, a little warm stream was running, and it was running the wrong way, out into the empty gravel.

Odin rolled one stone aside. Then another. His fingers were cold and the stones were warm, which felt funny and good. Pip dug beside him, flicking grit back through his legs. Slowly, the warm water turned. It slid into the hollow where the sleeping ferns stood. It spread under their folded leaves. Steam rose up in soft grey ribbons. Odin sat back on his heels and watched, and his knees began to feel warm again.

One fern unfolded. Then three. Then all of them, slow as someone stretching in bed. A small round dinosaur lifted her head out of the leaves and blinked at the steam. She made a sound like a creaky door. "Wake up a little, just to say goodnight," Odin told her. She shook the fog off her back and stepped into the warm shallow water. Pip sat down beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched.

Odin walked on through the steam with Pip just ahead. He cupped warm water in his hands and poured it into the cold mud. Little frogs came up out of it, one, two, six, singing. He pressed his warm palms to a smooth grey egg-shaped boulder, and something inside it peeped. The valley was waking the way a house wakes, one room at a time. Odin's breath stopped showing white. The air smelled like rain on hot stone.

The long-necks stood at the top of the rise, taller than the fog. Odin tipped his head back and back. They were too tall to touch and too big to shake. So he hummed instead. It was not a loud hum. Pip's ears swivelled. The small round dinosaur hummed too, and the frogs, and the peeping egg. "Wake up a little, just to say goodnight," Odin sang into the steam.

The nearest long-neck opened one enormous eye. Then she hummed. It came out of her chest like far-off thunder with no storm in it. The sound rolled down the slope and under Odin's feet. It went into his shoes and up his legs. All the long-necks joined in, one after another, and the valley hummed its goodnight at last. The fog loosened. It drifted up in soft pieces, and warm pink sky showed through.

The humming got slower. The frogs stopped first. The small round dinosaur lay down in the warm shallows with her chin on a fern and shut her eyes. Pip yawned a long pink yawn. Odin yawned too, and found he could not stop. The ground was warm now, all the way through. Footprints held little round mirrors of sky. Everything that had woken was going back to sleep properly this time, in the proper order.

The nearest long-neck lowered her head beside Odin, slow as a door swinging open. Odin climbed on with Pip tucked under his arm. Up she lifted them, over the ferns, over the steam, and carried them along the warm ridge in her gentle swaying walk. Pip went heavy and loose against his chest. "Wake up a little, just to say goodnight," Odin whispered, to nobody now. Then the swaying carried him off too.