A Witch In Winter by Ruth Warburton

Author:Ruth Warburton [Ruth Warburton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781444904727
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2012-01-04T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It took a long time for me to fall asleep that night, in spite of my exhaustion. I lay and read until my eyes scratched with tiredness and the radio had finished the Shipping Forecast and Sailing By. When the reader announced close-down I knew it was time to turn out the lights and – hopefully – to sleep. It was still school the next day, in spite of everything.

So I turned out the lights, turned my pillow to the cool side, and lay staring into the blackness, my eyes playing tricks on me with small twinkling lights that existed only in my mind, or as an echo of my reading lamp.

I’d never get used to the darkness of Winter, I thought. In London there’d always been a faint orange glow around my window where the street-lights filtered through, no matter how dense the blackout blind. But here, night was dark. Completely dark, unless there was a moon. I could hear sounds though – not the muted roar of traffic that had always filled my room in London, but the sound of Dad snoring through the wall and the movement of small animals in the woods outside. The screech of an owl and the scream of the small creature it had just caught. The rustle of leaves, the crack of a twig, a gate swinging in the wind, very faint and far away.

I lay and dozed, not quite sleeping, but not far off.

Crack.

My heart thudded, loud in the silence. What was that? A crack, a definite loud crack, like someone stepping on a stick. Then, a scraping, stealthy rustle. My heart was pounding so hard that I put my hand up, as if to press it into silence.

Was it the crow again? There were so many of them around the house, more every day it seemed. They stalked across the lawn like hunched old men in mourning weeds, tapped on the windows, threw bones and shells down the chimneys in the middle of the night. I’d developed an irrational hatred of them and their bold, watchful malevolence.

Please, let it not be a crow, scrabbling into my room in the darkness of the night and stealthily creeping around, with its sharp beak and malignant black eyes.

I was still paralyzed when there was a knock, not at the door, but at the window. I leapt, stifling an involuntary scream with my sheets. For a long moment I sat, completely still apart from my trembling hands. But the next noise I heard stirred me into movement. The window, which I’d left ajar, was opening. I knew its distinctive creak anywhere. With shaking fingers I fumbled for the lamp and turned it on expecting, I don’t know – dark wings, black eyes, a cold black beak.

The room blazed. A bare foot and a leg, covered in blue denim, was appearing from under the curtain. I drew breath, ready to scream the scream of my life – and knocked over the lamp. I heard the bulb smash.

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