Inside the Worm by Robert Swindells Read Free Book Online Page B

friends, aren’t we?’
    â€˜No, Fliss, we’re not, since you ask. Why don’t you get lost and leave us in peace?’
    â€˜I—’ Fliss realized with horror that she was about to cry. Biting her lip she turned away and crossed the road, half-blind with tears. There was an entry – a narrow walkway between two buildings which led on to waste ground. She turned into it, away from the stream of chattering kids, and when she was alone, she wept.
    That night, Fliss dreamed again. She’d grown since her bridesmaid day. The long white dress no longer covered her ankles, so Mum had let down the hem to lengthen it. Now she wanted Fliss to try it on, but the alteration had transformed the dress. Mum couldn’t see it – she was holding the thing out for her to slip into – but it wasn’t a dress any more. It was a—
    â€˜A shroud!’ She was screaming, shaking her head. ‘Can’t you see, Mum? It’s a shroud.’
    â€˜Don’t be silly, dear. Come – try it on.’ Mum advanced on her, smiling.
    â€˜No.’ Backing away, hands out to ward off the loathsome garment. Bitter tang of tears in her mouth. Backing towards the door, which opened. Mr Hepworth came in, smiling. ‘Try, Fliss,’ he crooned. ‘Try it on. It is like a shroud, but life is full of coincidences.’
    â€˜No, I don’t want to. Leave me alone.’
    â€˜Typically idiotic antic.’
    They rushed, seized her. She struggled, but the Deputy Head was holding her from behind and Mum had the cold fabric over her head. It clung, reeking of sodden clay, smothering her. She jerked herself this way and that. Couldn’t breathe. Dark rising. Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe —
    She woke with her face pressed in the pillow and the bedclothes on the floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY
    RONNIE MILLHOUSE WAS the town drunk. Everybody knew him by sight – he was what is known as a ‘character’ – but nobody knew the trouble he’d seen. Like all drunks he’d once had an ordinary life, but then the trouble had struck and he’d taken to the lotion in a big way. Now he spent his days on the street, cadging ten and twenty pence pieces from passers-by. ‘Have you got any spare change?’ he’d ask. ‘A few pence for a cup of tea?’ People either brushed past him looking angry, or fished in their pockets looking embarrassed, and most days there were enough of the latter sort to provide poor Ronnie with the price of several cups of tea. He didn’t waste it on tea, of course. Ronnie’s refreshment usually came in a fat brown bottle witha picture of a woodpecker on it. At night, when the wind blew chill and the stream of passers-by dried to a trickle, Ronnie would make his way to the derelict bandstand in the park, where he had a cardboard box for an hotel and a drift of old newspapers for his bed.
    At eleven-thirty that Tuesday night, while Fliss lay dreaming, Ronnie was shuffling unsteadily along the footpath which led to the bandstand. A fine drizzle was falling. On his left was the kiddies’ playground where the swings hung motionless on dripping chains and the slide gleamed wetly in the light from a distant streetlamp. To his right, the ground fell away in a long slope, thickly planted with trees and shrubs. At the foot of this slope, hidden even in daylight by the trees, was a stretch of level grassland on which, from time to time in the summer months, funfairs and circuses would pitch their camps. Now, as he headed for his bed at the end of a better-than-average day, Ronnie thought he heard voices on the slope. Now Ronnie was a cautious man even when drunk, and he knew there was a better-than-even chance that anybody you’d meet in a public park late at night would be up to no good, so he swerved off the path and pressed himself up against the wet trunk of a thickish tree to see who might