Meantime it was much too boring for Kay to wait until Nicky came back with a torch before she started searching. Her eyes had become more accustomed to the gloom and, she thought, she could see quite well; she began to lift the lids of the trunks nearest to her and to feel inside them, but they only contained, it seemed, what you would expect - discarded pieces of tissue paper, shoe-bags and things like that. Suddenly she stood very still. Someone was coming very slowly and cautiously down the basement stairs.
She opened her mouth to call encouragingly to Nicky, when she closed it again. Nicky would never come creeping down like that, like a nervous mouse - it was probably Gail, coming down to look at her swag. Kay lifted the lid of the nearest trunk and hopped inside. It was a tight fit and very uncomfortable and she was taking up to much room to be able to shut the lid down properly. But that wasn't a bad thing, she thought. She didn't want to be shut up in an old trunk like the girl in The Mistletoe Bough, a perfectly ghastly poem that Corly had once read to them about a girl who hid in a chest when she was playing hide-and-seek or something and couldn't get out again, and wasn't found until she was dead.
This was a very uncomfortable thought to be shut up in a trunk with, and Kay wished very much that if she had to go remembering poems, which wasn't the sort of thing she did as a rule, it had been something like The Ancient Mariner or Ode to a Skylark instead. She also wished that Gail would hurry and and do what she had to do and go.
Gail however was at that moment in the common-room waiting for her tea and wondering gloomily what on earth she was going to do with those blessed costumes now...
From NORTHMEAD NUISANCE, Chapter 7, A Plan Gone Wrong.
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