The Serpents of Arakesh Read Online Free PDF Page A

places, with little black dents in the skin, it smelt wonderful. Everything tasted better in my hide-out. I ate every scrap, even the core, and spat the pips away into the undergrowth.
    Time for business. I took the white card and the ballpoint pen out of my pocket. This was one time I was determined my handwriting would be its very tidiest, with no spelling mistakes. That shouldn’t be too hard; most of it was totally straightforward stuff like name, address, and telephone number.
    Carefully, I brushed some rotting leaves and twigs away to make a clean place on the ground, laid the card down and began to fill it in.
    It all seemed pretty simple until the last line. Pleaseexplain, in 20 words or less, why you believe you should be selected for this unique experience.
    I gnawed on the pen, my mind a complete blank. What was I supposed to say? Was there some magically right answer that would give you a better chance of being picked? Well, why did I believe I should be selected? I knew I wouldn’t be — like Cameron said, the chances were practically nonexistent. But after all … I scribbled: Sumwun has to — it mite as well be me.
    Above my head I heard the window of the staff room slide open, and Matron’s voice: ‘A cup of tea would be most welcome, thank you, Cook.’
    Having the staff-room window just above my hide-out was a problem in some ways — when the window was open, I had to be extra careful not to make any noise. But there were advantages. I got to know about things before anyone else and sometimes I heard things I was pretty sure Matron would have classified Top Secret. If I was ever found out, I’d be dead meat — we’d had it drummed into us over and over again how wrong it was to eavesdrop. But I reckoned it wasn’t eavesdropping so much as military intelligence — because at Highgate, the more you knew, the safer you were.
    I slipped back through my tunnel, crept away from the entrance, stood up and dusted myself off. I could hear voices and laughter from the lawn on the other side of the house. There were probably ten minutes or so before afternoon tea — long enough to slip out and post my card if I ran all the way to the postbox, although there’d be trouble if I was caught.
    I was out of breath by the time I reached the postbox. I took the card out of my pocket and looked at it one final time. I wondered who would look at it when it reached its destination. I imagined it lying in a clean, manicured hand … a red pen like Miss McCracken’s poised over it,ready to mark it with an angry red cross.
    Suddenly the card seemed grubby, and I noticed one corner was crumpled from being in my pocket. And now that I looked at it again, I had a sinking feeling that well should only have one ‘l’.
    But it was too late to worry about that now — it would look worse with heaps of stuff crossed out than with one tiny mistake nobody would even notice. Quickly, I dropped the card through the slot of the postbox and raced back to Highgate.

A letter
    It was dumb luck that I was in my hide-out when Matron went through the mail just over a week later. And it was even luckier that Cook was in the staff room, having a cup of tea before she started making dinner. Because if Matron hadn’t told Cook about the letter, I wouldn’t have heard about it either. At least, not until it was too late.
    It was Thursday — sausages and mash day — and one of those warm, muggy afternoons, so the staff-room window was open.
    At first, I didn’t pay any attention to the voices drifting over my head — it was like having the TV on in the background when you’re busy doing something else. Which I was — carving a little wooden horse out of a hunk of wood, using a craft knife I’d borrowed from the art room at school.
    I don’t know whether it was the sound of my name, or the sudden change in the tone of Matron’s voice,