Read Online His Dark Materials Omnibus by Philip Pullman - Free Book Online Page B

every time they glimpsed a solitary figure down an alley or in the dimness of the oratory: was it a Gobbler?
    But of course it wasn’t. Eventually, with no success, and with the shadow of Billy’s real disappearance hanging over them all, the fun faded away. As Lyra and the two College boys left Jericho when suppertime neared, they saw the gyptians gathering on the wharf next to where the Costas’ boat was moored. Some of the women were crying loudly, and the men were standing in angry groups, with all their dæmons agitated and rising in nervous flight or snarling at shadows.
    “I bet them Gobblers wouldn’t dare come in here,” said Lyra to Simon Parslow, as the two of them stepped over the threshold into the great lodge of Jordan.
    “No,” he said uncertainly. “But I know there’s a kid missing from the market.”
    “Who?” Lyra said. She knew most of the market children, but she hadn’t heard of this.
    “Jessie Reynolds, out the saddler’s. She weren’t there at shutting-up time yesterday, and she’d only gone for a bit of fish for her dad’s tea. She never come back and no one’d seen her. They searched all through the market and everywhere.”
    “I never heard about that!” said Lyra, indignant. She considered it a deplorable lapse on the part of her subjects not to tell her everything and at once.
    “Well, it was only yesterday. She might’ve turned up now.”
    “I’m going to ask,” said Lyra, and turned to leave the lodge.
    But she hadn’t got out of the gate before the Porter called her.
    “Here, Lyra! You’re not to go out again this evening. Master’s orders.”
    “Why not?”
    “I told you, Master’s orders. He says if you come in, you stay in.”
    “You catch me,” she said, and darted out before the old man could leave his doorway.
    She ran across the narrow street and down into the alley where the vans unloaded goods for the covered market. This being shutting-up time, there were few vans there now, but a knot of youths stood smoking and talking by the central gate opposite the high stone wall of St. Michael’s College. Lyra knew one of them, a sixteen-year-old she admired because he could spit further than anyone else she’d ever heard of, and she went and waited humbly for him to notice her.
    “Yeah? What do you want?” he said finally.
    “Is Jessie Reynolds disappeared?”
    “Yeah. Why?”
    “ ’Cause a gyptian kid disappeared today and all.”
    “They’re always disappearing, gyptians. After every horse fair they disappear.”
    “So do horses,” said one of his friends.
    “This is different,” said Lyra. “This is a kid. We was looking for him all afternoon and the other kids said the Gobblers got him.”
    “The what?”
    “The Gobblers,” she said. “En’t you heard of the Gobblers?”
    It was news to the other boys as well, and apart from a few coarse comments they listened closely to what she told them.
    “Gobblers,” said Lyra’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick. “It’s stupid. These gyptians, they pick up all kinds of stupid ideas.”
    “They said there was Gobblers in Banbury a couple of weeks ago,” Lyra insisted, “and there was five kids taken. They probably come to Oxford now to get kids from us. It must’ve been them what got Jessie.”
    “There was a kid lost over Cowley way,” said one of the other boys. “I remember now. My auntie, she was there yesterday, ’cause she sells fish and chips out a van, and she heard about it.… Some little boy, that’s it … I dunno about the Gobblers, though. They en’t real, Gobblers. Just a story.”
    “They are!” Lyra said. “The gyptians seen ’em. They reckon they eat the kids they catch, and …”
    She stopped in midsentence, because something had suddenly come into her mind. During that strange evening she’d spent hidden in the RetiringRoom, Lord Asriel had shown a lantern slide of a man with streams of light pouring from his hand; and there’d been a small figure