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    The Scream
    The Scream
    The Scream
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    The Scream

    By Joan Aiken and Ian Andrew

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    About this ebook

    When Davey and his sister are orphaned, their grandmother comes from a remote island to look after them—bringing macabre powers and dark secrets

    When Davey and his family moved to the city from the island of Muckle Burra off the coast of Scotland, they left his grandmother behind. But now his parents are dead—after a car accident that left Davey confined to a wheelchair—and Gran has moved in to take care of him and his sister, Lu-Lyn. A strange girl with a bizarre personality, Lu-Lyn is obsessed with 2 things: ballet and returning to Muckle Burra, where she was born. She believes that both she and Gran are “Ridders” who have strange, dark powers: With just 1 cast of their Evil Eye, bad things will start to happen. . . .
     
    When Lu-Lyn puts a terrible curse on the neighborhood boys who’ve been terrorizing her, it seems as if Gran’s dark arts have followed her from Muckle Burra. Then tragedy rocks their family again, and Davey embarks on a journey that will reveal the true secret of his grandmother’s rare gift—and the limitless power of his own potential.
     
    This ebook features illustrations by Ian Andrew and a personal history of Joan Aiken including rare images from the author’s estate.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2015
    ISBN9781504020978
    The Scream
    Author

    Joan Aiken

    Joan Aiken was born in Rye, Sussex in 1924, daughter of the American poet Conrad Aiken, and started writing herself at the age of five. Since the 1960s she wrote full time and published over 100 books. Best known for her children’s books such as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Midnight is a Place, she also wrote extensively for adults and published many contemporary and historical novels, including sequels to novels by Jane Austen. In 1968 she won the Guardian Children’s book prize for Whispering Mountain, followed by an Edgar Allan Poe award for Night Fall in 1972, and was awarded an MBE for her services to children’s literature in 1999. Joan Aiken died in 2004.

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    • 3/5
      A brief and chilling little chapter book, perhaps most suitable for upper elementary-school students looking for a quick read, The Scream is told from the perspective of David, a young Scots boy confined to a wheelchair after the car accident which killed his parents. Living with his uncanny grandmother, who has the "power," and who was once the "Ridder" on an evacuated northern island, and his tempestuous older sister Lu-Lyn, David is quick to sense the unspoken undercurrents of his life. When Lu-Lyn's conflict with some local boys spirals out of control and leads to tragedy, David and his grandmother must travel back to their ancestral home to lay her spirit to rest...A prolific and much-beloved children's author, Joan Aiken is perhaps best known for her classic "Gothic" adventures, chief among them The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Midnight is a Place. The Scream, which features Edvard Munch's famous painting of the same name, was written very late in the author's career, and although it makes for an agreeable "shivery" read, it does not have the power of Aiken's earlier work. It has its own modest charm however, and although David's voice is a little uneven at first, the reader soon settles into the narrative.

    Book preview

    The Scream - Joan Aiken

    To Charles and Hilary Schlessiger who gave me the screaming cushion

    Contents

    1. The Island

    2. The Tree

    3. The Letter

    4. The Dance

    5. The Death

    6. The Grave

    7. The Pigeon

    8. The Crossing

    9. The Laird

    A Biography of Joan Aiken

    1. The Island

    MY SISTER LU-LYN WAS A disaster area. Total. How did it happen? First, from as early as I can remember, she wanted to go and live with Gran.

    Why? Why do you want to? I can remember Mum saying. Give me one sensible reason. David doesn’t want to. Why should you?

    Because Gran lives on the island. David’s only a boy. And he’s never been there.

    It was an island called Muckle Burra. Far north of the north tip of Scotland. Lu-Lyn was born there. But then Mum and Dad had to move because of his job. Lu-Lyn had been back, three times since, to stay with Gran. She had never forgotten a single minute of any of those visits.

    It’s the only place where I ever want to live.

    But it takes days and days to get there from almost anywhere, Mum pointed out. That’s why Dad had to leave. What about your schooling? What about your ballet classes?

    Of course, the ballet classes were a strong argument. And another, a clincher, was that, by and by, Gran herself had to leave the island.

    "Why? Why?" Lu-Lyn wanted to know.

    The Department of Health are shifting everybody who lives on Muckle Burra. (There were only forty people altogether.)

    Why are they shifting them? How can they make people leave their homes?

    They pay compensation. People can get bigger, more modern houses on the mainland.

    "I wouldn’t leave my home. Not if it was a lovely white cottage with a garden like Gran’s."

    "I suppose, in the end, they have to go, sighed Dad. He didn’t sound happy about it. He too had been born in that cottage. There’s no power. No services. No way of getting to the mainland. Unless you have your own boat."

    I’d have my own boat.

    Lu-Lyn drew endless pictures of the island, of Gran’s cottage, of the garden, of the flowers she would plant when she went back to live with Gran, of the boat she would build, of the fish she would catch. Sometimes the island was covered with trees.

    But it isn’t like that. It’s bare and grassy, Dad argued.

    There are trees when I dream about it. Sometimes.

    Anyway, it’s no good. You can’t live there. They are making the people leave.

    "Why? Why?"

    They are going to poison the island.

    "Poison the island? That’s wicked!"

    For a scientific experiment. They want to find out what happens to the soil, and the animals, and the birds, and the fish, I suppose.

    That’s horrible!

    It did seem so. Perhaps that is what started all the trouble.

    A lot of people think that way, said Dad. There have been protests.

    Gran was not among the protesters. She had a very calm nature. She shrugged and packed up her scanty belongings and moved to a tenth-floor flat in a tower block in Kirkbrae near us on the mainland.

    You got a great view from the top of her block on a clear day. First, the grimy outskirts of Kirkbrae—factory roofs, cranes, derricks and chimneys—then the masts and funnels of ships, the river estuary, the Druidh Firth, then the rugged outlines of northern islands across the channel, Burra, Stour, Camsoe, Mink Ness—beyond them the Atlantic, away to the west.

    Lu-Lyn still wanted to go and live with Gran, and in the end she got her way. But that was because Mum and Dad were killed in a motorway pile-up. I had to go along too, in my wheelchair. Luckily there were lifts at Chateau Mansions.

    A queer thing: Lu-Lyn was homesick. Not for our own home. For the island where she had been born, which she had visited three times in her life. I used to hear her crying about it at night. Never in the daytime. And she went on drawing pictures of it. The island was her only friend, it seemed.

    What did Lu-Lyn look like? The kind of doll you’d win at a fairground stall by landing three hoops over a bottle—curly, butter-colored hair, round bluebell eyes, and a grin she could switch on and off like a blowtorch. She never wasted her grin, never switched it on unless she wanted you to do something for her. Never.

    I have to say, Lu-Lyn and Gran got on well together. Surprisingly, because they seemed very different. Gran was thin and spare and old and cobwebby. And her eyes drilled through you like lasers. But she and Lu-Lyn both felt the same way about the island. It was important to them in a way I didn’t understand at that time. Now I do.

    Gran and Lu-Lyn saw eye-to-eye about one important thing, which was that Lu-Lyn should always have her own way …

    In her young days, Gran had been a painter. Among other things. She did pictures of birds and wild creatures in queer places—seagulls in sinks, rats poking their snouts out of bookshelves, naked people wandering in forests. Once, Gran had been quite famous. Some of her queer bird and beast pictures hung on the walls of her flat, and that, maybe, was why she let Lu-Lyn have a pigeon of her own, though pets weren’t allowed in Chateau Mansions.

    Lu-Lyn’s pigeon,

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