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

Fitz realized it was the silver tip of a staff or cane, hooked and gleaming. It advanced, stiffly prodding, inches from Clare’s face. She stared at it, redoubling her strength, trying to drive it back.

You. The man from the wood.

Suddenly everything changed. The wind roared through the house as the kitchen door swung open, creating a powerful draught. Fitz tasted salt on the air, mingled with the blood his front teeth had drawn from his lips. Clare fumbled on her feet, dropping almost to her knees. She fought to hold the chain as the front door began to shake, the cane swerving wildly like a pumping lever against the inner wall. Now from the back of the house a heavy tread sounded, beating like a drum against the loose floorboards as a man strode down the hallway. Fitz shrank into the darkness, scarcely tethered to the stairs, scarcely daring to look as the man’s body engulfed the light, filled the hallway, as he drove towards the door, reaching out for Clare.

It was Mr Ahmadi.

His strong hands hit the door palms flat, slapping against the oak in perfect percussive unison. The door cracked heavily against the trapped cane. Clare scrambled to her feet and, taking up a position beside her neighbour, she put her shoulder to the wood and heaved.

For an agonizing interval, the intruder seemed to withstand them. The cane swivelled slowly, prising against their combined, blunt weight and force.

Mr Ahmadi braced his foot, and said something Fitz couldn’t make out – something fast and commanding, his words as hard as hammers, but unintelligible, as if in another language. With a last push, he forced the door hard against the cane; as it suddenly withdrew, the heavy oak collapsed back into its frame.

‘Go,’ said Mr Ahmadi.

‘I will come for him,’ said the voice outside, barely audible over the rushing gale.

Those five words.

Fitz’s neck suddenly clamped shut. He struggled to breathe.

‘I will come again for my jewel.’

A massive chest of drawers stood at the foot of the stairs. Clare and Mr Ahmadi dragged it directly in front of the door. Mr Ahmadi spent a long while prodding and shifting it, until he seemed reluctantly convinced that it would hold against the door. Clare watched him silently. Beneath the light, seen from above, she looked much smaller than she was, and haggard. Fitz was used to thinking of her height and broad frame the way he thought about a lighthouse, or a sea cliff: strong, unshakeable, capable of withstanding anything. Winds, tides, storms broke on her, and she withstood them without a thought. Now, beside Mr Ahmadi, she seemed instead a little frail, uncertain of her stance as she settled and unsettled her feet in a suppressed agitation. Pulling breaths from his chest as he might a hook from a wound, Fitz tried not to look at her.

When he was satisfied with the position of the chest of drawers, Mr Ahmadi stood awkwardly in front of it, his hands at his sides. Fitz had retreated into shadow at the top of the stairs, silently inching his way back towards his own bedroom door, but he could still see Clare’s back, and Mr Ahmadi’s feet, and their voices carried easily across the wooden floors. His neck felt damp and cold, and he had started to tremble.

‘I have to thank you,’ said Clare.

‘You don’t have to,’ said Mr Ahmadi. ‘Any neighbour would have done the same. I was in my garden when I heard you shouting. Luckily I had my key to the gate and –’

‘Habi.’

He stopped.

‘The kitchen door was locked. I locked it myself.’

Fitz listened to the wind outside. It was gusting now in waves. He counted three heavy swells. Each of them broke across the house suddenly, with a roar, then flourished in a long and frittering tympany of tossing branches and trembling leaves.

‘It is very late,’ said Mr Ahmadi, ‘and the story I have to tell is a long one. It will be better to tell it tomorrow.’

‘Tell it now,’ said Clare.

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Then I must ask you to leave.’ Clare stood back against the wall, and held out her arm to direct Mr Ahmadi to the kitchen. Her voice had sounded severe; her gesture, straight and rigid as metal, was no less so. He passed in front of her, and Fitz heard them both walk quietly to the back door. Nothing further was said, but from the top of the stairs he heard each minute click as Clare shut and locked the door behind her neighbour, and then slid the heavy bolt into place – a bolt they had never, so far as he could remember, used before.

Fitz stole back into his room then, and from his window watched Mr Ahmadi walk the length of the gravel path that ran alongside their cottage garden – the path that connected his own garden gate to the little lane in front of their house. At the gate Mr Ahmadi paused, and he stood there for several minutes, his hand on the gatepost and his head, partly turned, cocked to the wind, as if he were listening. Over the wind, back on the other side of the house, came the sound of a train passing in the night. As it faded, Mr Ahmadi opened the gate, turned to lock it from the other side, and then disappeared beyond the hedge.

Fitz slipped back into his bed, never taking his eyes off the window. After a few minutes, across the trees and the hedge and the garden that lay in its way, the faint gleam of a light illuminated the sliding beads of water where they had begun to run in spasms again down the glass. Fitz thought of Mr Ahmadi standing at his lighted window, watching over the garden, surveying the tossing trees and the tides of wind where they flooded and ebbed under the shifting clouds. Again and again his thoughts traced the steady beam of light that connected their windows, running over it with