Читать книгу Hector Finds Time - Francois Lelord - Страница 14

THE following night, Hector had a dream.

He was in a compartment of a train, just like the ones he remembered from his childhood, with a big corridor and windows you could open with a handle. He himself was a grown-up like the Hector we know now. He was alone and felt a little uneasy. Outside, the countryside rolled by, bathed in late-afternoon sunshine, but it was strange because the countryside was like it used to be when he was a child. You could still see cornflowers and poppies in the fields, big hedges with blackberries and raspberries where birds and rabbits hid, ponds where children fished on their way home from school, their bicycles lying in the grass, and, along country paths, cows and sheep being brought in for the night. Even the sky looked different – it was a softer blue, and the clouds were a purer shade of white. Hector was touched by this sight, and he wanted to share it with someone – perhaps one of his friends was sitting on the train. He went out into the corridor, but there was no one there, and all the other compartments in the carriage were empty.

Feeling a little uneasy, he went through to the next carriage, but there was no one there either. He continued walking up the train, thinking to himself all the while that there had to be someone on it.

While he was walking, Hector noticed something odd: the faster he walked up the corridor, the more the train slowed down, and the slower the countryside rolled by. He even had time to catch a glimpse of a pretty farm girl rounding up some nice sheep in the setting sun. If Hector stopped walking altogether to get a better view, the train would speed up, which was a little annoying. So he started running to make the train slow down even more. He ran so fast that eventually the train stopped altogether. But that wasn’t such a good thing, since Hector noticed that the landscape outside had become a snowy, icy wilderness, as if the train had arrived at the North Pole. He stopped running so that the train would move off again and get away from this icy and desolate place.

But the train didn’t move.

Ice began to creep up all the windows.

Very far away, at the other end of the train, Hector heard a door bang and realised that someone or something had just boarded the train. Footsteps … very heavy, very slow … were approaching the carriage he was in.

Hector desperately wanted to get off the train, but, the thing was, he couldn’t find a door that led outside! He wanted to open one of the windows in the carriage, but all the ones he tried were frozen solid by the ice outside.

In his dream, Hector started wishing he would wake up right away as the footsteps slowly approached his carriage.

Eventually, the train began to move off again, and then went faster and faster, and the nice countryside appeared again. This time, Hector didn’t see anyone at all, as if everyone, cows and sheep included, had gone in for the night at the same time as the sun. The only thing he saw was a happy-looking husky bounding along a path.

Hector carried on gazing at the countryside in the setting sun. Suddenly, he wasn’t afraid of the footsteps approaching his carriage any more.

The carriage door opened and Hector saw a young monk appear. Now, it wasn’t a monk from Hector’s country as you might think, but a monk like the ones from China, with a shaved head and wearing a sort of long orange robe which only covered one of his shoulders.

The monk was young, but it was strange because Hector knew that he was actually a very old monk he’d already met in real life. Yet, in his dream, it seemed perfectly normal to him that the monk was very young.

‘So,’ said the old-monk-who-was-very-young, ‘how are things with you?’

Then Hector woke up.

Clara was sleeping beside him. He reached for his notebook and penlight (which meant that he could write without waking anyone up) and wrote down his dream. Hector didn’t usually write down his dreams, but he had a feeling that this one was important.