Дженни Ниммо - The Snow Spider

"Come!" She looked back at him and smiled, but her fingers bit deeper into his wrist. "I'lease 1" she sighed. "I need you, Gwyn. We need you- out there!"

"No!" Gwyn began to shake, and through his tearshe saw the ship as a huge, glittering cloud behind the girl's pale shape. Then a voice inside him suddenly burst out, "Gwydion lives here!" and he pulled free from her grasp and flung himself to the ground.

He lay there with his eyes closed, nursing his aching hand. When the bitter cold and all the threatening sounds had vanished, he got up and saw something where Eirlys had been — the yellow scarf, frozen into the snow, and the seaweed beside it. He picked them up. He put the seaweed into his pocket, but the scarf was stiff with frost, like a strange, twisted stick.

He wandered slowly through the fields until he came to the path. There, on the last bend, he found Alun standing by the stone wall.

"What's that?" Alun asked.

"Someone's scarf," said Gwyn. "Look, it's still frozen!"

"Where's the girl?"

"She's gone!"

"Phew!" said Alun.

They walked back to the farm in comfortable silence. Mr. Griffiths was standing on the porch when they arrived, "She's gone, then?" he said.

"Yes!" Gwyn replied. And then, before his father could turn away, he said, "I'm not going, Dad. I'm not ever going!"

"I know!" Mr. Griffiths smiled. "And I'm glad of that, Gwyn! Very glad!"

They went into the house. A house that was not empty anymore.

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"7 Iic Snow Spider came into being as a result of my six-year-old daughter's love of spiders and my son's desire for a book about space," says Jenny Nimmo. "We live in an old converted water mill populated by huge spiders. They are frightening to some visitors, but my children treat them as friends. My daughter rescues them from sinks, baths, water troughs and cats; she scrapes them from beneath chairs and doors where they have come to grief and puts them in her dollhouse to con valesce.

"One day it seemed to me that a particularly fine cobweb was receiving some kind of image, and that perhaps, out in the unknown place where my son intends to spend his adult years, those cobweb images could be commonplace."

Jenny Nimmo has been an actress and written for children's television. Now she co-directs, with her husband, a school of art in Wales. They have two daughters, Gwenhwyfar and Myfanwy, and a son, Ianto.

Jacket illustration by K. W. Popp