"Cooper, Susan - Dark is Rising 01 - Over Sea, Under Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cooper Susan)

'Well,' Jane said regretfully, 'we aren't supposed to touch anything locked, are we? '

There's a lot not locked,' Simon said, handing her the bottle of lemonade. 'Here. You'll have to swig from the bottle, we forgot to bring any cups. Don't worry, we won't pinch anything. Though I shouldn't think anyone's been up here for years.'

'Food,' Barney said.

The scones are in that bag there. Help yourself. Four each. I've counted.'

Barney reached out an extremely dirty hand.

'Barney!' Jane squeaked. 'Wipe your hand. You'll eat all sorts of germs and get typhoid or - or rabies or something. Here, have my handkerchief.'

'Rabies is mad dogs,' Barney said, looking with interest at the black finger-prints on his scone. 'Anyway, Father says people make too much fuss about germs. Oh all right, Jane, stop waving that silly thing at me, I've got a proper handkerchief of my own. I don't know how girls ever blow their noses.'

Scowling, he thrust his free hand into his pocket, and then his expression changed to disgust. 'Ugh,' he said, and brought out a brown, squashed apple core. 'I'd forgotten that. All cold and horrible.' He flung the core away from him into the far corner of the attic. It bounced, slithered, and rolled into the shadows.

Simon grinned. 'Now you'll bring the rats out. All attics have rats. We shall hear greedy little squeakings and see twin green points of fire and there'll be rats all over the floor. First they'll eat the apple core, and then they'll come after us.'

Jane turned pale. 'Oh no. There wouldn't be rats up here, would there?'

'If there were they'd have eaten all the newspaper,' Barney said hopefully. 'Wouldn't they?'

'I expect they don't like ink. All old houses have rats. We've got them at school, you can hear them scuttling about in the roof sometimes. Come to think of it their eyes are red, not green.' Simon's voice began to lose its brightness. He was beginning to feel slightly unhappy about the rats himself now. 'I think maybe you'd better pick that apple core up, you know, just in case.'

Barney gave an exaggerated sigh and got to his feet, swallowing his scone in two gigantic bites. 'Where did it go, then? Over there somewhere. I wonder why they didn't put anything in this corner.'

He crawled about on his hands and knees, aimlessly. 'Come and help, I can't find it.' Then he noticed a triangular gap in the sloping wall of the attic where its planks joined the floor. He peered through, and saw daylight gleaming dimly through the tiles. Just inside the gap the floorboards ended and he could feel wide-spaced beams.

'I think it must have gone through this hole,' he called. I'm going to look.'

Jane dived across the floor towards him. 'Oh do be careful, there might be a rat.'

'Couldn't be,' Barney said, half-way through the gap. There's light comes through the tiles and I can see, more or less. Can't see any core, though. I wonder if it fell between the floorboards and the underneath part. Ow!'

His rear half jerked suddenly.

'What is it? Oh do come out!' Jane tugged at his shorts.

'I touched something. But it can't be a rat, it didn't move. Where's it gone ... here it is. Feels like cardboard. Blah - here's that disgusting core next to it as well.'

His voice grew suddenly louder as he backed out of the hole, flushed and blinking. 'Well, there it is,' he said, triumphantly, flourishing the apple core. 'Now the rats'll have to come and get it. I still don't believe there are any.'

'What's that other thing you've got?' Simon looked curiously at a tattered, scroll-like object in Barney's other hand.

'Piece of wallpaper, I think. I bet you've eaten all the scones, you pigs.' Barney bounded back across the floor, making the floorboards rattle. He sat down, pulled out his handkerchief, waved it ostentatiously at Jane, wiped his hands and began to munch another scone. As they ate, he reached over and idly unrolled the scroll he had found, holding one end down on the floor with his toe and pushing the other back with a piece of wood until it lay stretched open before them.

And then, as they saw what it was, they all suddenly forgot their eating and stared.

The paper Barney had unrolled was not paper at all, but a kind of thick brownish parchment, springy as steel, with long raised cracks crossing it where it had been rolled. Inside it, another sheet was stuck down: darker, looking much older, ragged at the edges, and covered with small writing in strange squashed-looking dark brown letters.