The Advent Calendar Read Online Free Page A

a safe. She hesitated just for a moment with her finger above the figure 4, remembering what had happened yesterday. Should she or shouldn’t she – especially without Sleeping Sam? Then the next instant she remembered how useless he’d been in the dark and pressed the number.
    There was a distant, echoing, grating sound, as if huge hangar doors were being cranked open. Alice kept her eyes on the new door. Sure enough it was opening very slowly from the bottom, rolling up like the garage at her old house. Out of the gap at the bottom of the door came wisps of something like very thick fog. As the door opened wider, it poured out faster, filling the room in a matter of seconds. It was clammy and cold. Alice held up her hand in front of her face and began to feel afraid. She could see about a metre – that was all. She turned around. The light was changing somehow to an outdoor kind of light on a damp winter morning. She bent down to touch the ground: instead of living-room carpet there was moist earth. What had she done?
    Just to her right Alice glimpsed a familiar shape, hunched up on the ground, shivering and rubbing his eyes. Sam! What was he doing here? Waking up – that was clear but only very slowly.
    ‘Sam! Sam!’ She shook his shoulder. ‘Sam! Wake up. It’s happened again. The calendar. The second door.’
    In an instant, Sam was wide awake, staring round, mouth open. The fog cleared, carried away on the morning wind. They were standing on a broad, flat plain just in front of an enormous building stretching away as far as the eye could see in every direction. Think of the biggest aircraft hangar you have ever seen, then try and imagine it’s the size of four football pitches, then eight, then double it again.
    Alice and Sam were still standing in front of the door from the Advent Calendar only now it was as high as a three-storey building. Inside the door, from within the hangar, came a deep roaring and choking sound like a thousand tractors. The ground began to shake. The smell of the engine fumes reached them a second or so after the sound and then, coming through the mist, they saw the barrel of an enormous tank.
    Sam drew Alice back a little away from the door. The tank was at the head of an enormous procession of vehicles, six or seven abreast. Sam said later it reminded him of the great parades of armaments from the old newsreels – except that the weaponry was from every different age and empire. There were ancient canons and armoured cars, huge missiles towed by tractors, jet fighters and massive futuristic bombers, chariots and submarines. Among the larger fighting vehicles were huge wagons filled with guns and knives, armour, shields and helmets, bows and arrows, decorated shields, muskets, landmines and hand grenades. Other vehicles carried spy satellites and robots and weapons which seemed to have come straight out of Doctor Who.
    Every single weapon invented by humankind was there: the whole inventory of destruction and despair: widow-makers; limb-renders; city-slayers all in one procession, a river of death. Alice looked closely: there were no people in the vehicles – they drove themselves, all in perfect timing, all in the same direction.
    ‘Come and see what happens next,’ said a voice in her ear, shouting above the noise. ‘It’s really rather good.’
    Turning around Alice and Sam saw the oldest people they had ever set eyes on: a man and a woman standing a little way back. The man’s fine grey hair and beard reached his waist. He wore a brown robe with a hood, tied with a rope girdle, and carried only a staff. He was about as tall as Sam and not at all stooped. His skin was old, dark brown and leathery as if he had spent hundreds of years in the hot sun. He wore a pair of ancient sandals: no socks, thought Alice, for some reason. He smelled just like a fusty old library, Sam thought: full of wisdom from the years.
    His companion was shorter and stooped a little. She was dressed in