Free Awakening by William Horwood Page A

been touched in years! They should go!’
    Stort grabbed a pencil and inscribed the number sixty-three upon the envelope he had just filled.
    ‘Thus do I work!’ he cried. ‘Who can tell what will be needed?’
    ‘Sixty-three,’ she said, ‘is that an important number? More important than sixty-two or four?’
    He stared at her blankly.
    ‘Well, of course it’s important, Madam—’
    ‘Cluckett, call me Cluckett.’
    He stared at her again, his thoughts confused. What had he been saying, what was his drift? Why did she so bewilder him? He waved the envelope about.
    ‘Sixty-three may be an important number, certainly it is an interesting one, but that is not quite—’
    ‘If it’s important, sir, would it not be better to look after that envelope more carefully?’
    ‘That is not the point I am trying to make, Goodwife . . .’
    ‘Cluckett is not a difficult name to remember, I would have thought, especially for a bookish kind of man like you.’
    ‘Well then, sixty-three may or may not be important depending on what is contained within, which is a recipe for canine dispersal. My point is that it might be a great loss to science and to mortality were it to be “tidied away”. I am ordering you to touch nothing.’
    ‘Canine is dogs and I don’t like ’em,’ said Cluckett.
    ‘Nor I,’ said Stort, ‘hence the vital, truly vital importance of this envelope and me being able to find it.’
    ‘Well, sir, you cannot stop me tidying things, it is in my nature. You are not, I take it, intending to stop me?’
    She stared at him boldly with challenge in her eyes and Stort knew the moment of truth had come. Back down now and all would be lost, his home tidied away to nothingness, the good work of many years destroyed, and he, as Barklice feared, tidied away as well.
    She advanced upon him as an army to battle, keys clanking warningly on her belt.
    ‘Madam, I . . . I . . .’
    She came nearer still.
    ‘Yes, Mister Stort, you have something to say?’
    ‘I . . . yes . . . no . . .’
    His chest felt constricted, his breath difficult, his throat so dry with trepidation that he could not speak. Nor finally could he stand up without the support of the nearest laboratory table, which he clutched, gasping for air.
    This had a salutary effect on Cluckett, who rushed to a sink in the laboratory, filled an empty glass vessel with water, and proffered it to him. He took it gratefully and drank it at once, his stand against her beginning to weaken. The water tasted strange yet not unpleasant. It put a sudden fire to his throat and then his spirit too as it hit the lining of his stomach like a thunderbolt. Moments later his hair, as it felt, began to stand on end.
    She stared at him in alarm as, while he still fought for words, his eyes turned a ferocious red.
    Speechless still, he stared down at the retort in his hand and saw that what he had drunk was water mixed with the evaporated remains of a little experiment he had been working on a year before. The label on it read ‘CURE FOR WARTS’.
    His nostrils flared and his ears trembled as a dragon-like heat came out of them both.
    Then he heard a voice deep and strong, which sounded only a little like his own. He felt himself advancing upon her in his turn. To his surprise she began to back away, fear in her eyes.
    ‘Madam or Cluckett or whatever your name is,’ he said, ‘if you touch a single thing in this laboratory without my permission I will dismiss you instantly and without a reference!’
    Her expression darkened, her cheeks and forehead turned red, she looked enraged.
    ‘Sir, if you—’
    ‘Cluckett,’ he responded at once, ‘if you continue like this I shall be forced to rid my home of you at once!’
    ‘You would deal roughly with my person?’
    He thought about this for a moment and finally said, ‘I would and come to think of it – I shall!’
    He loomed over her as if to carry through his threat.
    Her response astonished him.
    ‘Oh sir,’ she