World's End in Winter Read Online Free PDF Page B

they got on to the broad track through the wood, Lester rode up beside Carrie.
    ‘Victor,’ he said. ’How do you like that?’
    Carrie shrugged her shoulders.
    ‘It means Conqueror.’ Lester’s mother had a book of names, which she consulted whenever a relation or friendwas going to have a baby, and handed out advice which they never took.
    ‘Well, he seems to be always winning at games.’
    ‘All brawn and no brain. I know his sort.’
    Lester was jealous, but Carrie was thinking about the little girl. ’He said it was an expensive show pony. Perhaps the mother bought something much too hot for her because the family always has to win.’
    ‘So that makes her think it’s her fault,’ Michael jogged alongside. Because he did not read or write what the school called properly, they said he was backward, but he was very shrewd for his age.
    ‘That’s why she babies Priscilla,’ Lester said. ’She didn’t start crying till Mrs Agnew came on the scene.’
    ‘Mrs Agony,’ Michael said. ’She’s made a prisoner of Bristler.’
    Late that night, Carrie was thinking about Priscilla lying perhaps in that spooky round turret room at Brookside, and unable to go to the curved window and look out at the cold moon and the bare trees weaving changing designs on the night sky in the same breeze that blew the curtain into Carrie’s room, even though the window was shut.
    Did she know that the house was haunted? The other Agnews did not look as if they would believe a ghost if they met one head on. If they should hear the phantom baby crying, they would think it was Priscilla’s desolate wail.
    And
was
it Priscilla she and Lester had heard that day in the turret room? Or was it... ?
    To stop herself thinking about ghosts when everyone else was asleep in the quiet house, Carrie lit a candle and called Perpetua up on to the feed sacks stuifed with Henry’s last shearing, which was her quilt. Always having puppies was making Perpetua broader. Her back made a good prop for the notebook in which Carrie made her entries for
Carrie’s Horse Book.
    Remembering how Priscilla and Oliver had begun tocommunicate without words before the mother rushed up, she wrote:
    A horse blows out to smell not by sniffing in.
    If you let him blow into your hand, he will know you.
    A horse talks with breath.
    A horse brain weighs 1¼ lb. A human brain weighs 3 lb. If people have more brains, why don’t they try to understand what a horse says instead of expecting him to understand what they say?
    ’He understands every word I say. He’s almost human,’ they say.
    He is not human. He is a horse.
    But he is more intelligent because he understands Walk on, and Trot, and Canter, and Whoa, and knows his own name.
    People don’t understand when he says, I’m frightened, and they don’t even want to know what name a horse calls them.
    Carrie knew what John called her. He called her ’She’, using it as a name.
    When the candle blew out in the draught and she lay with her book and pencil fallen to the floor and Perpetua a dead weight on her legs, the brown horse came to her window and called, ’She-ee-ee!’ in the soft high whinny no one else could hear.
    She closed her eyes and together they galloped up to the Elysian Star where famous horses grazed, and horses who were waiting for their people to die and join them. A bow-legged Spanish gipsy was sitting on the gate watching a rickety old donkey weave its way through the grass to him, with hips like coat hangers and its ears sticking through holes in a straw hat.
    Some of the thoroughbreds, who were pretty conceited, were calling to the gipsy, ’Get a horse!’ which was what carriage horses from the early days of motoring used to call out as they passed drivers whose cars had broken down.
    One of the jokers was a very beautiful bay pony mare, nervous and quick. She went off like a rocket when thedonkey suddenly let out a bray like a rusty opera singer being strangled on the high note.
    It