The Curse of Deadman's Forest Read Online Free Page A

would be quite soon indeed.
    “Naw, mate,” Ian said to his friend. “I don’t think Lachestia’s dead. I think she’s just waiting for the right time to show herself.” To prove his point, he quoted the prophecy. “‘Loam of ground no longer tamed, unleashing wrath from ancient stone. Hear the earth below you moan.’ I believe Laodamia’s got to be telling us about Lachestia.”
    “So who’s the crone? And what’s that bit about a curse she holds?” Carl wondered.
    Ian shook his head. “I’ve no idea,” he admitted. “But we should be able to discover her by using this.” Ian lifted the sundial again, holding it up to the sunlight. “If I can figure out how to work this, we should have our answers.”
    Carl sighed and turned to his pretend fortress again.“Good luck,” he said. “I’ll be fiddling with this in the meantime.”
    “Yeah, all right,” Ian muttered, squinting at the sundial and willing its shadow to appear.
    After a bit Carl broke the silence. “Ian, have you seen that plank of wood I rescued from Landis’s woodpile? I thought it’d be a good piece to fit over this open section here.”
    Ian glanced up distractedly. “Plank?” he repeated.
    “Yeah,” said Carl. “You remember? I brought it up here last Saturday.”
    Ian did remember Carl struggling with a large section of wood up the stone staircase, but he couldn’t recall where Carl had set it among all the other clutter. “Sorry,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve no idea, mate.”
    Carl scrunched up his face and stared at the piles of wood and blankets, scratching his head again. “Where did I put it?” he mused to himself.
    Ian looked down again to continue examining the sundial only to gasp when he realized that the face of the dial had changed dramatically from just a few moments before. The surface was no longer dull and tarnished but reflected brightly as if it’d just received a thorough polishing. And more astonishing, it appeared to be working; there was a distinct triangular shadow on it. “Carl!” he shouted. “Come have a look!”
    His friend hurried over. “What?” he asked, and Ian pointed to the small relic in his hand. Carl gasped too. “Lookit that, it’s got a shadow!”
    “It just happened,” Ian said, his hand trembling slightly with excitement.
    “What’d you do to it?”
    Ian tore his eyes away from the sundial and blinked up at his friend. “Nothing,” he admitted. “I mean, nothing I can think of.”
    “Take it out of the sunlight and see what happens,” Carl suggested.
    Ian hesitated; he didn’t want to risk doing anything that might cause the shadow to disappear, but quickly realized he couldn’t hold it in the sunlight forever. So, taking a leap of faith, he moved it into the shade, and to both boys’ surprise, the shadow remained on the surface of the sundial. “Gaw blimey!” Carl said, his voice filled with delight. “Would you look at that?”
    “It’s working!” Ian replied excitedly while he moved the sundial even deeper into the shade with no effect on its surface. “I don’t know how, but it’s working!”
    And for a while both boys stared at the dial’s face, waiting for the shadow to fade, but after several minutes it was clear that the thin strip of darkness was there to stay.
    Soon the delight of their discovery waned and Carl said, “Well, I’m going back to the fort. Give us a shout if you figure out what it’s pointing to.” And he turned away.
    But something Carl said was like a trigger in Ian’s mind and he thought back through what had happened right before the shadow had appeared. Carl had been asking about the plank of wood; Ian had told him he didn’t know where it was; then, when he’d looked back down, he’d seen thethin strip of shadow, which seemed to be pointing like a compass’s arrow across the room. Ian’s head snapped up and he looked over at the pile of spare wood covered by one of the moth-eaten blankets the boys had pinched