Secret Heart by David Almond Read Free Book Online

snorted like a little beast. Then he turned and saw Joe there and he flinched and held up his hands like paws in protection. The two boys watched each other and the boy in the Hag's Kitchen returned to being just a boy again. Joe said nothing, didn't know how to say anything.
    “I was being a mole,” said the boy. “My name's Stanny Mole so I was being a mole.” He tipped his head to one side, daring Joe to challenge him. “OK?”
    “O-OK,” said Joe. Then he pointed to the air above the Black Bone Crags. “They f-fly,” he stammered.
    And Stanny looked and his eyes widened for a moment and Joe thought that Stanny Mole was on the brink of seeing, but then Stanny lowered his eyes again to the earth and said,
    “What fly?”
    Stanny Mole was a newcomer to Helmouth, sent from the city to live there with his mother. He was a boy already used to truanting, a boy who was more hardened to loneliness than Joe, a boy who right from the start told Joe that he needed to toughen up. But he became Joe's friend and they spent many days together wandering the wasteland. Then Joff entered Stanny's life and began to take him across the motor-way into the Silver Forest and up toward the Black Bone Crags and he began to teach Stanny how tosurvive and kill out there. And they wanted Joe to go with them, out into those places of wildness and vision and dream, but Joe held back. He knew if he ever did go there, it must be with someone who saw what he saw and felt what he felt, someone who was a true partner, a true friend. Someone who understood what it meant to move from Helmouth toward the furthest fringes of the world, toward the furthest fringes of the mind.
    Joe sniffed and shivered. His ears were alert to the night. He trembled, heart fluttered, muscles twitched. What had he almost heard, what had he almost seen roaming the wasteland further downhill, further away from the light? He crouched and watched. Nothing. Behind him, the crowd in the tent clapped and jeered. He imagined Hackenschmidt lapping blood from meat in his locked cage. He imagined Corinna spinning, spinning, spinning. He imagined Stanny dreaming of the panther. He imagined his mum in the Booze Bin, selling cigarettes and cheap lager to Cody's crew.
    “Spirits of the air and earth,” he breathed, “protect us all tonight.”
    He twitched again. What roamed the wasteland, further out into the dark? He peered. Nothing.
    “Spirits of water and fire, spirits of the moon, spirits of the stars, protect us all. Our men. Our men.”
    He crawled on hands and knees away from it, toward Helmouth's lights, into the great pool of blueness cast by the tent. A shadow moved across thewall of the tent, high up. A flying swinging thing. Corinna. He thought of her eyes, her speckled skin. He dreamed another shadow moving there, back and forth across the first, the shadow of another flier, a catcher from another time, another life. The scattered crowd applauded. There came a growl, like the growl of an animal echoing from a deep dark cave. He turned, cast his eyes across the wasteland. Nothing. But he began to move quickly back to Helmouth.

Fifteen
    Joe was exhausted by his day. Went straight to bed, lay there drifting in and out of sleep, disturbed by the folk returning from the tent, their feet on the sidewalks, their laughter. He wouldn't sleep properly anyway till he'd heard her key in the lock. Pale orange light filtered through his curtains from the streetlights. Joe gazed at his curtains, at the little mirror on his wall, at his half-open door, at the old pictures still stuck with tape to his wall, at the heap of his clothes on the floor. These things shifted and merged and changed. Nothing was fixed. Nothing was simply itself. The patterns of light and dark brought weird beasts to life, built weird cities, weird landscapes. Joe watched, and tried not to be afraid, and sometimes slept, and then jumped back from weird dreams to this weird form of waking. He sighed. He chewed