Read Chime for Free Online

Miss Rose?” said the constable.
    “Scissors are dangerous,” said Rose.
    “Danger?” said Eldric from across the room, where he and Mr. Dreary were stuffing Clayborne books into Larkin shelves.
    “I need someone to cut my papers,” said Rose. “Stepmother used to cut for me, but she’s dead.”
    “I’m just the man for a dangerous job,” said Eldric.
    “Happen I might talk to Miss Rose direct-like?” said the constable. “Tell her us needs her help to get them witches.”
    “Certainly you may,” said Father.
    Certainly,
Father? Do you have any idea what’s going to happen once the constable sticks his face beneath the table? That face of his, with those saggy eyelids turned inside out and the red bits showing?
    “I don’t prefer to speak to the constable.” Rose’s breath snagged on her words and set off a spasm of coughing.
    “Hand to your mouth, Rose,” I said.
    “He’s only going to ask you a few questions,” said Father. “If you act like a grown-up girl and answer them properly, you’ll never see those witches again.”
    The constable approached the table. Forge ahead, O mighty enforcer of the law. May you be stout of heart and eardrum.
    When Rose takes to screaming, she starts loud, continues loud, and ends loud. Rose has a very good ear and always screams on the same note. I’d tested her before I burnt the library, and our piano along with it.
    Rose screams on the note of B flat.
    We don’t need a piano anymore now that we have a human tuning fork. In any event, Rose and I never played very well, despite Father’s insistence that we practice an hour a day. We’d never be like Mother, who’d played the piano beautifully, or so Father said. I sometimes wondered if Father really remembered her. Seventeen years is a long time.
    It was wonderfully restful to stand back and do nothing. I heard Father call in the reinforcements, who are named Pearl. I watched Pearl escort Rose from the room. I heard Rose scream all the way upstairs.
    The pitch of B flat has uncommon carrying power.
    Strange how her screams eased the swamp craving, just a bit. It’s like rubbing your elbow after you bump it, I suppose.
    The mighty enforcer of the law returned to his seat. Eldric had taken Rose’s place beneath the table, fidgeting with bits of paper and working the scissors. There’s little to compare between Eldric and Stepmother, except they were the only people I’d ever seen join Rose under the table. How patient Stepmother had been, her hummingbird fingers cutting the papers into bits at Rose’s direction, and those bits into smaller bits, and those smaller, and smaller still.
    There fell what a novel would call an “awkward silence,” save for the sound of Eldric chopping at the air with the scissors. I fixed my gaze on the bookshelves. Before the flood, they’d been filled with a rainbow of fairy tale books and dog-eared Latin histories and all the novels of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters (except that sniveling Anne). Now they were empty, begging hands. The flood had turned the books into bloated corpses that had to be shoveled up and hauled away in barrows.
    I used to like books and reading, but I destroyed our books in a couple of fits of witchy jealousy. Had I meant to drown our books? Had I meant to burn our books? Honestly, you’d think a witch would know what she’d meant to do. I was, after all, a great girl of seventeen when I set the library fire. But I’m not a proper witch: If I’d had a proper witchy education, I’d certainly not have burnt my hand. A proper witch would avoid that unimaginable pain, that horrible healing, that horrible itching. Sometimes my scar itches unbearably. I have to bite at it so I don’t scream.
    The constable dragged up his eye folds. His sausage eyes slid about until they landed on me, which was a greasy sort of feeling. “Us been telled you seen them witches, Miss Briony.”
    I nodded.
    “Did you see ’em close-like?”