Chaos Quest by Gill Arbuthnott Read Free Book Online Page B

his mouth, but no words would come out.
    “We thought you might need help. We thought youmight be lost.” Thomas didn’t know what moved him to say it.
    “Like Kate and David,” said Erda. They looked at her uncomprehendingly. “They want to help me. They think I am in the wrong place.”
    “Are you?” asked Morgan quietly.
    Erda thought. “Maybe. I don’t know where I should be. Maybe here, maybe there.” She shrugged. “You knew I was here.” Morgan nodded. “Not you.” She looked over at Thomas, who shook his head, then turned back to Morgan. “How did you know?”
    “I’m not sure. I can feel if you are close or not, like …” He cast about for something that would serve for comparison, “like a magnet.”
    “Magnet.” She repeated the word, frowning at him slightly as she tried to make sense of what the word was telling her. It was very confusing. She would ask Kate and David. She turned her attention back to the men in front of her. “You found me. Now what will you do?”
    Here we go
, thought Thomas.
Now it all comes apart
. He braced himself for whatever was about to happen.
    “We could go for a walk,” said Morgan. “We could show you where we came from.”
    The all-powerful Stardreamer, the fragile girl in front of them, nodded her head smiling, and Thomas wondered anew if she was really what Morgan thought, or what she appeared to be.
    ***
    That night, Tiger died. David had known with his headthat it would happen one day soon. He was an old cat – fifteen and a bit – and for the last year or so he’d been losing weight. He’d always been a big lump of a cat, who dominated the others in the neighbourhood not because he was aggressive, but by sheer bulk, but recently he’d got scrawny; David could feel his hip bones and shoulder blades when he picked him up.
    They’d taken him to the vet, who’d said he had kidney failure and given him some tablets that perked him up for a while, but lately he’d gone off his food and David had realised he wasn’t going to live much longer, although he was still pottering about happily enough.
    Even that afternoon he’d been out in the garden, lying slit-eyed in an unseasonably warm pool of sunlight, purring to himself while David lay on his stomach on the grass beside him, reading.
    He’d jumped – a bit stiffly – up onto David’s bed in the evening, as he always did, waiting to curl up next to him at bedtime, but sometime during the night he must have got down again and made his way to the spare bedroom.
    David found him there the next morning, curled neatly up as though he was asleep; but it was instantly obvious he was dead.
    “Dad! Come here – quick. It’s Tiger.”
    They’d lifted him out from under the bed and laid him on his favourite cushion and stroked his fur smooth then looked, for the last time, at the wonderful shapes of the little pads on his paws and the elegant tufts of fur on his ears. Alastair had dug a grave under the apple tree and lined it with grass cuttings and they laid him in andcovered him with a pillowcase so they wouldn’t have to see the earth flatten his fur when they piled it back in and firmed the turf down again.
    “He was a good old cat,” said Alastair, “I remember Mum bringing him home. He was such a scrawny little kitten; we could never believe how big he got.”
    This was the beginning of a whole series of Tiger stories that they told each other regularly, like family fairy tales: “When Tiger got stuck in the chimney” and “When Tiger disappeared”.
    They stood on the dewy grass and told the stories again and laughed. Christine watched from an upstairs window and when she thought the time was right, came down to join them.
    “Poor old Tiger,” she said. “You know, we had lots of cats when I was small, but I think Tiger was the friendliest cat I ever met. He was really special.”
    David gave a watery smile. “You’re right. He was really special,” he said, then went to his room