Eight Days of Luke. Diana Wynne Jones

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CHAPTER THREE Luke

      It was like an earthquake. It is a horrible feeling to have caused an earthquake. The wavering and heaving were to some extent under David’s feet, and the compost shifted and quivered like quicksand. That would have been enough to send David leaping down from it. But he could see that the wavering and heaving was stronger near the wall. He knew the wall was going to come down and that it was his fault. He tried to run towards it.

      “No, no!” he said. “Stop it! I didn’t mean it!”

      The solid ground came up in ripples under his feet and made him stumble. In front of him, the wall rippled too. He could hear the bricks grinding as they swayed up and down. The top of the wall made a crazy outline against the hot blue sky, wagging up and down, with bricks coming loose and lifting, then banging back into place again, and mortar spurting from between them. After that, there was so much dust and mortar that he could hardly see the wall, and he had to hold his arm over his head against the rubble raining down on him. The heaving underfoot went fiercely on. The wall could take no more and fell, backwards from David, in three slow, sulky bangs, into the garden behind Uncle Bernard’s, and set loose even more dust as it went.

      The next second, the gravel was covered with angry orange flames, pale and vicious-looking in the sun and dust. David backed out from them desperately, until his shoulders hit the hedge and held him up. But the flames had gone by then. They just flared through the dust as if someone had dropped a match in a pool of petrol, and then went out. David was sure his curse had punctured a gas-main. He looked the heaving ground over hurriedly, to try and locate the leak before going to confess and get help.

      He saw a round thing, something like a pipe and at least as thick as his arm, writhing among the rubble, and he thought it was a gas-pipe. It was covered with an ugly mosaic pattern which glittered in the sun. There were others, too, further off, and if David had not known they were gas-pipes, he would have sworn they were snakes – snakes somehow swimming in the rippling ground, as if it were water.

      Then the thing nearest David surfaced, shaking clattering small stones off its blunt head, and saw David. It reared up as tall as he was, hissing furiously. David found himself face to face with a very large snake indeed, with a head as flat as Mrs Thirsk’s feet, a forked flicking tongue and yellow eyes which seemed to be made of skin. He could see its fangs, and the poison sacs at the top of them, and he was sure there was poison dripping from those fangs.

      David lost his head. He made a frantic sideways dash along the hedge and seized the spade from the compost. The snake struck after him and missed. It was still half under the gravel, which hampered its movements, fortunately for David and the ground was not heaving so much now. David turned round with the spade in both hands, and hit the snake a hearty smack with it. He did not kill it, but he made it recoil. So he hit it again. Meanwhile, at least two other snakes were moving towards him, slowly and with difficulty, as if the ground were getting harder every second. David hit the first snake again, and then aimed a swipe at the next two, to discourage them. But the first snake reared up again as he did so and he had to concentrate on that.

      He would never have managed alone. But, while David beat away at the first snake, he heard somebody else busily battering at a snake in the distance. There was so much dust and confusion still, that he never saw the person clearly while the battle lasted. He assumed it was Cousin Ronald at first. Then he caught glimpses of a shape much taller and thinner than Cousin Ronald’s and he thought it must be Aunt Dot. But he had little time to think. The ground was hardening all the time and he simply hammered the snakes back into it. If he hit them often enough, he discovered, they went back under the gravel and stayed there. The real trouble was to do it before the next snake could reach him, and that was where the other person helped. It was not until David had smacked the last length of the last snake well and truly into the earth that he realised this person was a complete stranger.

      They stood looking at one another in the settling dust, David leaning on the spade and the stranger propped on the hoe he must have fetched from the shed beyond the hedge. David was shaking all over. The stranger was panting rather, but not in the least upset. He looked jaunty. He even laughed a little, as if snakes were a bit of a joke. He was not as tall as David had thought – only about David’s height – and he seemed a year or so older than David.

      “Thanks,” David said to him gratefully.

      “Thank you,” replied the stranger, jauntily smiling. “I’m Luke. Who are you?”

      “David Allard,” said David. “I live in that house there. Do you—?” He meant to ask if Luke lived in the house beyond the broken wall, but he turned to point as he said it and after that he could think of nothing but what a hideous mess it was. The wall was in three long heaps – an utter ruin, lying on the neatly mown grass of the neat and respectable orchard belonging to the neat and respectable house David could just see down among the trees. David thought it was a miracle that nobody had come out of that house – or Uncle Bernard’s – with loud shouts of fury. Or not yet. “Oh dear,” David said miserably.

      “A bit of a ruin, isn’t it?” Luke agreed.

      “Yes, and I did it,” David said. “I shall get into trouble.” Which was putting it mildly, he thought.

      Luke СКАЧАТЬ