could easily hurt herself. One torn muscle and...
And what? I won't be able to run? She couldn't shake the sense of foreboding. The sun shone
outside, a beautiful summer afternoon. But gray winter seemed to be closing in.
She lifted herself up into the darkness, sitting on the hatch's edge and resting for a moment.
Listening. Looking for light from elsewhere. She still had no idea what had hap-pened. If the Uncles were
waiting for her to come home, perhaps they'd also be checking her house. And that could mean the attic
too.
When her eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, she set off on hands and knees. Mr.
Barker's attic had floor-boards, so the going was relatively easy. The old bachelor didn't have much stuff to
store, it seemed; there were a cou-ple of taped-up boxes tucked into one corner and an open box of books
slowly swelling with damp. Mustiness perme-ated the attic, and she wondered why he'd shoved the box up
here. She hadn't seen a bookcase anywhere downstairs. There were rumors that Mr. Barker's wife had left
him ten years ago, so perhaps these books held too many ghosts for him to live with.
At the wall dividing Barker's property from hers, Jazz crawled into the narrowing gap between floor
and sloping roof. Right at the eaves, just where her mother said it would be, was a gap where a dozen
blocks had been removed. Lazy builders, she'd said when Jazz had asked. But Jazz found it easy to
imagine her mother up here with a chisel and ham-mer, while she was in school and Mr. Barker was at
work.
She wriggled through the hole into her own attic. There were no floorboards here, and she had to
move carefully from joist to joist. One slip and her foot or knee would break through the plasterboard ceiling
into the house below. She guessed she was right above her bedroom.
A wooden beam creaked beneath her and she froze, cursing her clumsiness. She should have
listened first, tried to figure out whether the Uncle was still in there. Too late now. She lowered her head,
turned so that her ear pressed against the itching fiber-wool insulation, and held her breath.
Voices. Two men were talking, but she could barely hear their mumbled tones. She was pretty sure
their voices did not come from directly below. Her room, she thought, was empty —for now.
There were two hatches that led down from the attic into the town house. One was above the
landing, visible to anyone in the upstairs corridor or anyone looking up the stairs from below. And then there
was the second, just to her right, which her mother had installed in Jazz's bedroom. Emergency escape,
she'd said, smiling, when Jazz had asked what she was doing.
Everything you told me was right, Jazz thought. She felt tears threatening but couldn't go to that
place yet. Not here, and not now.
She crawled to the hatch, feeling her way through the darkness. When she touched its bare wood
and felt the han-dle, she paused for a minute, listening. She could still hear muffled voices, but they seemed
to come from farther away than her bedroom.
Jazz closed her eyes and concentrated. Sometimes she could sense whether someone else was
close. Most people called it a sixth sense, though usually it was a combination of the other five. With her,
sometimes, it was different.
She frowned, opened her eyes, and grasped the handle.
Maybe there was an Uncle standing directly below her. Maybe not. There was only one way to find
out.
Jazz lifted the hatch quickly and squinted against the sudden light. She leaned over the hole and found
her room empty.
Good start, she thought. Everything her mother had said to her, everything she had been taught,
shouted at her to flee. But there was something going on here that she had to understand before she could
bring herself to run.
Jazz lowered herself from the hatch into her room, land-ing lightly on the tips of her toes, knees
bending to absorb the impact. She remained in that pose, looking around her room and listening for
movement from outside.
Her drawers had been opened, her bookcase upset, and clothes were strewn across the floor. The
cover of her jour-nal lay loose and torn on her bed like a gutted bird.
Mum! she thought. And for the first time, the fear came in hard. The Uncles had always protected
and helped them, even if her mother had little respect for them. But now they seemed dangerous. It was as
if their surface veneer had been stripped away and her perception of them was becoming clear at last.
She glanced back up at the ceiling hatch, close enough to
| <<Previous page | |
Next page>> |