Thirteens by Kate Alice Marshall EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kate Alice Marshall
- Language: English
- Genre:Friendship Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Eleanor stared at the grandfather clock in the third-floor hall. It
stood eight feet tall, made of dark oak. A bone-white pendulum
hung within the case, carved like cords woven together in a loose
diamond. It reminded her of the end of a key, but maybe that was
only because of the keys that were painted on the wood around the
clock face: thirteen identical keys in gold. The last key was almost
entirely rubbed away.
The clock must be very old. It felt like it had tracked the passing of
years and years. But she was not staring at the clock because it was
tall, or impressive, or old. She was staring at for three reasons.
The first was that the clock hadn’t been there when she went to
sleep last night. Eleanor was sure of it. It stood opposite her door,
and she felt certain she would have noticed an eight-foot-tall clock
outside her bedroom or heard someone moving it into place.
The second was that those thirteen keys, gleaming against the
dark wood, were the precise shape of the birthmark on her wrist.
The third was that the hands of the clock were running backward.
It’s just a clock, she told herself. Nothing sinister. Maybe it had
belonged to her grandparents, and Aunt Jenny had inherited it along
with this house and the old car in the back shed that didn’t run and
the rambling, neglected orchard that spilled out behind the house
like a half-grown forest.
Except that it hadn’t been here last night.
And that wouldn’t explain the keys. Or why the hands were
moving backward—the second hand gliding from twelve to eleven to
ten, all the way around to one; the minute hand clicking back every
sixty seconds as the pendulum went left to right to left to right.
The clock chimed. The liquid, bottomless sound filled the hall,
bouncing off the walls with their faded green wallpaper, spilling
down toward the spiral staircase. Eleanor counted the chimes.
Seven.
Her phone agreed with the chimes—seven o’clock—but the
contrary hands of the clock pointed instead to five and twelve. Seven
hours backward from midnight, she thought, and rubbed the
birthmark on her wrist reflexively.
“Eleanor!” Aunt Jenny called. “Come grab some breakfast before
the bus comes. You don’t want to be hungry on your first day.”
Eleanor didn’t want to be anything on her first day of school at
Eden Eld Academy. She didn’t want to have a first day at Eden Eld
Academy. But she had promised Aunt Jenny and Ben, and she had
already broken enough promises.
She didn’t want to turn her back on the clock, either, but she did,
and scurried down the hall with her backpack over one shoulder. The
boards creaked and groaned even with the hall rug to cushion her
steps, and so did the stairs, which curled in a tight curve down to the
first floor. She’d never lived in a house with a spiral staircase.
Ashford House, which her grandparents had bought before her
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB