A Dark Dividing by Sarah Rayne Read Free Book Online Page A

fey.’
    ‘What’s fey?’
    ‘It means you might know what other people are thinking.’ She smiled at Simone, but Simone saw that when Mother drew the curtains that evening, she stood at the window for a long time looking out into the street.

    Mother found a house in the Welsh Marches quite soon afterwards, in a place called Weston Fferna.
    ‘Nearly but not quite Wales,’ she said as they drove along the roads, with the car piled high with suitcases and records and china, and things Mother said the removal van could not be trusted with. ‘It’s lovely countryside, isn’t it? This was a good idea of yours, Sim; I think we’ll like it here.’
    Simone hoped so too. She had not seen the house that Mother had found for them to live in, because Mother mostly did the house-hunting by herself, but she had seen photographs and it looked pretty nice.
    ‘And we’ll be together, Simone… We’ll really be together at last…’
    Simone sat very still in the car, because the little girl’s voice in her mind was much stronger and it felt much closer than ever before. It was pretty spooky to think she might get to meet her at last, but it was quite exciting as well. I might find out who she really is, and how she gets inside my head and then I might not be so frightened of her, thought Simone hopefully.
    They turned off the main road and went down a windy little lane, and that was when Simone looked across at the fields on their left. There were lots of fields, mostly with sheep in them, and lots of trees, and there were gorgeous smudgy mountains straight ahead. Here and there was a farmhouse or a little group of cottages or a church spire.
    And across the fields, set a bit above the road and frowning down at the cars, was an old, old house. Simone glanced up at it, and instantly felt as if somebody had punched her stomach.
    The house. The black stone house where the little girl lived. The place of clanging doors that were locked every night at exactly the same time, and of angry despairing screams. The place where you ate your meals at long scrubbed-top tables, and where there were sour smells of despair and loneliness, and where the rooms smelled of sick and dirt and some of the people smelled of sick and dirt as well.
    ‘Are you all right, Sim?’ This was Mother, not looking at her, concentrating on the unfamiliar road but picking up that there might be something wrong in the way Mother sometimes did pick up other people’s thoughts. ‘You’re not feeling car-sick, are you? We’re almost there now.’
    ‘I’m, um, OK.’ Simone was not OK, of course. But she said, ‘I’m just looking at the old houses and things on the road.’ She twisted round in the front of the car, trying to see through the rear window, watching the black house get smaller and smaller as they drove away from it. There was no mistake; Simone knew exactly what the house looked like; she knew about the door at the centre like a square grinning mouth, and the straggly little bits at the back which were called sculleries and the underground rooms where people were sometimes shut away.
    She even knew about the old trees that grew around the house, because the little girl had told her about them. She had said to Simone that they were bad old trees: if you looked at them for long enough you saw wicked faces in the trunk: horrid evil faces that looked as if they were a thousand years old, and that stared at you out of withered eyes. Wizard oaks, they were called. There was a poem about them; it told how on some nights the evil old wizard woke up and parted the branches, and peered into the room to see if there were any little children he could snatch up and carry away.
    Simone stared and stared at the house. It was scary to find it like this, all by itself in the middle of fields, but the really scary part was that even from here—even with Mother’s little car bowling smartly along the road—she could see that the house was a very old crumbly