Years 9 & 10 Form Reading Booklet:

Crime, Horror and Thrillers

Spring term 1

Week 1: Extract from​ The Bunker Diary ​by Kevin Brooks

Linus wakes up in a cold, dark, underground ​bunker

(underground shelter) with no memory of how he got
there.

The only way in and out of the bunker is a lift, controlled

by whoever has captured him. Linus’ theory that he has
been kidnapped for ​ransom ​(the money that is
demanded for the return of someone who is being kept
as a prisoner) is soon dismissed as the lift delivers five
more prisoners, from completely different walks of life,
with absolutely nothing in common. Pushed to the limits
of human endurance with constant physical and mental
torture, how long will the six survive being the playthings
of their captor?

This is the sort of book that demands to be read in one

sitting, only to haunt you for days after finishing it. But be
warned: with frequent swearing, and scenes of violence,
torture and death, this is not a book for the
faint-hearted.

In the following extract, Linus explains the last thing he

remembers before waking up in the bunker.

Monday, 30 January

10.00 a.m.
This is what I know. I’m in a low-ceilinged rectangular building made entirely of whitewashed
concrete. It’s about twelve metres wide and eighteen metres long. A corridor runs down the middle of
the building, with a smaller corridor leading off to a lift shaft just over halfway down. There are six little
rooms along the main corridor, three on either side. They’re all the same size, three metres by five, and
each one is furnished with an iron-framed bed, a hard-backed chair, and a bedside cabinet. There’s a
bathroom at one end of the corridor and a kitchen at the other. Opposite the kitchen, in the middle of
an open area, there’s a rectangular wooden table with six wooden chairs. In each corner of the open
area there’s an L-shaped bench settee.

There are no windows. No doors. The lift is the only way in or out.

The whole place looks something like this:

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In the bathroom there’s a steel bath, a steel sink, and a lavatory. No mirrors, no cupboards, no
accessories. The kitchen contains a sink, a table, some chairs, an electric cooker, a small fridge, and a
wall-mounted cupboard. In the cupboard there’s a plastic washing-up bowl, six plastic dinner plates,
six plastic glasses, six plastic mugs, six sets of plastic cutlery.

Why six?
I don’t know.
I’m the only one here.

It feels underground in here. The air is heavy, concrete, damp. It’s ​not​ damp, it just feels damp. And it
smells like a place that’s old, but new. Like it’s been here a long time but never been used.
There are no light switches anywhere.
There’s a clock on the corridor wall.
The lights come on at eight o’clock in the morning, and they go off again at midnight.
There’s a low humming sound deep within the walls.

12.15 p.m.
Nothing moves.
Time is slow.

I thought he was blind. That’s how he got me. I still can’t believe I fell for it. I keep playing it over in my
mind, hoping I’ll do something different, but it always turns out the same.

It was early Sunday morning when it happened. Yesterday morning. I wasn’t doing anything in
particular, just hanging around the concourse at Liverpool Street station, trying to keep warm, looking
out for Saturday night leftovers. I had my hands in my pockets, my guitar on my back, my eyes to the
ground. Sunday morning is a good time for finding things. People get drunk on Saturday night. They
rush to get the last train home. They drop stuff. Cash, cards, hats, gloves, cigarettes. The cleaners get
most of the good stuff, but sometimes they miss things. I found a fake Rolex once. Got a tenner for it.
So it’s always worth looking. But all I’d found that morning was a broken umbrella and a half-empty
packet of Marlboro. I threw the umbrella away but kept the cigarettes. I don’t smoke, but cigarettes

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are always worth keeping.

So there I was, just hanging around, minding my own business, when a couple of platform staff came
out of a side door and started walking towards me. One of them was a regular, a young black guy
called Buddy who’s usually OK, but I didn’t know the other one. And I didn’t like the look of him. He was
a big guy in a peaked cap and steel-tipped shoes, and he looked like trouble. He probably wasn’t, and
they probably wouldn’t have bothered me anyway, but it’s always best to play safe, so I put my head
down, pulled up my hood, and moved off towards the taxi rank.

And that’s when I saw him. The blind man. Raincoat, hat, dark glasses, white stick. He was standing at
the back of a dark-coloured van. A Transit, I think. The back doors were open and there was a
heavy-looking suitcase on the ground. The blind man was struggling to get the case in the back of the
van. He wasn’t having much luck. There was something wrong with his arm. It was in a sling.

It was still pretty early and the station was deserted. I could hear the two platform men jangling their
keys and laughing about something, and from the sound of the big guy’s clackety-clack footsteps I
could tell they were moving away from me, heading off towards the escalator that leads up to
McDonald’s. I waited a little while just to make sure they weren’t coming back, then I turned my
attention to the blind man. Apart from the Transit van, the taxi rank was empty. No black cabs, no one
waiting. There was just me and this blind man. A blind man with his arm in a sling.

I thought about it.

You could walk away if you wanted to, I told myself. You don’t have to help him. You could just walk
away, nice and quiet. He’s blind, he’ll never know, will he?

But I didn’t walk away.

I’m a nice guy.

I coughed to let him know I was there, then I walked up and asked him if he needed any help. He didn’t
look at me. He kept his head down. And I thought that was a bit odd. But then I thought, maybe that’s
what blind people do? I mean, what’s the point of looking at someone if you can’t actually see them?

‘It’s my arm,’ he muttered, indicating the sling. ‘I can’t get hold of the suitcase properly.’

I bent down and picked it up. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked.

‘Where do you want it?’ I asked.

‘In the back,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

There was no one else in the van, no one in the driving seat. Which was kind of surprising. The back of
the van was pretty empty too, just a few bits of rope, some carrier bags, a dusty old blanket.

The blind man said, ‘Would you mind putting the case up by the front seats for me? It’ll be easier to
get out.’

I was beginning to feel a bit uneasy now. Something didn’t feel right. What was this guy doing here?
Where was he going? Where had he been? Why was he all alone? How the hell could he drive? I

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mean, a blind man with a broken arm?

‘If you wouldn’t mind?’ he said.

Maybe he isn’t completely blind? I thought. Maybe he can see enough to drive? Or maybe he’s one of
those people who pretend they’re disabled so they can get a special parking badge?

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m in a hurry.’

I shrugged off my doubts and stepped up into the van. What did I care if he was blind or not? Just get
his suitcase into the van and leave him to it. Go and find somewhere warm. Wait for the day to get
going. See who’s around – Lugless, Pretty Bob, Windsor Jack. See what’s happening.

I was moving towards the front seats when I felt the van ​lurch ​on its springs (​lurch means to suddenly
move forward​), and I knew the blind man had climbed up behind me.

‘I’ll show you where to put it,’ he said.

I knew I’d been had then but it was already too late, and as I turned to face him he grabbed my head
and clamped a damp cloth over my face. I started to choke. I was breathing in chemicals –
chloroform, ether, whatever it was. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air. My lungs were on fire. I
thought I was dying. I struggled, lashing out with my elbows and legs, kicking, stamping, jerking my
head like a madman, but it was no good. He was strong, a lot stronger than he looked. His hands
gripped my skull like a couple of vices. After a few seconds I started to feel dizzy, and then . . .

Nothing.

I must have passed out.

Question to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. Was Linus right to help the man, even though he had doubts? Would you have done
the same?
2. What do you think of Linus’s character so far?
3. How does the writer build a feeling of suspense and tension?
4. What do you think might happen in the story?

