Eight Days of Luke Read Online Free PDF

Which was putting it mildly, he thought.
    Luke laughed, and jumped onto the nearest heap of wall to look at it more closely. “Did you really do this?” he said. “How?”
    David followed Luke over to the wall, thinking that Luke must be a trespasser and nothing to do with the neat and respectable house after all. He was wearing cast-off looking clothes, much like David’s, and he was covered with brick dust, cement dust and what seemed to be soot. And it was plain he did not care two hoots about the broken wall. He sat himself down on a convenient heap of bricks and patted another to show David where to sit too.
    â€œExplain,” he said, and folded his arms, ready to listen, with a very engaging look of interest. Luke had a sharp and freckly face, under the dirt, and a burn or something on one cheek, probably from those sudden flames. His hair seemed to be red. At any rate, he had those kind of red-brown eyes that only go with red hair. David rather took to him.
    â€œI did it trying to curse,” David confessed, and sat down too, though he could not help taking a nervous look at the respectable house first.
    â€œDon’t worry. They’re out, or they’d have been up here raving half an hour ago,” Luke said, which proved to David that he was certainly only a trespasser. “Now, explain. Whom were you cursing?”
    â€œAll my horrible relations,” David said. It was a relief to talk about it. He told Luke how his relations did not want him, how they were planning to send him to Mr. Scrum so that they could go to Scarborough, about Mrs. Thirsk, the food and the chewing gum, and about the row at lunch. Luke listened sympathetically, but it was when David came to the cursing part that he grew really interested.
    â€œWhat did you say?” he asked. “Can you remember?”
    David thought, and was forced to shake his head. “No. It’s gone. But I suppose it was some kind of curse if it knocked the wall down.”
    Luke smiled. “No. It wasn’t a curse.”
    â€œHow do you know? It brought out a load of snakes too, didn’t it?”
    â€œBut it wasn’t a curse, all the same,” said Luke.
    David was a little annoyed. For one thing, Luke could not possibly know, and, for another, although it would have been a relief not to have uttered a curse after all, it was plain to David that his words had had a powerful effect of some kind. “What was it then?” he said challengingly.
    â€œUnlocking words. The opposite of a curse, if you like,” Luke said, as if he really knew. David said nothing. He thought Luke was trying to make him feel less guilty about the ruin they were sitting on. Luke smiled. “You don’t believe me, do you?” David shook his head. “Oh well,” said Luke. “But they were, and I’m truly grateful to you. You let me out of a really horrible prison.” He smiled happily and pointed with one slightly blistered finger to the ground under the wall.
    This was too much for David, who, after all, had been there to see that nothing but flames and snakes had come from the ground. “Pull the other leg,” he said.
    Luke looked at him with one eyebrow up and a mischievous, calculating look on his filthy face. He seemed to be deciding just how much nonsense David could be brought to swallow. Then he laughed. “Have it your own way,” he said. “But I am grateful, and I’ll do anything I can in return.”
    â€œThanks,” David said disbelievingly. “Then I suppose you can help me stand this wall up again.”
    Luke looked at David in that shrewd and mischievous way again. “I might,” he said. “Shall we see what we can do?”
    â€œOh do let’s,” David said sarcastically.
    Luke jumped up briskly. “Come on, then. You take the other end of this and help me lift it.” He stooped and put his hands to a section of brickwork,