Amber’s Secret

скачать книгу бесплатно


From on top of the clock, William gave a pitiful little squeak. He wanted to come down again. He liked playing in Sally’s hair, he liked making nests in it. Sally looked up. ‘You’ll just have to wait,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m concentrating on this.’

But William took no notice. He had discovered that it was much easier to run up things than to slither down them and Sally’s nice thick hair spelt safety. To William it was like the safety blanket held out by firemen for someone stuck on the top of a burning building. He bunched himself up into a tight white ball and took an almighty leap.

‘What the— oh no— help. . .!’ The shock of William landing on her head sent Sally grabbing at the clock. She dropped the key and the stool tipped over and crashed on to the floor and she was left hanging on to the clock by her fingertips, clutching at the polished wooden columns that held up the beautifully carved face. She could hear both the weights bumping about very heavily and now Grandfather seemed to have come to life. He had started to move forwards with a terrifying, lurching motion.

There was a strange scraping noise, like a big, obstinate rusty nail being pulled out of something, and the clock was coming away from the wall – it was falling over! It had been screwed to the wall by Dad, but now—

Sally screamed, threw herself to one side, and landed in a heap on the far side of the hall as the clock toppled right over and hit the floor with the most enormous crash, followed by all kinds of weird noises. As she lay on the carpet, quite unable to move for shock and terror, there was a chinking noise, then a lot of funny bonging sounds, then the steady tinkle of glass.

Then, after all the noises, an awful silence fell. Sally shut her eyes tight, she didn’t want to look. But as she lay on the carpet she could hear wheezy, creaky sounds coming from the direction of the clock. It was like a very old person settling down to sleep.

She listened, thinking about Grandfather Bell, who had lived until he was one hundred and one years old. Grandfather Clock was even older, and the thing Mum loved best after Dad, Alan and Sally.

At last, she made herself get up from the carpet. She made herself walk across the hall. She made herself look at the clock. And when Sally saw what had happened, she really did burst into tears and once she had started to cry she felt she would never stop.

Grandfather’s ‘trunk’, the case that held the pendulum and the weights, had split into two pieces. The wooden columns which had risen up on each side of the glass door, holding up the roof of the clock with its two wooden roses, and its pointy carvings, were broken into tiny little bits, and all the other carvings seemed to have vanished completely. It was as if some evil magician had waved a magic wand and turned them into a heap of rubble.

All round the wreckage were pieces of fine glass. The pendulum must have flown out of Grandfather’s insides as he crashed down because the springy piece of metal, stuck on to the shiny round thing that ticked steadily to and fro, was all twisted and bent. Both the weights lay on the carpet and all round them were tiny pieces of wood, pieces smaller than matchsticks.

Only when Sally’s eyes had taken all this in did she pluck up the courage to pull the face of the clock out of the wreckage so that she could look at Grandfather’s face. And when she looked she turned away almost at once. What had happened to it was too awful to see.

The fingers of the clock, once so beautiful, were bent double like hairpins and one had snapped right in two. The moon face still looked out at her, in its kindly way, but the four little girls were all scratched and spoiled. Sharp pieces of glass and metal must have been hurled against them in the fall. They were almost unrecognisable now; in fact they were more or less blobs again.

Sally turned her back on it all and sat down on the carpet, staring dumbly at the front door. She sat and stared for a very long time. The awful thing was that it felt such an ordinary day. Out in the street she could hear a little child talking to its mother. Then someone rode past on a bicycle, ringing a bell, and the church clock down the road chimed five. At the same moment Mrs Spinks Next Door banged three times on the wall. This meant ‘Tea Time, Sally Bell’, – it was a signal. It meant ‘Lock up carefully and come back’. And it meant immediately. Mrs Spinks was strict about meal times.

Slowly, Sally went over to the little side window where people on the front door step could see into the hall. She pulled the curtains across, making everything dark. Nobody could look into their house now, nobody could see the remains of Grandfather, scattered all over the carpet. She went outside, pulled the front door shut and pushed her way through the dusty privet hedge to Mrs Spinks’s house.

Only when she looked down at her plate and saw that it was cheese on toast for tea, did Sally remember William, who liked cheese very much, at any meal.