Soul Stealer Read Online Free

“and that, I assume,
     is your musically inclined brother, Timothy?”
    “Yes,” Pip confirmed.
    As the teacher spoke, Pip felt a faint tremblingagainst her chest, as if a mobile phone was going off against her skin. She touched the pendant through the material of her
     shirt. It was quivering.
    Mr. Yoland entered Tim’s name in the register and, with an old-fashioned brass and wood scientific ruler, drew several short
     lines and some ditto marks beside it. Pip noticed how precise and neat his writing appeared. The ink in his pen was sepia,
     the color of old documents or faded photographs.
    As Pip turned to go back to her stool, she found the trembling ceased but the flame she had seen in Mr. Yoland’s eye remained
     in her own, the shifting image temporarily burned into her retina. At the same time, a faint perfume seemed to come from the
     teacher as if he was wearing a strong aftershave scented with thyme and lemon blossom.
    When the registration process was finished, course timetables and maps of the school were handed out. The class was then dismissed
     to find the rooms in which they would be taught.
    It was a large school, but well ordered. All the subject rooms were labeled — even the custodian’s office and store, full
     of mops, industrial vacuum cleaners, buckets and tins of polish bore a sign reading
Janitor.
Some of the classrooms were big: the geography room had a massive globe hanging from the ceiling, while the history room
     had cabinets full of displays of stone tools and old bottles with diagrams and pictures of famous battles hanging on the walls.
     In the IT room were ranks of PCs and printers. The design and technology workshops contained planing machines, a circular
     saw and a bandsaw,wood and metal-turning lathes, a forge and several anvils — and an old Mini Metro in pieces. The art room had rows of easels,
     pottery wheels and a kiln for firing clay. The biology laboratory was lined with racks and shelves of preserved specimens
     in jars — pickled frogs and newts, a dissected chicken, a cow’s head that had been sliced in half lengthways so that one could
     see the interior. There were even some cows’ eyes in one jar that stared out disconcertingly from within a murky liquid.
    The gymnasium was particularly impressive: it contained a wide range of equipment from blue crash mats to indoor cricket nets,
     climbing bars and ropes, parallel bars, benches, a trampoline and several vaulting horses.
    At break time, Pip and Tim followed all the other pupils out into the playground. Most of the new Year Seven pupils stuck
     together in a large mass, talking to friends whom they had known in their junior schools but, as Pip and Tim knew no one,
     they kept themselves to themselves. Scrotton, they noticed, also tended not to mix.
    “What do you reckon to the place?” Pip asked her brother.
    “Pretty impressive,” Tim replied.
    “And what do you think of Mr. Yoland?” she continued. “I bet, when he started teaching, they still caned you and he wore a
     black gown like some emaciated Batman.”
    “And I bet,” Tim added, “he’s not someone to mess with, either.”
    Shortly before the bell went for them to return to their classroom, the boy Scrotton approached again, sidling up to them
     with an irritating smirk on his face.
    “You any good at chemistry?” he asked Tim forth-rightly.
    “No, not really,” Tim admitted. “I’ve never done it before and neither’s my sister. We didn’t have real science courses in
     junior school.”
    “Huh! I am,” Scrotton said dismissively, grunting and strutting off, pushing another boy out of his way as he went.
    As he walked away, Pip said quietly, “He smells a bit.”
    “Only a bit!” Tim agreed. “It’s definitely time he shook hands with Mr. Soap.”
    “And became acquainted with Mrs. Toothpaste,” Pip added, “but it’s not just BO or bad breath,” she went on. “He smells sort
     of…” She searched for an apt word,