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 ​ rinter’s Devil Court​ by Susan Hill
Week 2: Extract from P

One murky November evening after a meal in their Fleet Street

(London) lodgings, a conversation between four medical students
takes a curious turn and Hugh is initiated into a dark secret. In the
cellar of their narrow l​ odgings​ (a lodgings is a place where you
live, but usually you just have one room) in Printer's Devil Court
and a little used ​mortuary ​in the hospital (a mortuary is where
dead bodies are kept), they have begun to interfere with death
itself, in shadowy experiments beyond the realms of medical
ethics. They call on Hugh to witness an event both extraordinary
and terrifying.

Years later, Hugh has occasion to return to his student lodgings

and learns the true horror of what happened before.

In this extract, he sees a girl in the graveyard as he is walking

through the streets of London.

Just before midnight I set off to walk back to the club. My route was the old one, but this corner of London
had changed a good deal. Fleet Street no longer housed the hot metal presses and many of the old alleys
and courts had long gone, most of them bombed to ​smithereens ​(​smithereens means a lot of small,
broken pieces​) by the Blitz. Once or twice I took a wrong turn and ended up among new buildings I didn’t
recognise.

At one point, I retraced my steps for a hundred yards and suddenly I was thrown back in time. I realised
that the old Printers Devil’s Court, where I had lodged, had been laid waste and that the hospital club was
now sited on part of the same ground. I thought little of it – Printer’s Devil Court held no special memories
for me, other than those last ​peculiar ​(strange or weird) and unpleasant ones.

I was about to turn into the club when I noticed that there was still a passageway to one side and saw the
tower of St-Luke’s-at-the-Gate rising up ahead of me in the ​fitful ​moonlight (fitful means stopping and
starting a lot - so ‘fitful moonlight’ means that moon was going from dark to light very quickly and
strangely). I stood stock still. London churches are always a fine sight and I was glad that this one, with a
surprising number of others, had escaped destruction. The passageway ended at the back of the old
graveyard, as before, and that seemed unchanged, the tombstones still leaning this way and that and
even more thickly covered in moss.

And then I saw her. She was a few yards away from me, moving among the graves, pausing here and
there to bend over and peer, as if trying to make out the ​inscriptions ​(words on the grave stones), before
moving on again. She wore a ​garment ​(piece of clothing)​ ​of a pale silvery grey that seemed strangely
gauze-like and her long hair was loose and free. She had her back to me. I was troubled to see a young
woman wandering here at this time of night and started towards her, to offer to escort her away. She must
have heard me because she turned and I was startled by her beauty, her ​pallor ​(how pale she was) and
even more, by the expression of distress on her face. She came towards me quickly, holding out her hand
and seeming about to plead with me, but as she drew near, I noticed a curious blank and glassy look in
her eyes and a coldness increased around me, more intense than that of the night alone. I waited. The
nearer she came the greater the cold but I did not – why should I? – link it in any way to the young woman,
but simply to the effects of standing still in this place where sunlight rarely penetrated in which had a

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dankness that came from the very stones and from the cold ground.

“Are you unwell?” I asked. “You should not be here alone at this time of night – let me see you safely to
your home.”

She appeared puzzled by my voice and her body trembled beneath the pale clothes. “You will catch your
death of cold.” She stretched out both her hands to me then but I shrank back, ​unaccountably loathe​ to
take them (this means he really did not want to take her hands but could not understand why he felt so
scared and disgusted). Her eyes had the same staring and yet ​vacant ​(empty) look now that she was
close to me. But she was fully alive and breathing and I had no reason to fear.

“Please tell me what is wrong?”

There was a second only during which we both stood facing one another silently in that bleak and
deserted place and something seemed to happen to the passing of time, which was now frozen still, now
hurtling backwards, now propelling us into the present again, but then on, and forwards, faster and faster,
so that the ground appeared to shift beneath my feet, yet nothing moved and when the church clock
struck, it was only half past midnight.

Question to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What makes a good gothic or horror story?
2. What makes this a gothic or horror story?
3. How does the author make the girl seem supernatural?
4. How do we know that Hugh, the main character, feels spooked by his encounter?
5. Look at the final paragraph. What do you think this means? What is the writer trying
to get across here about how Hugh is feeling?
6. What kind of experiments do you think the medical students were doing?

​ y Bram Stoker
​ racula b
Week 3: Extract from D

Dracula is one of the world’s most famous horror novels about

a blood-sucking vampire from Transylvania: a nobleman
called Count Dracula.

This extract is taken from the moment that young English

lawyer, Jonathan Harker, arrives at the Count’s house and
meets him for the first time. The journey to the castle is
harrowing ​(very upsetting and causing a lot of stress), and the
carriage is nearly attacked by angry wolves along the way.
Upon arriving at the crumbling old castle, Harker finds that the
elderly Dracula is a well educated and ​hospitable ​(welcoming
and polite)​ ​gentleman. After only a few days, however, Harker
realizes that he is effectively a prisoner in the castle.

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​I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the ​chinks ​(small narrow
cracks or gaps) the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the
clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse,
and the great door swung back.

Within stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from
head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique
silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering
shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right
hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange ​intonation (accent/ way of
speaking)​.

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!" He made no motion of stepping to
meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The
instant, however, that I had stepped over the ​threshold ​(entrance), he moved impulsively forward, and
holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not
lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again
he said:

"Welcome to my house! Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring!" The
strength of the handshake was so much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I
had not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I was speaking. So
to make sure, I said interrogatively, "Count Dracula?"

He bowed in a ​courtly ​way (a polite and formal way) as he replied, "I am Dracula, and I bid you
welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest."
As he was speaking, he put the lamp on a bracket on the wall, and stepping out, took my luggage. He
had carried it in before I could forestall him. I protested, but he insisted.

"Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late, and my people are not available. Let me see to your comfort
myself." He insisted on carrying my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding stair, and
along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang heavily. At the end of this he threw
open a heavy door, and I rejoiced to see within a well-lit room in which a table was spread for supper,
and on whose mighty ​hearth ​(fireplace) a great fire of logs, freshly replenished, flamed and flared.

The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened another
door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of
any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter. It was a welcome
sight. For here was a great bedroom well lighted and warmed with another log fire, also added to but
lately, for the top logs were fresh, which sent a hollow roar up the wide chimney. The Count himself
left my luggage inside and withdrew, saying, before he closed the door.

"You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your toilet. I trust you will find all you
wish. When you are ready, come into the other room, where you will find your supper prepared."

The light and warmth and the Count's ​courteous ​(polite) welcome seemed to have ​dissipated ​all my
doubts and fears (made them disappear). Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I
was half ​famished ​(starving) with hunger.

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By this time I had finished my supper, and by my host's desire had drawn up a chair by the fire and
begun to smoke a cigar which he offered me, at the same time excusing himself that he did not
smoke. I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked ​physiognomy
(physical appearance).

His face was a strong, a very strong, ​aquiline ​(like a strong bird/eagle), with high bridge of the thin
nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing ​scantily ​round the
temples (not much around his temples) but ​profusely ​(lots of it was growing) elsewhere. His eyebrows
were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own
profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather
cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth.

These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ​ruddiness ​(redness) showed astonishing vitality in a
man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was
broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary ​pallor
(paleness).

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had
seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were
rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm.
The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands
touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible
feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

Question to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What was Jonathan Harker’s journey like?
2. How does Count Dracula behave when he lets Jonathan into the house?
3. How does Jonathan feel about him?
4. What does Dracula look like?
5. How does the author, Bram Stoker, give us hints that this is a gothic/horror story?
6. How does the author build a feeling of tension and suspense?
7. Which parts of the extract seem very supernatural?
8. Do you trust Dracula? Why or why not?

