Free Samuel Blink and the Forbidden Forest by Matt Haig

stay another night here. Oskar had been right. It was one thing stopping them from going into the forest and quite another stopping the forest from coming to them. It was what Henrik would want, she’d told herself. But she wasn’t going to tell the children until later, until she’d done all the washing and the packing, because it would only worry Martha and put her off her breakfast.
    â€œTake this to the table,” Aunt Eda said, handing Samuel a breakfast tray full of plates of flatbread and cheese.
    Samuel didn’t like cheese at the best of times, but he had never seen one that looked like the one on the tray. The cheeses he had tried at home had been yellow or white, but this one was a strange brown color.
    â€œWhat is the matter with your face, young man?” Aunt Eda asked him as she handed both children glasses of cloudberry juice. “Haven’t you seen cheese before?”
    â€œNot cheese that is brown,” came Samuel’s reply.
    â€œThat is because you haff neffer seen Gjetost cheese,” said Aunt Eda. “Like the cheese Uncle Henrik used to make. It is very popular with skiers. They take chunks of it on the slopes to keep themselves going. This particular one is not as nice as Henrik’s ‘Gold Medal’ cheese, but it is still a Norwegian speciality. It’s a sweet goat’s cheese. The taste is a little bit like caramel. Or even chocolate. Children haff it for breakfast, and grown-ups haff it as well.” She was speaking faster than usual, as if scared of the silence between words.
    As she spoke Aunt Eda was peeling paper-thin slices of the strange cheese with a funny looking slicer. Samuel noticed her hand was trembling. Ibsen was also watching very closely, as he loved cheese more than anything. Even steak. Not that he was ever given any. He just had to make do with the smell, which teased his nostrils and made him drool saliva into his basket.
    â€œYou see this handle?” Aunt Eda asked Martha, but didn’t wait for a reply. “It is made with the horn of a reindeer.”
    Samuel sighed, remembering the sight of the huldres. “Who cares?”
    Aunt Eda decided to ignore the sulky face that accompanied the question. “Well,” she said. “I should imagine the reindeer cared werry much indeed.”
    She smiled, like she had made a joke, but her eyes looked scared.
    â€œI don’t like goat’s cheese,” said Samuel. “I like cow’s cheese.”
    Aunt Eda’s shaking hands placed five thin slices of Gjetost on his plate, along with some flatbread. “Well, young man, in this part of Norway we haff goats, not cows.”
    She gave Martha the same amount of cheese and flatbread, and Samuel watched as his sister started to eat it without any sign of complaint or enthusiasm. Then he looked out of the dining-room window at the empty grass fields that lay in front of the forest, and thought of the charging huldres and the creature they had captured. A shudder went through him.
    Again, Samuel shook the feeling away and picked up his brown cheese and flatbread.
    If a stranger had arrived in the room during those five minutes it took Samuel to finish his breakfast, he could have been perfectly mistaken for thinking that the suddenly quiet young man was the most well-behaved twelve-year-old on the face of the earth.
    However, if the stranger had a sharp eye—a sharper eye than those belonging to Aunt Eda—he would have noticed that Samuel was only eating the flatbread.
    He flicked his wrist before taking his first mouthful. This meant the cheese fell onto his lap. He could then place the fallen slices in his pocket with the hand he kept out of view under the table. He smiled, knowing he was breaking his aunt’s fifth rule.
    And then, right after breakfast, Samuel decided to break another of Aunt Eda’s rules.
    â€œI’m going to go up to the attic,” he told his sister, when they