Twelve Drummers Drumming by C. C. Benison Read Free Book Online Page B

Of course, there wouldn’t be a Church of England, if Henry hadn’t gone off his first wife! But then that was about children and heirs and so forth, wasn’t it. Shame the Hennises haven’t tried again to have a kiddie. King Henry reminds me that I’ve got to a part in Dad’s history of Thornford about the Romans, though I might leave a blank page as some archaeologists have started a dig outside the village and I might be able to add to Dad’s writings. Mr. Christmas thinks I should get a computer, but I don’t really want to type out Dad’s handwriting all over again. Mr. Christmas suggested a scanner. I know Mrs. Drewe has one and maybe I will borrow it. But I’ll worry about that later. You probably don’t know what a scanner is, do you, Mum? Anyway, must dash. Mr. C. will be back from Morning Prayer and wanting his breakfast. The cats are both well. Mr. C. muttered something about getting a dog the other day, but I don’t think
Powell and Gloria would take to a dog. Love to Aunt Gwen. Glorious day! Hope you have a good day
.
    Much love
,
    Madrun
    P.S. I remembered to ask Dr. Hennis about your new arthritis pills, but he said that as you weren’t his patient it was none of his business. He was quite rude about it!

CHAPTER SIX

    A s the purest joy seized his heart, Tom grasped for an instant—and, really, for the first time—the sensations of Lazarus’s sisters as they beheld their adored and freshly animated brother: the astonishment, the thankfulness, the unquestioning, unalloyed happiness. For what greater gift could God bestow than the return of a loved one from the shadow of death? Lisbeth was alive.
She was alive!
It had all been a horrible mistake. Oh, there would be time to settle later with the authorities—the police, the doctors, the undertakers—for their foolish imperceptions. How could they not have seen that she had been merely asleep, breathing shallowly, the victim of some wicked spell? How fortunate that she had awoken!
Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap
. It had been the insistent, persistent tapping that had torn him from his place of grief and sent him flying to her coffin to spring the lid. She had looked up at him dreamily, guiltily, as if caught napping when she should have been at her surgery, but yielding easily, laughing, to his eager embrace, greedily matching his barrage of kisses, as if it had been the first time they had made love. And then, just as he bent further to lift her from her confinement,darkness dropped like doom upon the earth. Lisbeth was vanished from his arms.
Tap tap tap
. The sounds came again, only this time muffled. The air, sickly warm and redolent of dust, grew close and he gasped, struggling for the breath of life against an alien presence now pressing along his face. He sensed, but could not see, his arms flailing and thrashing as he spun downwards, downwards into an abyss.
    And then, just as there had been darkness, now there was light. A bit of it, at least, peeking through soft hairs that grazed his eyelashes. Tom widened his eyes and stared dully past the blurry boundary towards the bedroom wall, which was flushed with morning’s first sun. He freed one hand from under the covers and pushed Powell—or possibly Gloria; he still couldn’t tell the difference—away from his face. He breathed in sharply, then jerked his head up to see the cat regarding him with a kind of diabolical fixedness.
Go away, spawn of Satan
, Tom ordered the cat telepathically, hoping the creature’s peanut brain would pick up the signal. Apparently, it did not. Powell—it was Powell; a quick glance at his vulgar backside confirmed the feline’s sex—climbed his chest and circled it. Tom dropped his head back and began absently stroking the nesting cat, grateful that no dead bird had been desposited this time on the duvet. The tapping noise coming from the ceiling—Madrun writing her daily letter to her deaf mother on some confounded ancient typewriter—had a peculiar