Take Your Last Breath. Lauren Child

      THE SUN FLICKERED ON THE OCEAN, cutting bright diamonds of light into the surface of the indigo water. A three-year-old girl was peering over the side of a sailboat, staring down into the deep. The only sounds came from her parents’ laughter, the sing-song hum of a man’s voice and the clapping of the waves against the yacht.

      Gradually the sounds became less and less distinct until the girl was quite alone with the ocean. It seemed to be pulling her, drawing her to it… confiding a secret, almost whispering to her.

      She barely felt herself fall as she tipped forward and slipped into the soft ink of the sea.

      Down she twisted, her arms, her legs above her like tendrils. The water felt smooth and perfectly cold; fish darted and silver things whisked by – her breath bubbled up as transparent pearls.

      Then suddenly, like a snap of the fingers, all the fish were gone: it was just the girl in the big wide ocean.

      But she wasn’t quite alone.

      There was something else.

      Something calling to her, but she couldn’t see what. It saw her though, with ancient eyes, unblinking as it steadily pulsed its way through the blue. Something with long, long snaking arms hovering between her and nothing.

      And then, vine-like, the thing coiled a limb round her ankle and tugged her firmly in the direction of infinity. Down to who knew where?

      Ooops, thought the child. And on she spun. Bubbles fizzed about her and her head began to throb, her breath almost gone.

      And then yank! Something grabbed her arm, someone grabbed her arm. The strangling-thing released her; suddenly she was coming up for air, breaking through the surface of the ocean.

      She found herself slapped mackerel-like onto the hot deck of the boat, coughing saltwater from her lungs. Her green eyes blinked open and she smiled up at two troubled faces. She felt the water dribble from her ears, and heard the sound of the gulls screaming in the sky above.

      WHEN RUBY REDFORT WAS FOUR, she noticed something unnoticeable while reading the back of the Choco Puffle packet. What looked like a word-search game to every other breakfast-eating kid, she could see at a glance was in fact some kind of message – a code.

      It took Ruby five days and seven helpings of Choco Puffles to puzzle it out, and when she had, this is what she read.

      Fill in this coupon and win a lifetime supply of Choco Puffles. Entry address can be found somewhere on this packet. Warning: you will have to search long and hard to find it.

      Ruby found the address in thirty-two seconds, cut out the coupon on the side of the box, filled in her name and address, popped it in an envelope and asked her father to mail it.

      He forgot.

      Ruby discovered this thirteen and three-quarter months later when she was searching her dad’s pockets for confiscated Hubble-Yum bubblegum. There, in his grey suit jacket, was the slightly battered envelope, addressed in her handwriting, stamp in the top right-hand corner. The deadline for entering the competition had long passed.

      Ruby took the letter up to her room and slipped it into the secret hiding place she had made within the doorframe of her bedroom. It was a shame about the lifetime supply of Choco Puffles; they were, after all, her favourite breakfast cereal.

      Some several years later…

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