Read Online My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen - Free Book Online Page B

cards down on the table. ‘And that he never died! He is in there, alive,
& she knows it! They must have a pact’
    â€˜But how does he come out?’ asked Else.
    We had to wait while Gudrun shuffled & applied her mind to the question. Her scar looked paler today, as though coated in
powder. ‘There must be a secret passage,’ she said after a moment. ‘That house is a warren of traps & sewers & strange connections.
It is like a rotted brain. He must get out at night’ She looked excited at the thought, & then I remembered in the laundry
she said she had been much attached to her employer, for all his oddity.
    â€˜That’s when he’s been sighted,’ said Else. ‘Always after dark, & wrapped in a cloak with half his face hidden by a scarf
or a balaclava.’
    â€˜A balaclava?’ I asked sharply, remembering the incident at Herr Bang’s. Was I being spied upon? And if so, was the creature
stalking me a chimera, or living flesh?
    â€˜If he really is alive,’ I pondered, ‘then his wife cannot marry the Pastor. Perhaps that is why she would rather not know
he is down there!’ And my mind galloped further, for here was even more knowledge I could use to my financial gain. What might
it be worth to Fru Krak to keep her supposedly dead husband’s presence a secret? A hundred kroner? Two? Per month?
    I much liked this idea of mine, but just as I was getting my teeth into it, Else asked: ‘Why don’t he just seize the house,
& boot Fru Krak out? It’s his property, after all, ain’t it?’
    â€˜God knows,’ said Gudrun. ‘But again, it points to a pact’
    â€˜And what does he do in there, do you think?’
    â€˜The same as he always did, I expect,’ she replied, almost happily. ‘Tinker with his engineering all day. He’d lock himself
away in there for days at a stretch,’ she reminisced. ‘Then when there were visitors – the noises you’d hear! Noises like
murder. But I’ll tell you one thing. On those nights, Fru Krak always pretended she’d gone deaf. Never asked what he was up
to. Didn’t want to know, I suppose. She wasn’t bothered how he came about his money, so long as her purse was chock-a-block
when she went shopping.’
    â€˜I clapped eyes on her myself last week,’ said Else. ‘I sold her some holly. For Sataan, what a nincompoop she looked in that green-tinted fur!’
    â€˜All I know,’ said Gudrun after they had played the next round, ‘is that I counted folk coming in, & when I counted them leaving,
there were always fewer.’
    â€˜What sort of folk?’ asked Else, scowling at her cards.
    â€˜All sorts. Men & women. Children with them, sometimes. But no one ever came asking about them afterwards. I never got it.
Where did they go, & why did no one care that they had disappeared?’
    And so Gudrun sat dealing the cards, & Else sat advising me to discover all as soon as I could, but to apply caution, & then
Gudrun counselled the opposite, but nevertheless fished in her purse for a rusty key which she said she had pilfered from
the Kraks when she left, & which operated one of the back doors, though she could not recall which, & Else warned in her usual
dramatic way that I would probably die in the process of uncovering the truth, & Gudrun echoed that if I valued my life, I
should stay away, & throw the key in the lake, & fingered her scar in a most meaningful & disconcerting manner.
    â€˜I’ll be grief-struck to lose you, Charlotte!’ wailed Else with a tear in her eye as Gudrun dealt another set of cards. ‘We’ve had such larks together
you & me, & I’ll miss your company something rotten!’ And she stifled a dramatic sob while scooping up her cards, surveying
her hand & doing some nifty rearranging. But O, had we only known that for once Else had no need to exaggerate! That I would