Black Swan Green Read Online Free PDF

couldn’t get out. I wiped the poultice off my foot with a snotty hanky. Unbelievably, my ankle swivelled fine, cured, like magic. I pulled on my sock and trainer, stood up and tested my weight. There was a faint twinge, but only ’cause I was looking for it. Through the beaded doorway I called out, ‘Hello?’
    No answer came. I passed through the crackly beads into a tiny kitchen with a stone sink and a massive oven. Big enough for a kid to climb in. Its door’d been left open, but inside was as dark as that cracked tomb under St Gabriel’s. I wanted to thank the sour aunt for curing my ankle.
    Make sure the back door opens , warned Unborn Twin.
    It didn’t. Neither did the frost-flowered sash window. Its catch and hinges’d been painted over long ago and it’d take a chisel to persuade it open, at least. I wondered what the time was and squinted at my granddad’s Omega but it was too dark in the tiny kitchen to see. Suppose it was late evening? I’d get back and my tea’d be waiting under a Pyrex dish. Mum and Dad go ape if I’m not back in time for tea. Or s’pose it’d gone midnight? S’pose the police’d been alerted? Jesus . Or what if I’d slept right through one short day and into the night of the next? The Malvern Gazetteer and Midlands Today ’d’ve already shown my school photo and sent out appeals for witnesses. Jesus . Squelch would’ve reported seeing me heading to the frozen lake. Frogmen might be searching for me there, right now.
    This was a bad dream.
    No, worse than that. Back in the parlour, I looked at my grandfather’s Omega and saw that there was no time. My voice whimpered, ‘ No .’ The glass face, the hour hand and minute hand’d gone and only a bent second hand was left. When I fell on the ice, it must’ve happened then. The casing was split and half its innards’d spilt out.
    Granddad’s Omega’d never once gone wrong in forty years.
    In less than a fortnight, I’d killed it.
     
    Wobbly with dread, I walked up the hallway and hissed up the twisted stairs, ‘Hello?’ Silent as night in an ice age. ‘I have to go!’ Worry about the Omega’d swatted off worry about being in this house, but I still daredn’t shout in case I woke the brother. ‘I’ve got to go home now,’ I called, a bit louder. No reply. I decided to just leave by the front door. I’d come back in the daytime to thank her. The bolts slid open easily enough, but the old-style lock was another matter. Without the key it wouldn’t open. That was that. I’d have to go upstairs, wake the old biddy to get her key and if she got annoyed that was just tough titty. Something, something , had to be done about the catastrophe of the smashed watch. God knows what, but I couldn’t do it inside the House in the Woods.
    The stairs curved up steeper. Soon I had to use my hands to grip the stairs above me, or I’d’ve fallen back. How on earth the sour aunt went up and down in that big rookish dress was anybody’s guess. Finally, I hauled myself on to a tiny landing with two doors. A slitty window let in a glimmer. One door had to be the sour aunt’s room. The other had to be the brother’s.
    Left’s got a power that right hasn’t so I clasped the iron door knob on the left. It sucked the warmth from my hand, my arm, my blood.
    Scrit-scrat .
    I froze.
    Scrit-scrat .
    A death-watch beetle? Rat in the loft? Pipe freezing up?
    Which room was the scrit-scrat coming from?
    The iron door knob made a coiling creak as I turned it.
     
    Powdery moonlight lit the attic room through the snowflake-lace curtain. I’d guessed right. The sour aunt lay under a quilt with her dentures in a jar by her bed, still as a marble duchess on a church tomb. I shuffled over the tipsy floor, nervous at the thought of waking her. What if she forgot who I was and thought I’d come to murder her and screamed for help and had a stroke? Her hair spilt over her folded face like pondweed. A cloud of breath escaped her mouth every ten