The Various by Steve Augarde Read Free Book Online Page A

’Twas no business of his. He hitched his quiver of arrows a little higher onto his leather-clad shoulder and melted back into the deep foliage. The squirrel, of course, had long gone.

Chapter Five
    THE GALVANIZED DOOR of the pig-barn felt cool to the touch, and Midge leaned her head against it as she gulped at the fresh air outside. She had no recollection of how she had got there. It was as though she had somehow managed to both faint and run, at the same time. Wings! The thing had wings! Like . . . a bat. Like huge bats’ wings – not the feathery little wings of fairytale horses – but skin, and bone, velvety, covered in fine downy hair. Whitish, beneath all the blood and dirt. And it spoke! It spoke to her in strange voices, and colours, and oh, but this was too . . . this was . . . She held on tight to the door for support. A semicircle of young cattle, black and white heifers, had gathered before her. Midge had not noticed them till now. They edged closer, their front legs splayed as though some invisible force were pushing them from behind. There was something comical and reassuring about them, with their dribbly noses and woolly fringes. They were comfortingly real. And wingless.
    Midge pushed herself away from the door, and jammed her hands into the back pockets of her dungarees . The sudden movement took the heifers by surprise, and they skittered sideways. Midge ignored them and tried to think. What should she do? She must go and get help, of course. This was too much for her to deal with. She was only twelve. She must go back to Mill Farm, tell Uncle Brian – then he would phone . . . who? The police? The vet? The zoo? Midge wandered around to the side of the barn, thinking. How could this be? Something that Mr McColl, her English teacher, had once said came drifting into her thoughts. ‘What’s
for
ye, won’t go
by
ye.’ He was fond of delivering Scots quotations, was Mr McColl, though he didn’t really have a Scots accent. He just put it on sometimes. The words didn’t seem particularly appropriate.
Was
this for her? Was
she
meant to do whatever needed doing? The creature, the horse, had said ‘
You
help me.
You
 . . .’ Help me, maid. You. The words went round and round.
    She raised her head and let her gaze travel up the hill towards the overgrown wood, the Royal Forest. She knew then, suddenly and instinctively, that the horse had come from there – belonged there. And she knew that it was up to her, somehow, to get it back there. This
was
for her. She would not let it go by. She would do what she could. Turning around, she found herself confronted once again by the heifers, stupidly shuffling and nudging each other towards her. Now they were a distraction, a nuisance, and they made her angry.
    ‘Yah!’ she shouted, waving her arms at them. ‘Yah! Yah!’ The animals scattered, kicking their back legs into the air. The ground tremored slightly with the weight of them. Midge tucked her hair behind her ears and strode purposefully back inside the pig-barn. She knelt down in the muck beside the poor broken creature that lay there, and bravely put her hand on its slim white neck. It didn’t move.
    ‘I’m here,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll do whatever I can.’ She felt a slight shiver beneath her hand in the darkness, and – overcome with fear and pity, and the utter strangeness of it all – she began to cry.
    High up in the forest, Glim had caught the faint echo of Midge’s voice as she shouted at the cattle. ‘Yah! Yah!’ – a tiny sound drifting in from the outside world. The Gorji child. He paused, but did not turn around. His curiosity had already cost him one squirrel that morning.
    There was a bucket, battered and rusty but reasonably sound, and there was some folded blue polythene sheeting, stiff and unyielding. There were a couple of ancient bales of straw, musty and grey. There was a sack, one of the old-fashioned hessian sort, not a paper one, that had served as