Read Online My Name Is Mina by David Almond - Free Book Online

their hearts that he never would.
“Did Grandma keep on loving him?” Mina asked one day.
Mum shrugged and sighed. “She said she did. But it’s hard to go on loving somebody that’s always on the seven seas.” She smiled. “Grandma was quite a force herself, of course.” She winked. “She was liked by lots of men.”
For a few years while Mina was growing up, the house was rented out to students. Mina remembered seeing them sometimes, going in and out of the house, rolling bicycles into the hallway, sitting in the front garden eating sandwiches, throwing Frisbees, playing guitars. She remembered wondering what it would be like, to live in a big house like that with lots of friends, and to throw Frisbees in the garden, though she found it hard to think of herself with lots of friends. Then she thought, Maybe I’ll find friends who are rather like me, and we’ll be able to put up with each other.
The students didn’t last forever. The house was getting run-down. It needed decorating, some of the window frames were starting to rot, the electrics needed to be fixed up. Mina’s mum wroteto Grandpa about it. He said he’d sort it out soon. They knew, of course, that he never would. So Mina’s mum locked the house, put boards across the windows and put a sign on the door that simply said:

     
And for a long time, the house was almost forgotten about.
One afternoon, just after the reading of the will, Mum got the key to the house out of a drawer. She found a torch. She and Mina put on old clothes, and they walked to Crow Road, to the dark green gate that led to the house. Mum unlocked the gate and they walked through the garden to the DANGER door. Mum unlocked that too. She pushed it open, stepped aside and bowed.
“Welcome to your inheritance, Mistress McKee,” she said in a spooky-sounding voice, and she ushered Mina into the inside darkness.
The house had big rooms, bare floorboards,bare walls. Mum shone the torch up into the corners to show the heavy plasterwork, the wallpaper curling away from the walls, the dangling light fixtures. There were cobwebs everywhere. Little creatures kept scuttling across the floors. Chinks of light shone through the cracks in the boards on the windows. Dust (skin!) danced through the torch beam. They climbed the wide stairways. Their footsteps echoed and echoed through the house.
“What on earth will you be doing with something so large?” said Mum.
“I shall live in it with my servants, of course,” said Mina. “Or I shall establish a school.”
“A school, my lady?”
“Yes. A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.”
They climbed three stairways. On the final landing there was a final narrow flight of stairs.
Mum paused.
“This leads to the attic,” she said. She shuddered. “I remember hardly anything of being in this house, but I do remember looking up these stairs and feeling very weird.”
“Weird?” said Mina.
“Yes, scared, and … weird.”
“Let’s go up,” said Mina.
Mum held back.
“Do I dare?”
Mina led the way. The stairs were narrow. She reached towards the attic door and opened it.
They were in a wide room. Light came in from an arched window that had not been boarded. Beyond the window was the park, then the roofs and spires and towers of the city, and the wide wide sky. The window was broken. Glass lay on the floor beneath. There were large bird droppings upon the glass.
“Look!” said Mina.
In one of the walls there was a hole where plaster and bricks had fallen away. Below the hole there were more droppings, a few brown and black feathers and some furry balls. Mum held Mina back.
“A nest!” hissed Mina.
Slowly, slowly, she approached it.
“Mina, take care!” whispered her mother.
But Mina wasn’t scared. The hole in the wallwas as high as her head. She stood on tiptoes and peered into the shadowed space. She saw the feathered bodies lying there together. She saw the bodies moving as the birds