The Beast. Barry Hutchison
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Название: The Beast
Автор: Barry Hutchison
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Детская проза
isbn: 9780007455393
isbn:
I stared down at the shape in the sugar. A shape that could only be described as an enormous, three-toed footprint. ‘You know,’ I whispered, ‘I might just take you up on that.’
‘Should we search the rest of the house?’ Ameena asked. She didn’t take her eyes from the print. It was about forty centimetres in length, and the same again at its widest point, up near the three saucer-sized toeprints.
‘Probably,’ I said, though I doubt I sounded convinced.
‘Thought you’d say that.’ Ameena gave a grim nod, then swept the sugar aside with her foot. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Mrs Angelo’s house was laid out differently to mine, even though they were on the same block. The stairs in my house led up from the living room, but in Mrs Angelo’s they started in the hall. Two steps, then a sharp left turn and more stairs leading to the upper floor.
The stairway was narrow, but neither of us felt like pushing ahead. Flicking on the light, we made our way up, shoulder to shoulder, side by side. Each step brought a groan of protest from the floorboard beneath us. If anything was up there, it would already know we were coming.
‘Anyone home?’ The sound of Ameena’s voice in the cramped space made me jump.
‘Sssssh!’ I hissed.
‘Why?’
‘Um, well, giant footprint,’ I whispered. ‘Remember?’
‘Um, well, narrow staircase,’ she said.
‘So?’
She gave a sigh, then spoke slowly, as if explaining to a child. ‘Big thing no fit up small stairs.’
I thought about this for a moment. The footprint we saw suggested an enormous creature. Rhino-sized, maybe bigger. A rhino couldn’t fit up these stairs in a million years. Not even with someone pushing it really hard from behind.
‘Anyway, we don’t even know if it was a footprint,’ she said.
‘Oh, it was,’ I nodded. ‘It was definitely a footprint.’
We were almost at the top of the stairs now and began to creep even more slowly. ‘How do you know?’
‘Because I don’t want it to be a footprint,’ I said. ‘Because the worst possible thing it could be is the scary big footprint of something that wants to kill us. And the worst possible things keep happening to me lately.’ I took a deep breath, stopping my rant before it became too loud. ‘I know it’s a footprint, because with my recent luck, it couldn’t be anything else.’
She shrugged. ‘Fair point. But it still couldn’t fit up the stairs.’
We stepped on to an upper landing awash with the smells of old lady. Talcum powder. Lavender. Something that could’ve been cabbage. As I breathed them in, my memories of Mrs Angelo became pin-sharp in my mind. I remembered my last meeting with her, chatting to her for a few seconds on Christmas Eve as I’d delivered her card.
Mum was always late writing Christmas cards, but even for her, 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve was cutting it fine. I’d planned to drop the card through the letterbox and move on, but Mrs Angelo had clocked me coming up the path and had come to the door to talk to me.
She was the last person I’d seen before Christmas Day. Before Mumbles. Before any of this had started. Mrs Angelo – and her smell – were normality. They represented the last moments of my old life, a life where the only things I had to worry about were my mum’s cooking and a regular hammering from school bully, Billy Gibb. A life I’d go back to in a heartbeat.
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