The Convicts Read Online Free PDF

the earth.
    Worms scrambled into the grave. He brushed the coins away and puHed the handkerchief off. Then lie pressed himself against the eatthjso that I might see past him. He smiled up at ine as I stared down. “Now, that's what I call a dead ringer,” he said.
    It was true that I couldn't believe my eyes. It was as though I were staring into a well and seeing my own reflection in die water. The boy in the coffin was exactly like me. He might have been my age to the very day. The passing bell that had rung in the fog must have been tolling for him.
    “Pass me the rope there, Tom,” said Worms.
    It lay on the other side of the hole like a coiled snake. I wondered hew many bodies it had hauled from the ground.
    “Hurry, Tom,” said Worms in his low voice. He was crouching now over the broken coffin, ready to slip the dead boy out by his shoulders. “We're goners if we're caught geaching here like this.”
    I could have left him there and run away. Why I didn't I would never know, though I would often wish I had. But I'd always done just what I was told, and now I did it again. I went to fetch the rope; I bent to pick it up. Then the ground gave way at the grave's edge, and down I went. I scrambled for something to stop me, but all I could grab was the rope, and it slithered in on top of me. I landed on the coffin. The diamond in my pocket thumped against the wood, and I lay face to face with my dead twin. I gathered breath to scream.
    Worms clamped his hand on my mouth. “Easy, Tom,” he said. “Keep your wits about you, now.”
    He pulled me upright, suddenly not so kind. “Clumsy fool,” he called me. “You stay here and I'll go up. And take off your coat if you don't want to smell like a graveyard.”
    He did it for me in his anger, pulling it from my shoulders, flinging it onto the earth. Then he used me for a ladder, and his boots dug at my thighs, my chest, my shoulders before he rolled away into the starlight. I bent down to get my coat, but his head came back above me, and he snapped at me to leave it there. “Put the rope around him, Tom. Quick! Under his shoulders, now, his shoulders, boy!”
    I didn't want to stay in that grave an instant longer than I had to. So I gritted my teeth and threaded the rope below the dead boy's shoulders, though my skin crawled to do it.
    “Tie a knot. Make a noose,” growled Worms.
    I wished I had listened when my father had tried to teach me bowlines and sheet bends and whatnot. Twice I dropped the rope, and twice I stooped to pick its coils from the dead boy's chest. “A noose. A noose,” said Worms, but all I managed was a great tangle.
    “Now lift him up, boy.”
    The rope went tight at Worms started pulling. Isttaddled the dead hoy, my feet in his coffin, and scooped my hands below his shoulders, I pulled, and up he sat, his head nodding forward, Ms mouth gaping open. He seepjtd to slide himself from the ground, standing on legs that had no muscles, swinging arms that could do no work. He wrapped diem round my waist, then around my ribs. Clods of earth tumbled as he slithered up the side of his grave as though to his resurrection. He was dressed in a good shirt and a fine long coat, but his feet were bare. They were white, pathetic things to see as they went sliding past me.
    I had tipped my head, and was watching him rise to the ligbt and the sky when my knots unraveled and down he came.
    He fell into my arms, and I into his, and we leaned together in a cold embrace against die grave's sheer wall. His chin hit my shoulder, and his teeth chattered shut I thought that my mind, like my mother's, might unhinge at ttie horror
    “Stop mucking about,” said Worms. “Give Mm a boost.”
    I gained a strength from my fear and desperation. I ducked a shoulder under the boy, and straightened him up toward Worms. He rose quickly then, slipping face-first from his grave to the ground. His legs swung stiffly above me for a moment, until they too slid across the stars. His