Читать книгу The Gargoyle in My Yard - Philippa Dowding - Страница 5

A New Statue

Katherine looked at her homework piled up on the kitchen table.

“Too much to do,” she thought and took another bite of her apple. She munched slowly looking out the kitchen window.

A beautiful fall day was happening outside, without her.

The maple tree against the back fence was glorious with orange, yellow and red leaves gently fluttering to the ground. The warm sun shone on the still-green grass. The fall flowers were in full bloom, and her favourite flowers of all, her mother’s award-winning New England Asters, were showing their pretty purple faces to the world.

Her mother and father were really proud of their fall flowers and had the awards to prove how beautiful they were. Katherine had grown up around flowers and knew many of their Latin names: the New England Asters were called “symphyotrichum novae-angliae”.

She sighed, tapping her pencil on the table, and took another stab at math problem #6. She read: “Mr. Henry has 3,335 nails and 170 boards to nail onto the fence. If he uses 16 nails for every two boards, how many nails will he use in all? Bonus: How many nails remain unused?”

“Uggh,” she said out loud and decided to walk outside to clear her head. She grabbed her apple and said “Come on, Milly,” to the pretty calico cat. She let the screen door slam behind her as she escaped the dull world of Mr. Henry and his nails and boards.

Katherine went and sat on the backyard swing, slowly dragging her feet in the grass, the maple leaves falling on her long hair. Her green eyes took in a little statue sitting nearby.

The new garden gargoyle had his back to her a few feet away, with his head in his hands and his wings folded tightly behind his back. He was one of the many garden ornaments Katherine’s parents kept in their tiny backyard.

He looked as though he was thinking hard about something. He was sitting on a small pedestal made of stone which had once belonged to a goddess statue, now long gone. This little gargoyle was brand new to their garden, and he was now her favourite.

There were plenty of statues to choose from. Even though their backyard was small, it was definitely full of interesting things to look at. You might say her parents, well, her mother really, were statue-freaks. And they gardened constantly. For such a small piece of land, her father liked to say their backyard got more attention than Casa Loma.

Their garden already had six statues: a little faun with the body and face of a man and the legs of a goat; a small cherub with an angelic, baby face, perfect wings and a little harp; three bearded, pointy-hatted dwarves; and a water fountain with a unicorn in the middle. The water splashed out of the unicorn’s long, curly horn.

But she liked the gargoyle the best. He had a thoughtful sort of face (for a gargoyle) and folded wings that looked leathery and real. He also had a small pouch at his side, bulging with something she couldn’t make out.

Katherine wondered what a gargoyle would keep in a pouch like that?

“What do you have in that pouch, Mr. Gargoyle?” she asked. Katherine was reading The Hobbit in school and wondered if the gargoyle was anything like a goblin. “Do you have some snails, and wet string and a sharp stone to gnaw? Why I bet ...” she was going to go on, but stopped when she heard her mother call from the kitchen.

“Hi, Katherine! I’m home...”

“Hi Mom!” she yelled back and hopped off the swing. She ran past the gargoyle, dropped her half-eaten apple in the grass, stroked Milly, who was sunning herself on the porch, and disappeared back into the house with a slam of the screen door.

Katherine didn’t see what happened next, but Milly did.

Slowly, a small, leathery claw reached out and closed around the apple Katherine had dropped. The gargoyle was hungry.