House of the Lost Read Online Free PDF

make coffee or a sandwich or to heat tinned soup, eating it at the end of the dining table with the laptop in sight, unwilling to stay away from his boy for longer than necessary. Once or twice he paused to wonder where the boy’s story was coming from, but it was tumbling onto the screen with such insistence he was almost afraid of questioning it too much in case it vanished. It did not vanish, though – if anything it grew stronger, and the boy’s world gradually became so vivid that Fenn House and its rooms seemed dim and slightly unreal. If Theo half closed his eyes, he could see the house where the boy lived and the rather sparse bedroom at the top of the house beneath low eaves. It seemed to be a large but slightly shabby house. Like Fenn House? said a voice inside his head, but he rejected this at once because he refused to accept that this was some kind of lingering ghost from Fenn House’s past. But it was a very similar house.
    It was just about possible that the boy was some kind of manifestation of Theo’s own childhood: there were several parallels. Theo’s early years had not been as dark and fearful as the boy’s seemed to be, but they had been a bit mixed. There had been patches of unhappiness and times when he had not understood why people around him behaved oddly. His father had died in a car crash when he was four and his mother had been devastated: it was a bit of a family legend that when John Kendal died Petra had, as Nancy put it, gone to pieces for years. Theo could not remember his mother’s in-pieces behaviour, nor could he really remember his father, but he could remember escaping into fantasy worlds of his own making, although in Theo’s case the worlds had been the ones he wrote about. There had been compositions for school – My Holidays, My Pets, My Favourite Place – which had expanded, almost without him realizing, into short stories. He had been secretive about those early stories, scribbling diligently in an old exercise book in his bedroom for hours on end, spawning another little family legend that Petra’s son was slightly odd, although what could you expect? poor fatherless child, without any brothers or sisters. Nancy and several of the older aunts had been thinly disapproving, but Guff, kindly and concerned, had invited the small Theo to stay with him at his own house. It was a rather precise, over-tidy house, because Guff himself was precise and over-tidy, but Theo had liked being there and he liked Guff, who had explained about his mother not being very well. ‘She’ll get better, though,’ Guff said.
    Petra had got better as Guff termed it, but she had become what Nancy called very flighty, travelling for long spells while Theo was away at school.
    ‘Nancy thinks your mother’s a bit of a tart,’ Charmery said, years later, when they were at Fenn House for her ninth birthday celebrations.
    ‘No, she isn’t,’ said Theo, furious and hurt.
    ‘Is it a bad thing to be, a tart?’
    ‘It would be if she was, but she’s not. Nancy’s jealous of her, that’s all. But if you’re going to call my mother a tart I’m not coming here again.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Charmery, and Theo forgave her because she was only nine, which was too young to know what a tart was.
    *
    The boy in the story was called Matthew. Theo had written the best part of an entire chapter before he realized this. He had, in fact, been getting slightly cross at not knowing the boy’s name, particularly when he knew so many other things about him. He knew what he liked to eat, and how he struggled with arithmetic, and he knew how, every morning, he met a small friend, a girl with whom he walked to school. The girl was a bit of a chatterbox but Theo’s boy liked listening to her, because he was rather quiet himself. Theo knew all this, but he still did not know the boy’s name, and he was starting to think it was a bit much of him to invade his life like this without providing a name.
    And