VIII Read Online Free Page A

terrible thick feeling to the flesh beneath the clothes, like a lump of cold meat.
    Scrambling up, I lurch back across the room until I bang into one of the bedposts. I’ve got Raggy rammed against my mouth; I can taste vomit. I swallow, breathing hard. My heart’s hammering, but in the room there’s silence. Nothing moves.
    What should I do? Wait till Compton comes and finds me, quivering here like a hunted hare?
    I make myself walk to the trunk, though I keep my focus to one side of it; I can’t bear to look at it directly. Slowly, slowly, my fingers reach down to the black velvet. Summoning all my courage, I watch them as they touch it. And freeze, confused. Then I spread my fingers and grab. The velvet crumples in my hand. It is one of my doublets – it is empty.
    I am scrabbling now, clutching fistfuls of cloth and flinging them out of the trunk. Nothing, nothing, nothing – except the clothes and, beneath them, the bare wooden floor of the box. The body is not there.
    “What on earth are you doing?”
    Compton is standing in the open doorway, staring at me. He’s holding a hat-case in one hand and one of my best daggers and a sword-belt in the other.
    I sit back on my heels, panting, and wipe a hand across my mouth. Clothes are strewn everywhere. I say, “I don’t know.”

IV
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    “If you see something that isn’t really there…” I say slowly, “does it mean something’s wrong with you? In the head?” I can’t bring myself to say the word ‘mad’.
    My mother looks down at me, her eyes hidden in shadow. The room is dark, the fire damped for the night, one lonely candle casting a pool of yellow light across my pillows. I’m lying under the covers, Raggy hidden out of sight. My mother’s shadow stretches itself across the floor and runs straight up the wall, like spilt ink running the wrong way.
    She’s standing near the end of the bed. For a long moment she doesn’t move or speak, then she comes closer, frowning a little, and perches on the edge of the quilt. She says, “If you see what kind of thing, Hal?”
    I say, “Oh, anything.” I turn my head away, reach one hand up to the nearest bedpost, and trace over its pattern. “You know, like in stories.”
    On the quilt under my other hand there’s a book. My mother gently slips it from my grasp, and opens it to look atthe title page. “Well… in this story Galahad sees a vision of the Holy Grail before he really finds it, doesn’t he? Have you got to that bit? And stories of saints’ lives often mention visions, too.”
    “And no one thought they were mad for seeing things? The saints, I mean?”
    My mother smiles. “No, of course not. God was speaking to them. They were blessed. Though the message He gave was not always easy to hear, I suppose.” She closes the book carefully, fastens its silver clasps and moves into the shadows to stow it in a box on a shelf. She says, “Sweetheart. Why all the questions about seeing things?”
    “No reason. I was just wondering.”
    I haven’t spoken to anyone about what happened this morning. Not even Compton. I told him the clothes were everywhere because I’d got frustrated looking for my book. At Mass I prayed about it, though. Begged God not to let this be the first sign of some awful brain disease.
    My mother moves round the bed, tugging shut the curtain at the far side, and the one at the foot. Some of the lining, she notices, is moth-eaten. As she tuts over it, I think: If my vision of that body – that dead boy – in the trunk was God’s way of speaking to me, what could He possibly have been saying?
    That this is my future: the rebels will defeat my father and make someone else king, and I will be murdered and put in a trunk?
    I sit bolt upright as my mother pulls the last curtain half-shut . I blurt, “Does this place scare you?”
    Her pale eyes widen. “No. Why should it?” Gently, she lays me down again. “It’s old. A bit fusty. It