Читать книгу The Book of Rapture - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 20

‘Hey, I remember something now.’ Mouse presses his knuckles to his temples. ‘It’s coming … from last night…’ He’s screwing up his eyes as if trying to squeeze memory out. You lean.

‘Okay I was lying in my bed. Trying to fall to sleep. Then Dad came in. He lay down next to me and put his hand over my mouth. There was a hanky on it. He was whispering, "Sssh, little man, sssh," but his voice was full… like, like there was crying in it. And I was breathing in but feeling funny and then Dad was holding me and clamping me tight and then he was sealing off my talking and then, and then, this is the really scary bit, it was like I was slipping into this sea of the inkiest, scariest black, like some body in a coffin being slid from a ship and then the dark was crowding over me and just before I was completely under Dad was curling around me and clinging on, tight, like I was some life buoy in this vast ocean of fear …’ Your little boy looks straight at his brother and sister. Frightened eyes. A blink. ‘Then no dreams. Nothing. Just this enormous blank …’

‘Like being dead.’ Tidge, quiet.

The brothers look at each other. Pins and needles take over their eyes. They’re both blinking like two ships sending out distress signals and the crying’s coming now, a great dumping wave of it; young, so young, too young for this.

Verily every soul has as a surety a guardian over it.