Boy in the Tower by Polly Ho-Yen Read Free Book Online

the fallen buildings.
    I’m not sure what it used to be because it had been empty for quite a long time, even before it fell. It was big and had crumbling red bricks and large windows with lots of panes that had been smashed.
    Now that it had gone, it was a massive empty space. The police had put up lots of red-and-white tape all around it and we could see a couple of men with yellow hard hats on who were having a look at some of the rubble left on the ground.
    ‘Let’s keep going,’ I said, and I tugged at Gaia’s arm. We kept walking and then we passed the old pub, the first building that had fallen.
    Gaia stopped to look but I kept walking, so she had to run to catch up with me.
    ‘Did you notice . . .’ Gaia started. I waited but she didn’t carry on.
    ‘What?’ I asked.
    ‘Did you notice something funny—’ Again, she stopped herself. She looked behind her to where the pub once stood. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘What?’ I asked again.
    ‘I thought the bricks looked a bit . . . this is going to sound really strange. But I thought they looked a bit . . . blue.’
    ‘Blue?’
    ‘I know it sounds weird but I’m sure I saw it.’
    ‘We’ll have a look on our way back.’
    ‘OK. Well. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I get the feeling that we shouldn’t hang around there. There’s a funny feeling about it.’
    I’d felt it too. Was it just because we knew what had happened in those buildings or was it something else? I couldn’t explain but I didn’t want to stand there for long either. Something was telling me to move away.
    We did the shopping as quickly as we could and headed home.
    We didn’t see anyone on the way back. There was no sign of the two men in the yellow hard hats who’d been sifting through the rubble and we only stopped briefly to look again.
    ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Maybe it
is
a bit blue.’
    ‘Do you think there’s something on the bricks?’ Gaia said.
    ‘We’d need to get closer to really see.’
    ‘Maybe we could do it tomorrow. After school. Not now.’
    ‘No, not now,’ I agreed.
    We hurried off down the road.
    ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ I said.
    ‘It’s OK,’ Gaia replied. ‘We were probably getting scared over nothing. I mean, apart from being unlucky if your building falls down when you are inside it, people aren’t getting hurt just by going past the fallen down ones.’
    ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said.
    We said goodnight and walked off in opposite directions, back to our own homes.

Chapter Fifteen
    That very night, I was watching the telly when they suddenly stopped the programme with a breaking news story. I had been eating my dinner. Tonight I’d made baked beans on toast and I was chasing the last two beans round my plate with my fork. However quickly or slowly I tried to shovel them up, I couldn’t quite get them onto my fork. However hard I tried.
    I was looking down at my plate when I heard the newsreader’s voice. She sounded so anxious.
    ‘We’ve just heard news of another development following the growing number of collapsing buildings in South London which, as yet, cannot be explained. Two council workers were discovered dead at one of the sites earlier tonight. Both men were examining the remnants of an abandoned warehouse, which collapsed only two nights ago. We are going live to Bill Franklin, who is at the scene.’
    The screen flashed to a man standing in front of the debris of a fallen building. It was the one Gaia and I had been standing in front of only a few hours ago.
    I dropped my fork and it made a loud clanging sound as it hit my plate.
    ‘Thanks, Kathy. I’m standing just across the street from where the two council workers were discovered at about seven o’clock this evening. They have been identified as Richard Leighton and Frank Stewart. Both men were examining the rubble left when the warehouse collapsed, and the alarm was raised when neither man returned home earlier