The Giant-Slayer Read Online Free PDF

she were in it.
    “What do you see?” asked Carolyn Jewels, behind her.
    “Nothing,” said Laurie.
    “Clean your glasses, four-eyes.”
    There was a laugh from Chip. Laurie blushed. “Well, it’s kind of raining,” she said. “There’s a car going out—”
    “What kind of car?” asked Chip.
    “A Cadillac. A Park Avenue, I think.”
    “That’s boss!” he said. “They’re keen.”
    “The gardener’s picking up all his bits of ivy; he doesn’t look very happy. There’s a brown duck in the pond, but no one’s sitting—”
    “What pond?” asked Chip.
    “The one right there.” Laurie pointed. “With the benches around it.”
    “He can’t see it, you stupe,” said Carolyn.
    Laurie turned toward the respirators. She could see three faces hovering in the slanted mirrors, reflected from the pillows. They seemed to float there, just above the round machines, like the disembodied head of the Wizard of Oz.
    “I came in the dark,” said Chip. “In an ambulance.”
    “Well, it’s not much of a pond,” said Laurie. “It’s got willow trees around it, and benches for people.” She looked again through the window, trying to see what Dickie and the others would see in their mirrors: the sky and the clouds; maybe the very tops of the highest buildings, the peaks of the hills in the distance. They could never look down at the grass, never watch the squirrels or the ducks or the mothers with their babies. The shadows slid across the grass unseen by them, shrinking in the mornings, growing in the afternoons. The sun was always hidden.
    “My nanna used to take me to the pond in a stroller,” said Laurie. “That’s my first memory: throwing bread for the ducks when I couldn’t even throw as far as the water. I remember how they waddled out, like they were angry. We called it Piper’s Pond.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know.” She had never thought about the name. “Maybe there was a man who played the bagpipes there. Way before the war.”
    “What did he look like?” asked Dickie.
    “No one ever saw his face.”
    This was how she and Dickie had told their stories of the train people: one asking questions, the other inventing answers. It made Laurie feel more comfortable to be doing it again, and now she put her forehead on the glass, her palms on the windowsill. In her mind she could see the piper down below her, with long tassels streaming from the horns of his bagpipes. It wasn’t daylight anymore. She was looking out at a chewed-away moon that turned the water to silver, thepiper to a dark silhouette. “He wore a white mask that made him look like a ghost,” she said. “It covered his eyes and his cheeks, just a white mask with one black teardrop painted on the cheek. And he played the same song all the time. He played ‘Danny Boy,’ slowly, under the weeping willows.”
    “Why?” asked Dickie.
    “He was mourning,” she said. “For a girl that he loved, who drowned in the pond.”
    “That’s bull,” said Carolyn.
    “Oh, it’s just a story!” Laurie heard the angry snap in her voice, and regretted it right away. She could hear the machines wheezing behind her, and imagined herself in Carolyn’s place, lying for eight years on her back, seeing the world upside down in a mirror. Wouldn’t she too find it hard to be nice to people?
    “I’m sorry,” said Laurie.
    Carolyn didn’t answer. The motors whirred on the iron lungs, the bellows groaned and filled.
    When it seemed that no one might ever speak again, it was Dickie who started talking.
    “Laurie makes up stories all the time,” he said. “She used to tell about the train people. About Davy Crockett. Boy, she told good stories.”
    His voice was high and happy. He beamed at Laurie in his mirror. “Could you tell us one now?”

CHAPTER
THREE

A G IANT -S LAYER I S B ORN
    M ore than anything Laurie wanted to please Dickie. But when he asked her to tell a story, she didn’t think that she could do it.
    “Please?” he