Excerpt from Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Granddad's Omega'd never once gone wrong in four decades.  In less than a fortnight, I'd killed it.

Wobbly with dread, I walked up the hallway and rasped up the twisted stairs, "Hello?" Silent as night in an ice age. "I have to go!" Worry about the Omega'd swatted off worry about being in this house, but I still daredn't shout in case I woke the brother. "I've got to go home now," I called, a bit louder. No reply. I decided to just leave by the front door. I'd come back in the daytime to thank her. The bolts slid open easily enough, but the old-style lock was another matter. Without the key it wouldn't open. That was that. I'd have to go upstairs, wake the old biddy to get her key, and if she got annoyed that was just tough titty. Something, something, had to be done about the catastrophe of the smashed watch. God knows what, but I couldn't do it inside the House in the Woods.

The stairs curved up steeper. Soon I had to use my hands to grip the stairs above me, or I'd've fallen back. How on earth the sour aunt went up and down in that big rookish dress was anybody's guess. Finally, I hauled myself onto a tiny landing with two doors. A slitty window let in a glimmer. One door had to be the sour aunt's room. The other had to be the brother's. Left's got a power that right hasn't, so I clasped the iron doorknob on the left door. It sucked the warmth from my hand, my arm, my blood.

Scrit-scrat.

I froze.

Scrit-scrat.

A deathwatch beetle? Rat in the loft? Pipe freezing up?

Which room was the scrit-scrat coming from?

The iron doorknob made a coiling creak as I turned it.

 

Powdery moonlight lit the attic room through the snowflake-lace curtain. I'd guessed right. The sour aunt lay under a quilt with her dentures in a jar by her bed, still as a marble duchess on a church tomb. I shuffled over the tipsy floor, nervous at the thought of waking her. What if she forgot who I was and thought I'd come to murder her and screamed for help and had a stroke? Her hair spilt over her folded face like pondweed. A cloud of breath escaped her mouth every ten or twenty heartbeats. Only that proved she was made of flesh and blood like me.

"Can you hear me?"

No, I'd have to shake her awake.

My hand was halfway to her shoulder when that scrit-scrat noise started up again, deep inside her.

Not a snore. A death rattle.

Go into the other bedroom. Wake her brother. She needs an ambulance. No. Smash your way out. Run to Isaac Pye in the Black Swan for help. No. They'd ask why you'd been in the House in the Woods. What'd you say? You don't even know this woman's name. It's too late. She's dying, right now. I'm certain. The scrit-scrat's uncoiling. Louder, waspier, daggerier.

Her windpipe bulges as her soul squeezes out of her heart.

Her worn-out eyes flip awake like a doll's, black, glassy, shocked.

From her black crack mouth, a blizzard rushes out.

A silent roaring hangs here.

Not going anywhere.

Excerpted from Black Swan Green by David Mitchell Copyright © 2006 by David Mitchell. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.