Week 4: Extract from Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Alternating between the present-day narrative of husband Nick

Dunne and the past diary entries of his wife Amy, we learn their
previously perfect marriage has come undone following a move from
New York to Missouri. Amy ​inexplicably ​(without an explanation)
disappears without trace, apparently pregnant; Nick, whose
emotions seem to show little outward signs of grief or worry, is the
prime suspect ​(the main person people believe to be guilty).
However, is all that we read the truth? Is Amy genuinely missing, and,
if not, what could be her possible motive?

This novel has one of the best twists that has ever been written! In
the following extract, Nick realises his wife has gone missing from
their house.

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"Hey, Nicky," Carl's watery voice came over the phone. "Sorry to bother you. I just thought you should
know. . . your door is wide open, and that cat of yours is outside. It isn't supposed to be, right?"

I gave a noncommittal grunt.

"I'd go over and check, but I'm a little under the weather," Carl said heavily.

"Don't worry," I said. "It's time for me to go home anyway."

It was a fifteen-minute drive, straight north along River Road. Driving into our development
occasionally makes me shiver, the sheer num​ber of gaping dark houses—homes that have never
known inhabit​ants, or homes that have known owners and seen them ejected, the house standing
triumphantly ​voided (​empty), humanless.

When Amy and I moved in, our only neighbors descended on us: one middle-aged single mom of
three, bearing a casserole; a young father of triplets with a six-pack of beer (his wife left at home with
the triplets); an older Christian couple who lived a few houses down; and of course, Carl from across
the street. We sat out on our back deck and watched the river, and they all talked ​ruefully (​in a way
that shows that you are feeling sorry and wishing that something had not happened) about zero
percent interest, and zero money down, and then they all remarked how Amy and I were the only
ones with river access, the only ones without children. "Just the two of you? In this whole big house?"
the single mom asked, doling out a scrambled-egg some​thing.

"Just the two of us," I confirmed with a smile, and nodded in appreciation as I took a mouthful of
wobbly egg.

"Seems lonely."

On that she was right.

Four months later, the ​whole big house​ lady lost her mortgage battle and disappeared in the night
with her three kids. Her house has remained empty. The living-room window still has a child's picture
of a butterfly taped to it, the bright Magic Marker sun-faded to brown. One evening not long ago, I
drove past and saw a man, bearded, bedraggled, staring out from behind the picture, floating in the
dark like some sad aquarium fish. He saw me see him and flickered back into the depths of the house.
The next day I left a brown paper bag full of sandwiches on the front step; it sat in the sun untouched
for a week, ​decaying ​(rotting away) wetly, until I picked it back up and threw it out.

Quiet. The complex was always disturbingly quiet. As I neared our home, conscious of the noise of the
car engine, I could see the cat was definitely on the steps. Still on the steps, twenty minutes after
Carl's call. This was strange. Amy loved the cat, the cat was declawed, the cat was never let outside,

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never ever, because the cat, Bleecker, was sweet but extremely stupid, and despite the LoJack
tracking device pelleted somewhere in his fat furry rolls, Amy knew she'd never see the cat again if he
ever got out. The cat would waddle straight into the Mississippi River—deedle-de-dum—and float all
the way to the Gulf of Mexico into the ​maw o
​ f a hungry bull shark (a maw is the mouth of a fierce
animal).

But it turned out the cat wasn't even smart enough to get past the steps. Bleecker was perched on
the edge of the porch.. As I pulled into the drive, Carl came out and stood on his own front steps, and I
could feel the cat and the old man both watching me as I got out of the car and walked toward the
house, the red ​peonies ​(a type of flower) along the border looking fat and juicy, asking to be devoured.

I was about to go into blocking position to get the cat when I saw that the front door was open. Carl
had said as much, but seeing it was different. This wasn't taking-out-the-trash-back-in-a-minute
open. This was wide-gaping-​ominous​ open (ominous means giving the impression that something
bad is going to happen).

Carl hovered across the way, waiting for my response, and like some awful piece of performance art,
I felt myself enacting Con​cerned Husband. I stood on the middle step and frowned, then took the
stairs quickly, two at a time, calling out my wife's name.

Silence.

"Amy, you home?"

I ran straight upstairs. No Amy. The ironing board was set up, the iron still on, a dress waiting to be
pressed.

"Amy!"

As I ran back downstairs, I could see Carl still framed in the open doorway, hands on hips, watching. I
swerved into the living room, and pulled up short. The carpet glinted with shards of glass, the coffee
table shattered. End tables were on their sides, books slid across the floor like a card trick. Even the
heavy antique ​ottoman ​(a fancy-looking box that you store things in) was belly-up, its four tiny feet in
the air like something dead. In the middle of the mess was a pair of good sharp scissors.

"Amy!"

I began running, bellowing her name. Through the kitchen, where a teakettle was burning, down to
the basement, where the guest room stood empty, and then out the back door. I pounded across our
yard onto the slender boat deck leading out over the river. I peeked over the side to see if she was in
our rowboat, where I had found her one day, tethered to the dock, rocking in the water, her face to
the sun, eyes closed, and as I'd peered down into the dazzling reflections of the river, at her beautiful,
still face, she'd suddenly opened her blue eyes and said nothing to me, and I'd said nothing back and

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gone into the house alone.

"Amy!"

She wasn't on the water, she wasn't in the house. Amy was not there.

Amy was gone.

Question to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What do you think might have happened to Amy?
2. How does the writer, Gillian Flynn, create a feeling of mystery?
3. Does her husband Nick care about her going missing or not? How can you tell?
4. Look at the final section of the extract. What do you think their relationship might
have been like before she went missing?
5. What is the area that they live in like? How do you know?
6. Early on in the extract, how does the writer hint at something bad happening?

​ ast of Eden​ by John Steinbeck

Week 5: Extract from E

East of Eden takes place in California and is a re-telling of the

biblical story of Cain and Abel. In the book of Genesis, in the bible,
Cain is jealous of his younger brother Abel, thinking that their
father prefers Abel to him. Eventually, he kills Abel out of jealousy.

The novel, published in 1952, has a slow and intentional pace

without much tension, which was different from most popular
fiction of the time. It received a cold reception from critics but was
a bestseller immediately. A film was made based on the novel in
1955.

This extract describes a character called Cathy Ames: a girl from

a town nearby. Cathy does many horrible things in the novel,
beginning by killing her parents and setting fire to their property.

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, ​misshapen
(having an unusual shape) and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms,
no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no
one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for ​concealed
sins​ (concealed means hidden and a sin is when you break a religious rule or law: a crime against God).

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face
and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a ​malformed ​(wrongly formed)​ ​egg can produce
physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

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Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be
born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of ​conscience ​(an inner
feeling of right and wrong. If you have a guilty conscience, you feel like you have done something
wrong.) A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but
one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he
cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there
is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the normal must seem
monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more ​obscure
(hard to see), since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience,
a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a
monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced
her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other
people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilise his lack so that he becomes
more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful
and bewildering stir in her world.

There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would
have been ​exorcised ​to cast out the evil spirit (an exorcism is a ritual performed by a priest to get rid of
the devil inside someone), and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a
witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to
distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.

