The Kingdom by the Sea by Robert Westall Read Free Book Online Page B

be bedding down under a boat again. With the dog. It felt like the only way he had ever lived now. Other bits of him seemed to have dropped off during the day. He tried to think of Dad and Mam and Dulcie and the old days, but the pictures wouldn’t come. But he didn’t worry. They were buried somewhere, deep and safe in his mind. He’d be able to think about them again. Some day. For now he had the sound of the sea, and a full belly, and warm blankets. And Don. And for the first time, that was enough.

Chapter Seven
    The rain caught them on the move. They were travelling by night now, since the business with the farmer. Harry’s fear of farmers and policemen was very great.
    The rain didn’t catch Harry without warning. There was a warning in the change of sounds, in the silence. Every noise came to him as clear as a bell, as they struggled along the fringe of the beach in the dark. A dog barking; voices in the kitchen of a fisherman’s cottage; the very breathing of the sea. And the silences in between were cushioned, velvety.
    And then there was a warm damp pressure on his left cheek. He knew that rain was coming. But there was nowhere to run to. No upturned boats, no abandonedsheds, not even a shallow cave in the low cliff. Nothing. He tried to hurry in the dark, but that just meant he tripped up more often.
    The stars were wiped out one by one, starting with the ones in the west. When half the stars were gone, the first huge dollop of rain smacked him in the face.
    He stood, for a moment, full of rage and despair.
    “No,” he shouted. “Oh, no.” But there was no one to hear, no one to help. All he could do was press on.
    The dollops came more often, and then they came in a drumming roar on the sand. It was like having a hose-pipe turned on you. His hair settled in streaks across his eyes, dribbling slightly salty water straight into his mouth. The water began to get inside the collar of his raincoat, then it ran down his back. It broke in through the raincoat at his shoulders, where the strap of the blankets pressed, making his goose-fleshed skin crawl and shudder. Soon it was running down his legs, and sloshing in his shoes, and everything was sodden. There came a time when he gaspingly knew that he couldn’t get any wetter. His clothes began to chafe his flesh like wet ropes; the handle of the attachè case grew too slippery to hold, so he kept on dropping it. He knew the blankets must be getting sodden too, for they grew heavier and heavier, and the strap cut more and more.
    Don just plodded along beside him, occasionally shaking himself to get the water out of his coat.
    Everything was melting away. All his plans, all his hopes, all his sense. Except a stubborn voice that went on telling him to keep going, keep going…
    He would have walked straight past the place in his misery; he had given up looking around, the rain beat in his eyes too much. But the dog stopped, and looked left, and sniffed. So Harry looked too.
    There was a dip in the low cliff, a sheltered tiny cove with a little leaping stream, and what looked like three or four small abandoned railway carriages, without their wheels, dotted about. There were no lights in them; no smoke coming from their chimneys. The night sky showed through their big windows.
    A last savage burst of energy drove him up the bank of the stream, slipping and slithering. His foot went into the stream and didn’t feel any wetter, though the mud on the bottom sucked at his shoe treacherously, and he almost lost it. Then he was in the lee of the first carriage; the rain stopped battering in his face, and he came to his senses.
    He tried a door on the first carriage, but it was locked. He tried all that carriage’s doors; they were all locked. But he could see, through the carriage windows, tantalising objects in the gloom. Beds and heaps of blankets, a castiron stove, a box of knives and forks.
    He ran across and tried the next carriage. That was locked too. But he saw