Ruined 2 - Dark Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jeff.
    “So — she suffocated?” Miranda asked Lord Poole quickly. There wasn’t any point in hearing such a sad and creepy story, she thought, unless you got all the details. And after what she’d seen with her own eyes, nothing much could disturb her anymore.
    “Crushed to death,” Lord Poole whispered, leaning close. As he stood up, he murmured, “Ribs break, then you start bleeding. And your organs …”
    “So now she’s a saint,” Jeff mused in the loud summing-up voice he used in the lectures Miranda hadattended. “With a shrine in the house where she hid the priests.”
    “Well …” Lord Poole began, but Peggy interrupted him, worrying aloud about Rob waiting outside in the cold, and then apologizing to Lord Poole. “No, no — you’re quite right,” he said. “We should be on our way. Plenty of time for history.”
    They all walked slowly up the snow-dusted Shambles, Rob telling his parents about two people who’d walked by dressed up as reindeer. Miranda and Lord Poole ambled along behind them. She couldn’t stop thinking about Margaret Clitherow’s decision to remain silent, even though it meant such a terrible punishment.
    “Some people say,” Lord Poole confided, his voice low, “that they experience some kind of serene presence in Margaret Clitherow’s shrine. That they sense her spirit.”
    Miranda hadn’t felt anything when they were in the shrine — nothing but pity, anyway, for Margaret and the barbarous way she had to die. But no ghostly presence, either serene or creepy. Maybe Miranda could see ghosts only in Iowa. That would make this week much more bearable, she thought, if York’s centuries of ghosts were completely invisible to her.
    They stopped outside their flat, and Jeff asked Lord Poole about arrangements for the following week. Rob wandered over to a store on the other side of the Shambles, a few houses down, and stood gazing in the window. It was one of those places — lame, in Miranda’s opinion —where you could get your photo taken in medieval garb, outfitted like the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood. Her mother was sure to suggest they go there and get dressed up like extras from
The Other Boleyn Girl
for some corny sepia-tone family picture.
    Rob stood with his hands in his pockets, oblivious to the couple in matching fleeces who were staggering out of the store, laughing uproariously about whatever photo they’d just been posing for.
    Oblivious even to the woman who seemed to emerge out of nowhere — from the window, though that wasn’t possible — and appeared to hover there just above the pavement, looking directly at Miranda.
    Miranda was transfixed, so surprised by this strange sight that she was holding her breath. How did this woman materialize so suddenly? She hadn’t stepped out of the shop, like the laughing couple: She’d floated into the street. Her face was sweet and angular, and her dark hair hung over her shoulders. All she wore was a loose, off-white sack of a garment, like some kind of coarse nightgown. It was torn across the chest, streaked with dark stains. Dark stains like blood.
    Even though the night was cold, and her pale arms were bare, the woman was smiling. She reached out her hand, and a sharp, tingling cold passed through Miranda — an electric jolt of ice. Miranda’s heart was beating fast now: She knew what this meant. She remembered the wintry breeze that was Jenna’s hand, brushing over her hair one last time. The icy fingers reaching upfrom the river in Iowa, sending surges of cold up her leg. Rob and everyone else in the street couldn’t feel these cold darts. They couldn’t feel or see the woman in white at all. She was a ghost.
    “Time to go in, Verandah,” her father was saying, using his old pet name for her. Saying it in public, in front of strangers, was strictly forbidden, and usually she would have scowled at him or at least rolled her eyes. But tonight Miranda didn’t move — couldn’t move. This