Kit's Wilderness Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t know,” I said. “Could you? There’s no way of knowing if they pretend or if it’s real.”
    She glared at me.
    “No, sir, Mr. Watson. Of course you’re perfectly right, sir, Mr. Watson.”
    “You think you know everything,” I said. “You think everything’s just a game. You think everything’s for your own stupid entertainment.” I felt tears running from my eyes. “People
do
die. People
do
. People
do
.”
    I lay staring down into the grass. I heard Grandpa’s songs running through my head. I heard Grandma’s far-off whispering.
    “They do,” I softly said again, and the words were carried away across the wilderness on the breeze.
    Allie shuffled closer.
    “Jeez,” she whispered. “I was right. You do need somebody to protect you.” I felt her watching me.
    “Trouble with you is,” she said, “you’re not one of the louts or thickos or no-hopers. And you’re not in it for fun like me. Left to yourself you’d be begging Askew to dig a hole and chuck you in.” She tapped my skull. “Hey,” she whispered. “Hey. Mr. Watson. Mr. Innocent.”
    “What?” I muttered.
    “I’m just looking after you,” she said. “Like your grandma would have wanted me to.”
    “How d’you know what she wanted?”
    She sighed and clicked her tongue.
    “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll stop going to the game as well, eh? I’m sick of it anyway, being down there with that lot and that lout. We’ll start doing other things together, eh?”
    I stood up and squeezed the tears from my eyes.
    “You haven’t got a clue, have you?” I said. “What if I
want
to play? What if I
want
to see what really happens?”
    And I hurried away from her across the wilderness, past the kids playing, squeezing back my tears.

 

    “L ook at this,” said Grandpa.
    I was in my room, doing homework, something boring about time differences between England and the rest of the world. It was a chilly evening and rain was pouring down onto the wilderness. I kept looking up from my desk, staring out. I worked out that if you traveled fast enough you could get to where you wanted before you even started. I didn’t write that, but wrote what they wanted: that if it was such and such a time in Stoneygate, then it would be such and such a time in New York. Boring. Then Grandpa knocked on my door.
    He put it on the desk in front of me. It was a flat rectangle of coal, polished like the pony. There were deep imprints on its surface. I ran my fingers across them.
    “It’s tree bark,” I said.
    “That’s right. Tree bark. Lots of coal’s got tree bark patterns on it if you slice it careful enough.”
    “That’s what coal was,” I said. “Trees. Millions of years back.”
    “Correct.” He nodded at the window. “That’s what you’d’ve seen if you sat here then. Massive trees. Swamps. All those millions of years back.” He ran his fingers over the coal. “There’s this as well.” He put a black fossil on the desk. A spiraling horn-shaped shell. “Guess,” he said.
    “Some kind of animal. Something that lived at the same time as the trees.”
    “Correct. An ammonite. This is the fossil of its shell. The creature lived inside, like a snail does, or a hermit crab. This too came out of the pit, just like the tree bark.”
    I held it in my palm.
    “Thing is,” he said. “It’s a creature that lived in the sea.”
    I imagined it squirming its way across sand, beneath the water.
    “The sea came in and flooded the place and the trees fell down and time passed and the sea laid down sediment that turned to rock and the earth churned and laid down more rock and time passed and the rock thickened and pressed down on the ancient trees and animals and time passed and passed and turned them all to coal.” He laughed. “But you know this, eh? They’ve told you this at school?”
    I nodded. He laughed again.
    “When we dropped down in the cage we dropped through time. Million years a minute. Pitmen. Time