As though nature concealed a trap, Cathy had from the first a face of innocence. Her hair was gold
and lovely; wide-set hazel eyes with upper lids that drooped made her look mysteriously sleepy. Her
nose was delicate and thin, and her cheekbones high and wide, sweeping down to a small chin so that
her face was heart-shaped. Her mouth was well shaped and well lipped but abnormally small — what
used to be called a rosebud. Her ears were very little, without lobes, and they pressed so close to her
head that even with her hair combed up they made no silhouette. She was a pretty child and she
became a pretty woman. Her voice was huskily soft, and it could be so sweet as to be irresistible. But
there must have been some steel cord in her throat, for Cathy’s voice could cut like a file when she
wished.

Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at
her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one
looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing
everyone to turn toward her.

She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to
inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly.
And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.

Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most
children ​abhor ​(hate) difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others.

Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to.

12
The result was that quite often other children ​imitated ​(copied) her.

As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults
felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated
with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.

Cathy was a liar.

Cathy’s lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility,
and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told
or because the lie is suddenly faced with an ​incontrovertible ​truth (impossible to doubt). But Cathy did
not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to
the truth so that one could never be sure.

Since Cathy was an only child her mother had no close contrast in the family. She thought all children
were like her own. And since all parents are worriers she was convinced that all her friends had the
same problems.

Cathy’s father was not so sure. He operated a small ​tannery ​(a place where leather is made)​ ​in a town
in Massachusetts, which made a comfortable, careful living if he worked very hard. Mr. Ames came in
contact with other children away from his home and he felt that Cathy was not like other children. It
was a matter more felt than known. He was uneasy about his daughter but he could not have said
why.

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts
just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things ​in check ​(keep them under control)
or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own
gain.

Question to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What does Cathy look like?
2. How do her looks contrast with her character?
3. What does the writer mean when he says that some people are born as monsters?
4. According to the narrator, was Cathy always this way or has her character
developed over time?
5. How does Cathy make people feel?
6. How would you describe her character? Try to pick at least three words and be ready
to explain why you picked them.
7. How is Cathy different to other people?
8. What do you think Cathy is capable of?

​ tormbreaker ​by Antony Horowitz

Week 6: Extract from S

They told him his uncle died in an accident. He wasn't wearing

13
 his seatbelt, they said. But when fourteen-year-old Alex finds his uncle's windshield riddled
with bullet holes, he knows it was no accident.

What he doesn't know yet is that his uncle was killed while on a top-secret mission. But he is
about to, and once he does, there is no turning back. Finding himself in the middle of
terrorists, Alex must outsmart the people who want him dead. The government has given him
the technology, but only he can provide the courage. Should he fail, every child in England
will be murdered in cold blood.

This extract is from the opening chapter, in which Alex learns of his uncle’s death, but
suspects there’s something strange happening.

When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news.
Alex Rider was woken by the first chime. His eyes flickered open, but for a moment he stayed
completely still in his bed, lying on his back with his head resting on the pillow. He heard a bedroom
door open and a creak of wood as somebody went downstairs. The bell rang a second time, and he
looked at the alarm clock glowing beside him. There was a rattle as someone slid the security chain off
the front door.
He rolled out of bed and walked over to the open window, his bare feet pressing down the carpet pile.
The moonlight spilled onto his chest and shoulders. Alex was fourteen, already well built, with the body
of an athlete. His hair, cut short apart from two thick strands hanging over his forehead, was fair. His
eyes were brown and serious. For a moment he stood silently, half hidden in the shadow, looking out.
There was a police car parked outside. From his second-floor window Alex could see the black ID
number on the roof and the caps of the two men who were standing in front of the door. The porch light
went on and, at the same time, the door opened.
"Mrs. Rider?"
"No. I'm the housekeeper. What is it? What's happened?"
"This is the home of Mr. Ian Rider?"
"Yes."
"I wonder if we could come in . . ."
And Alex already knew. He knew from the way the police stood there, awkward and unhappy. But he
also knew from the tone of their voices. Funeral voices . . . that was how he would describe them later.
The sort of voices people use when they come to tell you that someone close to you has died.
He went to his door and opened it. He could hear the two policemen talking down in the hall, but only
some of the words reached him.
". . . a car accident . . . called the ambulance . . . intensive care . . . nothing anyone could do . . . so sorry."
It was only hours later, sitting in the kitchen, watching as the grey light of morning bled slowly through
the West London streets, that Alex could try to make sense of what had happened. His uncle—Ian
Rider—was dead. Driving home, his car had been hit by a truck at Old Street roundabout and he had
been killed almost instantly. He hadn't been wearing a seat belt, the police said. Otherwise, he might
have had a chance.
Alex thought of the man who had been his only relation for as long as he could remember. He had
never known his own parents. They had both died in another accident, this one a plane crash, a few
weeks after he had been born. He had been brought up by his father's brother (never "uncle"—Ian
Rider had hated that word) and had spent fourteen years in the same terraced house in Chelsea,
London, between the King's Road and the river. The two of them had always been close. Alex
remembered the ​vacations ​(means holidays) they'd taken together, the many sports they'd played, the
movies they'd seen. They hadn't just been relations, they'd been friends. It was almost impossible to

14
imagine that he would never again see the man, hear his laughter, or twist his arm to get help with his
science homework.
Alex sighed, fighting against the sense of ​grief ​(means the sadness/suffering you feel when losing
someone)​ ​that was suddenly overwhelming. But what saddened him the most was the realization—too
late now—that despite everything, he had hardly known his uncle at all.
He was a banker. People said Alex looked a little like him. Ian Rider was always traveling. A quiet,
private man who liked good wine, classical music, and books. Who didn't seem to have any girlfriends . .
. in fact, he didn't have any friends at all. He had kept himself fit, had never smoked, and had dressed
expensively. But that wasn't enough. It wasn't a picture of a life. It was only a thumbnail sketch.
"Are you all right, Alex?" A young woman had come into the room. She was in her late twenties with a
sprawl of red hair and a round, boyish face. Jack Starbright was American. She had come to London
as a student seven years ago, rented a room in the house—in return for light housework and
baby-sitting duties—and had stayed on to become housekeeper and one of Alex's closest
companions. Sometimes he wondered what the Jack was short for. Jackie? Jacqueline? Neither of
them suited her and although he had once asked, she had never said.
Alex nodded. "What do you think will happen?" he asked.
"What do you mean?"
"To the house. To me. To you."
"I don't know." She shrugged. "I guess Ian would have made a will," she said. "He'll have left instructions."
"Maybe we should look in his office."
"Yeah. But not today, Alex. Let's take it one step at a time."
Ian's office was a room running the full length of the house, high up on the top. It was the only room that
was always locked—Alex had only been in there three or four times, and never on his own. When he
was younger, he had fantasized that there might be something strange up there . . . a time machine or
a ​UFO ​(means something strange flying in the sky - people think UFOs might have aliens in them). But it
was only an office with a desk, a couple of filing cabinets, shelves full of papers and books. Bank
stuff—that's what Ian said. Even so, Alex wanted to go up there now.
"The police said he wasn't wearing his seat belt." Alex turned to look at Jack.
She nodded. "Yeah. That's what they said."
"Doesn't that seem strange to you? You know how careful he was. He always wore his seat belt. He
wouldn't even drive me around the corner without making me put mine on."
Jack thought for a moment, then shrugged. "Yeah, it is strange," she said. "But that must have been the
way it was. Why would the police have lied?"

Questions to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What is mysterious about the way Alex’s uncle died?
2. What do you think might have really happened? Can you come up with a theory and
some evidence?
3. How does the writer capture the reader’s attention straight away?
4. How would you describe the uncle’s character, based on what we’ve been told?
5. What do you think Alex and his uncle’s relationship was like?

