The Fangs of the Dragon by Simon Cheshire Read Free Book Online Page A

breathed Muddy, eyeing the cracked plaster and the peeling paint and the damp shreds of wallpaper clinging in miserable patches above the high skirting
boards.
    ‘Yeh, it’s not too good at the moment,’ agreed Jack. ‘Still, if it was beautifully decorated we’d have been calling it The Lovely House all these years,
wouldn’t we? Mind out for that floorboard, Saxby, it’s rotten. Mum put her foot straight through it yesterday. I laughed till I cried.’
    Sounds of heavy-duty machinery were echoing from somewhere upstairs. We picked our way carefully up the wide, curved staircase and waited on the landing until the loud sawing noises stopped and
the cloud of dust that was drifting out of one of the bedrooms subsided.
    Jack’s dad appeared through the dust haze, wielding a huge circular saw. The saw’s battered power cable hung from his other hand like a lasso. From the heels of his boots to the bald
patch on his head, he was caked in a mixture of sawdust, white emulsion paint and more sawdust.
    ‘Hello,’ he said, grinning. ‘Watch where you step.’
    ‘The rotten floorboards?’ said Muddy.
    ‘No, our rotten cat. Dirty little so-and-so,’ said Jack’s dad. ‘He sees a pile of sawdust and thinks it’s a litter tray. S’cuse me, I’ve got to knock
out some old plaster before Jack’s mum gets back from the builder’s merchant. Then I’ve got the man from the Planning Department coming. Then I’ve got to find the broom I
left around here somewhere.’
    ‘Yeh, the floor could do with a good sweep,’ said Jack.
    ‘No, I was going to whack the cat with it,’ muttered Jack’s dad. ‘Dirty little so-and-so.’
    We left Jack’s dad to work his way through his To Do list. The sound of a sledgehammer breaking stuff apart followed us along the hallway. As Jack showed us into a large, dusty room
overlooking the road, Muddy told him about our earlier discussion.
    ‘You really think that parchment is as old as the house?’ said Jack. Our shoes crunched against the grit that littered the bare floor.
    ‘We know it must pre-date 1937,’ I said. ‘And if that storage compartment was as well hidden and as precisely sized as Muddy said, then it’s quite possible that it was
built into the wood panelling specifically to hide that one piece of paper.’
    ‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’ said Muddy. ‘To build a compartment into a wall just for that? If what’s written on the paper is that secret, why
write it down at all? Why not just memorise it?’
    ‘Quite,’ said Jack. ‘It’s a spooky-sounding load of nonsense, which someone made up and hid years and years ago, giggling away to themselves, knowing that someone else
would come along and get all excited about it. It really is just gobbledegook. I think you’re wrong, Saxby, I think it’s a long-lost Victorian practical joke.’
    ‘This is the room you found it in?’ I said. It was a large but unremarkable room, with two tall windows – two of those ‘teeth’ in the front face of the building
– and an irregularly-shaped fireplace built into one corner.
    ‘I’ve got it over here,’ said Jack. From off the deep windowsill he fetched a box file, the sort of solid cardboard case you see in offices for keeping papers in. He flipped it
open and handed it to me.
    Inside was a sheet of thick paper, about thirty centimetres tall and fifteen wide. Its left-hand edge was slightly jagged, the others neatly cut. It was yellowed with age, with brownish spots
and blotches here and there across its surface, but it was surprisingly smooth and solid to the touch. Obviously very expensive paper (the exact opposite of the sort encountered in the case of The Tomb of Death !).
    On the paper, in angular but flowing handwriting, were lines written in black ink, all neatly level on the page. The words had clearly been written with one of those old-fashioned dip-in-the-ink
pens: you could see where the ink kept thinning out every few words, then