Room 13 Read Free

Sir.’
    The teacher frowned. ‘Then I’m afraid I don’t understand. You didn’t bring it from home, and you didn’t get it in the ladies’. You haven’t been anywhere else, yet here it is. Perhaps you laid it, like a hen lays an egg. Did you?’
    ‘No, Sir.’
    ‘Then what did you do?’
    ‘I went in a shop, Sir.’
    ‘You did what?’
    ‘Went in a shop, Sir.’
    ‘And what had I said about shopping, Lisa Watmough, just before you got off the coach?’
    ‘We weren’t to do any, Sir.’
    ‘Right. Then why did you go into that shop?’
    ‘I don’t know, Sir.’
    ‘You don’t know, and neither do I, but here’s something I do know. This evening, when the rest of the group is listening to a story in the hotel lounge, you will be in your room writing two apologies – one to the children for having kept them waiting, and one to me for having disobeyed my instructions. When both apologies have been written to my satisfaction, this torch will be returned to you. In the meantime you can leave it with me. Go to your seat.’
    ‘What the heck did you do that for?’ whispered Fliss, as Lisa slid into her seat. Lisa was one of those girls who seldom step out of line and are rarely in trouble at school.
    She shook her head miserably. ‘I don’t know, Fliss. I don’t even need a torch – I’ve got a better one at home. You’ll think I’m crazy, but I couldn’t help it – it was as though my feet were going by themselves.’
    ‘Oh, don’t you start,’ groaned Fliss.
    ‘What d’you mean?’
    ‘Nothing. Forget it.’ She looked out of the window. They passed a sign. North Yorkshire Moors National Park. The coach was climbing. Fliss gazed out as green pasture gave way to treeless desolation. She shivered.

‘HEY LOOK!’
    A boy on the right-hand side near the front of the coach stood up and pointed. Everybody looked. Out of the bleak landscape rose three white, dome-shaped objects, like gigantic mushrooms breaking through the earth. As the coach carried them closer, they saw a scatter of low buildings and a fence. The great spheres, gleaming in the sunlight, looked like objects in a science-fiction movie.
    ‘Wow! What are they, Sir?’
    Mr Hepworth got up. ‘That’s the Fylingdales early-warning station,’ he told them. ‘Inside those domes is radar equipment, operated by the British and American forces. It maintains a round-the-clock watch for incoming missiles. They say it would give us a three-minute warning.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Three minutes in which to do whatever we haven’t done yet and always wanted to.’
    ‘What would you do, Sir?’ asked a grinning Waseem Kader.
    ‘What would I do?’ The teacher thought for a moment. ‘I think I’d get a brick and throw it through the biggest window I could find.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve always fancied that.’
    ‘Oh, I wouldn’t, Sir – I’d run to the Chinese and get chicken chop-suey ten times and gobble it right quick.’
    ‘Yeah!’ cried Sarah-Jane Potts. ‘That’s what I’d do and all – we wouldn’t have to pay, would we, Sir?’
    ‘I’d get a big club and smash our Shelley’s head in,’ said Ellie-May. ‘I hate her.’
    ‘There’d be no point, fathead!’ sneered a boy behind her. ‘She’d be dead in three minutes anyway.’
    The noise level rose. Excited voices called back and forth across the coach as everybody tried to outdo everybody else in what they’d do with their last three minutes. The fact that many of them would have needed several hours or even days to carry out their plans was disregarded, and the discussion continued till the vehicle topped the highest rise and Mrs Marriott raised her voice, drawing everybody’s attention to the ruins of Whitby Abbey, which were now visible in the hazy distance.
    Gary Bazzard knelt, leering at Fliss over the back of his seat. ‘See – that’s where Dracula lives – in the ruins. Old Hepworth told us.’
    ‘Old Hepworth told you no such thing.’
    The boy’s