Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [57]
Arthur sighed.
“I’m just feeling a little jumpy and unsettled, I think,” said Arthur.
“I’m sorry,” said Random, and put the package down again. She could see that it really would upset him if she opened it. She would just have to do it when he wasn’t looking.
Chapter 16
Arthur wasn’t quite certain which he noticed as being missing first. When he noticed that the one wasn’t there, his mind instantly leapt to the other and he knew immediately that they were both gone and that something insanely bad and difficult to deal with would happen as a result.
Random was not there. And neither was the parcel.
He had left it up on a shelf all day, in plain view. It was an exercise in trust.
He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them. He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
You also panic.
Arthur ran out of the hut. It was the middle of the evening. The light was getting dim and a storm was brewing. He could not see her anywhere, nor any sign of her. He asked. No one had seen her. He asked again. No one else had seen her. They were going home for the night. A little wind was whipping around the edge of the village, picking things up and tossing them around in a dangerously casual manner.
He found Old Thrashbarg and asked him. Thrashbarg looked at him stonily, and then pointed in the one direction that Arthur had dreaded and had therefore instinctively known was the way she would have gone.
So now he knew the worst.
She had gone where she thought he would not follow her.
He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid, and reflected that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn’t feel like a bunch of complete idiots riding out of.
With a heavy sense of the utmost foreboding he set off on the track that led to the forest in the next valley. The first heavy blobs of rain began to hit the ground as Arthur tried to drag himself to some sort of run.
Random reached the crest of the hill and looked down into the next valley. It had been a longer and harder climb than she had anticipated. She was a little worried that doing the trip at night was not that great an idea, but her father had been mooching around near the hut all day trying to pretend to either her or himself that he wasn’t guarding the parcel. At last he’d had to go over to the forge to talk with Strinder about the knives, and Random had seized her opportunity and done a runner with the parcel.
It was perfectly clear that she couldn’t just open the thing there, in the hut, or even in the village. He might have come across her at any moment. Which meant that she had to go where she wouldn’t be followed.
She could stop where she was now. She had gone this way in the hope that he wouldn’t follow her, and even if he did he would never find her up in the wooded parts of the hill with night drawing in and the rain starting.
All the way up, the parcel had been jiggling under her arm. It was a satisfyingly hunky sort of thing: a box with a square top about the length of her forearm on each side, and about the length of her hand deep, wrapped up in brown plasper with an ingenious new form of self-knotting string. It didn’t rattle as she shook it, but she sensed that its weight was concentrated excitingly at the center.
Having come so far, though, there was a certain satisfaction in not stopping here, but carrying on down into what seemed to be almost a forbidden area-where her father’s ship had come down. She wasn’t exactly certain what the word “haunted” meant, but it might be fun to find out. She would keep going and save the parcel for when she got there.
It was getting darker, though. She hadn’t used her tiny electric torch yet, because she didn’t want to be visible from a distance. She would