The Silver Child by Cliff McNish

Author:Cliff McNish [McNish, Cliff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781444004182
Publisher: Cliff McNish
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

the hiss of rain

THOMAS

‘Will you two just shut up your racket!’

The twins had been driving me crazy all evening, scratching the door, wanting to be let out – but I wasn’t about to go blundering around in Coldharbour during the middle of a storm. I couldn’t calm them down, though. Emily was tetchy; Freda simply would not shut up. Around midnight, both stopped arguing with me altogether and simply ran around the shack, going berserk, completely freaking out.

‘Just stop it!’ I said. ‘I know you want to go out, but not in this storm!’

‘Let uz go!’ Emily cried.

‘Open the door, Toms!’ Freda wailed, slapping my leg.

‘Don’t be crazy!’ I told her. ‘You’ll catch your deaths if you go out in this! Just calm down and tell me what’s wrong!’

‘There’s another special one of ’em out there!’

‘Another what?’

‘Dunno. Dunno. Let’s see!’

The wind hurled rain into the shack. There was no drainage in Coldharbour, nowhere for the water hitting the summer-baked soil to go. Looking through a crack in one of our walls, I could see puddles already turning into lakes big enough to drown in. The twins had given up trying to persuade me. They yanked at the door.

‘We’ll go out in the morning!’ I told them. ‘Be reasonable! Even if someone’s out there, we’ll never find them in this.’

‘Now! Now!’

‘The morning!’

Then I heard Walter, banging on the roof. He’d never wanted to come in before, but I suppose even he needed to take shelter from a storm this bad. I held the twins back, but as soon as I opened the door they wriggled past and were out and running.

‘Catch hold, Walter!’ I yelled, but he simply fell in alongside them, his big arms swinging as the twins scuttled northwards.

‘Go on, then!’ I shouted. ‘If you’re mad enough to go out there …’ Cursing them, I went back inside. A moment later Walter was knocking politely on the door. When I didn’t answer he pushed it open with his finger, reached in an arm and plucked me up.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I demanded, astonished.

‘W-w-w-w-we gotta g-go, Tommy,’ he said apologetically. ‘I g-got the car door!’ He held it over my head, as if that made everything OK.

‘Put me down!’ I growled. ‘You should be trying to stop the twins! Who knows what’ll happen if they go wandering about in this!’

But something in Walter’s expression made me put on a jacket. It was one Emily had found a few weeks earlier. Meant to be waterproof, but it was obviously some cheap rubbish that would leak straight away.

Walter smiled, very satisfied, helping with the hood.

‘You look g-good in that,’ he said, trying to get on the right side of me.

‘You great twerp,’ I said. ‘Get that door over my head!’

Grinning, Walter plonked me onto his shoulders. He steadied me there with one hand and held the car door at a good angle to the wind. ‘P-perfect!’ he said.

‘I’ll give you perfect!’ I blasted – and then we were off.

We were off!

‘Whoop! Whoop!’ the twins were going, yelping and singing their rhymes.

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