01_-_The_Alchemyst

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The bell jangled as Nicholas Flamel pushed open the door and stepped
back to allow a rather ordinary-looking elderly woman in a neat gray blouse
and gray skirt to precede him into the shop. Short and round, her hair tightly
permed and touched faintly with blue, only the overlarge black glasses
covering much of her face set her apart. A white cane was folded in her right
hand.
Sophie and Josh immediately realized that she was blind.
Flamel cleared his throat. “Allow me to introduce…” He stopped and
looked at the woman. “Excuse me. What do I call you?”
“Call me Dora, everyone else does.” She spoke English with a decided
New York accent. “Scathach?” she suddenly said. “Scathach!” And then her
words dissolved into a language that seemed to consist of a lot of spitting
sounds…which Sophie was surprised to find she could understand.
“She wants to know why Scatty hasn’t come to see her in the past three
hundred and seventy-two years, eight months and four days,” she translated
for Josh. She was staring intently at the old woman and didn’t see the fear
and envy that flickered across his face.
The old woman moved quickly around the narrow room, head darting
left and right, never looking directly at Scatty. She continued to speak,
seemingly without stopping for breath.
“She’s telling Scatty that she could have been dead and no one would
have known. Nor cared. Why, only last century she was desperately ill, and
no one called, no one wrote…”
“Gran…,” Scatty began.