Vile Visitors Read Online Free PDF

stain.
    â€œAre you sure you didn’t spill your tea?” Dad asked.
    Mum gave him a stern look. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We were going to throw the chair away, anyway. We were just talking about it when you came.
    â€œOh good!” Auntie Christa said merrily. She rummaged in the box again. “Look, here’s the conjurer’s wand,” she said, bringing out a short white stick wrapped in a string of little flags. “Let’s magic the nasty wet away
so that I can sit down again.” She tapped the puddle in the chair with the stick. “There!”
    â€œThe puddle hasn’t gone,” said Dad.
    â€œI thought you were going to throw the hideous old thing away, anyway,” Auntie Christa said crossly. “You should be quite ashamed to invite people for a coffee morning and ask them to sit in a chair like this!”
    â€œThen perhaps,” Dad said politely, “you’d like to help us carry the chair outside to the garden shed?”
    â€œI’d love to, of course,” Auntie Christa said, hurriedly putting the hat and the stick back into the box and collecting her bags, “but I must dash. I have to speak to the vicar before I see about the music. I’ll see you all at the Underprivileged Children’s Society party the day after tomorrow at four-thirty sharp. Don’t forget!”
    This was a thing Simon and Marcia had often noticed about Auntie Christa. Though she was always busy, it was always other people who did the hard work.

ow Mum had told Auntie Christa they were going to throw the chair away, she wanted to do it at once.
    â€œWe’ll go and get another one tomorrow after work,” she told Dad. “A nice blue, I think, to go with the curtains. And let’s get this one out of the way now. I’m sick of the sight of it.”
    It took all four of them to carry the chair through the kitchen to the back door, and they knocked most of the kitchen chairs over doing it. For the next half hour they thought they were not going to get it through the back door. It stuck, whichever way they tipped it. Simon was quite upset. It was almost as if the chair was trying to stop them throwing it away. But they got it into the garden in the end. Somehow, as they staggered across the lawn with it, they knocked the top off Mum’s new sundial and flattened a rosebush. Then they had to stand it sideways in order to wedge it inside the shed.
    â€œThere,” Dad said, slamming the shed door and dusting his hands. “That’s out of the way until Guy Fawkes Day.”
    He was wrong, of course.
    The next day, Simon and Marcia had to collect the key from next door and let themselves into the house, because Mum had gone straight from work to meet Dad and buy a new chair. They felt very gloomy being in the empty house. The living room looked queer with an empty space where the chair had been. And both of them kept remembering that they would have to spend Saturday helping in Auntie Christa’s schemes.
    â€œHanding round cakes might be fun,” Simon said doubtfully.
    â€œBut helping with the party won’t be,” said Marcia. “We’ll have to do all the work. Why couldn’t one of us have guessed what was in that box?”
    â€œWhat are Underprivileged Children, anyway?” asked Simon.
    â€œI think ,” said Marcia, “that they may be the ones who have to let themselves into their houses with a key after school.”
    They looked at one another. “Do you think we count?” said Simon. “Enough to win a prize, anyway. I wouldn’t mind winning that conjuring set. It was a real top hat, even if the crystal ball did leak.”
    Here they both began to notice a distant thumping noise from somewhere out in the garden. It suddenly felt unsafe being alone in the house.
    â€œIt’s only next door hanging up pictures again,” Marcia said bravely.
    But when they went