Black Maria. Diana Wynne Jones

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      “Aunt Maria will be able to plot our course exactly at this rate,” I said. “Or Elaine will. How many more of them?”

      “Nine,” said Chris. “She talks about thirteen Mrs Urs. I read a book and counted while she was talking yesterday.”

      “Only if you count Miss Phelps and Lavinia too,” I said. “What did Miss Phelps say to upset her? Did she tell you?”

      “No. Unless it was ‘Stop that boring yakking,’” Chris said. “Let’s get on a bus and get out of this place.”

      But the buses don’t start until next month. We went to the railway station and asked. A porter in big rubber boots told us it was out of season, but we could get a train to Aytham Junction, and it turned out that we hadn’t got enough money for that. So we walked out along the path that started by the station car park, through brown ploughed fields to the woods.

      “I think it was the day after that I noticed mud on his robes,” Chris said, looking at the ploughed earth. He kept talking about the ghost like that, in snatches. “And the light seems to come with him. I experimented. I went to bed without a candle last night and I could hardly see to find the bed.”

      “Do you wake up each time?” I said.

      “The first two nights. Last night I stayed awake to see if I could catch him appearing.” Chris yawned. “I heard the clock strike three and then I must have dropped off. He was just there suddenly, and I heard four strike around the time he faded out.”

      We had lunch in the woods. They were good, lots of little trees all bent the same way by the sea wind. Their trunks grow in twists from all the bending they get. It gives the wood a goblin sort of look, but as soon as you are among the goblin trees you can’t see any open land outside. We nearly got lost later because of that.

      “But what’s the ghost looking for?” I said. I know that was during lunch because I could hear the twisted trees creaking while I said it, and I remember dead leaves under my knees, clean and cold as an animal’s nose.

      “I’d love to know,” Chris said. “I’ve looked all along the books in that wall. I took them out and looked behind them, in case the ghost hadn’t the strength to move them, but it’s just wall behind them.”

      “Perhaps it’s a book?” I suggested. “Are any of them A History of Hauntings, or maybe Dead Men of Cranbury, to give you a clue who he is?”

      “No way!” said Chris. “The Works of Balzac, The Works of Scott, Ruskin’s Writings and Collected Works of Joseph Conrad.” He thought a bit and the trees creaked a bit, and then he said, “I think the ghost brings rather awful dreams, but I can’t remember what they are.”

      “How can you like him then?” I cried out, shuddering.

      “Because the dreams are not his fault,” Chris said. “You’d know if you saw him. You’d be sorry for him. You’re the soft-hearted one, not me.”

      I do feel quite sorry for the ghost anyway, not being able to lie quiet because he’d lost something, and having to get up out of his grave every night to hunt for it. I wondered how long he’d been doing it. I asked Chris if he could tell from the ghost’s clothes how long ago he died, but Chris said he never saw them clearly enough.

      The creaking of the trees was making me shudder by then. I couldn’t finish my lunch – Mum always gives you far too much anyway. Chris said he was blowed if he was going to cart a bag full of half-eaten pork pie about and I hate carrying carrier bags. So Chris put some of the cake in his pocket for later and we pushed the bag under the twisted roots of the nearest tree. Litter fiends, we are. The wood was wonderfully clear and airy, with a fresh mossy smell to it. It made it seem cleaner still that there were no leaves on the bent branches – barely even buds. We both felt ashamed of leaving the bag and made jokes about it. Chris said a passing badger would be grateful for the pork pie.

      It was after that that we got lost. The wood went steeply up and steeply down. We never saw the fields, or even the sea, and we didn’t know where we were until I realised that the wind always came in from the sea. So in order to find Cranbury again we had to face into the wind. We might have been wandering all night if we hadn’t done that. I said it was a witch-wood trying to keep us for ever. Chris said, “Don’t be silly!” But I think he was quite scared too: it was all so empty and twisted.

      Anyway, I think what we must have done was to go right up the valley behind Cranbury and then along the hill on the other side. When we finally came steeply down and saw Cranbury below us, we were right on the opposite hill from Cranbury Head, and Cranbury was looking like half-circles of doll’s houses arranged round a grey misty nothing that was the sea.

      I thought it looked quite pretty from there. Chris said, “How on earth did we cross the railway? It comes right through the valley.”

      I don’t know how we did, but we had. We could see the railway below us too. The last big house in Cranbury was half-hidden by the hill we were on, quite near the railway. We took it as a landmark and went down straight towards it. By this time it was just beginning to be evening, not dark yet, but sort of quietly dimming so that everything was pale and chilly. I kept telling myself this was why everything felt so strange. There was a steep field first of very wet grass. The wind had dropped. The big house was all among trees, but we thought there must be a road beyond it, so we climbed a sort of mound-thing at the bottom of the field to see where the road was. The mound was all grown over with whippy little bushes that were budding big pale buds and there were little trampled paths leading in and out all over. I remember thinking that it looked a good place to play in. Children obviously played here. Then we got to the top of the hill and we could see the children.

      They were in the garden of the big house. It was a boring red-brick house that looked as if it might be a school. The garden, which we could look down into across a wall, was a boring school-type garden, too, just grass and round beds with evergreens in them. The children were all playing in it, very quietly and sedately. It was unnatural. I mean, how can forty kids make almost no noise at all? The ones who were playing never shouted once. Most of them were just walking about, in rows of four or five. If they were girls, they walked arm in arm. The boys just strolled in a line. And they all looked alike. They weren’t alike. All the girls had different little plaid dresses on, and all the boys had different coloured sweaters. Some had fair hair, some brown hair, and four or five of the kids were black. Their faces weren’t the same. But they were, if you see what I mean. They all moved the same way and had the same expressions on their different faces. We stared. We were both amazed.

      “They’re clones,” said Chris. “They have to be.”

      “But wouldn’t clones be like twins?” I said.

      “They’re part of a secret experiment to make clones look different,” Chris said. “They’ve managed to make their bodies not look alike, but their minds are still the same. You can see they are.”

      It was one of those jokes you almost mean. I wished Chris hadn’t said it. I didn’t think the children could hear him from where we were, but a man came up beside me from the bushes while Chris was talking, and I knew the man could hear. Luckily at that moment, a lady, dressed a bit like a nurse, came out into the garden.

      “Come along, children,” she called. “It’s getting cold and dark. Inside, all of you.”

      The lady was one of the СКАЧАТЬ