Moominvalley in November Read Online Free PDF

the door, waited a little and then went into the drawing-room.
    Fillyjonk saw immediately that no one had cleaned up there for a long time. She took off one of her cotton gloves and ran her finger along the edge of the stove, making a white line in the grey dust. It can't be true, she whispered, and a shudder of agitation went through her. To stop cleaning, and of your own free will, too... She put her suitcase down and went over to the window. It was dirty as well, the rain had left long melancholy streaks all over the pane. Only when Fillyjonk noticed that the curtains had been taken down did she understand that the family wasn't at home at all. She saw that the chandelier had been wrapped in muslin. And all of a sudden the chilly smell of the deserted house enveloped her and she felt utterly deceived. She opened her suitcase and took out the china vase, the present for Moominmamma, and put it on the table. It stood there as a silent reproach. It was terribly quiet everywhere.
    Suddenly Fillyjonk dashed upstairs. It was even chillier there, the kind of stagnant cold you find in a summer-house that has been closed up for the winter. She opened one door after another, all the rooms were empty and in semi-darkness with the blinds down. She became more and more uneasy and began to open the wardrobes, tried to open the clothes-cupboard but it was locked, and suddenly she went quite crazy and hammered on the cupboard door with both paws, then she rushed up to the box-room and pulled the door open.
    There inside sat Toft, staring at her. He had a big book in his lap and looked frightened.
    'Where are they? Where are they?' shouted Fillyjonk.
    Toft dropped his book and crept against the wall, but when he caught the smell of this strange, excited fillyjonk he knew that she wasn't dangerous. She smelt of fear. He said: 'I don't know.'
    'But I've come to see them!' Fillyjonk exclaimed. 'I have

    a present with me. A very fine vase. They can't have moved away just like that without saying a word!'
    Toft just shook his head and went on staring at her. Then Fillyjonk shut the door behind her and went away.
    Toft crept back into the roach-net that lay rolled up on the floor and made a fresh comfortable hollow for himself and went on reading. It was a very big book which had no beginning and no end and the pages were all faded and had been nibbled by rats at the edges. Toft wasn't used to reading and it took him a long time to spell his way through every line. All the time he was hoping that the book would explain to him why the family had gone away and where they all were. But the book was about quite different things, curious beasts and murky landscapes and nothing had a name that he recognized. Toft had never known before that deep down at the bottom of the sea lived Radiolaria and the very last Nummulites. One of the Nummulites wasn't like his relatives, there was something of Noctiluca, about him, and little by little he was like nothing except himself. He was evidently very tiny and became even tinier when he was frightened.
    'It is impossible for us to express sufficient amazement,' read Toft, 'at this raro variant of the Protozoa group. The reason for its peculiar development naturally evades all possibility of well-founded judgement, but we have grounds for conjecturing that an electrical charge was a crucial necessity of life for it. The occurrence of electrical storms at that period was exceptionally abundant, the postglacial mountain chains described above being subjected to the unceasing turbulence of these violent electrical storms, and the adjacent ocean became charged with electricity.'
    Toft let the book fall. He didn't really understand what it was all about and the sentences were so long. But he thought all the strange words were beautiful, and he had never had a book of his own before. He hid it under the roach-net and lay still, thinking. A little bat was hanging from the broken skylight, sleeping upside down.
    He heard