Читать книгу Dead Water - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 7

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CHAPTER 1

Prelude

A boy stumbled up the hillside, half-blinded by tears. He fell and, for a time, choked and sobbed as he lay in the sun but presently blundered on. A lark sang overhead. Farther up the hill he could hear the multiple chatter of running water. The children down by the jetty still chanted after him:

Warty-hog, warty-hog

Put your puddies in the bog

Warty Walter, Warty Walter

Wash your warties in the water.

The spring was near the top. It began as a bubbling pool, cascaded into a miniature waterfall, dived under pebbles, earth and bracken and at last, loquacious and preoccupied, swirled mysteriously underground and was lost. Above the pool stood a boulder, flanked by briars and fern, and above that the brow of the hill and the sun in a clear sky.

He squatted near the waterfall. His legs ached and a spasm jolted his chest. He gasped for breath, beat his hands on the ground and looked at them. Warty-hog. Warts clustered all over his fingers like those black things that covered the legs of the jetty. Two of them bled where he’d cut them. The other kids were told not to touch him.

He thrust his hands under the cold pressure of the cascade. It beat and stung and numbed them, but he screwed up his blubbered eyes and forced them to stay there. Water spurted icily up his arms and into his face.

‘Don’t cry.’

He opened his eyes directly into the sun or would have done so if she hadn’t stood between: tall and greenish, above the big stone and rimmed about with light like something on the telly so that he couldn’t see her properly.

‘Why are you crying?’

He ducked his head, and stared like an animal that couldn’t make up its mind to bolt. He gave a loud, detached sob and left his hands under the water.

‘What’s the matter? Are you hurt? Tell me.’

‘Me ‘ands.’

‘Show me.’

He shook his head and stared.

‘Show me your hands.’

‘They’m mucky.’

‘The water will clean them.’

‘No, t’won’t, then.’

‘Show me.’

He withdrew them. Between clusters of warts his skin had puckered and turned the colour of dead fish. He broke into a loud wail. His nose and eyes ran salt into his open mouth.

From down below a voice, small and distant, halfheartedly chanted: ‘Warty Walter. Warty Walter. Stick your warties in the water.’ Somebody shouted: ‘Aw come on.’ They were going away.

He held out his desecrated hands towards her as if in explanation. Her voice floated down on the sound of the waterfall.

‘Put them under again. If you believe: they will be clean.’

‘Uh?’

‘They will be clean. Say it. Say ‘Please take away my warts.’ Shut your eyes and do as I tell you. Say it again when you go to bed. Remember. Do it.’

He did as she told him. The sound of the cascade grew very loud in his ears. Blobs of light swam across his eyeballs. He heard his own voice very far away, and then nothing. Ice-cold water was bumping his face on drowned pebbles.

When he lifted his head up there was no one between him and the sun.

He sat there letting himself dry and thinking of nothing in particular until the sun went down behind the hill. Then, feeling cold, he returned to the waterfront and his home in the bay.

Dead Water

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