Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

as rolls of chicken wire neither you nor I could lift, piles of dustbins, graden rollers neither of us could move, and stacks of hefty white chamberpots that we would have to take one at a time. Every evening he takes it all in again and brings out the shuterts. He could, if he wished, win an Olympic Gold Medal for wieght-lifting, but this has never occurred to him.
    In between customers, he idly sharpens axes and stares out into the street, thinking. Like me, he has an active mind, but not having been given the education which was thrust upon me, his mind whirrs about rather. He buys old books from junk shops and reads them all. Most of them are horribly out of date. His sister Edna, who, you tell me, hates him to spend money on useless things like books, tells him he is mad. Mr Piper thinks she may be right. At any rate, on this particular morning his thoughts are whirring about worse than ever, because he has been reading an old book called “Don Quixote,” about a tall thin man who had read books until he went mad and fought some windmills, thinking they were giants.
    Mr Piper is staring out between dangling scrubbing brushes as he sharpens his axe, wondering if he is that mad himself, when the light is blocked from the door, once, twice, by something enormous going by. The fire-irons round the door knock together. Mr Piper blinks. For a moment he could have sworn that those were two huge legs, each ending in a foot the size of a Mini Metro, striding past his door. “I am that mad,” he thinks. He has gone back to sharpening his axe when he hears crashing from up the street. Then screams. Then running feet.
    Edna calles from the back room. “What’s going on, Tom?”
    A girl Mr Piper recofnises as Maisie Millet from the supermarket checkout goes running past, looking terrified. “Something at the supermarket, dear,” he calls back.
    “Go and see!” Edna screams at him. She is unbearably curious. She likes to know everything that goes on in Stow Whatyoumacallit. But she cannot go out herslef because she always wears a dressing gown to save money and never takes her hair out of curlers.
    Mr Piper, still holding his axe, goes out of his shop and stares up the srteet. Sure enough, there is broken glass over the pavement in front of the supermarket, and people are running away from it in all directions, shouting for help. A robbery, thinks Mr Piper, and runs towards it, axe in hand. He pases the phone booth on the way. The manager of the supermarket is in it, white-faced, dialing 999. The plate glass window of the supermarket has a huge hole in it, with notices about this week’s prices flapping in shreds around it. As Mr Piper races up, a white deep-freeze sails out through the hole and crashes into a parked car. Dozens of pale pink frozen chickens drop like bricks and skid across the road. People scream and scatter.
    One person does not run. This is a small boy with rather long, fair hair. As Mr Piper stops and stares at the slithering chickens, this boy girl person comes hopping through the mess towards him.
    “Thank goodness you’ve come, Tan Coul!” this person calls. “Do hurry! There’s a giant in the supermarket.”
    This child suffers from too much imagination, Mr Piper thinks, looking down at her -sorry!- him . She-sorry!-he is madder than I am. “There are no such things as giants,” he syas. “What is really going on?”
    Like an answer, there is a terrible roar from inside the broken window. Mr Piper wonders if his glasses need cleaning. A young man in white overalls from the butchery departmnent leaps through the hole in the window and runs as if for his life. Something seems to grab at him as he leaps. Whatever it is is snatched back immediately, and there is an even louder roar. It sounds like swearing.
    Mr Piper is trying to convince himself that he did not, really and truly, see a huge hand trying to grab the younf man, when the boy says, “See that, Tan Coul? That was the giant’s hand.