Samuel Blink and the Forbidden Forest (2 page)

The tree trunks lying on the back of the truck were stacked up like a pyramid, and fastened with three gray straps. One of the straps was a bit too loose and caused the trunks to vibrate as if they were restless, or as if they were trying to escape and make it back to the forest.

The truck overtook the car at a reckless speed.

“Have you seen anything like it?” Samuel's dad, Peter, was saying. “What a maniac!”

Samuel's dad thought every driver apart from himself was a maniac, and truck drivers were the biggest maniacs of the lot.

“Great,” he said as the giant vehicle began to slow down, hogging both lanes. “Now we'll never get there.”

“There's no hurry,” said Samuel's mum, who was called Liv.

Samuel didn't know where they were going, but he knew he didn't want to spend another minute having to listen to his sister's singing. Well,
singing
was hardly the word for it.
Cat-strangling
was a more accurate description of the sound.

“Mum, tell Martha to stop making that horrible noise.”

His mum tutted. “It's not horrible noise. It's beautiful singing.”

This was a lie. One of the million parent lies Samuel had grown used to during his twelve years on the planet. But he knew he wouldn't get any support today. After all, it was Martha's birthday—a fact indicated by the two pins on her sweater saying
I AM
10 and 10
TODAY
.

The singing got louder. Samuel's head vibrated like the logs as he rested it against the car window, and stared out at the fast blur of grass on the side of the motorway.

“Dad,” he said, asking the second-in-command parent. “Tell Martha.”

His dad ignored him. He was too busy grumbling. “This is ridiculous! Why bother passing us if you're going to then go slower?!”

Martha twisted around in her seat belt and sang really loud in Samuel's ear:

Ugh! Samuel thought he was going to be sick. He hated his sister's singing at the best of times, but especially when he was tired. He'd only had two hours' sleep the night before, because he was having his usual nightmare. A nightmare about strange gray-skinned monsters with tails and eyes that never blinked. He'd woken in a cold sweat and couldn't get back to sleep.

“They should make murderers have to listen to you as punishment,” he told Martha.

“Shut up, Smell-uel. You're just jealous.”

And then she started again, singing bits of silly girly love songs. He knew she would sing all day. After all, she sang every day. It was like Martha's whole life was one big long song. As if she was trapped in one of those rubbish musicals she always watched on TV.

Samuel went back to looking out of the window and prayed for Martha to be quiet.

Quiet as a log.

Even when she said something normal, she turned it into a song, going high and low to make each word a different note.

So instead of just asking, “Where are we going?,” she sang:

To which their mum said, “You don't want us to spoil the big surprise, do you?”

“Yes,” sang Martha.

“Well, you'll find out soon,” said her mum.

“Not if we stay stuck behind this truck,” said her dad.

Samuel wondered what the big surprise was going to be. He hoped it was a trip to a theme park, like it had been for his last birthday. A loop-the-loop roller coaster would stop Martha singing, if only for a short while. He had gone on a ride with his dad called the Catapult that went so fast you couldn't move your face. Samuel had loved every high-speed second of it, and his dad had pretended to feel the same way until he had to rush to the toilet and throw up his lunch (parent lie number 910,682).

But Samuel suspected that the big surprise was going to be something far more boring than a theme park. He thought of all the rubbish things Martha liked doing.

Horse-riding…

Doing hairstyles…

Spending her pocket money on rubbish music…

Listening to rubbish music…

Singing rubbish music…

So Samuel had, on the basis of Martha's interests, narrowed the options down to a day trotting on a horse, watching his sister have her hair cut at a posh hairdressers, or—worst-case scenario—going to see a musical. Possibly even a musical about a hairdresser who becomes a show-jumper and sings to her horse.

Samuel smiled at the unique version of hell he had created in his mind.

Beeeeep!

The daydream of people singing on horses ended with the sound of his dad blasting the car horn at the truck.

“This is ludicrous,” his dad said, switching on the turn signal.

“Peter, what are you doing?” his mum asked.

“I'm turning off. We'll be on this road all day if we stay behind this timber truck. And have you seen the way those logs are strapped up? It's an accident waiting to happen.”

“But we don't know the roads.”

“We've got a map. In the dashboard.”

Uh-oh.

Samuel and Martha knew what the map meant. It meant their mum and dad having a massive row for an hour, arguing about where they should have turned left.

“Okay,” said their mum. “We need the B642. Kids, look out for the B642.”

“B642,” sang Martha.

The car went round a roundabout three times, until Samuel spotted the B642, hiding in brackets on a small green road sign.

“There it is,” he said.

The car turned off the roundabout, and within five minutes, the map had managed to create the usual left-turn row. Samuel kept staring out of the window and the birthday girl kept singing as their mum and dad's argument took root and began to grow.

“Left.”

“What?”

“Too late. We should have turned left back there.”

“You could have told me. You're the one with the map.”

“I did tell you.”

