Read Online Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson - Free Book Online

Silver. ‘You saved me. Thank you very much. My name is Silver. Who are you?’
    ‘I am called Gabriel,’ answered the boy. ‘A Throwback.’
    ‘A what?’ asked Silver.
    ‘A Throwback. That be my Clan and my Kind. We dwellunder the earth, and we do not live as Updwellers do.’
    ‘What’s an Updweller?’
    ‘You be an Updweller.’
    Silver looked at the strange boy, with his strange speech and ragged clothes, and she felt two things simultaneously; two feelings so twinned together that she couldn’t separate them. She felt that she had known this boy all her life, which was silly because she had just met him, and she felt that she could trust him. Since her father had died, and Mrs Rokabye had come, and everything had gone wrong, this was the first time that Silver felt she had a friend. She didn’t think about what she felt, she just spoke straight away, without explaining.
    ‘I am in trouble. Will you help me?’
    The boy nodded. ‘Let us go together to the Chamber.’
    ‘The Chamber?’
    ‘Come,’ said Gabriel.

Ghosts!
    Thugger was having an underground experience too.
    He had gone down the hidden flight of stairs into the cellars, and as soon as his feet had touched the bottom step, the opening to the reading room above had closed with a dreadful grinding noise. However he was going to get out would not be the way he had come in.
    He swallowed hard and decided to be brave. It was very dark so he got out his torch and flashed it around.
    Cobwebs everywhere, YUK! which meant spiders everywhere, big YUK! And the biggest YUK! of all was the slime. His fingers turned green from feeling their way along the walls. Suppose he was walking into a sewer?
    Sewers meant rats, and Thugger didn’t like rats.
    At last he found a door and opened it thankfully. Doors meant rooms or passageways, and rooms and passageways led out of sewers.
    He went into the room – nothing there, but there was another door. He opened it into a room with two doors, tried one, and found it led into a room with three doors. He went back and tried the second door of the second room. It led into another room with three doors, which led intoanother room with four doors, and now the doors were like mirrors, every one identical, every one showing him the same thing, but multiplying themselves, so that he no longer knew which doors he had tried and which doors were untried.
    He panicked, and ran through the rooms, pulling open the doors. There were echoes too – footsteps, his own, they must be his own. The rooms were an echo chamber and the noises were delayed, because even when he stood still he could hear footsteps in the other rooms.
    ‘Who’s there?’ he called, and the voice answered, ‘THERE THERE THERE.’
    He spun round. Where where where?
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘YOU YOU YOU,’ the voice said.
    ‘I’m not scared!’
    ‘SCARED SCARED SCARED.’
    ‘I’ve got to get out of ’ere,’ Thugger whispered to himself so that the Echo wouldn’t hear him, but it did hear him, and chased him step by step and room by room, as he went on through the endless house.
    ‘HERE HERE HERE.’
    ‘It’s just my voice,’ he said. ‘I’m lost and I don’t like it, that’s all, but there’s nothing to worry about.’
    Then he fell over. No, he didn’t fall over, he was tripped up; someone or something had put out their hand and pulled him flat on his nose. Punching wildly, his closed fist hit a solid object that straight away hit him back right over thehead. As he lost consciousness he had the feeling that he knew what, or who, it was.

The Throwbacks
    Silver had never seen anything like the underground world of the Throwbacks.
    She followed Gabriel down a narrow passage about six inches deep in water. She had no shoes on, and running through the city had torn her socks. Now she was footsore and soaked, but she didn’t say anything, just hoisted up her jeans and pyjamas to keep them dry, and walked as quickly as she could. Bits of rubbish