Читать книгу Sophie's Treason - Beverley Boissery - Страница 5

They called him The Loon.

He knew that wasn’t his name. He knew what loons were, remembered watching a pair of them one summer on a lake. Where the lake was, though, he didn’t know. But he did remember being awed by their ability to dive straight into it from the air, and that someone had told him they could dive at least one hundred feet. And he remembered feeling melancholic as he listened to their plaintive cries at sunset.

It was strange. In his mind’s eye he could see the two loons swimming. He could even recall grinning as he watched their mating dance. But when he tried to think where it had happened, the familiar blackness was like an ocean of darkness in which his mind’s pictures of the loons shone like a sunlit globe. He felt like a disembodied eye that had this one vision. For a while, he wondered if this was how God saw the universe, and if the earth was like that globe.

Of course, he knew he wasn’t God. Maybe he was in hell, although he’d always thought it must be bright from all the fires, not like this constant darkness. For all he knew, he could be dead and six feet underground.

Then, he heard soft voices. The women were back. They spoke French as they whispered to each other. A strange kind of French, but French nevertheless. That made no sense either. As he lay quietly, trying to find something to help him understand, he heard someone else enter the space. He recognized the sound of boots on bare floors. The stranger muttered something in English and immediately pain stabbed the Loon’s head, like a pin being jabbed into a pincushion.

He fought the pain, trying to stay awake to learn something from this Englishman he somehow associated with brutality. He listened while the man questioned the women brusquely, and smiled as they answered more and more slowly while the Englishman sounded ever more impatient. He felt he could see the man’s hand and see a finger punching the air as he spoke, because the jabbing pain in his head became more and more intense.

Someday, he thought, he’d understand. Someday, he’d answer the Englishman’s questions, and someday, he promised himself, he’d thank the women for their protection.