Hunting Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

hair. It looked like a spooked cat.
    “What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.
    “It’s his Scottish lordship himself – it’s you.”
    “Me!” I held out my hand for it, but he stood up, reared back, and threw it into the lake.
    I jumped up. “Why’d you do that? I wanted to keep it.”
    He gave me a defiant look. “’Cause I’m evil. Fool without wit, boy of shit, leave today and go away! ”
    “You ought to have at least let me get a good look. That wasn’t fair!”
    Daniel’s face crumpled as though I’d slapped him. When I reached out for him, he jerked away and said, “Don’t touch me, I’m filthy.”
    *
    After he’d stopped crying, I swam in the cold tarn while Daniel waited on shore. He asked me questions about the bird market we’d seen earlier, which was pitched every Tuesday and Saturday in New Square.
    “Listen,” he said, “we’ll go there on Tuesday. Late afternoon. I want to follow the seller with the most birds as he leaves for home. Also, I want you to get some paints – and brushes.”
    “Daniel, what are you planning? My parents have warned me – ”
    “Christ, John, I haven’t worked it all out yet. Have a little patience.”
    What he wouldn’t let me say was that my parents had forbidden me from visiting the bird market. This was because once, when I was four, I’d fainted dead away on seeing a goldfinch in a wire prison no bigger than a man’s fist. Now that I was older, they surely feared that I’d get my revenge and do something rash, for which I’d end up caged myself.
    Quite right, they were, as it turned out. Though I suppose I might even today blame it all on Daniel.

III
    O n the Sunday after Senhora Beatriz was beaten, Father told me a Scottish tale counseling caution. In this story, a witch transformed Papa into a pimply toad and chained him to a standard in her granite tower. To my delight, Porritch – the dog he’d had as a lad – rescued him by sneaking up on the hag, catching her asleep, and clamping his jaws around her neck. I say delight because I had always wished for a dog, though my mother had obliged me to wait until I was a trifle older and more “responsible,” as she put it.
    “When a witch is killed,” Papa explained to me on this occasion, “all the evil spells she’s ever uttered are undone in an instant.”
    I recall he made quite an impression on me that day by explaining that the gold chain on his pocket watch had been the same one the witch had used to tie him to her standard. “It’s fixed now, son, but the clasp was broken when I found it. You see, when the evil nighthag was killed, I was transformed from a toad to a lad in an instant. My growth shattered the clasp.”
    He let me hold the watch and added, “I shall give it to you on the day we celebrate your twenty-first birthday. Do you know why I told you this particular tale, son?” When I shook my head, he said, “It has to do with what happened to Senhora Beatriz and certain other related dangers in the city at the moment. Son, you’re a wee thing still and, though you are brave and swift of foot, already a defiant kelpie ,you cannot do everything yourself.” Kelpie meant monster of the lochs in Scottish, but Papa used it as a term of endearment. “We all need to be rescued now and again – from all sorts of snares. So you are to race home to me if you ever see anything like that again – any woman, man, or child being hurt. Do you see my point, lad?”
    “I understand.”
    At the time, Papa’s worry, and his vague reference to certain other related dangers ,seemed to have nothing to do with the preacher I’d listened to in New Square. But as I write these memories it is now only too obvious that my parents would have heard a number of terrifying accounts of his hateful activities by then.
    *
    To get the paints and brushes that Daniel had asked for, I went early on Monday morning to visit Luna and Graça Oliveira, kindhearted neighbors whom we referred to as the