Nieve by Terry Griggs Read Free Book Online

see if anything looked un familiar.
    Sure enough, she saw that out in the fields those noxious weeds were spreading. Near the road where she’d encountered the Weed Inspector, there appeared to be a lake of black ooze. From where she was sitting, the plants more resembled an oil spill than a mass of growing, living vegetation. Before school, she had checked on the one that had appeared under her window and was surprised to see that it had vanished, which was odd, but a relief all the same. So they could be gotten rid of. To her even greater relief, the Weed Inspector was nowhere to be seen. But she did spot something else. Someone else . . . two someones advancing over the top of a rise in the road.
    She was sorry she hadn’t brought binoculars out with her, but her eyes were sharp and what she saw clearly enough was a tall, skinny man on a creaky old claptrap bicycle, to which was attached a kind of sidecar and in which rode a small, plump man – a man with a face as round and white as the moon. The bike was creaking noisily as the tall one laboured along, pedalling hard, his long spindly legs pumping vigorously. The noise his bike made sounded to Nieve like a super-creaky hinge on the door of a haunted house. A haunted house came to mind because a cloud of bats were swirling around the heads of the men.
    Bats? At midday?
    Yes bats, and that wasn’t the only unnatural thing. Unnatural and terrible . Nieve stared in disbelief. The men appeared to be dragging a darkness with them. Darkness billowed out behind them like a vast black cloak that smothered the daylight as they advanced steadily, creakily toward the town.
    Nieve knocked over her glass of milk as she scrambled off the picnic table. She hurled her half-eaten sandwich onto the ground and sprinted toward the house. In the kitchen, she made straight for the phone. She called Theo Bax at the police station; she called Mayor Mary at the clinic; she called Mr. Shearing, the principal of their school. But try as she might, calling number after number, no one picked up the phone at their end of the line.

–Seven–

Wormius & Ashe
    â€œ A total eclipse,” Sutton said.
    Sophie, when she got home from wherever, said, “What a marvellous eclipse! Everyone’s out watching it.”
    Nieve knew better. It was not an eclipse, or not what normally constituted one. For one thing, it lasted for hours, then never really ended. The sky remained overcast and dark at the edges as though bordered in black. It was unnatural and frightening, although her mother didn’t seem troubled at all, and her father only frowned and shook his head as he stood blank-faced at the window staring out.
    That night in bed Nieve kept mulling it over. What had happened was impossible, but it had happened. She’d seen it; she’d seen them . Two more of them. But who were they? Why were they here in her town? What did they want ? Too many questions, all barring the way to sleep. Her thick white cotton sheets rustled like sails as she turned on her side, and then as she turned onto her other side, and then when she kicked her feet – she was so restless! – and then when she flipped onto her back. She knew she should get up and make some warm milk, or read the dictionary, or do something . . . when she heard an unfamiliar noise. She lay very still, no more fidgeting and rustling the sheets. She listened intently. It wasn’t a middle-of-the-night house sound, one of those abrupt creaks or cracks she sometimes heard, and it wasn’t a Mr. Mustard Seed sound, the kind he would make if he were to creep up from the basement to check things out. It sounded more like a marble rolling across the hardwood floor. It was faint at first, but as it got closer to her room, it grew louder, and seemed to be rolling faster, gaining momentum. She lay rigid listening to its approach. It can’t be , she thought . . . and then it shot under her door, and across her