Read Online His Dark Materials Omnibus by Philip Pullman - Free Book Online Page A

would protect it instinctively.
    But here was Ma Costa, a queen among the gyptians, in a terror for a missing child. What was going on?
    Ma Costa looked half-blindly over the little group of children and turned away to stumble through the crowd on the wharf, bellowing for her child. At once the children turned back to one another, their feud abandoned in the face of her grief.
    “What is them Gobblers?” said Simon Parslow, one of Lyra’s companions.
    The first gyptian boy said,
“You
know. They been stealing kids all over the country. They’re pirates—”
    “They en’t pirates,” corrected another gyptian. “They’re cannaboles. That’s why they call ’em Gobblers.”
    “They
eat
kids?” said Lyra’s other crony, Hugh Lovat, a kitchen boy from St. Michael’s.
    “No one knows,” said the first gyptian. “They take ’em away and they en’t never seen again.”
    “We all know that,” said Lyra. “We been playing kids and Gobblers for months, before you were, I bet. But I bet no one’s seen ’em.”
    “They have,” said one boy.
    “Who, then?” persisted Lyra. “Have you seen ’em? How d’you know it en’t just one person?”
    “Charlie seen ’em in Banbury,” said a gyptian girl. “They come and talked to this lady while another man took her little boy out the garden.”
    “Yeah,” piped up Charlie, a gyptian boy. “I seen ’em do it!”
    “What did they look like?” said Lyra.
    “Well … I never properly saw ’em,” Charlie said. “I saw their truck, though,” he added. “They come in a white truck. They put the little boy in the truck and drove off quick.”
    “But why do they call ’em Gobblers?” Lyra asked.
    “ ’Cause they eat ’em,” said the first gyptian boy. “Someone told us in Northampton. They been up there and all. This girl in Northampton, her brother was took, and she said the men as took him told her they was going to eat him. Everyone knows that. They gobble ’em up.”
    A gyptian girl standing nearby began to cry loudly.
    “That’s Billy’s cousin,” said Charlie.
    Lyra said, “Who saw Billy last?”
    “Me,” said half a dozen voices. “I seen him holding Johnny Fiorelli’s old horse—I seen him by the toffee-apple seller—I seen him swinging on the crane—”
    When Lyra had sorted it out, she gathered that Billy had been seen for certain not less than two hours previously.
    “So,” she said, “sometime in the last two hours there must’ve been Gobblers here.…”
    They all looked around, shivering in spite of the warm sun, the crowded wharf, the familiar smells of tar and horses and smokeleaf. The trouble was that because no one knew what these Gobblers looked like, anyone might be a Gobbler, as Lyra pointed out to the appalled gang, who were now all under her sway, collegers and gyptians alike.
    “They’re
bound
to look like ordinary people, else they’d be seen at once,” she explained. “If they only came at night, they could look like anything. But if they come in the daylight, they got to look ordinary. So any of these people might be Gobblers.…”
    “They en’t,” said a gyptian uncertainly. “I know ’em all.”
    “All right, not
these
, but anyone else,” said Lyra. “Let’s go and look for ’em! And their white truck!”
    And that precipitated a swarm. Other searchers soon joined the first ones, and before long, thirty or more gyptian children were racing from end to end of the wharves, running in and out of stables, scrambling over the cranes and derricks in the boatyard, leaping over the fence into the wide meadow, swinging fifteen at a time on the old swing bridge over the green water, and running full pelt through the narrow streets of Jericho, between the little brick terraced houses and into the great square-towered oratory of St. Barnabas the Chymist. Half of them didn’t know what they were looking for, and thought it was just a lark, but those closest to Lyra felt a real fear and apprehension