Frozen in Time Read Online Free PDF

weird.’ He felt suddenly exhausted by the excitement and fear. ‘Maybe we should get Uncle J down to have a look.’
    ‘He’d love all this!’ agreed Rachel. ‘It’s so weird! Amazing.’ She too, leaned on the second torpedo thing, resting her cheek on her palm, her elbow on the bit that Ben had just dusted. Then she opened her eyes wide. And then her mouth.
    And began to scream.

 
    Ben had heard his sister scream quite a lot. She was a girl, after all. But he had never, in twelve years, heard her scream like this. He jumped violently and grabbed at her and saw that her eyes were bulging with shock and horror. She was pointing and screaming: ‘A body! Oh, Ben! It’s a dead body!’
    Ben stared into the glass and saw a face. Eyes closed, pale pink lips very slightly open, revealing milk-white teeth. Dark hair curled across an alabaster forehead. It was a girl—about the same age as Rachel. It made him think of Snow White in her glass coffin. A shudder of fear went through him, making his heart thud and his legs feel weak. Rachel had stopped screaming now, and was holding her hands across her mouth, her eyes shut, shaking and crying. They should get out of here—now! And yet, something inside him couldn’t let him walk away, just as it had barely allowed him to walk in a few minutes earlier. This girl … this cool, still, sleeping girl …
    ‘She doesn’t look dead,’ he said, finally, still holding on to Rachel’s shoulder. ‘Maybe they had a way of p-preserving them. You know—embalming— like they did with Lenin and Eva P-Peron …’
    Rachel stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’ she gasped.
    ‘I just mean—that she looks … pretty good for a dead person.’
    ‘Oh—my—God …’ said Rachel. ‘You fancy a corpse!’
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said, with an exasperated click of the tongue, and suddenly he realized he wasn’t really that scared any more. He was more fascinated— as if he’d stumbled into Tutankhamun’s cave. ‘Come on—we can’t go back now. We have to know …’
    Rachel gave a little shriek as he vigorously wiped the top of the last torpedo chamber. Ben caught his breath in shock, even though he’d been half expecting it this time. Another face lay beneath the curved glass window. Also dark haired. His eyes, too, were closed, and his features were similar to the girl’s. Perhaps they were related. He seemed, thought Ben, to be smiling. As if he was having a bit of a joke. At any moment his eyes might spring open and he might shout ‘SURPRISE!!!’
    ‘He looks like her,’ breathed Rachel, who had overcome her fear to move around to lean on Ben’s shoulder. ‘A bit older. He’s probably her brother. Maybe this is some weird kind of mausoleum … you know … like when they buried Egyptian kings and put all the stuff they’d need in with them, to take them into the afterlife.’ Ben nodded—he’d been thinking similar thoughts.
    ‘But if someone took this much care over burying their kids,’ he pondered, ‘you’d think they’d’ve put up a headstone or something … wouldn’t you?’
    ‘It’s creepy,’ shivered Rachel. ‘I can’t believe I’m still standing here.’
    ‘Well, they’re hardly going to spring up and bite you, are they?’ said Ben. ‘They must have been dead for decades. I wonder what killed them … and who they were … Maybe …’ He walked back to the console, ducking past the pipes and wires that went into the top of the torpedo chambers. ‘Maybe there’s something about who they were in these notebooks.’
    Rachel hurried after him. She did not want to be standing on her own between two dead bodies, no matter how healthy they looked. Ben was flipping through the notebook, coughing now and then as the dust from it caught in his throat. She glanced at the other books, but they looked like textbooks—the kind of stuff she hoped never to have to get down off the shelf in maths class. She studied the console with