Читать книгу The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom - Margaret Mahy - Страница 4

CHAPTER 1 At the Very Back of the Drawer

Suddenly, something clonked softly at the back of the empty drawer.

Sophie Sapwood, sitting in a sea of old photographs, stopped listening to her brothers who were outside, shouting and whistling as they bounced on the family trampoline. She tuned in to the back of the drawer instead.

She had been planning to go out to the trampoline herself, just to show both brothers the best way to turn somersaults in the air. After all, she had already found what she had been searching for – photographs of their dead mother which she had studied carefully. There was nothing left to look for. The drawer was completely empty.

But it wasn’t! It couldn’t be! Somewhere at the very back of the drawer, somewhere behind that first empty openness, something had clonked softly Sophie tugged at the drawer, trying to pull it right out, but it remained obstinately jammed halfway. Reaching in once more, her searching fingers spidered left, then spidered right. Nothing! But then, by flattening her arm, Sophie managed to reach just a little further and her fingertips brushed something smooth. Whatever it was was also icy cold, which was unexpected on such a warm morning. After all, here in New Zealand it was nearly midsummer – nearly Christmas.

The night before, Sophie had dreamed about her mother. She had woken and lain in bed for a few minutes without actually opening her eyes while she tried to work out if her mother had really looked like the mother in the dream. It had bothered Sophie to find that, though she could remember her mother’s voice, though she could remember the songs she had sung and her way of laughing, she was no longer sure about the colour of her hair, or the shape of her nose. That was why she had sneaked upstairs, all on her own, to sort through the bottom drawer in an old forgotten chest of drawers, boxed in by family junk at the back of the upstairs spare room. This drawer was crammed with photographs – some of Sophie’s mother, some of her big brother, Edward, and her little brother, Hotspur, and some of Sophie herself. Most of the photographs, however, showed icebergs, distant mountains and her father, the famous Antarctic explorer, Bonniface Sapwood, proudly posing beside sledges, flags and whole parties of penguins. There were even one or two photographs of the redheaded penguin-expert Corona Wottley, who had been part of an exploring expedition Bonniface had organised several years ago.

Sophie had patiently worked her way right through that jam-packed, higgelty-piggelty, mishmash of Antarctic photographs until she had entirely emptied the drawer… or at least, she thought she had. Yet here she was, touching this clicking, cold shape; this whatever-it-was which must have been left and lost for years and years. Scrabbling busily, she got a grip on it. Gently, she drew it out into the light of day.

Dangling from her dusty fingers was a yellowish-white pendant – a milky tear carved from a bone. Whalebone, perhaps, thought Sophie. It was threaded on a thin strip of leather rather like a long bootlace. The greenish light, filtering through the ivy that half-covered the upstairs window, seemed to love this pendant, stroking it, then sinking into it. Sophie loved it too – loved it so much that she immediately hung it around her neck and then, leaping across the room, stared at herself in the dusty mirror above the old dressing table.

How strange! The pendant had changed her. She had suddenly become a girl with a secret. She touched it wonderingly. It must have been shut up in the drawer for years and years, and during that time no one had worn it or warmed it or wanted it. It’s meant for me, thought Sophie. Even though Christmas was a whole five days away she felt that the house had given her a sort of early Christmas present. “It’s meant for me,” she repeated aloud, and nobody argued or contradicted her. However, just to be on the safe side, she slipped the pendant down under her T-shirt. For some reason she felt certain that, although it wanted to be worn, it also wanted to be hidden. Perhaps there was something it needed to hide from.

As it slid down over her heart, stroking her warm skin, Sophie gasped, for it still felt as cold as – no! even colder than ice! She clapped both hands against her chest as if she were in pain. But within a second or two the pendant began to feel a little less cold. Sophie’s skin was working on it.

Aha! I’m the boss! thought Sophie, and began packing photographs back into the drawer, but neatly this time. She looked at the photographs of her mother all over again.

We do look alike, she thought. That means she’s still here in a way I’m watching the world for both of us. And this thought made her happy.

She leaped up, made for the door and pounded down the stairs on her way out to play with her brothers on the family trampoline.

There was no way that Sophie could have known as she hopped from one step to another, with the pendant slowly warming up against her skin, that far away in a lost part of the wild Antarctic coast, a pair of eyes that had been closed for a long, long time were opening. Someone – someone who had not moved for the last seventy years – had begun to stir.