Read Online Long Lankin by Lindsey Barraclough - Free Book Online

to rip out the elastic and shake loose my scraped-back hair. I wondered if Auntie would believe me if I undid it all and said the rubber bands were so tight that they just snapped of their own accord.
    My eyes moved down to the piano. On top was a dusty wooden clock with no hands, and next to it a small sitting lion made of brass, with ugly green stone eyes and a snarling mouth.
    I wrote CORA with my finger in the thick dust on the piano lid.
    Nan Drumm, Dad’s mum, had a piano in her little front room. Some of the notes didn’t work, but it didn’t matter. Before she went back to Scotland and we didn’t see her anymore, she would play it sometimes — old music-hall songs, and carols when we went over for our Christmas dinner. I loved singing and dancing around the room to the music, holding out my skirt and bumping into the furniture. That was before my sister was born.
    I’d heard Auntie Ida go upstairs with her, Mimi clanging the buckets. Surely Auntie wouldn’t mind if I had a little tinkle on the ivories, as Nan used to say. I would have liked to learn to play the piano like Nan did. She might have shown me how to do it if she had stayed.
    I sat down on the stool, one of those that whirled around and went up and down, and I must have whizzed round on it for five minutes at least before I came to a stop, all giddy. I blew at the dust on the lid. The top layer rose up around my name in a thick cloud, making me cough. CORA remained faintly there, even when the dust began to settle. The lid creaked a little as I lifted it to uncover the long row of black and yellow-brown keys.
    I wiggled my fingers and put them softly down, thinking I might try and have a go at “Three Blind Mice,” which I’d worked out once on Nan’s piano.
    I found the first three notes, and played them twice and then once more for luck.
    My hand moved up the keys a little way for
“See how they run.”
I put the two bits of tune together. Then I tapped out a couple of notes with my left hand to find one that would fit, but it was difficult. None of them sounded right. I played
“Three blind mice, three blind mice,”
over and over —
“See how they run, see how they run,”
four, five, six times —
“Three blind mice, three blind mice . . .
    Just then, over the noise of my clumsy playing and the steady pattering of the rain, I became aware of another sound, barely on the edge of my hearing. I stopped my fingers.
    It grew louder. Inside the room, somewhere behind me, a woman was singing. I lowered my hands silently, trembling, into my lap. The tune was strange, awkward:
    “Said my lord to my lady as he mounted his horse:
    ‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss.’
    “Said my lord to my lady as he rode away:
    ‘Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the hay.’”
    It wasn’t Auntie Ida’s voice.
    Every nerve prickled on my skin. I could hardly breathe. Out of the corner of my eye I could make out the rain trickling down the diamond panes in silver ribbons.
    “‘Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned,
    And leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in.’”
    I felt the blood pumping through the vein in my neck.
    “The doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned,
    Except one little window where Long Lankin crept in.”
    “Hello,”
said the parrot.
    The singing stopped.
    I gasped, stood up, and whirled round. There was nobody there. The parrot was biting at a seed in his claw. I turned back, and through the black specks scattered on the mirror I saw my white staring face, slashed into two pieces by the crack in the glass.
    Auntie Ida and Mimi clattered loudly down the stairs. In my haste to get out of the room, I picked up the wrong end of the paper bag, and the seeds shot out and scattered all over the floor.
    I grabbed the seeds in handfuls, tearing the bag in my hurry to get them back inside. In the end, I pushed the rest through a big hole in the carpet, then ran out of the door and back to the