Читать книгу Blink and You Die - Lauren Child - Страница 14

IT HAPPENED ONE BRIGHT APRIL DAY when the child, then barely five weeks old, was sleeping. The world crashed down and the baby opened its eyes, but there was only darkness to see. The walls were packed around it, almost touching, and the doors and the windows all gone. The baby cried out, but no one came. It screamed and clenched its furious fists, trying in vain to push at the tomb of rubble, but nothing happened. Its little mind began to panic, its eyes closed shut and its heart began to hurt.

She was alone and no one would ever find her.

The baby had been left in the care of the housekeeper, who had just put some cookies to cool on the porch when, without warning, the ground began to shift and the buildings began to shake, trees creaked and then cracked. Some of them – the big oak on Amster Green – stood firm, others – the giant cedar of west Twinford – fell.

Sidewalks buckled and streetlights toppled. The earth tremor lasted just a few seconds and Twinford City escaped by-and-large unscathed – a few buildings needed repair, but remarkably no one, not a soul, lost their life. The townsfolk mourned their fallen trees, but counted their blessings: no one had died. There was only one real casualty; the Fairbank house on Cedarwood was completely destroyed. After 200 years of standing just exactly where it was, looking out across the ever-changing townscape of west Twinford, this historic house was gone.

It was the housekeeper who dug the child out with nothing but ‘the hands God gave her’. This woman had endured more than earthquakes in her time and no mere earth tremor was going to have her standing by while an infant lay buried, perhaps dead, perhaps alive. By the time the baby’s parents returned to their home, now a wreckage of wood and brick, their daughter was lying in the housekeeper’s lap quiet as a lamb and smiling up at them. Everyone was very relieved, their little girl saved, not a scratch to her perfect face, no damage done.

Or so they thought, for in that baby’s head a tiny kernel of fear had lodged, a fear which would grow and grow until in her thoughts a monster lurked.