Free The Haunted Storm by Philip Pullman Page A

aware of what was happening, he was swamped, overcome by her; and she didn’t move an inch, but stood there quite still, with her back to him. The quiet hall they were in suddenly assumed the proportions of a womb or a cradle or a pair of enveloping maternal arms, and the air of the afternoon swept around him, imperious and amniotic, so that all he had of self-awareness and independence was swiftly and momentarily annihilated.
    And then she turned to him and smiled briefly, and said, “Well, the Lord knows what He’s up to, but we don’t; sometimes I wish He’d make it all a bit clearer. Poor Mrs. Andrews; her heart’ll break.”
    And with that she opened the front door and went out.
    Matthew thought of grief and terror bounding out greedily through the village, straining forward like gaunt spectral dogs from their birthplace on the edge of the wood; and in his mind he watched them, impersonally.
    “What does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean for me ?” he thought.

Chapter 4
    NEXT DAY being Sunday, Matthew decided as soon as he was awake that he would go to church. There was an impulse of refuge-seeking in this idea, for he had had a disturbed unpleasant night, waking in the grey dawn from a nightmare of the girl’s broken body that hung straddling a fence, with black blood pouring from it, and he could neither run away nor take his eyes off it. He lay awake, frightened at first by the singing of the birds, which seemed to be resounding in a bare, damp, grey place, the wood of the self-murderers, extended in his head; he lay still in misery for almost half an hour until the sky cleared and the sun rose, and then he fell asleep again. When he woke for the second time he felt tired and oppressed.
    Harry had told him the night before that he’d be gone when Matthew woke up; he was going to preach in Silminster. Matthew wished he’d got up earlier and gone with him. But the church would do; it would have to. Such a craving he had for order now, and stability! He had not set foot willingly in a church for years – not when there was a service on, at any rate – but this morning the thought of singing psalms and hearing prayers spread over his senses like balm.
    The morning outside was bright and cloudless and windy; he shaved and dressed quickly and went downstairs. The clock in the hall said it was nearly ten o’clock. Mrs. Parrish had made him some breakfast and left it in the oven to keep warm, and he ate it in the kitchen, staring dreamily through the window on to the back garden.
    He washed up carefully when he had finished and then wandered outside. He supposed that they still held services at eleven o’clock, but perhaps he had better set off and find out. He went out into the road and turned up towards the village. He dawdled; the warmth of the sun on his head kept slowing him down to a standstill, and he felt as weak on his knees as a newborn calf. For the matter of that, everything felt newborn and unfamiliar. He could not give a name to a single one of the wildflowers and grasses that grew by the side of the road. He felt small in the face of the world.
    On the right-hand side of the road he passed the great yard of Locke and Son. It used to be the firm’s headquarters, but nowadays most of the large construction work was carried on from Silminster, leaving the Barton yard free for smaller contracts and carpentry work. It looked this morning as clean and tidy as if it had just sprung naturally out of the earth, like a huge flower or a tree; and, like a tree, there was something powerfully organic about the way it functioned and rested. The piles of timber and bricks, the fleet of lorries with the firm’s name on them in black and red, the neat offices and sheds – there was order there, and it was visible and clear. Matthew lingered for a long time, staring through the screen of trees that separated it from the road, marvelling at it.
    He got to the church at a quarter to eleven and looked