The House at World's End Read Online Free PDF

back to the kitchen and store rooms, and the wide stairs going straight up at the end of the hall.
    Tom walked towards the stairs bravely, but Carrie knew his bony shoulders and the knobby back of his neck well enough to know that he was scared. He raised the candle. The flame blew in a draught from a broken window. Shadows moved on the staircase, but there was no one there. Then as they stood in the dark hall and looked up, they heard three more footsteps towards the top of the stairs.
    But there was no one there.
    For a moment, Tom and Carrie still stood staring up, with their mouths open. Then they looked at each other. Then without a word, they ducked back into the front room.
    The four of them spent the rest of the night keeping the fire and the candles going. They didn’t talk. They listened. They heard no more footsteps, but they all knew, without having to discuss it, that they could not stay another night in this house.
    Their short sweet dream was over already. Their beautiful World’s End was a place of nightmare and terror.Carrie sat stiffly with her back against a table leg and her arm round Charlie’s fur shoulders. It was the first night for ages that she did not even think about calling the Arab horse. She was much too frightened.
    When the first light of dawn began to spread through the small panes of the old leaded windows and across their tired faces, things began to look better.
    ‘Perhaps we imagined it,’ Tom said. He had been to the back of the house to fill the kettle, and had found nothing strange. No trail of blood on the stairs. No feeling of ice-cold fear in the passage, or in the raftered, stone-floored kitchen with its low sink as big as a small bathtub and its ancient round scarred table, cut with the initials of people who had lived there.
    ‘Who’s going up to look?’ Em asked, getting back into her sleeping-bag and curling like a maggot.
    No one offered. If anybody - or anything - had gone up in the night to those cold, cobwebby bedrooms, nobody wanted to see it.
    ‘Because I know there’s nothing there,’ Tom argued. ‘Let’s give it one more night.’
    ‘No.’ Em stuck her jaw out over the edge of the sleeping-bag. ‘You can’t make us.’
    Michael said, ‘I’m not afraid. But the girls are.’
    Carrie said, ‘No, Tom. It’s not fair on the younger ones.’ She was not going to tell them about the face she had imagined at the window on the day of the picnic. The footsteps on the stairs were enough without that. Because now she was beginning not to be sure whether she had imagined the white face, or actually seen it.
    ‘But where could we go?’ Tom poured out the tea. Ashes had got into the kettle. It tasted disgusting. ‘We can’t go back to Uncle Rudolf’s.’ As soon as they had left,Valentina had filled their rooms with a whole rabble of her nastiest relations, to make Uncle Rudolf feel that
his
family had been keeping
hers
out. ‘We’d have to camp out’
    ‘Or sleep in the stable,’ Carrie said. ‘If we could only get a horse before winter it would be warm.’
    ‘Oh, knock it off,’ Tom said irritably. He liked horses. They all liked horses. But Carrie overdid it.
    Michael began to wail. He was hungry, and he wouldn’t drink tea without milk. ‘I want to go home!’
    ‘This is your home, boy.’ Em’s hair had been especially wild and wiry when she crawled out of her sleeping-bag. To flatten it, she had pulled a red woollen cap low down on her forehead. Her deep blue eyes stared under it at Michael. ‘There’s nowhere else to go.’
    ‘What are we going to doo-oo-oo?’ Michael went on wailing.
    Tom put his hands to the sides of his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said crossly. ‘Shut up. I don’t know.’
    ‘Some head of a house,’ Em jeered.
    ‘If you want orders,’ Tom told her, ‘go to the village and get us some milk, and something to eat.’
    ‘Make Carrie go.’
    ‘I don’t want to.’
    ‘You can both go then.’
    They did not