The Derring-Do Club and the Empire of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t. She’d die. She’d become like Hideous Helga, whom the girls talked about in whispers. That poor lost soul had gone out in a storm to meet her lover only to be abandoned. Her flesh had been frozen off her features and her tormented ghost haunted the hills and mountains searching for her lost beau, and with every passing storm the wraith screeched and rattled at the windows.
    A sound like an engine moved overhead and then, as she craned her neck to look, she saw a dark, ominous shape, whirring and phutting above, until it was lost in the blustering Alpine flurries.
    Georgina’s limbs were no longer cold, just numb; wooden as if they belonged to someone else.
    She stumbled, saw her own hands in front of her, but she could feel nothing.
    She tried standing, but her dress seemed made of card, stiff and unforgiving.
    She crawled: her progress measured in yards, then feet and finally inches.
    Three trees loomed over her, their branches leaning down to pluck her up; no, it was a bear with gigantic looming eyes, each reflecting a strange tormented face. She saw a pair of Hideous Helgas, but they were her own pitiful self, already as pale and insubstantial as a ghost reflected in the monster’s eyes. Great arms reached down and huge hands swept her up from the snow.
    The creature spoke: “I say,” it said.
    Miss Charlotte
    Charlotte worried about what her sisters would say with the same gut-wrenching feeling she had when she looked down. The ground was so far away now: it made her dizzy and excited. And it was a Zeppelin, they’d understand, surely? She’d put her thick blue coat on before going outside, like they kept telling her to, and she hadn’t left the school grounds... as such, until the airship had taken off and flown east.
    It had just landed at the back of the school, with airmen in dashing uniforms tying it to trees with thick ropes, and she’d only gone for a closer look, a teensy peek, and then, well, no–one had been watching, so she’d not exactly sneaked on board, but rather she’d gone to have a look inside. It had been floating off the ground, so she’d had to climb the ladder, hadn’t she? Only a few rungs, no more than fourteen, and once she reached the top, she thought she’d just take a couple of steps inside.
    When the rotors had fired up to speed giving her such a fright, she’d instinctively hidden in one of the cabins, but that was only so she wouldn’t be caught. Earnestine would not want her to be caught, so she had done the right thing and Earnestine would be proud, and not cross as she usually was, wouldn’t she?
    But what did any of that matter: Charlotte was flying!!!
    She’d hidden in a cabin and, opposite the wooden door made of the lightest wood, was a single small porthole. With her face pressed against the glass, she’d seen the trees zoom away and the school itself shrink to a doll’s house, and then smaller still and the sky had become huge. There was no sense of movement, no buffeting like a carriage or a train, or a swaying of deck on a boat, just a gentle change of angle and a surge of engine noise. It had rained briefly, but then she realised that they had risen through the clouds. Above the dreadful weather, it was a bright, dazzling sunny day and the crisp Swiss air allowed a view of the entire world!
    And there were mountains below her .
    What was the point of hacking through a jungle or riding a camel, when you could simply soar above the unknown?
    Charlotte looked up: a huge whale of darkness blotted out half the blue sky. The black skin of the beast was stretched over the visible ribs of a steel skeleton. The thrumming noise was not in her head but from the huge propellers that were turning lazily on outstretched beams.
    It was magnificent.
    Perhaps a little look round before she thought about how to get back to needlework class.
    Charlotte returned to the corridor on tiptoe.
    The propellers were strung out on wings halfway along, so perhaps the engine