The Secret Prophecy Read Free

crowd. Despite all Mum had done to tidy it up, to turn it into a shrine to the dead, the study was still the one place in the house, the only place, where his dad was still around.

Chapter 4
    T he idea was, once he’d helped Mum clear up, he could go to his room, maybe go online, try to chill. But when he reached the Swamp and switched on his computer, somehow the old MMOs had lost their appeal, along with everything else. All he wanted to do was kick off his shoes, stretch out on the bed, stare at the cobweb hanging from the crack in the ceiling. That was when he discovered how tired he was, closed his eyes just for a second. . . .
    It was dark when Em woke, sometime in the middle of the night, not sure exactly. The confusion felt good somehow; but then it cleared and he remembered again that Dad was dead, even though, for a minute, he couldn’t believe it. His stomach knotted, a familiar feeling.
    There were voices coming from outside his window. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there definitely seemed to be more than one. He pushed himself off the bed and went to look. This part of the lodgings faced across a campus courtyard, poorly lit at the best of times but now with no lights at all. But there was enough moonlight to show a solitary figure staring upward out of the shadows. For a split second it seemed as if the man was gazing directly at Em or at least at his window. Then he looked away and walked off in the direction of the students’ quarters.
    The voices were still there, but now Em knew they were coming from inside the lodgings, not outside. It happened sometimes if there was a window left open down below. His attic room was directly above the little sitting room where Mum and Dad had sometimes chatted in the evenings. If the window was open, the sound of voices drifted upward. Usually this didn’t disturb him, certainly didn’t wake him; but the voices were louder tonight.
    And his mother certainly wasn’t talking to Dad.
    Without bothering to switch on a light, Em padded across the room and opened the door. He was facing a flight of steps down to a tiny landing, then three more stairs to his mum’s room and the room where he’d found Dad dead, then the long flight down to the living room. Who was Mum talking to in the little sitting room after midnight?
    He hesitated for a moment and then walked down the stairs without switching on lights. There was a single standard lamp lit in the living room at the bottom, leaving it mostly in gloom. But there was light streaming under the door to the sitting room. Em took a cautious few steps forward. He could hear the voices clearly now, hear the conversation. One was his mum. The other was her brother, Uncle Harold.
    So Mum had probably asked Harold to stay the night for some additional support.
    Em turned to go back upstairs, then heard his mother say, “Harold, I’m afraid.”
    Uncle Harold’s voice sounded loud but steady. “None of this makes any sense, you know? Eddie was a professor of medieval history, for Christ’s sake! He couldn’t have been any more harmless if he’d worked as an accountant.”
    “I know,” his mother said. It came out as something close to a wail.
    Uncle Harold’s voice again: “So why would anybody want to harm him?”
    Em’s ears pricked. Who said anybody wanted to harm Dad? He was one of the most popular professors on campus. Everybody said that. Em couldn’t think of a single thing his father might have got up to that could possibly have caused someone to want to harm him.
    Except . . .
    Em frowned. He was thinking of his mother’s comment about the stretched salary. Could Dad have got involved with a loan shark? Those guys turned very nasty if you didn’t pay them back. Everybody knew that. The really bad ones sent someone around to break your legs. Only Dad never had his legs broken. The worst that happened to him was he caught pneumonia.
    “I don’t know,” his mother said in answer to her