Читать книгу Look into My Eyes - Lauren Child - Страница 22

Chapter 10.

The voice

RUBY KNEW THAT VOICE. It was the voice of the telephone, the voice of the codes and the riddles, but she could not see where it came from.

Slowly her eyes began to adjust and she found that the wall was no longer a wall, and she stumbled forward into an entirely white room.

It was a big room, huge, at its centre an enormous desk. Behind the desk sat a woman; the owner of the gravelly voice. The woman was older than her mother but not “old”. Dressed completely in white, she was elegant and strikingly beautiful, immaculately groomed – although in no way “dolled-up”, as Mrs Digby would put it.

Under the white desk Ruby could see the woman’s feet – she wore no shoes and her toenails were painted cherry red, the only visible colour in the room. She was studying some papers which were spread out across the tabletop, engrossed in these, too busy to be bothered looking up.

A fly buzzed aimlessly around the room.

Ruby wasn’t bad at physics, in fact she was pretty good, but even she couldn’t work out how a space this big could fit into a space this small – it was like she had crawled through a drain and found herself in a ballroom.

‘Wow,’ said Ruby. ‘Your decorators really know how to make a place feel roomy.’

The woman reached for her glasses, then, showing only the merest hint of curiosity, she peered across the desk. She paused before asking in a far from joking tone, ‘Do you know why you are here?’

‘Because you called me up and got me crawling down a tunnel?’ said Ruby.

The woman paused again. ‘Do you know who I am?’

Ruby looked at the desk, then above it at the all-white painting, and then at the carpet on the floor. After some close looking she began to see a pattern in the white mat and gloss paint, and another in the pile of the carpet. The patterns were all made up of the same letters, two letters.

‘LB?’ she said.

The woman nodded, almost smiling. ‘LB is correct. I am in charge here.’

‘And where exactly is here?’ asked Ruby

‘The hub of it all, the hub of intelligence.’

‘Come again?’ said Ruby

‘Well if you must have a label – Spectrum.’

‘Nope,’ said Ruby. ‘Still means nothing to me.’