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

want to go together, or alone. No one wanted to do anything. It was all spoiled. Their wonderful idea of living here, of living the way they wanted to without grown-ups to interfere, of making the poem come true:
‘I think I could turn and live with animals…’
    They went outside on to the uncut grass, dewed with morning cobwebs, and looked glumly at the old stone house. It stared back at them glumly with its crackedwindows, an upstairs blind hanging half-way down crookedly, like a drooping eyelid. They felt just as miserable and rejected as when they had stood on the potato patch in the rain and looked at the black ruin of their Army hut. Once more, they had no one to turn to, nowhere to go.

8
    Carrie and Em dragged their feet up the lane, in the other direction from the wood. Over the rise of a small hill was the village where there were a few shops, and a church, and some houses and cottages full of people they would now never get to know.
    The dairy was a white-painted shed at the back of a farmhouse on the edge of the village.
    ‘New round these parts?’ Mr Mossman was as broad and heavy as one of his own milk churns. His wide red face was like the sinking sun, his hands were like hams, with sausages for fingers. His rubber boots were as wide as tree trunks, with thick ribbed soles that marked the ground like a tractor.
    ‘We’re the people at the World’s End,’ Carrie said, since Em was not going to answer. Em was still at the age when you can’t make yourself speak to a stranger, or sometimes even someone you know.
    ‘Oh, you’re
those
people.’ Mr Mossman nodded the tweed hat which sat too small on the top of his bushy grey head, with the brim turned up all round. He nodded several times, as if there had already been a lot of talk in the village. ‘Yes,
that’s
who you are,’ he said, as if he were telling Carrie, not she telling him.
    ‘Yes. I mean - well, we
were,
but—’
    ‘Too far gone? Can’t cope with such a blooming ruin?’Mr Mossman was good at putting words into other people’s mouths. ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you do.’ He folded his hands over the thick jersey that was stretched across his stomach like a jib sail full of wind. ‘What you want to do is this…’
    He began to lecture about shoring up and tamping down and reeving in and mucking out, but Carrie interrupted him. ‘We can’t,’ she said shortly. ‘It’s haunted.’
    ‘Oh, fish now, what’s this? I know that old place. Used to get my beer there when it was still in business. It’s no more haunted than I am.’
    There’s a ghost on the stairs.’ Carrie watched to see if he would laugh.
    He did laugh, but not a jeer. He opened his mouth very wide, like a split melon, and laughed through what were left of his teeth.
    ‘Been like that for years, old chump! Poor old Neddy Drew, who was caretaker there, used to say it kept him company.’
    ‘The ghost?’ Em whispered, looking up at him from under the red wool cap.
    ‘No, chump, the stairs! They’re old, see. In the daytime, when it’s warmer, the boards expand. Then at night they shrink away from the old loose nails. Crack, crack, crack.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘My dear Miss What’s-it,’ Mr Mossman said, sticking out his front even farther and tilting the tweed hat over his grey forelock, which was like a Welsh pony, ‘I know everything. Stay round here and you’ll find
that
out.’
    ‘Oh, we will, we will! Oh
thanks.’
Carrie and Em could not wait to get back and tell the others. They rushed out with the milk, and ran down the village street to the shopswhere they could buy bread and bacon and butter, and a stamp to write to their mother. They were stared at by the long-faced grocer, questioned by his sharp-eyed daughter, and tut-tutted at by the old lady in the post office, which was only a fire guard nailed to the counter in the sweet-shop.
    ‘You really going to live in that old scarecrow of a place?’ She took her spectacles out of the