The Giant's Almanac, Andrew Zurcher [accelerated reader books txt] 📗

light and light – that is when you must read. Read as if your life depended on it. The torch wasn’t the sort of thing you could buy at the shop. It wasn’t much of a torch at all. Oblong, about the size of his fist, it lay in a case of tough, leathery hide scribbled about with geometrical figures. The strap from which he hung it, on his bedpost, also fastened this cover; releasing it, the leather case fell away easily to reveal a luminous, perfectly polished, crescent-shaped jewel set in a heavy stone wedge. This rough chunk of stone, blacker than the night, sat solidly wherever you placed it, as chunky as granite. From the milky and phosphorescent jewel that stood a little proud of its surface, almost hanging in the stone as the new moon does above the sea, arose a glittering light. It didn’t extend very far, and it wasn’t very bright – but here, beneath the huddled covers, close and warm, it was enough to read by.

Fitz hunkered down further beneath the duvet. He didn’t want Clare to see any kind of glow from beneath the door, and anyway the wind had carried a chill off the sea, and he was cold. He reached under his pillow again and pulled out his book. Feeling carefully with his fingers, he opened it to the place he had marked, earlier, with an envelope.

That other letter. The one he had found on the mat after dinner.

He let the book close, and turned the letter over in his fingers, almost afraid to touch it, handling it as if it were a dangerous thing – maybe dead, maybe not. The return address had immediately caught his attention. It was printed in small, stately capital letters across the back of the envelope: ‘KEEP HOUSE, DUNURE, AYRSHIRE’. Just like the first one. Even now the words felt to his fingers like little stings, like the taste of a battery, sharp and acidic against his tongue. After the ordeal of the afternoon, he would have torn it up, or burned it without opening it, but for one thing. The first letter was addressed to Clare, in a neat, anonymous hand. This one was different. On its front, in an almost illegible scrawl, only their own address appeared.

That scrawl. It was from a different person.

Not now. He would open it tomorrow.

Fitz was tucking the unopened envelope back into his book when he heard a sudden, sharp, violent rapping. With practised fingers, he slipped the light back into its leather sheath, then drew the cord tight to seal it. He slid it under his pillow, pulled the duvet close round his neck, and lay flat. No one knocked at this hour. He strained to hear, willing himself to be alert, to catch every sound. Below, just audible above the roar of the sea wind, he thought he could hear Clare stepping on the old floorboards of the cottage’s front hallway.

Again: three sharp, angry blows echoed through the house. It sounded like something metal beating against wood.

The front door.

Fitz slipped from his bed, keeping his head and body low, leaving the duvet and blankets behind him lying flat and warm. Between his bed and the bedroom door nothing lay in his way, and he knew which floorboards creaked, and which didn’t. He stepped only on the latter, picking his way like a cat across snow. The door never latched properly; he had only to draw the handle with a single, fluid tug, and it swung noiselessly open, wide enough for him to slip through into the brighter darkness of the first-floor landing. The light was on downstairs. Fitz could see Clare’s feet where she stood at the far end of the hallway, by the entrance. She was slipping the chain across the door.

He had only just taken up his perch, squatting at the top step, when she was suddenly thrown back. She stumbled and nearly fell. She was shouting, something incomprehensible. Fitz grabbed the painted newel. His fingers bored into it. The wind was rocking the house as if it were a ship heaving on swells, as if it were a bough tossing in a gale. He fought his stomach, and his eyes, trying to stay still, to force or wedge himself into safety, to make the rocking stop. He couldn’t have said whether he was pulling on the newel post, or pushing it away, but somehow his head was craning lower, and lower, down the staircase, trying to make out what was happening.

Clare had stumbled to her feet and thrown herself at the door. She was shouting again, her frightened voice a descant above the roaring southerly wind that gusted through the opening. Only the chain was holding the door now. Fitz could see through Clare’s frantic hands the splintered wood where the lock had been broken. Someone must have forced it open, kicked or battered it down. Someone had to be pushing against it, trying to sever the chain, trying to topple Clare over. In the glare from the ceiling light above, the muscles of her lower calf bulged where she had braced her turned ankle against the floor.

For a long moment, nothing moved: the heavy oak door, poised between opposing forces; Clare, planted against the floor like a strut, pushing and striving with every muscle just to stay still; and Fitz, gripping the newel, contorting his neck, holding his breath, willing his eyes like hands to heave against the door and slam it back into place.

In a lull of the wind a voice came through the opening. It was reedy, strong and low, a man’s voice, and angry.

‘I said I would come for him. He is my jewel. It is time. It is past time.’

My jewel. The letter. Fitz felt his stomach heave.

The man was sticking something through the crack of the opening. It appeared slowly, effortfully, as if he were trying to drill through a stone. Its tip caught the light and