A Hundred Horses Read Online Free PDF

anyone else you saw me,” she whispered through her teeth as she ran past, “and you’ll never get it back.”

Twelve
    I didn’t dare tell anyone about Angel, not yet. Not now that there was a chance of getting the carousel back. But why didn’t she want me to say I’d seen her? I remembered Gem had said she’d stolen ninety-nine horses. Did it have something to do with that? I hadn’t even been in the countryside a whole day and already I’d decided I never, ever wanted to come again. But while I was here, I was going to get that carousel back, and I was going to build it.
    Later Aunt Liv took me into a secondhand shop in the village and made me try on things that smelled musty and old. She bought me someone else’s jeans and T-shirts and sweaters and a pair of blue rubber boots. It wasn’t like a costume or anything, but I definitely didn’t look like me anymore. Or anyone I knew.
    And then, just as we stepped out of the shop, some chickens almost flew into our faces. There were thousands of them, scattered in the street and along the sidewalk. They ran into open shop doors, fluttered up onto walls and windowsills, bok-bok-bokkahing and flapping. People shooed them out of doorways and tried to collect them in their arms and herd them all together.
    “Electric chickens!” shouted Gem. “You plug them in and out pops an egg.”
    “She means battery chickens,” said Alfie, rolling his eyes.
    “What?” said Gem. “You’d lay an egg if I plugged you in.”
    “And they’re barn chickens, dopey,” said Alfie.
    “Liv, give us a hand!” someone shouted.
    “Come on, children,” she said. “Mrs. Barker needs some help.”
    Soon loads of people had joined hands, trying to collect the escaped chickens into a big horseshoe shape between them.
    “Nell!” called Gem, breaking the circle and holding her hand out. It was her face that made me join in, her happy eyes and tinkling laugh.
    Nobody else seemed to find it funny, and I don’t think Gem was laughing because of the chickens. I think it was that giddy feeling of everyone swooping and tugging one another around.
    We all shuffled together, toward the other end of the street where chickens spilled in and out of a field.
    A lady with gray, curly hair, wearing a hounds-tooth coat and rubber boots, was by the open gate, waving a long stick to guide the chickens back into the field. A collie dog lay pressed to the ground beside her.
    There were long wooden barns down the end of her field, and one of them was wide open. The chickens fluttered like bonfire sparks, ran into a barn and back out again, as if they didn’t know what to do.
    And then some of the chickens made a dash for the road again. One headed straight for me. It flapped into the air. And I caught it!
    I could feel the spiny tubes in its wings and a warm bare patch of skin underneath, prickled with tiny new feathers. The chicken didn’t wriggle, but now that I had it, I didn’t know what to do with it.
    “In here.” Mrs. Barker pointed, reaching her stick around me to guide me into the field too.
    Her dog thought she meant him.
    “Down, Kip!” she shouted as he darted forward. He dropped instantly, although you could see in his shiny eyes he was desperate to scatter the chickens.
    I crouched and held the chicken away from me as more chickens flapped past. I lowered its feet until they touched the ground. The chicken jerked its head and looked at a long piece of rope lying on the ground, tied to a metal pole.
    “That’s not a worm,” I whispered.
    It twitched its head and looked up. And I don’t know why, but I couldn’t let it go. Maybe it was because of its cross little eyes and the way its head was on one side, like it wanted to ask me a question.
    I realized the chicken lived in a barn and maybe it didn’t get to look out of the window very often. And then the tin girl was there, in my mind’s eye, looking up. So I did too, and I saw the sky was as blue as forever. And somehow I