The Time of the Ghost Read Online Free PDF

had churned up new ideas—this was probably only a dream. But just in case it was real, Mother and Himself would know what to do. Mother had really, very nearly seen her by the green door. She need only wait until school was over for the day, and they would be able to tell her what had happened. Probably everybody knows except me , Sally said, with the pricking of not-real tears in her nonexistent eyes. I’m always left out of things.
    Almost at that moment school was over for the afternoon. Sally found herself mixed, tumbled, and swept back again, in a running gray crowd of boys. She was surrounded by laughing—” Did you listen to what Triggs said to Masham in Geography?”—and arguing—“No, it isn’t! They have four-wheel drive!”—jeering—” Don’t give up, Peters! Just hit me and see what you get!”—and wordless fighting. BANG.
    Ow! said Sally. I felt that!
    It was very curious. She began to wonder if she had some kind of body, after all. She had definitely been caught just then, between somebody’s fist and somebody else’s body. And it was as difficult to go forward against the crowd as it would have been in the ordinary way. Though Sally pushed and shoved, and expected with every push that she would go right through one of the chattering, running boys, she found that this was one thing she could not do. Each boy seemed to have, around his solid body, a warm, elastic, quivering field of life, which held Sally off. It was as thin as tissue paper, but it was there. Sally could feel it crackling faintly every time she bumped against a boy.
    That’s peculiar , she said. I wonder if all living things are like this. I must remember to try walking through a hen sometime. Oliver would have made a bigger target, but the idea of walking through Oliver was too alarming.
    While Sally said this, the crowd of boys surged off past her and left her on her own, feeling strange and shaken. It was like being breathless—except that she had no breath to start with. She went on, round into the school garden beside the lime trees. More boys were coming out from under the lime trees and wandering about there. Sally hovered above the trampled earth, watching them. It was strange how few of them walked like human beings should. They went shambling, or knock-kneed, or with one shoulder up and the other down, and it almost seemed they did it deliberately. One boy was going up and down a space about twenty feet long, walking with his toes digging into the earthy lawn and his knees giving gently. His jaw was hanging, and he was muttering to himself. Every few steps one of his knees bent sharply, as if he had no control over it.
    â€œMinistry of Silly Walks,” Sally heard him mutter. “Ministry of Silly Walks.” It was Howard, the boy whose splinters were not catching.
    Near him another boy, with gingery hair, was going about with one arm bent like a cripple’s and jerking about. At each step he made a different hideous face. “Quiet, please, gentle men !” he muttered from his contorted mouth. This one was Ned Jenkins, Sally remembered, and she did not think there was anything wrong with his arm usually.
    Honestly! You’d think they were all mad, to look at them! she said wonderingly. She could not believe boys usually behaved like this. The boys at this school were clean-limbed young Englishmen. Yet as she watched the stumbling, muttering, jerking figures, she knew that they often did this—or something equally peculiar. Cart had once told her that all boys were mad. Sally had protested at the time, but she now thought Cart was right. And she went on watching, trying to fix all of their bizarre antics in her strange, nebulous mind, hoping that something—anything—might give her a clue to how she came to be like this. Because I can’t stay like this for the rest of my life , she said. I shall go as mad as Jenkins.
    Panic