Free The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman

and find Mr. Locke and ask him to ring the police and the doctor.’ I didn’t know what he could be talking about, Jenny Andrews dead, what’s he mean, I thought, but then he sat down and sort of groaned and put his face in his hands and said ‘Now I’ve done it wrong! I should have left her, mum, now they won’t find any clues! I’ve messed it all up, I should have left her there.’ and then I saw he must be telling the truth. Mr. Parrish is out on the tractor; he doesn’t know about it; oh Lord, it’s too horrible.”
    “Christ,” said Matthew in a whisper. “How was she killed? Do you know how long she’d been there?”
    “She’d been strangled; oh, the brute, he must be mad. Peter said she was stiff and her clothes were all wet. She must have been there all night, and her mother wondering where she was – now she’ll have to hear this, on top of it – oh, it’s just wickedness, it’s pure wickedness!”
    Matthew was silent. He stared at the wallpaper without seeing it. “Now then,” he thought, “this is another gulf opening – this is the world moving again – it’s like the girl on the beach – I don’t move as fast as I thought; I don’t move at all, it’s the world that moves, it strides like a giant and I can’t keep up with it…”
    But in fact his mind was racing, darting here and there over the whole image of murder. It shocked him like thunder; and like thunder it was a natural phenomenon, perhaps; it came out of a clear sky, and demonstrated contemptuously how deep in sleep he was. It spoke too loudly to be human.
    After a second or two Mrs. Parrish had recovered a little. She stood up and smoothed her hands over her skirt. “Oh dear, I’m all trembling; look at my hands. I’d better go and see what they’re doing over there, then I’ll go to Mrs. Andrews’; the police’ll be here in a minute, I suppose…”
    “Can I do anything, Mrs. Parrish?” said Matthew, feeling that he ought to say something, “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do, really – I don’t want to get in the way. There’ll be so much going on in a minute.”
    She went across to the window beside the front door that overlooked the drive and the entrance to the farm, and leant forward to look out, resting her hands on the window sill.
    “No; I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think you’d better get in the way, Matthew, because the police’ll have lots to do; I should just stay here, if I was you.”
    Whenever his emotions were excited, as they were now, he found himself experiencing a curious kind of over sensitivity; he responded in the most extravagant way to the most minute stimuli. It amounted almost to clairvoyance. He was aware of every smallest degree of feeling in Mrs. Parrish, and even felt a momentary flare of lust for her thickset body, because unconsciously she had put her weight on one hip and bent the other leg in a way that gave her an unusual lightness and grace. As soon as she turned round, of course, the spell would be broken, but he was astonished by the strength of it, while it lasted. Perhaps the murderer had seen the girl like that, and been unable to resist – it would only take a moment… But the words she had just spoken would have protected her, because Matthew had been hurt by them, feeling them to be a harsh rebuke to his presumptuous desire to interfere. Consequently he sat absolutely still, hiding his feelings but still being aware of every tiniest gradation of the light around her body, every variation in the emotional atmosphere between them. He could even smell her, among the other smells of furniture-polish, of cooking oil, of soap, of flowers through the open window; he caught the warm smell of her flesh, not entirely clean, but certainly not dirty. And he heard quite distinctly, over and apart from the flooding of his own blood, the rush and pull of the tides of hers, and felt her heart above him like the moon.
    And before he could become