The Frost Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself in. The tunnel smelt of mud and algae, and she wrinkled
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    her nose before climbing upward, slipping several times on the slimy floor.
    In a few minutes she had emerged into a courtyard. She'd been here before, when she and Owen and Dr. Diamond had opened the wooden doors of the shop with the sign J. M. Gobillard et Fits on the window, and had found the tunnel that led to Hadima. Little did she know then who Gobillard would turn out to be--a friend of Owen's grandfather, maker of an amazing trunk that could enclose a deadly whirlwind of time, a trunk that used the Mortmain as a lock. Owen had met Gobillard in the prison in Hadima and had got his grandfather's maps from him. But Gobillard had died there.
    Then, the first time Cati had entered the courtyard, it had been an empty, sleepy place, the row of shops closed and almost derelict, weeds growing in the center. But something had changed. Cati's eyes narrowed as she moved cautiously forward.
    Someone had been here. On every surface--the walls and fronts of the shops, and even the dusty glass--words had been scrawled in red ink. They were words in some strange language that she did not recognize, but their jagged forms spoke of hate and envy and bitterness so strongly that Cati gasped and took a step backward.
    She forced herself to move forward toward the wooden double doors that led downward to Hadima. The graffiti was concentrated there, an almost continuous scrawl. One of the tunnel doors was slightly ajar, as though someone had passed through in haste. Cati stared
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    at it. The Hadima entrance was no longer intriguing. She dreaded what lay beyond it.
    Instinctively she reached out to the open door and closed it. She made her way back down the tunnel, casting nervous glances over her shoulder. When she got to the end she cast the grappling hook onto a branch of a tree growing out of the bank and, using the rope as a swing, descended to the opposite side. It was only then, as she loosened the grappling hook from the branch, that she noticed something different. The sky had gone from gray to a sullen zinc color, with a dull red at the edges, and the cold was biting. Something was terribly wrong.
    I need to contact Owen , she thought, and set off up the river as quickly as she could.
    Owen too had seen the sky from the kitchen. He went outside. Without thinking he leaned on the thwart of the Wayfarer , and as he did so he felt a shock through his sleeve, a bolt of anxiety from the boat itself. He looked at the sky again. How ominous it was! He knew that it was time to contact the Watcher. Without stopping to tell his mother, he set off for the Workhouse.
    A few minutes later Martha, who had been in the shop, became aware of the odd light. She went to the back door and looked up at the strange, dull color. Her first impulse was to find Owen. She called him but he wasn't in the house or the garden. Then she saw his red jacket, two fields away, moving toward the Workhouse. She drew breath to call to him, but the sound never left
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    her mouth. There was a great howling, like the cry of a terrible beast, and, almost instantly, Owen disappeared as if he had never been, as a curtain of needle-sharp sleet swept in front of her. The storm had struck.
    Cati had never heard anything like the shriek of the wind as it drove sleet and snow horizontally across the town. Blindly she made her way upriver, using the water underfoot as her guide. Soon she was soaked to her hips. There was some shelter from the wind in the trees and bushes along the river, but there was no hiding from the terrible cold that tore at her exposed flesh. She rubbed at her nose and cheeks. You can't get frostbite that quickly , she thought, but still she rubbed at the exposed parts.
    Through eyes narrowed against the cutting sleet she could see that the water at the edge of the river was starting to freeze, and the water that flowed around her knees was a milky color, as though just about to turn to