Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath Read Free Page A

could never see “the thing” until it was too late.
    Suddenly she would feel something grab her leg, and she would spin down, down, down into the indigo depths. And the miniature man who appeared in the water just couldn’t save her. And all the while the calling, like someone whispering a song to the ocean.
    The vision was so real that whenever she awoke, she felt sure it had happened, the whispering so familiar that she could believe that she must have heard it once before, a long, long time ago, perhaps in a past life.
    Ruby sat up in bed. She was covered in perspiration, freezing cold, and her head was thudding. She put out her hand and blindly felt around for her flashlight. But somehow the beam it shone just made things worse, more dramatic. She fumbled for the switch on the lamp beside her bed.
    Click
.
    The room was bathed in light, and Ruby could breathe again. Through the blur of her less-than-perfect vision she was reassured: there was the comic she was working on, spread out on her desk; there were the floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, hundreds of them — fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, codebooks, puzzle books. Her record player, her records, her telephone collection — eccentric designs, from a squirrel in a tuxedo to a conch shell — all perched haphazardly on shelves and furniture. There was the jumble of clothes on the floor. She was definitely in her room and not miles beneath the heavy ocean, sinking through indigo.
    Ruby lay back on her pillow, sighed a deep sigh, and drifted back into sleep, this time dreamless, her glasses still perched on the end of her nose. She was only wrenched from her slumber when her subconscious tuned in to the sound of screaming, coming from the backyard.
    Ruby scrambled to get out of bed, tripped over the tangle of discarded clothes, and limped to the window. There she saw clouds of seagulls swooping and diving around the house, filling the air with their wings, legs trailing, ready to land. Seagulls are sizeable birds, and as they dodged and swooped, their gray and white feathers almost made contact with the glass, and Ruby found herself instinctively backing away.
    The noise they made was enough to drown out most other noises, but not the screaming — this was coming from a small elderly woman who was darting around the yard waving a broom.
    It was Mrs. Digby.
    Mrs. Digby was the Redforts’ housekeeper and she had been with the family forever, which is to say longer than Ruby had existed, longer, even, than Sabina had existed. No one could do without her, and no one wanted to do without her: she was the family treasure.
    Ruby stood transfixed, watching the tiny woman attacking the birds, shouting abuse at them and generally telling them where to go. It seemed that they had made the mistake of settling on her freshly laundered sheets, and this had got her hopping mad.
    “I didn’t get up before six in the a.m. and work my fingers to the bone only to have you feathered vipers do your business all over my clean linen!”
    It was fair to say Mrs. Digby was furious.
    Just then a well-groomed man came into view. He was wearing a beautifully cut suit and appeared entirely unruffled as he calmly strolled out into the yard, a tiny device in his hand. He held this up to the sky, depressed a button, and suddenly, in a deafening screech, the birds all rose as one and squawked their way back in the direction of the ocean.
    Ruby pushed open the large square picture window that made up most of the wall beside her desk (the Redfort house was a miracle of modern architecture) and leaned out.
    “Wow!” she said, somewhat sarcastically. “I didn’t know you could talk to the animals.”
    The man looked up and winked.
    “Hey, kid. Surprised to see you up before noon.”
    “Oh, you should know, Hitch. Early bird catches the worm and all that.”
    “Too late for worms,” said Hitch. “Gulls got ’em, but I can rustle up some pancakes, kid.”
    Ruby pulled on her