“Well, you could have told me before we reached the flaming turnoff.”

“It's this stupid old map. It's too hard to read.”

Samuel thought about what his mum had just said and he wondered how a map could be stupid. And then he thought about the tree that was turned into paper to make the map. Maybe the map was hard to read as a kind of revenge.

Whatever the reason, they missed the left turn and were now stuck on the B642.

“If we keep going, we'll be able to get back on the dual carriageway,” Samuel's mum said as she analyzed the map.

“Fan-flaming-tastic,” said Samuel's dad. “Back where we started!”

“It was your idea to turn off.”

“Well, we'd have been fine if you could just read a flaming map!”

“Oh no,” said Samuel's mum.

“What's the matter?” Samuel's dad shook the question out of his head.

“It doesn't join the dual carriageway…It goes
under
it.”

And, to prove her point, the view around the next bend revealed a large concrete bridge, directly above the B642.

Samuel saw, to his far left, the timber truck rising at a steady angle toward the bridge. What he couldn't see was that the loose gray straps that helped fasten the logs had come completely undone.

As the car headed toward the bridge, Samuel tried to keep his eyes on the lorry. He had worked out that if they kept going at the same speed, the car would go under the bridge at the exact moment the truck would go over it.

So when he saw the first tree trunk bounce off the truck, he knew the danger.

“Dad! Stop the car!”

“Samuel, what on earth's the matter?”

“Stop the car! The logs! Falling off the truck! Stop the car!”

“Samuel, what are you talking about?” His dad was showing no sign whatsoever of stopping the car.

The first log broke through the roadside barrier one hundred meters before the bridge and started rolling down a slope toward the field at the side of the B642.

“Stop the car! Stop the car!”

“Samuel?” His mum always added a question mark to his name when she was cross.

“Stop! Stop! Just stop!”

But the car kept going, the logs kept falling, and his sister kept singing.

And when Samuel's dad finally decided to brake, it was too late. The last of the logs rolled off the truck and fell off the bridge.

Smash!

Within less than a second from it hitting the thin metal, Samuel and Martha lost both of their parents, while they themselves, along with the entire back half of the car, remained physically unharmed.

Samuel and Martha stayed sitting on the backseat. They were too shocked to move. Or to speak. Or to make any sound at all.

Neither of them knew where their parents had planned to take them for Martha's birthday. All they did know was that whatever else happened, nothing would ever be the same again.

The crushing of their parents by a giant log wasn't Samuel and Martha Blink's first encounter with death.

Indeed, most of their direct relatives had been wiped out within the two children's lifetimes, although they hadn't been present at most of these other deaths.

They weren't there, for instance, when Granddad had a heart attack carrying a box of ornamental gnomes into his back garden. Or when Nan, two months later, tripped over one of the gnomes and fell headfirst into the greenhouse.

Nor were they there when Uncle Derek electrocuted himself trying to rescue a tiny piece of toast from the bottom of the toaster with his fork. Or when Aunt Sheila collapsed and banged her head against the doorstop after getting five numbers in the lottery.

And they weren't there when their Norwegian uncle Henrik had…Well, the case of Uncle Henrik was something of a mystery.

Unlike all the other deaths, Samuel and Martha were never told how Uncle Henrik had died. In fact, they weren't told much of how he lived either.

You see, Uncle Henrik was from Norway. That is the country where Samuel and Martha's mum, Liv, was from and a country the two children had never visited. Their mum had a twin sister called Eda. Liv and Eda grew up in a town called Fredrikstad, near Norway's capital city, Oslo. When they were twenty, their long-widowed mother died. The next year Liv moved to England, to study at university, where she met her future husband, Peter. That same year, Eda fell in love with a ski jumper called Henrik in Norway.

Samuel and Martha knew very little about Aunt Eda and Uncle Henrik. But one thing they did know was that Aunt Eda had been a very good javelin thrower, the best in the whole of Norway, and she made it to the Olympics in Moscow. Samuel had always thought this was an amazing fact—that a blood relative had made it to the Olympics—and it always had made him try harder at Sports Day. But when a javelin he had thrown nearly skewered his gym teacher, he realized he probably wasn't going to be following in his aunt's footsteps.

Whenever Samuel and Martha had asked about Aunt Eda, their mother had always given the same reply. “She is a kind and wonderful woman.”

So why had they never seen this very kind and wonderful woman?

You may well ask. Samuel and Martha certainly had done, about one hundred times each, but they never got a satisfactory answer.

Here are three of the not-very-satisfactory answers they received:

And that was it.

Well, it had been it until six days after their mum and dad died. That was the day the letter came, placed in Samuel's hand by Mrs. Finch, the kindly old neighbor who had been looking after them.

Samuel looked at the handwriting, but didn't recognize it. The letters were tall and leaned back slightly, like people that don't like the smell of something.

He opened the envelope and found two airplane tickets along with a letter, which he started to read.