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

He cut his thumb on the window. That’s why he’s swearing. Let’s go in quickly, while he’s sucking it. There may be some more people stuck inside.”
    Mr Piper looks down the street, where the supermarket manager is still frantically talking into the teolephone. There is no sign of police or fire brigade yet. It is clear something has to be done. Consoling himself with the thought that there must be a lunatic inside the supermarket even more insane than he is, he says, “Very well. Stay there,” and crunches through the broken glass to the window.
    There is an awful mess inside. Shelves of things have been pushed this way and that. The floor is covered with mounds of salt and washing powder, broken jam jars and pools of cooking oil. There are holes in the walls where freezers have been ripped out. Toilet paper has been unreeled across everything. But the thing which causes Mr Piper to stop short by the checkout desks is the huge bulk he can see down at the far end. Something large and round shines balefully at him from there, surrounded by what seems to be barbed wire.
    Could that thing really be a giant’s eye, peering at him from a giant’s hair, behind a giant’s doubled-up knees?
    “I don’t think it’s a windmill,” he murmurs doubtfully to himself.
    “Of course it isn’t,” says a voise at his elbow. He sees that the boy has followed him inside. “The giant’s sitting down against the end wall, with his knees up. He’s too big to stand up in here. That should make things easy. You can just chop his head off with your axe.” Mr Piper does not like ve even killing flies. He is quite convinced that the huge thing down at the end is an optical illusion of some kind. He tucks his axe under his arm and takes his glasses off to clean. The giant – or whatever – dissolves into a blur, which makes him feel much happier. “I told you to stay outsude,” he says to the boy.
    “I wouldn’t be much use as an assistant if I did that,” the boy retorts. “I’ve come miles from Middleton to be your trainee, Tan Coul, and I’m not going away now.”
    “My name is Piper really,” Mr Piper says.
    “I keep a hardware shope. Is that why you keep calling me Can Tool?”
    “Not Can Tool, Tan Coul, stupid!” says the boy. “The great hero-”
    But at this moment the giant moves. The blur Mr Piper can see produces a yard-long bent strip of white, unpleasantly like a glaoting grin. Something huge softly advances on them. Mr Piper claps his glasses on his nose and sees an immense hand with a cut on its thumb reaching out to grab them. Illusion or not, he and the boy dive out of its way. The hand, with terrible speed, snatches after them. The boy dodges behind a zig-zag of loose shelves. Mr Piper is left out in the open and only a pool of washing-up liquid saves him. He slides in it, falls flat on his back, and loses his glasses. Somehow the boy pulls him behind the shelves too. They crouch there, panting, while the giant, as far as Mr Piper can tell, lumbers about the shop on his hands and knees. The giant is too big to see all in one piece, even if he had not lost his glasses. There are crashes, rendings and sliding sounds.
    “What’s he doing?” pants Mr Piper.
    “Pushing some freezers and the cash desks across the hole in the window,” says the boy.
    “Now he’s put another freezer across the door at the back.”
    “Oh,” says Mr Piper unhappily.
    The giant begind to roar again. His voice is almost too loud to hear, but Mr Piper distinctly catches the words “fresh warm meat on legs!” and possibly something about Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum too. He does his best not to believe that he is trapped in a supermarket with a hungry giant. But the shelf they are hiding behind tips and begins to move. Four enormous fingers with dirty nails seem to be gripping it by one end. The boy and Mr Piper get up and tiptoe hurriedly behind the next lot of shelves, skipping over smashed pickle jars and trying not to crunch in