Читать книгу The Flask - Nicky Singer - Страница 16

It’s on the window sill.

What I thought was a patch of sunlight isn’t sunlight at all. It’s bright like sunlight, but it doesn’t fall right, doesn’t cast the right shadows. Light coming through a windowpane starts at the sun and travels for millions of miles in dead straight lines. You learn that in year 6. Light from the sun is not curved, or lit from inside, or suddenly iridescent as a soap bubble or milky as a pearl. It doesn’t expand and pulse and move. It doesn’t breathe. Whatever is on the window sill, it isn’t light from the sun.

I go towards it. It would be a lie to say I’m not frightened. I am frightened, terrified even, but I’m also drawn. I can’t help myself. I remember my old maths teacher, Mr Brand, breaking off from equations one day and going to stand at the window where there was a slanted sunbeam. He cupped his hands in the beam and looked at the light he held – and didn’t hold.

“You can’t have it,” he said. “You can’t ever have it.”

And all of the class laughed at him. Except me. I knew what he meant because I’ve tried to capture sunbeams too.

And now I want the thing on the window sill, because it is strange and beautiful and I don’t want to lose it again. I don’t want to feel what I felt when I saw that the flask was empty, which is sick and hollow, my stomach clutching just like in the moment when Mum told me Aunt Edie was dead.

So I move very slowly and quietly, as though the thing is an animal after all and might take fright. And it does seem to be vibrating – or trembling, I can’t tell which – as though it is aware of me, watching me, though something without eyes cannot watch.

“It’s all right,” I find myself saying. “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

I won’t hurt it! What about it hurting me?

My room’s not big, as I’ve said, but it takes an age to cross. I am just a hand-stretch away from the pearly, pulsing light when there is a sudden whoosh, like a wind got up from nowhere, and I feel a rush and panic, but I don’t know if it is my rush and panic or that of the thing which seems to whip and curl past my head and pour itself back into the flask.

Back into the flask!

Quick as a flash, I put my thumb over the opening and I hold it down tight as I scrabble in the desk for my sticky tape. I pull at the tape, bite some off, jam it over the open throat of the flask and then wind it again and again around the neck, so the thing cannot escape.

I have it captured.

Captured!

Then I feel like one of those boys you read about in books that pull the wings off flies: violent, cruel. But here’s the question: if you had something in your bedroom that flew and breathed and didn’t obey the laws of science, would you want it at liberty?

There you are then.