A Bridge to the Stars Read Online Free PDF

room and jumps into bed with all his
clothes still on and pulls the cover up to his chin.
    That must have woken his father up, he thinks. Nobody
could have slept through that row. Least of all a sailor. But
not a sound comes from his dad's room. He's still asleep.
He hasn't heard a thing. Joel gets up once more.
    Back in the kitchen he gropes around for the saucepan.
It's ended up in a corner, between the sofa and the
firewood bin. Joel places it carefully on the table, then
goes out into the hall carrying his boots and jacket.
    When he's outside in the street, listening to the
silence, it occurs to him that there's something badly
wrong with the secret society he's founded.
    The word society means that there's more than one
person involved. Joel on his own can't be a society.
    But who can he ask to join? Who could he possibly
share his secret with?
    Joel has a lot of friends, but none of them is sufficiently
close for him to share his secret with him.
    If only I had a brother, he thinks. If Mum was determined
to run away, the least she could have done would
have been to leave me a brother.
    He suddenly felt sad.
    'Why should I go running around on my own in the
middle of the night, looking for a dog that might not
exist?' he asks himself aloud.
    Just as he says that it starts snowing. A few
snowflakes dance around under the streetlight. Then
there are more and more, and he thinks crossly that
spring is going to be delayed this year as well. The only
good thing about it starting to snow is that he might be
able to get a bicycle before everybody else has started
cycling around.
    He decides to take a look at the new bikes on display
in the cycle shop window, before starting to look for the
dog. There's a particular one he wants to see. It has a red
frame and there's a logo with a flying horse just above
the pump holder.
    He hears a car coming and sees its headlights in the
distance. He stands in the shadow cast by the tall
gatepost next to the chemist's. When the vehicle passes
he sees that it is in fact the rusty old lorry belonging to
The Old Bricklayer.
    He has an odd name, Joel remembers that. Simon
Windstorm. But he's never referred to as anything but
The Old Bricklayer. Everybody is a bit scared of him.
He was once locked up in a home for madmen. Joel
knows he was in there for nearly ten years. Nobody
thought he would ever get out, but one day he jumped
off the train at the local station and explained that he'd
been released because he was fit again.
    But why is he driving his lorry around in the middle
of the night?
    Joel presses on and thinks he must make a note of The
Old Bricklayer in his logbook. It's something special
that has to be recorded.
    Anton Wiberg's bicycle shop is on the corner of Norra
Vägen and Kyrkogatan. Joel pauses in the shadows
before approaching the display window. There are a lot
of streetlamps and illuminated shop windows just there.
If he stands in front of the window anybody could see
him. He checks the blocks of flats on all sides, but it's
dark in all those windows.
    He runs quickly over the street, jumps over the
heaped-up snow left in the gutter by the snow plough,
and there's the red bike. The Flying Horse.
    There are a lot of bicycles in the window, but it's only
the red one that interests Joel. That's the one he wants to
be riding this spring.
    He's been into the shop several times and asked about
the price, and he knows it is only slightly more
expensive than the rest of the bikes. The hard part won't
be persuading his father to buy him that particular one,
but getting a bicycle at all. It takes his father a long time
to make up his mind about things, but once he's decided,
fifty kronor is neither here nor there.
    But there is another danger as well.
    Anton Wiberg has only one red bicycle. There are
several of all the other models. He must make sure
nobody gets there before him and buys the red bike.
    Joel pictures Otto in his mind's eye, coming towards
him on the red bike. It's a