​ y Antony Horowitz
​ tormbreaker b
Week 7: Extract from S

They told him his uncle died in an accident. He wasn't wearing

his seatbelt, they said. But when fourteen-year-old Alex finds
his uncle's windshield riddled with bullet holes, he knows it was
no accident.

15
 What he doesn't know yet is that his uncle was killed while on a top-secret mission. But he is
about to, and once he does, there is no turning back. Finding himself in the middle of
terrorists, Alex must outsmart the people who want him dead. The government has given him
the technology, but only he can provide the courage. Should he fail, every child in England
will be murdered in cold blood.

This extract is from the opening chapter, in which Alex learns of his uncle’s death, but
suspects there’s something strange happening.

The day dragged on. Alex hadn't gone to school even though, secretly, he wanted to. He would have
preferred to escape back into normal life, the clang of the bell, the crowds of familiar faces, instead of
sitting here, trapped inside the house. But he had to be there for the visitors who came throughout the
morning and the rest of the afternoon.
And then the day of the funeral arrived and Alex found himself dressed in a dark jacket and cords,
preparing to leave in a black car that had come from nowhere surrounded by people he had never
met. Ian Rider was buried in Brompton Cemetery on the Fulham Road, just in the shadow of the
Chelsea soccer field, and Alex knew where he would have preferred to be on that warm Wednesday
afternoon. About thirty people had turned up, but he hardly recognized any of them. A grave had been
dug close to the lane that ran the length of the cemetery, and as the service began, a black
Rolls-Royce​ drew up (means a type of expensive car), the back door opened, and a man got out. Alex
watched him as he walked forward and stopped. Alex shivered. There was something about the new
arrival that made his skin crawl.
And yet the man was ordinary to look at. Grey suit, grey hair, grey lips, and grey eyes. His face was
expressionless, the eyes behind the square, gunmetal spectacles, completely empty. Perhaps that
was what had disturbed Alex. Whoever this man was, he seemed to have less life than anyone in the
cemetery. Above or below ground.
Someone tapped Alex on the shoulder and he turned around to see Mr. Crawley leaning over him.
"That's Mr. Blunt," the ​personnel manager​ (someone who manages people in the company) whispered.
"He's the chairman of the bank."
Alex's eyes traveled past Blunt and over to the Rolls-Royce. Two more men had come with him, one of
them driving. They were wearing identical suits and, although it wasn't a particularly bright day,
sunglasses. Both of them were watching the funeral with the same grim faces. Alex looked from them
to Blunt and then to the other people who had come to the cemetery. Had they really known Ian Rider?
Why had he never met any of them before? And why did he find it so difficult to believe that they really
worked for a bank?
". . . a good man, a ​patriotic ​man. He will be missed." (If you are patriotic, you have love and pride for
your country.)
The vicar had finished his graveside address. His choice of words struck Alex as odd. Patriotic? That
meant he loved his country. But as far as Alex knew, Ian Rider had barely spent any time in it. Certainly
he had never been one for waving the Union Jack. He looked around, hoping to find Jack, but saw
instead that Blunt was making his way toward him, stepping carefully around the grave.
"You must be Alex." The chairman was only a little taller than him. Up close, his skin was strangely
unreal. It could have been made of plastic. "My name is Alan Blunt," he said. "Your uncle often spoke
about you."
"That's funny," Alex said. "He never mentioned you."
The grey lips twitched briefly. "We'll miss him. He was a good man."
"What was he good at?" Alex asked. "He never talked about his work."
Suddenly Crawley was there. "Your uncle was overseas finance manager, Alex," he said. "He was
responsible for our foreign branches. You must have known that."

16
"I know he traveled a lot," Alex said. "And I know he was very careful. About things like seat belts."
"Well, sadly, he wasn't careful enough." Blunt's eyes, magnified by the thick lenses of his spectacles,
lasered into his own, and for a moment, Alex felt himself pinned down, like an insect under a
microscope. "I hope we'll meet again," Blunt went on. He tapped the side of his face with a single grey
finger. "Yes . . ." Then he turned and went back to his car.
That was when it happened. As Blunt was getting into the Rolls-Royce, the driver leaned down to open
the back door and his jacket fell open, revealing a stark white shirt underneath. There was a black
shape lying against it and that was what caught Alex's eye. The man was wearing a leather holster
with an ​automatic pistol​ (gun) strapped inside. Realising what had happened, the driver quickly
straightened up and pulled the jacket across. Blunt had seen it too. He turned back and looked again
at Alex. Something very close to an emotion slithered over his face. Then he got into the car, the door
closed, and he was gone.
A gun at a funeral, Alex thought. Why? Why should bank managers carry guns?
"Let's get out of here." Suddenly Jack was at his side. "Cemeteries give me the creeps."
"Yes. And quite a few creeps have turned up," Alex muttered.
They slipped away quietly and went home. The car that had taken them to the funeral was still waiting,
but they preferred the open air. The walk took them fifteen minutes and as they turned the corner onto
their street, Alex noticed a moving van parked in front of the house, the words stryker & son painted on
its side.
"What's that doing . . .?" he began.
At the same moment, the van shot off, the wheels skidding over the surface of the road.
Alex said nothing as Jack unlocked the door and let them in, but while she went into the kitchen to
make some tea, he quickly looked around the house. A letter that had been on the hall table now lay on
the carpet. A door that had been half open was now closed. Tiny details, but Alex's eyes missed
nothing. Somebody had been in the house. He was almost sure of it.
But he wasn't certain until he got to the top floor. The door to the office, which had always, always been
locked, was now unlocked. Alex opened it and went in. The room was empty. Ian Rider had gone and
so had everything else. The desk drawers, the closets, the shelves . . . anything connected to the dead
man's work had been taken. Whatever the truth was about his uncle's past, someone had just wiped it
out.

Questions to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What clues do we have that Alex is a curious character, who has good attention to
detail?
2. What clues do we have that Alex is courageous and not afraid to say what he thinks?
3. After reading the opening chapter, what questions does the reader have in their
mind?
4. What is strange about the death and the funeral?
5. How does the writer build suspense in the opening chapter?

​ he Goldfinch​ by Donna Tartt

Week 8: Extract from T

This prize-winning novel begins with a boy called Theo

Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, who miraculously
survives an accident that kills his mother.

Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a

17
 wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by
schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable
longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously
captivating painting of a goldfinch bird.

This extract comes from the opening chapter and describes the last time Theo saw his
mother.

The Goldfinch has recently been made into a film.

Things would have turned out better if my mother had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and
though everything that’s happened to me since then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I
lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or
congenial ​life (means pleasant or friendly).

Her death was my fault. Other people have always been a little too quick to assure me that it wasn’t;
and ​yes, only a kid, who could have known, terrible accident, rotten luck, could have happened to
anyone​, it’s all perfectly true and I don’t believe a word of it.

It happened in New York, April 10, 14 years ago. (Even my hand balks at the date; I had to push to write
it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day but now it
sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.)

If the day had gone as planned, it would have faded into the sky unmarked, swallowed without a trace
along with the rest of my eighth-grade year. What would I remember of it now? Little or nothing. But of
course the texture of that morning is clearer than the present, down to the drenched, wet feel of the air.
I was 13. I hate to remember how awkward we were with each other that last morning, stiff enough for
the doorman to notice; any other time we would have been talking ​companionably ​enough (means
they would have been talking in a friendly way), but that morning we didn’t have much to say to each
other because I’d been suspended from school. They’d called her at her office the day before; she’d
come home silent and furious; and the awful thing was that I didn’t even know what I’d been
suspended for, although I was about 75 per cent sure that Mr Beeman (​en route​ [on the way] from his
office to the teachers’ lounge) had looked out the window of the second-floor landing at exactly the
wrong moment and seen me smoking on school property. My mother hated smoking.

