The Night Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

sight as he took step after stumbling step.
    “That’s Cuddy,” said Eddie. “Oh Christ, it’s him.”
    And it was. Sergeant Bill Cudden stood there on the edge of a small clearing, motionless. There was something wrong with his face, and it took Donnie a moment to understand what.
    It wasn’t attached to anything.
    It had been cut loose, and hung like a flag from the top of a wooden man. Moonlight shone through the eyes and mouth, nestled like a halo in his hair, giving him the appearance of a saint. His body was a collection of sticks and branches, standing maybe eight or nine feet tall, a rifle for one leg. A coat had been draped over his shoulders, twigs poking from the bloodied cuffs and the pockets stuffed with straw. Donnie stared at him, at this human doll, and felt something break loose in the engine of his mind.
    “No,” somebody sobbed. “It isn’t … It can’t be.”
    Donnie staggered forward, his rifle hanging by his side, forgotten. Cuddy hadn’t suffered his fate alone. Two more men had been propped around the circumference of the clearing, each just as tall, each facing inward as if attending a bizarre midnight rendezvous of quiet giants. They, too, were puppets of flesh and wood, their faces leather masks worn by crude, knotted mannequins. One—it was Albert Connaught, Donnie thought—held his helmet against his chest with twig fingers, like a pious man entering a church. The other, unrecognizable, had a deer’s skull for a torso, the antlers pushing up the arms of his jacket as if he had frozen midway through a lumbering dance. His legs were saplings thrust through the eye sockets of his improvised chest.
    The world came undone, spinning on a brand-new axis. Donnie swung in a wild circle, the dead men surrounding him, and were they closing in, taking clumsy steps with their stick-legs, their gaping mouths uttering voiceless truths? He felt his body give way, shaking hard, and it was only the adrenaline that kept him on his feet, the thought that if he lost it here then soon it would be his face hanging there, eyes like buttonholes.
    He looked back, saw Eddie on his knees clutching at his throat, Henry and Mike to either side of him, suddenly aged. And Joan, standing there shaking her head as she sobbed into her hand, I told you not to come. I told you it was something bad. But never in his life could he have understood.
    He opened his mouth, croaked out a word, cleared his throat and tried again: “Mike.”
    Nothing.
    “Private Levy, Private Grady, look at me.”
    Mike’s head swiveled around on his shoulders like a mill wheel, his bloodshot eyes fixing on Donnie.
    “Pull yourself together,” he said. “Both of you. That’s an order. And get Eddie on his feet. Do it!”
    Mike flinched at the barked command. He hooked an arm under Eddie’s armpit, hoisting him up. Donnie walked over and cradled the boy’s head.
    “Eddie,” he said to a gaze that was about as far from here as it was possible to be. “Eddie, look at me.”
    He did, although it took an age for him to focus. He was going into shock. It usually happened with an injury, a bullet wound or shrapnel, but Donnie had seen minds snap for plenty of other reasons, too. He clicked his fingers until he had the kid’s full attention.
    “Listen, Eddie, it’s not real. It’s some Nazi trick. You know what they’re like, they’ll try anything to get into our heads. You, uh, you remember those pamphlets Gunny found back in Bastogne? The ones about the gas?”
    “The gas that makes your pecker fall off?” Eddie said, a distant glimmer of a smile.
    “Yeah, the pecker gas. All lies, Eddie, lies. Scaring us is half the battle.”
    “But that’s Cuddy,” Eddie said, trying to look over Donnie’s shoulder. Donnie held him in place, kept eye contact.
    “Cuddy’s dead. But is that any different to the other guys we’ve lost? Davidson, Crawford on that mine. This is war, and you’ve seen worse. We all have.”
    Eddie swallowed; then he nodded, some of the color seeming to find its