Free Return to Groosham Grange by Anthony Horowitz Page B

down the book and went over to the pile of paper. Paper, candles and bats. They were right next to one another. And when you added them together, what did you get? Candles to see by. Paper to write on. Bats to . . .
    “Homing bats,” he muttered. Why not? Homing bats were more reliable than homing pigeons. And they were perfect for carrying secret messages. They preferred the dark.
    David felt in his pants pocket and pulled out a pencil. It was such an old trick that he was almost ashamed to be trying it. Softly, he scribbled the pencil along the top sheet on the pile of paper, shading it gray. When he had penciled over the entire sheet, he picked it up and held it against the candle flame.
    It had worked. David could read five faint lines written in the same tight hand as the notebook:
    EVEN MORE TOP SECRET
    THAN USUAL
    To the Bishop of Bletchley
    David Eliot is out of the running. The Grail will be delivered on prize-giving day. Departure from the island will proceed as planned. Am confident that a few days from now, Groosham Grange will no longer exist.
    The note was signed with a cross.
    Smiling to himself, David wandered over to the broken window and gazed out into the night. Just a few hours before, he had been considering packing his bags and leaving the school. Everything was different now. The sheet of paper and the notebook were all he needed. Once he showed them to the heads, the truth would come out.
    What happened next took him completely by surprise. One moment he was standing on the edge of the tower. The next he was toppling forward as something—someone—crashed into the small of his back. He hadn’t seen them. He hadn’t heard them. For a second or two his hands flailed at the empty air. He tried to regain his balance, but then whoever it was pushed him again and he fell out of the window, away from the tower, into the night.
    He was dead. A fall of six hundred feet onto the cold earth below would kill him for sure. The wind rushed into his face and the whole world twisted upside down. There was no time to utter a spell, no time to do anything.
    With a last, despairing cry, he thrust his hand out, grabbing at the darkness, not expecting to find anything. But there was something. His fingers closed. Somehow his arm had caught a branch of ivy. He gripped tighter. He was still falling, pulling the ivy away with him as he went. But the farther he fell, the thicker the ivy became. He was tangled up in it and it was slowing him down. More branches wrapped themselves around his chest and his waist. He came to a halt. With the ground only a hundred feet away, the ivy reclaimed him, springing him back, crashing him into the brickwork. David shouted with pain. His arm had almost been torn out of its socket. But a few moments later he found himself dangling in midair. He was no longer falling. He was alive.
    It took him thirty minutes to disentangle himself and climb the rest of the way down, and when he finally found himself on the ground once again, he felt dizzy and sick. He took a deep breath, then looked back up. The window where he had been pushed was almost out of sight, terribly high up. It was a miracle that he was alive at all.
    Even so, he knew what he had to do. As much as the idea appalled him, he had to be certain and so, forcing himself on, he went back into the East Tower and all the way back up the stairs. The top chamber was empty this time. And his worst fears had been realized. The pile of papers, the bats and the notebook were gone.

Prize-Giving
    T he orange Rolls-Royce was tearing up the highway at a hundred miles an hour. All around it, cars were hooting, swerving and crashing into the hard shoulder as they tried to get out of the way.
    “Shouldn’t you be driving on the left side of the road, dear?” Mrs. Eliot demanded.
    “Nonsense,” Mr. Eliot replied, poking her with the cigarette lighter. “We’re part of Europe now. I drive on the right in France and Switzerland. I don’t see