The Waking That Kills Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stairs.
    It was May. The woodland was busy with birdsong, and everywhere was bursting with the fresh greenery of brambles and nettles and sweet new grasses. And yet, somehow, a whispering uneasiness seemed to lie among the rambling acres of Chalke House. Despite the fanfare of the wren, despite the watery song of the robin and the fluting of the blackbird, the morning threw a smothering gauziness among the trees and across the overgrown lawns. The songs of the birds were oddly muted by something in the air... and as the boy and I strolled further from the house where the cover of the trees grew denser still, I began to feel it was he, the boy, who wore a cloak of stillness, his own space, his own quietness, which damped all the sounds around him.
    We paused at the lake, whose edges were fringed with a bed of reeds.
    ‘Pike...’ he said, and his eyes flickered over me as if he’d almost forgotten I was there and he couldn’t remember who I was. ‘My Dad told me there’s a pike in the lake, a monster, maybe a hundred years old... he told me he caught it once, when I was a baby, and he put it back into the water because it was so huge, so old, such a marvellous monster he couldn’t not put it back where it belongs.’
    He stared across the still, green water.
    ‘So deep,’ he said, more to himself than to me, ‘no one knows how deep it is, no one knows how big the pike is now, how old it really is.’
    He turned and looked at me. With a defiant cast in his eye, as though to pre-empt a display of schoolteacherly knowledge from his new tutor, he added, ‘But I know that the pike is there, and it’s a monster, and it’s a hundred years old, because my father’s seen it and he’s told me. I don’t need to see it for myself or read about it in books.’
    ‘We won’t just read books, Lawrence,’ I reassured him, as we walked away from the pond and closer to the Scots pine. ‘Your mother didn’t want me to come and do lots of the same old schoolwork with you, all the stuff you’ve been doing at school. I’ll just stay a while, just as long as you’re both happy to have me here, and as long as I’m happy to be here, and we’ll talk, or not talk, and maybe we’ll get to know each other a bit better. Or maybe we won’t.’
    I took his elbow to make him stop walking ahead of me, to make sure he was hearing what I was saying. ‘Lawrence, you don’t have to tell me anything about yourself, either you or your mother, that you don’t want me to know.’
    He looked at me with his head slightly on one side – a dark beady eye, the pelt of his hair as dense and glossy as an otter’s – oddly unsure of what I was saying. So I added, ‘Lawrence, I haven’t come here to try and solve you, like a puzzle. If we get on alright, that’s good. If we don’t, then I’ll move on. A few days ago I’d never heard of you or knew you existed.’
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s heard of me.’ He glanced down at my hand so that I let go of his arm, and he spun away from me, through the shade of the woodland.
    Lawrence Lundy. I remembered how my father had struggled to recall the name, how he’d chiselled the letters onto thin air, seen them hovering in front of his eyes as though they were carved onto cold, hard stone. Lawrence Lundy. The name meant nothing to me.
    The cat stood up on the bonnet of the Daimler. It stretched luxuriously as the boy stroked it from the top of its head to the very tip of its tail. Then it had had enough. It slipped off the car and slunk into the long grass, parting the tall blades with its nose and snaking its hips deeper in and in and disappearing. The boy fingered the shattered windscreen, the edges of the hole which the hammer had smashed into the car.
    ‘What was your mother doing up there?’ I asked him, with a jerk of my head up into the branches of the pine tree. She had already told me, the previous evening. So he answered, with that odd curl of a smile on