The Perils and Dangers of this Night Read Online Free PDF

fingers. He whispered, 'One
pull and it's done.'
    I pulled. There was a click. I felt the slippage of bone,
and the rabbit was limp in my hands.
    'Good man,' he said, standing away from me. 'Nice
and quick, no pain. Here, use this, you can do the rest
yourself.'
    He took a knife from his pocket and handed it to me.
I lifted the rabbit to the workbench in the stall, and Roly
watched approvingly as I started to skin it, as he'd
already shown me, slitting and opening and peeling until
the flesh of the dead animal, still warm, still twitching
here and there like the body of an exhausted athlete,
shone in the lamplight.
    'I saw all the cars,' Roly was saying. 'Posh, some of
them. I can't be doing with all that nonsense. I waited till
they'd gone before I came through the wood. What about
your folks? Are they coming?'
    But all my concentration was on the skinning and
cleaning of the rabbit, and the watchful presence of my
bird. I was half-listening while Roly went on, 'I don't
envy you staying in the big house all on your own, just
you and the Kemps, I reckon she's all right but I'm not
sure about him . . .' For me, the bird and the warm flesh
of the rabbit were all that really mattered, that existed
just then.
    Indeed, as I sliced the leanest strips of meat from the
dead animal and held them to the jackdaw, Roly picked
up his gun and made for the door. I was lost in a kind of
worship. I didn't see a shabby crow with dusty feathers
and a brittle, skeletal frame. To me the bird was an imp,
damaged but not beyond repair, delivered into my care
by some mischievous spirit of the forest. It took the meat
from my fingers with grace and tenderness, obsequious,
as though mocking my silly, boyish reverence. I stared
deep into its eyes and it stared into mine.
    I heard the door creak behind me, heard the heavy step
of boots on the cobbles outside. Still I didn't turn from
the bird.
    'Roly?' I called over my shoulder. 'Thanks, Roly.' I
waited, and when I knew that the man had disappeared
into the night and left me alone in the stable, I whispered
to the bird, 'You're mine, you're mine . . .'
    Too late, I realised that Roly had left his knife. I
hurried to the door and looked out, but he'd gone. I
cleaned the blade with my fingers, flicking the blood onto
the stable floor.

THREE
    Flint and slate, Foxwood Manor gleamed in the
moonlight.
    It was eight o'clock that night. The house was a block
of blackness, surrounded by deep woodland, and the
moon, full and round but embedded in cloud, gave only
a milky light – enough to catch a gleam from the walls
which were faced with shards of flint and from the slates
of the roof. As I crossed the lawn to the front door, there
was one light in the building, from the windows of the
great hall on the ground floor. Upstairs, the windows of
the dormitories on the first and second floors were black.
The old house was all but empty. No one moved along
the corridors, upstairs or downstairs: no cries or laughter
or boyish complaint rang from the changing-rooms or
bathrooms; no one was reading in a secret corner of the
library; not even a bored and lonely teacher was gawping
at the television in the staffroom or drinking beer in his
garret.
    The light which shone from the hall was the only light
for miles and miles. The nearest road – apart from the
lane which wound like a worm through the school park
– was a twenty-minute drive away, and then the nearest
village or pub or telephone box was further still. Maybe,
in the darkest corner of the woods, a lamp was lit in
Roly's caravan. But that would be all. Foxwood Manor,
once the grand and opulent hunting lodge of some
reclusive gentry, now a decaying boarding-school, was
cut off from the world by acres of deciduous Dorset
forest, some of the oldest and densest in England.
    An owl hooted. For a moment, the clouds thinned and
parted and the moon was bright as daylight. Then the
flint and the slate of Foxwood Manor shimmered like
diamonds. The dead dry leaves of