But I’d been in trouble at school for a while. It had all started, or begun to snowball rather, when my
father had run off and left my mother and me some months before; we’d never liked him much, and my
mother and I were generally much happier without him, but other people seemed shocked and
distressed at the abrupt way he’d abandoned us (without money, child support, or forwarding
address), and the teachers at my school on the Upper West Side had been so sorry for me, so eager to
extend their understanding and support, that they’d given me – a scholarship student – all sorts of
special allowances and delayed deadlines and second and third chances: feeding out the rope, over a
matter of months, until I’d managed to lower myself into a very deep hole. So the two of us – my mother
and I – had been called in for a conference at school. On the way, my mother insisted we went to the
museum. She loved it there.

***

My mother was making me look at a ​Rembrandt ​painting (Rembrandt is a famous painter). We were

18
standing behind a crowd of Asian tourists, so many heads that I could see the picture scarcely at all,
but then again I didn’t care that much because I’d seen this girl.

She’d seen me, too. We’d been eyeing each other as we were going through the galleries. I wasn’t
quite even sure what was so interesting about her, since she was younger than me and a little
strange-looking – nothing at all like the girls I usually got crushes on, cool serious beauties who cast
disdainful ​looks around the hallway (means that they gave dirty looks) and went out with big guys. This
girl had bright red hair; her movements were swift, her face sharp and mischievous and strange, and
her eyes were an odd colour, a golden honeybee brown. And though she was too thin, all elbows, and
in a way almost plain, yet there was something about her too that made my stomach go watery. She
was swinging and knocking a battered-looking flute case around with her – a city kid? On her way to a
music lesson? Maybe not, I thought, circling behind her as I followed my mother into the next gallery;
her clothes were a little too bland and suburban; she was probably a tourist. But she moved with more
assurance ​(means confidence) than most of the girls I knew; and the sly, composed glance that she
slid over me as she brushed past drove me crazy.

I was trailing along behind my mother, only half paying attention to what she was saying, when she
stopped in front of a painting so suddenly that I almost ran into her.

“Oh, sorry —!” she said, without looking at me, stepping back to make room. Her face was like
someone had turned a light into it.

“This is the one I was talking about,” she said. “Isn’t it amazing?”

I inclined my head in my mother’s direction, in an attitude of attentive listening, while my eyes

wandered back to the girl. She was accompanied by a funny old white-haired character who I
guessed from his sharpness of face was related to her, her grandfather maybe: houndstooth coat,
long narrow lace-up shoes as shiny as glass. His eyes were close-set, and his nose beaky and birdlike;
he walked with a limp – in fact, his whole body listed to one side, one shoulder higher than the other;
and if his slump had been any more pronounced, you might have said he was a hunchback. But all the
same there was something elegant about him. And clearly he adored the girl from the amused and
companionable way he hobbled at her side, very careful where he put his feet, his head inclined in her
direction.

“This is just about the first painting I ever really loved,” my mother was saying.

The girl and the old man had come up next to us. Self-consciously, I leaned forward and looked at the
painting. It was a small picture, the smallest in the exhibition, and the simplest: a yellow finch, against a
plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.

19
 ​ he Goldfinch​ by a painter called Fabritius)
(This is the painting they would have been looking at. T

I stepped back, to get a better look. It was a direct and matter-of-fact little creature, with nothing
sentimental ​about it (means it didn’t show feelings or emotions); and something about the neat,
compact way it tucked down inside itself – its brightness, its alert watchful expression – made me think
of pictures I’d seen of my mother when she was small: a dark-capped finch with steady eyes.

The girl and her grandfather were ​loitering ​quietly to the side (standing without any real purpose),
listening to my mother talk, which was a bit embarrassing. I glanced away and then — unable to resist
— glanced back. They were standing very close, so close I could have reached out and touched them.
She was batting and plucking at the old man’s sleeve, tugging his arm to whisper something in his ear.

“Anyway, if you ask me,” my mother was saying, “this is the most extraordinary picture in the whole
show. Fabritius is making clear something that he discovered all on his own, that no painter in the
world knew before him – not even Rembrandt.”

Very softly – so softly I could barely hear her – I heard the girl whisper: “It had to live its whole life like
that?”

I’d been wondering the same thing; the shackled foot, the chain was terrible; her grandfather
murmured ​some reply (said quietly in a way that is hard to hear) but my mother (who seemed totally
unaware of them, even though they were right next to us) stepped back and said: “Such a mysterious
picture, so simple. Really tender – invites you to stand close, you know? All those dead pheasants back
there and then this little living creature.”

Questions to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. What does the narrator say about his life since the death of his mother?
2. Why were the narrator and his mother on bad terms that morning?
3. Why did they go to the museum?
4. What is it about the red-haired girl that the narrator finds interesting?
5. On the day described, how do you think the narrator feels about his mother?
6. After reading the summary of the book at the top, what do you think the chained up
bird in the painting could symbolise?

​ he Goldfinch​ by Donna Tartt

Week 9: Extract from T

20
 This prize-winning novel begins with a boy called Theo
Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, who miraculously
survives an accident that kills his mother.

Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a

wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on
Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know
how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his
unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing
that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating
painting of a goldfinch bird.

This extract comes from the opening chapter and describes

the last time Theo saw his mother.

The Goldfinch has recently been made into a film.

I allowed myself another ​stealthy glimpse ​in the girl’s direction (stealthy means secret and quiet; a
glimpse is a quick look/glance). She was standing on one leg, with her hip swung out to the side. Then –
quite suddenly – she turned and looked me in the eye; and in a heart-skip of confusion, I looked away.

What was her name? Why wasn’t she in school? I’d been trying to make out the scribbled name on the
flute case but even when I leaned in as far as I dared without being obvious, still I couldn’t read the bold
spiky marker strokes, more drawn than written, like something spray-painted on a subway car. The last
name was short, only four or five letters; the first looked like R, or was it P?

“People die, sure,” my mother was saying. “But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose
things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. ​The Parthenon ​(an Ancient Greek historical site, now ruins),
used as a ​munitions storehouse ​(a place to store guns). I guess that anything we manage to save from
history is a miracle.”

The grandfather had drifted away, a few paintings over; but she was loitering a few steps behind, the
girl, and kept casting glances back at my mother and me. Beautiful skin: milky white, arms like carved
marble.

Definitely she looked athletic, though too pale to be a tennis player; maybe she was a ballerina or a
gymnast or even a high diver, practising late in shadowy indoor pools. Plunging with arched chest and
pointed toes to the bottom of the pool, a silent pow, shiny black swimsuit, bubbles foaming and
streaming off her small, tense frame.

Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid,
fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street
forming quite such an interest in me. And yet I was fascinated by strangers, wanted to know what food
they ate and what dishes they ate it from, what movies they watched and what music they listened to,
wanted to look under their beds and in their secret drawers and night tables and inside the pockets of
their coats. Often I saw interesting-looking people on the street and thought about them restlessly for
days, imagining their lives, making up stories about them on the subway or the crosstown bus. Years
had passed, and I still hadn’t stopped thinking about the dark-haired children in Catholic school

21
uniforms – brother and sister – I’d seen in Grand Central, literally trying to pull their father out the door
of a seedy bar by the sleeves of his suit jacket. Nor had I forgotten the ​frail ​(means thin and weak
looking), gipsyish girl in a wheelchair out in front of the Carlyle Hotel, talking breathlessly in Italian to the
fluffy dog in her lap, while a sharp character in sunglasses (father? bodyguard?) stood behind her
chair, apparently conducting some sort of business deal on his phone. For years, I’d turned those
strangers over in my mind, wondering who they were and what their lives were like, and I knew I would
go home and wonder about this girl and her grandfather the same way. The old man had money; you
could tell from how he was dressed. Why was it just the two of them? Where were they from? Maybe
they were part of some big old complicated New York family – music people, academics, one of those
large, artsy West Side families that you saw up around Columbia or at Lincoln Center matinees. Or,
maybe – homely, civilised old creature that he was – maybe he wasn’t her grandfather at all. Maybe he
was a music teacher, and she was the flute prodigy he had discovered in some small town and brought
to play at Carnegie Hall –

“Theo?” my mother said suddenly. “Did you hear me?”

