The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman Read Free Book Online

commands; he had reassured her by the intent silence in his eyes. How they had stared! It was almost as if he’d been afraid. No, no; he had not been afraid.
    Far off in the woods a vixen called to her cubs to warn them that a human being was nearby; her savage and uncertain-sounding cry, between a bark and a moan, echoed time and time again between the trees.
    Elizabeth smiled to herself with relief. But it was strange, all the same, that none of the men to whom she had confessed had done exactly what she wanted. Most of them tried to speak. She might so easily have been murdered by any of them. She must have been lying in fragments, separated, disconnected, for the past months; or asleep.
    For some distance the railway ran parallel to a road. It was not a main road, but it was straight and had a good surface. She imagined him in a car, a large, expensive, comfortable car, driving swiftly along the road beside the train, looking up at her fixedly, with his hands on the wheel; the expression on his face was bewildered at first, then stern, and finally, unwillingly, happy. And if the train stopped somewhere she would get into the car with him, and listen to him as he talked.
     
    She got off the bus and stood, a little dazed, beside the main road that led through the village as the bus drove away. The village was empty at this time of night; the pubs would be doing business, but there was no-one in the streets or in the village hall. It was not a Sunday or a feast day and her father would not be in the church; it was far too late for evensong now anyway. She could see lights in many of the windows, so people were alive; they were probably watching television, most of them, or talking, or playing games. In the window of the grocer’s shop on the other side of the road a neon light glowed, illuminating the interior of the shop.
    The road was wet. The street-light fixed to an iron bracket in the wall behind her shone distinctly green, but the colours of the tar on the road and the bricks of the wall and even the paint were all reduced not to shades of green but to shades of grey, though with a metallic hint of green in them. It was clear colour, and one that showed up the textures of things with great force and clarity, tempting her to peer closely at them, to examine, to make comparisons, or just to look for a moment, clearly.
    There was a swirl of petrol on the wet road in front of her, and she crouched down to look at it. Even the rainbow purples and reds and blues were subordinated to the monochrome luminosity of the streetlamp, and revealed themselves in minutely differing curves and stripes of texture, some of them glassy-smooth and others almost completely matt. It set her teeth a little on edge to look at it, and she stood up again and glanced away down the street.
    A car went past, braking as it came to a curve that led round past the garage, and its lights flared brightly in the air and on the wet surface of the road, making a sudden red smear of brilliance on things, so that the palms of her hands felt hot.
    The road seemed endless, although she could see hardly a hundred yards of it from where she stood. What she could see, the surface of things, was just like the road: it was either too open or too enclosed, and she could not tell which.
    She leant back against the wall and closed her eyes, and felt the air blow around her face. Perhaps what she could not see would be more welcoming. What lay around the village? Fields, to be sure, and on one side, as she had told him, the moor, that came down behind the church and the rectory. The moor was wide, at least, and never deceived her. Fields lay darkly side by side and she could fly above them silently. There were barns that contained hay, and barns that were empty but for tractors, farm machinery, perhaps an old car… the thought of them made her shiver. How did this appalling dilemma get into the world, that made things either near or far away, either calm or