The Windvale Sprites by Mackenzie Crook Read Free Book Online Page A

he opened his eyes. The yellow light in the tent was unfamiliar and he lay there for a while trying to remember.
    Emerging slowly, he blinked in the sunlight and looked around. The air was chilly and the grass was damp with dew but the sky was clear and cloudless with the promise of a beautiful autumn day.
    He set up his little stove and heated water for a cup of tea, warmed a tin of vegetable soup and as he ate he thought about the day ahead. The first thing he wanted to do was take a closer look at Benjamin Tooth’s farmhouse. He didn’t expect to find anything there but as it was a definite, stone-built part of the story it seemed a good place to start.
    He cleared away the stove, zipped up the tent, slung his sack over his shoulder and set out.
    As he approached Asa was again overcome by that self-conscious feeling of being watched.
    The house was a solid, stone building with a slate roof and, though it had done well to stand up to the ravages of time, the moor was slowly reclaiming it. Grass sprouted between the roof tiles giving it the appearance of a balding thatched cottage and the walls were covered with creepers. At one end a tree had grown up inside the house and burst through the roof where the wind made the branches grow horizontally. An ornate but broken weathervane on a crumbling chimney made the whole place look like a crackpot mechanical device that had been abandoned on the moor. It all fitted in with the description of Tooth and his weird lifestyle.
    The front of the house had the look of a stern face frowning down at him and a shiver ran up Asa’s spine. Reaching the edge of what was once a garden surrounding the house he hesitated. The perimeter drystone wall had melted over the years to a long, shallow mound of flat rocks, completely covered in places by a blanket of turf. He picked his way over the boulders and rusty iron railings and made his way towards the entrance.
    The front door to the farmhouse was solid wood and, though the rest of the house was crumbling, with windows and shutters hanging from their hinges, the door was locked and impassable.
    Asa made his way around the side to where he found a low window with cracked green glass. It was dark inside, but Asa could just make out the shapes of furniture and tattered drapes hanging from the walls.
     
    Around the side he found a small outhouse with a door at the back which led into the main building. This outhouse was filled with old tools and what was once a small handcart that had long since separated into its individual components. A jumble of twisted iron parts Asa discovered were animal traps rusted into a solid, tangled mass like a deadly tumbleweed and next to it a pile of wooden half-barrels and buckets. He nervously stepped over the junk towards the door which was open a crack and he peered through. There seemed at first to be music coming from within but he soon realised it was just the wind whistling through holes in the house like a church organ. He pushed the door – it didn’t budge. Either the hinges had rusted solid or there was something behind it, so Asa gave a hard shove. The door creaked and splintered and went crashing to the floor, whipping up a dense cloud of dust and cobwebs. With a new channel to escape by the wind rushed out, blowing dust into Asa’s face. He stumbled blindly back into the junk, sneezing and rubbing his stinging eyes.
    Once recovered he gingerly took a few steps into the house.
    What he found inside was weird. It was obvious that the remote building hadn’t had a visitor for two hundred years. Instead of the empty rooms and broken furniture that Asa had expected, he found the rooms filled with stuff, piles of it, all covered with a thick layer of dust. He shone the torch around. Mouldy books and stacks of paper, bizarre scientific instruments and rows of bottles and jars covered every surface. It looked as though it had been used as some sort of laboratory.
    There were threadbare rugs on the floor,