Soul Music by Terry Pratchett EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Terry Pratchett
- Language: English
- Genre: Satire Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Where to finish?
A dark, stormy night. A coach, horses gone, plunging through the rickety,
useless fence and dropping, tumbling into the gorge below. It doesn’t even
strike an outcrop of rock before it hits the dried riverbed far below, and
erupts into fragments.
Miss Butts shuffled the paperwork nervously
Here was one from the girl aged six:
‘What We Did On our Holidays: What I did On my holidys I staid with
grandad he has a big White hors and a garden it is al Black. We had Eg and
chips.’
Then the oil from the coach lamps ignites and there is a second explosion,
out of which rolls—because there are certain conventions, even in tragedy
—a burning wheel.
And another paper, a drawing done at age seven. All in black. Miss Butts
sniffed. It wasn’t as though the gel had only a black crayon. It was a fact
that the Quirm College for Young Ladies had quite expensive crayons of all
colors.
And then, after the last of the ember spits and crackles, there is silence.
And the watcher.
Who turns, and says to someone in the darkness:
YES. I COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING.
And rides away.
Miss Butts shuffled paper again. She was feeling distracted and nervous, a
feeling common to anyone who had much to do with the gel. Paper usually
made her feel better. It was more dependable.
Then there had been the matter of…the accident.
Miss Butts had broken such news before. It was an occasional hazard
when you ran a large boarding school. The parents of many of the gels were
often abroad on business of one sort or another, and it was sometimes the
kind of business where the chances of rich reward go hand in hand with the
risks of meeting unsympathetic men.
Miss Butts knew how to handle these occasions. It was painful, but the
thing ran its course. There was shock, and tears, and then, eventually, it was
all over. People had ways of dealing with it. There was a sort of script built
into the human mind. Life went on.
But the child had just sat there. It was the politeness that scared the
daylights out of Miss Butts. She was not an unkind woman, despite a
lifetime of being gently dried out on the stove of education, but she was
conscientious and a stickler for propriety and thought she knew how this
sort of thing should go and was vaguely annoyed that it wasn’t going.
“Er…if you would like to be alone, to have a cry—” she’d prompted, in
an effort to get things moving on the right track.
“Would that help?” Susan had said.
It would have helped Miss Butts.
All she’d been able to manage was: “I wonder if, perhaps, you fully
understood what I have told you?”
The child had stared at the ceiling as though trying to work out a difficult
problem in algebra and then said, “I expect I will.”
It was as if she’d already known, and had dealt with it in some way. Miss
Butts had asked the teachers to watch Susan carefully. They’d said that was
hard, because…
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB