The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper

Author:Susan Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

. . . until he woke, in the dim morning room with a glimmer of light creeping round the dark square of the curtained window, and saw and heard nothing for an enchanted expectant space, because all his senses were concentrated on the weighty feel, over and around his blanketed feet, of strange bumps and corners and shapes that had not been there when he fell asleep. And it was Christmas Day.

• Christmas Day • When he knelt beside the Christmas tree and pulled off the gay paper wrapping from the giant box labelled “Will,” the first thing he discovered was that it was not a box at all, but a wooden crate. A Christmas choir warbled distant and joyful from the radio in the kitchen; it was the after-Christmas-stocking, before-breakfast gathering of the family, when each member opened just one of his “tree presents.” The rest of the bright pile would lie there until after dinner, happily tantalising.

Will, being the youngest, had the first turn. He had made a beeline for the box, partly because it was so impressively large and partly because he suspected it came from Stephen. He found that someone had taken the nails out of the wooden lid, so that he could open it easily.

“Robin pulled out the nails, and Bar and I put the paper on,” said Mary at his shoulder, all agog. “But we didn’t look inside. Come on, Will, come on.”

He took off the lid. “It’s full of dead leaves! Or reeds or something.”

“Palm leaves,” said his father, looking. “For packing, I suppose. Mind your fingers, they can have sharp edges.”

Will tugged out handfuls of the rustling fronds, until the first hard shape of something began to show. It was a thin strange curving shape, brown, smooth, like a branch; it seemed to be made of a hard kind of papier-mâché. It was an antler, like and yet not like the antler of a deer. Will paused suddenly. A strong and totally unexpected feeling had leapt out at him when he touched the antler. It was not a feeling he had ever had in the presence of the family before; it was the mixture of excitement, security and delight that came over him whenever he was with one of the Old Ones.

He saw an envelope poking out of the packing beside the antler and opened it. That paper bore the neat letterhead of Stephen’s ship.

Dear Will:

Happy birthday. Happy Christmas. I always swore never to combine the two, didn’t I? And here I am doing it. Let me tell you why. I don’t know whether you’ll understand, specially after you see what the present is. But perhaps you will. You’ve always been a bit different from everybody else. I don’t mean daft! Just different.

It was like this. I was in the oldest part of Kingston one day during carnival. Carnival in these islands is a very special time — great fun, with echoes going back a long, long way. Anyway I got mixed

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