Her voice brought me back to myself. We were in the last room of the show. Beyond lay the exhibition
shop – postcards, cash register, glossy stacks of art books – and my mother, unfortunately, had not
lost track of the time.

“We should see if it’s still raining,” she was saying.

I noticed the girl observing my mother as she spoke – eyes gliding curiously over my mother’s sleek
black ponytail, her white satin trenchcoat cinched at the waist – and it thrilled me to see her for a
moment as the girl saw her, as a stranger. Did she see how my mother’s nose had the tiniest bump at
the top, where she’d broken it falling out of a tree as a child? Or how the black rings around the light
blue irises of my mother’s eyes gave her a slightly wild quality, as of some steady-eyed hunting
creature alone on a plain?

“You know – ” my mother looked over her shoulder – “if you don’t mind, I just might run back and take
another quick look at The ​Anatomy Lesson​ (the name of a painting) before we leave. I didn’t get to see
it up close and I’m afraid I might not make it back before it comes down.” She started away, shoes
clacking busily – and then glanced at me as if to say: are you coming?

This was so unexpected that for a split second I didn’t know what to say. “Um,” I said, recovering, “I’ll
meet you in the shop.”

“Okay,” she said. “Buy me a couple of cards, will you? I’ll be back in a sec.”

And off she hurried, before I had a chance to say a word. Heart pounding, unable to believe my luck, I
watched her walking ​rapidly ​(quickly) away from me in the white satin trenchcoat. This was it, my
chance to talk to the girl; but what can I say to her, I thought furiously, what can I say? I dug my hands
in my pockets, took a breath or two to compose myself, and – excitement fizzing bright in my stomach
– turned to face her.

But, to my ​consternation​, she was gone (a feeling of worry or shock). That is to say, she wasn’t gone;
there was her red head, moving across the room. Her grandpa had slipped his arm through hers and –
whispering to her, with great enthusiasm – was towing her away to look at some picture on the
opposite wall.

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I could have killed him. Nervously, I glanced at the empty doorway. Then I dug my hands deeper in my
pockets and – face burning – walked ​conspicuously ​across the length of the gallery (means in a way
that is noticeable). The clock was ticking; my mother would be back any second; and though I knew I
didn’t have the nerve to barge up and actually say something, I could at the very least get a last good
look at her. Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched Citizen Kane, and I was
very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and
remember her for the rest of his life. Someday I too might be like the old man in the movie, leaning back
in my chair with a far-off look in my eyes, and saying: “You know, that was 60 years ago, and I never
saw that girl with the red hair again, but you know what? Not a month has gone by in all that time when
I haven’t thought of her.”

I was more than halfway across the gallery when something strange happened. A museum guard ran
across the open doorway of the exhibition shop beyond. He was carrying something in his arms.

The girl saw it, too. Her golden-brown eyes met mine: a startled, ​quizzical ​(means questioning) look.

Suddenly another guard flew out of the museum shop. His arms were up and he was screaming.

Heads went up. Someone behind me said, in an odd flat voice: oh! The next instant, a tremendous,
earsplitting blast shook the room.

The old man – with a blank look on his face – stumbled sideways. His outstretched arm – knotty fingers
spread – is the last thing I remember seeing. At almost exactly the same moment there was a black
flash, with debris sweeping and twisting around me, and a roar of hot wind slammed into me and threw
me across the room. And that was the last thing I knew for a while.

Questions to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. How many people has the narrator obsessed about in the past?
2. What does he find so fascinating about strangers?
3. Why does he choose not to go back to look at a painting with his mother?
4. How do you think he will feel about this choice in the future?
5. How does the writer build up to the explosion? How does he suddenly make the story
quite tense?
6. What do you think the guard might have been carrying in his arms?

Week 10: Extract from ​Cujo ​by Stephen King

Cujo is a novel by bestselling horror author Stephen King.

Cujo is a family dog who is bitten by a bat with rabies. Cujo's

illness goes unnoticed by his owners, who are embroiled in
their own drama, allowing the illness to progress to the point
that Cujo turns from a gentle, loving dog into a horrifying
killer.

The thought of a powerful dog suddenly turning on his family

is one that fills us with dread. All of us have considered what

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 would happen if man’s best friend suddenly turned on us, and this idea is terrifying.

This extract comes from the opening chapter in which Tad, the young boy in the family, is
alone in his bedroom and feeling frightened.

The light snapped off. "Good night, Tad." His mother's voice trailed back to him lightly, softly, and in his
mind he cried out, Be careful, Mummy, they eat the ladies! In all the movies they catch the ladies and
carry them off and eat them! Oh please oh please oh please-- But they were gone.

So Tad Trenton, four years old, lay in his bed. He lay with the covers pulled up to his chin and one arm
crushing Teddy against his chest, and there was Luke Skywalker on one wall; there was a chipmunk
standing on a blender on another wall, grinning cheerily (IF LIFE HANDS YOU LEMONS, MAKE
LEMONADE! the cheeky, grinning chipmunk was saying); there was the whole motley Sesame Street
crew on a third: Big Bird, Ernie, Oscar, Grover.

But oh the wind outside, screaming over the roof and skating down black gutters! He would sleep no
more this night. His mind began to drift. . . . And then a new screaming, this one closer than the
night-wind outside, brought him back to staring wakefulness again. The hinges on the closet door.
Creeeeeeeeeeeee-- That thin sound, so high that perhaps only dogs and small boys awake in the
night could have heard it.

His closet door swung open slowly and steadily, a dead mouth opening on darkness inch by inch and
foot by foot. The monster was in that darkness. It crouched where it had crouched before. It grinned at
him, and its huge shoulders bulked above its cocked head, and its eyes glowed amber, alive with
stupid ​cunning​ (means he looks very sly).

I told you they'd go away, Tad, it whispered. They always do, in the end. And then I can come back. I
like to come back. I like you, Tad. I'll come back every night now, I think, and every night I'll come a little
closer to your bed . . . and a little closer . . . until one night, before you can scream for them, you'll hear
something growling, something growling right beside you, Tad, it'll be me, and I'll pounce, and then I'll
eat you and you'll be in me.

Tad stared at the creature in his closet with drugged, horrified fascination. There was something that .
. . was almost familiar. Something he almost knew. And that was the worst, that almost knowing.

Because-- Because I'm crazy, Tad. I'm here. I've been here all along. My name was Frank Dodd once,
and I killed the ladies and maybe I ate them, too. I've been here all along, I stick around, I keep my ear
to the ground. I'm the monster, Tad, the old monster, and I'll have you soon, Tad. Feel me getting closer
. . . and closer. . . . Perhaps the thing in the closet spoke to him in its own hissing breath, or perhaps its
voice was the wind's voice. Either way, neither way, it didn't matter. He listened to its words, drugged
with terror, near fainting (but oh so wide awake); he looked upon its shadowed, ​snarling ​face, which he
almost knew. (If something is snarling, it is showing its teeth aggressively while making a growling
noise.)

