Castle Of Bone by Penelope Farmer Read Free Book Online Page A

dragging her. “You’re hurting ,” Anna said.
    “Get up then.”
    “No.” Anna laughed again.
    “ Get up,” Penn shook her furiously. She stopped laughing abruptly, set her feet down, wriggled round, lashed out, fought with him, Penn’s greater strength quite matched by her fury.
    “She was hurting, really scratching,” Jean said to Hugh afterwards. “And kicking. Did you see? I’ve never kicked you like that, or scratched.”
    “Well he was brutish enough too. But you wouldn’t call her timid exactly. I always used to think her timid. She scarcely opened her mouth at all.”
    “But she is still timid, in a funny sort of way,” said Jean.
    The fight had stopped as suddenly as it began. Anna froze, looking at Penn’s watch. “Oh Lord, oh dear, it’s after one already. I promised Mummy I’d be home to help with lunch.” She seemed all anxiety and awkwardness, and left without picking up a thing.
    Penn bellowed down the stairway after her. “When we try putting a human in the cupboard, it’ll be you, Anna, you’ll be the guinea-pig, if you don’t damn well watch out.”

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Hugh gazing out of his window after lunch saw Penn and Anna turn out of their gate and up the road. He spent a great deal of time gazing out of his window. It amused and occupied him at least when he had nothing else to do or when a painting was going badly, and at most it left him with an extraordinary, strange, creative ache; a beautiful yet unbearable sense of growing out of himself, exploding skin and bone. He tried to catch this feeling sometimes, record it, pin it down. But always at once it faded, or collapsed like a blown-up paper bag.
    It gave him a pleasing sense of power too, gazing out of his window. He felt god-like – seeing people who did not see him, scratch themselves, or mutter or gesture dramatically, unaware of being watched, people with whom he had no need to involve himself, as merely passing in the street he would have had to be involved. Like a god he felt above time even, anticipating event. He knew for instance now, that the car nipping so busily along the road was about to be brought up short behind a trail of cars barred by an oil-delivery tank; and again seeing a poodle shut up in a parked car, a large alsatian approaching on a lead foretold an enjoyable eruption of which no one else was yet aware.
    Anna and Penn were just ahead of the dog, walking slowly, their heads together. Whatever did they always have to say to each other, Hugh wondered, with annoyance. In company Anna was so silent usually and Penn critical of her or teasing.
    The poodle sprang against its window barking furiously. The alsatian leaped explosively, thunderously, almost dragged its startled owner down. Penn and Anna jumped apart, Anna scuttling in at the gate, Penn almost scuttling too, but then pausing and shaking himself and walking in with dignity, while Hugh laughed himself silly in strangely malicious triumph and amusement.
    “I saw it coming a mile off,” he explained.
    “I saw it too,” said Penn aggressively.
    “Rubbish,” said Anna, “neither of us did.”
    “Well are you ready, Hugh, anyway?” Penn asked.
    They were going to the Royal Tournament, a military display; not a function Hugh would have chosen for himself or indeed any of them, except Penn just possibly.
    “It’s hardly for pacifists,” Hugh commented.
    “Well I’m not a pacifist. Why? Are you?”
    “I’m thinking of it. I was last term.”
    “I bet you’re not. Rubbish. It’s just affectation.”
    Penn’s father had been given four tickets by some business acquaintance. “It’s free entertainment, isn’t it?” Penn said. “It won’t entertain me in the slightest,” protested Hugh, and indeed when he walked into the exhibition hall that afternoon and saw tanks and guns lined up, the array of dowdy yet lethal armaments, he almost retreated and went home at once.
    He resisted everything at first; the marching, the patterns