Hidden Among Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

straight for the line of cars squeezed as close to the kerb as possible. I felt in my pocket for the car keys. Still there. Sliding the manuscript carefully out of my shirt, I laid it face-down on the passenger seat, hidden beneath my rucksack. At least I couldn’t sweat on it there and blur the writing. So precious it could only be touched with gloves. Just sitting on the passenger seat in my car.
    I started the engine and reached for the steering wheel, saw my hands were shaking. I pulled out into our road, leather steering wheel hot to the touch.
    London traffic at eight o’clock on a Friday evening is hell but I’m a good driver with a functioning sense of direction. It took almost an hour to reach the furthest edges of town, slipping up back streets. I didn’t notice the car until I was waiting at traffic lights, trying to remember Dad’s shortcut onto the Westway. A grey Alfa Romeo, waiting behind the van who’d been tailgating me: nondescript but very fast. The same Alfa Romeo that had overtaken me earlier, I was sure. Now it was behind me again.
    “Don’t be paranoid,” I said aloud. “No one’s following. Why would anyone be following?”
    Because of the manuscript. Because of that message in brown ink: They will kill you
.
    Rubbish. Shut up. It’s just a stupid old journal from the library archives that—
    That I’ve stolen
.
    It was Friday night.
Everyone
was leaving town, heading west. So what if I’d seen the same car twice? It was hardly a miracle.
    I pulled out onto the motorway. Now I was moving along in fast traffic and driving into a wide summer sky, I could see sense: even if the librarian
had
realized what I’d done (which he must have, by now), it would be hours before the police responded to a report of theft on a Friday night in central London. I could relax. There wasn’t a chance they’d trace me here, not so quickly. Especially not after the precautions I’d taken. I might have used the school’s name as leverage, but my own remained out of the equation.
    For now.
    It was a fairly transparent trick, and I just hoped it would work. For a few days at least.
    Once I’d been on the motorway an hour, I felt safe enough to stop and look. Finally.
    The service station streamed with people: businessmen in suit trousers and crumpled shirts, people escaping London for the weekend, carloads of families leaving for half-term. I got a gritty espresso from a chain outlet inside and sat in the car with the manuscript in my hands again at last.
    The librarian had been right, of course. It
was
a journal; I should have expected that after finding the title on their database:
Facts Concerning Concealment of a Hidden Race 5
. Five was the issue number. There had been no record of issues one to four, no mention of anything that might have come afterwards. It was dated May 1820.
1820
. So old.
    I waited before opening it again, ancient paper fragile beneath my fingertips, savouring the single word “facts”, after a lifetime of trawling through websites produced by pathetic delusional hippies about elves and fairies and crystal pathways.
    Because none of that comes even close to the truth about what happened fourteen years ago.
    I started to read.
    It is well known they take children, for what purpose God alone can tell. Bewitched by their whispered promises, grown men and women have left the civilized world, never again returning to their families and friends. I have ridden every inch of this island and only once did I hear of such a Creature facing Justice.
    I turned the page, hardly even breathing. I’d found it at last. Evidence. A shadow of proof.
    In the parish records of Hopesay village it is written that in the Year of Our Lord 1707 a young child, one Philippa de Conway, was snatched from her bed. Fitzwilliam de Conway’s men captured one known to be Elven and held her fast in the Gaol. It is recorded that the Creature screamed out most horribly when the iron fetters touched her