The House at World's End Read Online Free PDF Page A

the highwayman Dick Turpin, and a small blind costermonger’s pony who was waiting for the old man who had bought oats for his feedbag when he had no bread himself, and covered him with his own coat when it rained.
    Carrie told them about the house at World’s End, and how she and Tom and Em and Michael were going to make it their place, to live their kind of way.
    ‘I think I could turn and live with animals
…’ She quoted the poem to them. They were quite interested.

7
    They moved in as soon as the summer term was over.
    Uncle Rudolf bought them sleeping-bags and tin mugs and plates and an iron kettle and cooking pot, since at first it would be more like camping out than living in a house. Aunt Val gave them fly spray and a half-gallon bottle of Milk of Magnesia, and a lot of advice about wet feet and not letting a dog lick your face.
    Nobody listened. They were not listening to any voice from the past. They had their ears pricked forward to the new adventure ahead.
    Carrie wanted to throw away her hateful school uniform, but Tom, who had suddenly become very grown up, said No. There might be lean times coming. They would need every stitch next winter.
    ‘Not my gym tunic.’
    ‘Em can make it into a skirt’ Em could sew. Their mother’s sewing machine, an indestructible heap of old iron, had been one of the few things saved from the fire.
    ‘If you’re going to order everyone about and tell them what to do, I’m not coming,’ Em said. ‘And nor are the cats.’
    But someone had to be head of the house, and Tom was the eldest, and he wasn’t going back to school next year (although his mother thought he was). The first night at World’s End, when they had considered the bedrooms,with their bird’s nests and their few sagging old bits of furniture and their windows broken by village boys, Carrie and Em had been glad when Tom decided they should all sleep downstairs. And when they had blown out the candles and lay in their sleeping-bags on the flagstone floor of the front room which had once been the lounge of the Wood’s End Inn, they were both very glad to have Tom there to say, in his deepest voice, ‘Don’t worry. Old houses always creak.’
    ‘But it’s outside, Tom,’ Michael said. ‘It’s - it’s trying to get in.’
    ‘If you’re going to get hysterical, the very first night—’
    ‘I am not historical. There’s somebody crying outside.’
    ‘A dog,’ Tom said.
    ‘A cat?’ But Carrie knew that all the cats were in. Maud and Paul and Nobody and the stray orange kitten they had found on the day of the picnic.
    ‘A lost baby …’ Michael whispered. ‘The ghost of a baby looking for the churchyard…’
    ‘It’s the inn sign creaking over the door,’ Em grunted. ‘Shut up and let a person sleep.’
    The creak-squeak of the sign in the wind was now quite friendly. But that other sound … inside the house. On the staircase. ‘Old houses always creak,’ Tom had said. But he could say what he liked. There was no doubt about it. There
was
someone on the stairs.
    When the others had fallen asleep at last, and Carrie lay awake, wishing she could make a hole for her hip in the floor, like you can in the sand, someone - something-tiptoed up the stairs. Quite slowly. Step by step.
    ‘What’s that?’ she shouted, and everyone sat up. Charlie barked once, a shrill, aimless bark, then dropped his head again.
    ‘I’m going to see.’ Since Tom was head of the house, he had to say that, and since he said it, Carrie had to say, ‘I’ll come with you. Charlie?’ He would not even get up. Why didn’t he whine and raise his hackles, as dogs were supposed to do when they smelled ghosts? Life was not like books.
    Tom lit the stub of a candle. Carrie walked behind him with her hand over her eyes, looking through her fingers as if she were watching a horror film. They opened the door to the narrow hall. There was another door opposite which still said ‘Public Bar’, a passage leading