He would sleep no more tonight; perhaps he would never sleep again. But sometime later, sometime
between the striking of half past midnight and the hour of one, perhaps because he was small, Tad
drifted away again. Thin sleep in which hulking, furred creatures with white teeth chased him
deepened into dreamless ​slumber (​means sleep). The wind held long conversations with the gutters. A
rind of white spring moon rose in the sky. Somewhere far away, in some still meadow of night or along

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 some pine-edged corridor of forest, a dog barked furiously and then fell silent. And in Tad Trenton's
closet, something with amber eyes held watch.

Questions to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. How does the writer show us that Tad is very childish and innocent at the beginning
of this extract?
2. How does the weather reflect the mood of the story?
3. How does the writer keep us guessing about whether the monster is real or not?
4. Do you think this is a real monster? Why or why not?
5. How does the writer create a scary feeling?
6. What do you think might happen?

​ y Charlie Higson
Week 11: Extract from ​The Enemy b

They’ll chase you. They’ll rip you open. They’ll

feed on you . . . When the sickness came, every
parent, police officer, politician – every adult –
fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are
crazed, confused and hungry. Only children
under 16 remain, and they’re fighting to
survive.

The Enemy is a ​post-apocalyptic ​young adult

horror novel written by Charlie Higson. The
book takes place in London, United Kingdom,
after a worldwide sickness has infected
adults, turning them into cannibalistic
zombies. (​An apocalypse is a very serious
event resulting in huge destruction.
Post-apocalyptic means something that takes
place ​after ​an apocalypse​.)

This extract shows what happens when one child goes missing.

Small Sam was playing in the parking lot behind the Waitrose supermarket when the grown-ups took
him. He’d been with some of the little kids, having a battle with an odd ​assortment ​of action figures
(assortment means a mixture) when it happened. They weren’t supposed to play outside without a
guard, but it was a lovely sunny day and the little kids got bored indoors. Sam wasn’t the youngest of
the group, but he was the smallest. That’s why they called him Small Sam. There had originally been
two other Sams, Big Sam and Curly Sam, who had curly hair. Big Sam had been killed a few months
ago, but Small Sam was stuck with the name.

It was probably because of his size that the grown-ups went for him. They were like that—they picked
out the youngsters, the weaklings, the little ones. In the panic of the attack the rest of Sam’s gang got
back safely inside, but Sam was cut off and the ​roving ​pack of grown-ups trapped him in a corner.
(Roving means travelling from place to place).

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They had come over the side wall, led by a big mother in a tracksuit that might once have been pink but
was now so filthy and greasy it looked like grey plastic. She had a fat, egg-like body on top of long
skinny legs. Her back was bent and she ran stooped over, but surprisingly fast, her arms held wide like a
scorpion’s claws, her dirty blond hair hanging straight down. Her face blank and stupid. Breathing
through her mouth.

Small Sam was too scared even to scream or call for help, and the grown-ups made no noise, so the
whole scene was played out in horrible silence. The mother blocked off the route back toward the
building while two lanky fathers ran at him from either side. Sam dodged them for a few seconds, but
he knew they’d get hold of him in the end. By the time help came from inside, the grown-ups had gone
back over the wall, with Sam stuffed inside a sack.

Maxie led a group of bigger kids out into the parking lot. Even though they were armed with spears and
clubs and good throwing rocks, they moved cautiously, not knowing exactly what to expect.

“We’re too late,” said Callum, scanning the empty parking lot. “They’ve got him.”

“Shame,” said a ​stocky ​(means short and wide), dark-haired kid called Josh. “I liked him. He was funny.”

“That’s the second attack this week,” said Maxie angrily. “What’s going on? Either the grown-ups are
closing in on us, or they’re getting braver.”

“They ain’t brave,” said Josh, spitting on the ground. “If they was still here I’d show them brave. I’d mash
their ugly faces. Nothing scares me.”

“So why were they here?” asked Maxie.

“They’re just hungry,” said Josh.

“We’re all hungry,” said Callum.

“We should have been here,” said Maxie. “We should have been watching over them.”

“We can’t be everywhere at once,” Callum pointed out. “There’s not enough of us, not with Arran out
with the scavs. Our job’s to keep a lookout from the roof. The little kids knew they weren’t supposed to
be out here. Nobody should be out here. We should all stay inside.”

“We can’t stay inside all day,” scoffed Josh. “We’d go crazy.”

“It’s good inside,” said Callum.

“You’re just scared to come outside,” said Josh with a smirk.

“No I ain’t,” said Callum. “No more scared than you.”

“Nothing scares me,” said Josh.

“Then you’re just stupid,” said Callum.

“Nah,” said Josh. “The thing about grown-ups is, some of them are strong, some of them can run fast,
and some of them are clever, but the strong ones are slow, the fast ones are stupid, and the smart ones
are weak.”

“Tell that to Small Sam,” said Maxie angrily, “and to Big Sam and Johnno, and Eve and Mohammed and

26
all the other kids we’ve lost.”

“Grown-ups won’t get me,” said Josh.

“What?” said Callum. “So it was their fault they got taken? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, I am,” said Josh.

“Shut up,” Maxie snapped at the two of them. Then she said the thing that nobody wanted to admit.
“We can’t go on like this.” Her voice was heavy with bitterness. “Soon we’re all going to be dead. I can’t
stand it anymore.”

She threw down the spear she had been carrying and sat on the ground, resting her head in her hands.

It was her fault. That was all she could think. It was all her fault.

When Arran was away she was supposed to be in charge. She couldn’t remember when it had been
decided—Arran was the leader, she was second in command—it must have happened early on, when
most of the kids had been too frightened and confused to do anything for themselves. Arran and Maxie
had just got on with it, organizing everyone, keeping their spirits up. Arran was clever and likeable. Right
from the start he’d kept his head and not panicked. He’d been captain of the soccer team at William
Ellis School, and nothing ever seemed to freak him out. The two of them had worked together. A team.
Maxie had always been good at getting other children to help out. There were better fighters than her,
true, but they were happy for her to tell them what to do. They didn’t want the responsibility. And when
Arran wasn’t there, she was the leader.

So, it was all her fault. Another kid gone. She shut down part of her mind. She didn’t want to think about
what the grown-ups would do to Small Sam.

She started to cry. She didn’t care who saw it. Callum looked at Josh. They both felt awkward. In the
end it was Josh who squatted down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders.

“It’s all right, Max,” he said quietly. “We’ll be all right. Something’ll happen, someone will come.
Something’s gonna change. When Arran and the others get back we’ll talk about it maybe, yeah? Make
a plan?”

“What’s the point?” said Maxie.

“When Arran gets back, yeah?”

Maxie looked up into Josh’s concerned, grubby face. “Sorry,” she said.

“Come on,” said Callum. “Let’s try and find out how they got over the wall. Then we should get back
inside.”

“Yeah.” Maxie jumped up. It was okay as long as you were doing something, as long as you didn’t stop
and think.

She wished Arran were here, though. She always felt safer when he was around.

It was just . . . What was he going to think?

Another kid gone.

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All her fault.

Questions to discuss (form tutor to select)

1. Who are the ‘grown ups’? What has happened to them?
2. What kind of character is Josh? Does his character seem to change as the extract
goes on?
3. What is Maxie’s character like?
4. Why do you think they are all bickering (arguing) with each other?
5. Where do you think Arran might be?
6. What do you think might happen next?

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