Free Samuel Blink and the Forbidden Forest by Matt Haig Page B

about up here, so he closed his eyes and whipped the tablecloth off the chest as fast as a magician wanting to keep a tea set in place.
    He opened his eyes and became instantly disappointed. The chest was full of books, and not even interesting-looking books. These were old books, in boring hard covers with dull colors and no pictures on them. And they were written in Norwegian.
    Samuel hadn’t read a book since his parents died. He had tried. Mrs. Finch, the neighbor who had looked after Samuel and Martha before they flew out to Norway, had suggested that Samuel should read to take his mind off things. But he hadn’t been able to concentrate enough to finish reading a single sentence. His mind was still so full of the car accident that his eyes had slid off words like feet on an icy pavement.
    Picking through the books in the tea chest, Samuel looked at the titles on the spine.
    Niflheim og Muspellshein
    Ultima Thule
    Ask og Embla
    Ã†sir
    Per Gynt
    And then he saw another book, underneath all the others. It was right at the bottom and Samuel had to stretch his arm as far as it would go in order to reach it.
    It was heavy—heavier than its average size suggested—as if the words weighed more than in the other books. The cover was the dullest of greens, like grass in a March fog, but it somehow looked better than the rest.
    Samuel looked at the spine, and felt a chill as the wind kept blowing against the side of the house.
    The book had a title he could understand. It was called The Creatures of Shadow Forest, by Professor Horatio Tanglewood.

The Fascinating Darkness
    While her brother was nosing around in the attic, Martha stared out of the bedroom window and watched her aunt collect the washing from the line. The wind was strong, and kept blowing the vests and long johns and jumpers into Aunt Eda’s face as she unpegged them.
    What was Martha thinking about as she stared out from that upstairs window? Whether you were ten thousand miles away or right in the same room, you wouldn’t have been able to understand what was going on behind those dark brown eyes as they observed her aunt battling the wind.
    The truth is, she wasn’t paying much attention to anything her eyes were witnessing. Since her parents’ death, everything she saw in the outside world struck her as being pointless. What was the purpose of doing anything? Where did it get you? Everybody dies in the end, whether that end comes sooner or later it didn’t really matter. She knew that some people—like Aunt Eda—could try to spend time talking and smiling to cover up the sadness inside them, but words and smiles belonged to another world now. A world to which Martha knew she would never be able to return.
    So when she watched a bedsheet that her aunt had placed in the basket fill like a cotton balloon and fly up into the air, she didn’t open the window and tell Aunt Eda that the washing was escaping in the wind.
    It was only when her aunt turned around from unpegging her last pair of long johns that she caught sight of the rebellious bedsheet.
    Aunt Eda shoved the long johns into the basket and started running after the white sheet as it swooped up in the air, and back down, cartwheeling over the grass toward the forest.
    Martha saw other items were now leaving the basket as well, due to the increasing strength of the wind. And pretty soon all of the washing was traveling through the air toward the trees, flying over Aunt Eda’s head or whizzing past her on the grass.
    Undershirts, long johns, woolly socks, underpants—all tumbling and soaring like birds with injured wings…
    Aunt Eda managed to catch hold of some socks and a shirt, then she saw the bedsheet come to rest only a few steps away from the forest. She ran toward it, pinning the rescued items of washing to her chest with her left arm. Then, once she had gotten to the bedsheet she stretched out her other arm—her javelin arm—but