Читать книгу Demon in My View - Tom Henighan - Страница 6

It was not a village, hardly even a hamlet; merely a cluster of shacks and shabby outbuildings that skirted a deeply rutted road beside a stretch of bare, open field.

A cold day in spring, for the afternoon sun had vanished behind a barrier of thick, grey clouds. An old woman, sweeping the steps of the largest building, stopped to rub her skinny hands together and blow on them.

Very slowly, she tilted her head sideways, as if she had heard something in the distance. She stood listening, staring off in the direction of the gently sloping, wooded hillside. Suddenly, she ran from the large building — a rickety old schoolhouse surrounded by a few benches and crude play-structures. She scampered across the road and disappeared inside a tarpaper shack no bigger than an outhouse.

Inside the school’s single large classroom, a crowd of boys and girls of various ages, from about ten to eighteen, were singing verses they knew by heart: an old hymn, although delivered in the style of a rap song. Mr. Koenich, the teacher, a grizzled, desperate-eyed, worn-out looking man dressed in a brown, shabby garment like a monk’s, insisted they finish each school day in this manner. He explained that the terrifying visions and beseeching words of this song had been handed down from the days of the great terror, and that it was necessary to remember them, and to pray every day, if they were to prevent evil forces from destroying everything they valued.

God’s wrath has thundered down

On every village and town.

The fields dry up and burn

The demons take their turn.

The bikers ride from hell

The priest will toll a bell.

The mountains run with blood.

In our old neighbourhood

There’s nothing left to steal

There’s nothing worse to feel.

Save us from the fire

And terror in the night

Save us from the plague

Help us fight the fight.

Yeah, Lord! Yeah!

Show us the righteous way

Help us in our pain.

Bring the good times back again!

The students had sung — rapped out — these words often, and even though they enjoyed the pulsing rhythm of their own delivery, they knew the words were powerless to change anything. And because they were eager to be released from school, they always chanted them very fast, and with a certain careless ease.

Young Toby Johnson, at the back of the classroom, who had the best voice and the keenest ears of them all, was not speaking, but listening. He shifted uneasily in his place, fists clenched against his well-worn overalls, eyes pressed tightly shut. He was trying hard to identify a distant sound, the same sound that had caused the old woman to throw down her broom and flee to shelter.

Toby didn’t move, although he wanted badly to run to the window and look out. The distant sound, much closer now, and clearly audible, was a roaring of powerful engines. Within seconds it became bursts of thunder that shook the walls of the schoolhouse and reverberated among the buildings outside. The students’ singing faltered a little, and the room seethed with excitement.

Mr. Koenich raised his hickory stick and nodded to his burly teaching assistant. The class stopped singing, and the students whispered and nudged each other, stirring uneasily in the places. The assistant rubbed one thick hand against his black leather jacket, pushed himself off the high stool where he sat dozing, and quickly fetched his shotgun from the corner of the room.

“Only fire at them if they attack the school,” Mr. Koenich ordered. “Students! Lie flat on the floor. Keep still, and stop your fussing about. Toby! Get away from that window!”

“But, sir, my dog’s out there. I’ve got to fetch him inside.”

“You’ll do no such thing. Lie down with the rest of the students and keep your mouth shut. Your dog can take care of himself.”

Toby stretched his body on the floor, closing and unclosing his fists in sheer frustration. A pretty girl lay down next to him and began to stroke his left arm and shoulder.

“Don’t take no mind, Toby. Ranger will hide out from them all right.”

“They’ll kill him if they see him, that’s the problem.”

“Two motorcycles!” the teaching assistant reported from the window. “It’s a couple of the Reardon boys. They’re buzzin’ in and out the schoolyard. Just having some fun, I guess. Just passing through.”

The younger children, laughing and calling out to each other, were wriggling and writhing on the floor, imitating the roar of the engines and making jokes about the Reardons. Only a few of the older ones, who knew something about the biker family, seemed frightened. Toby wanted desperately to look out the window. The walls of the room shook and vibrated. Suddenly, the roaring subsided, and in the silence, in quick succession, they heard two gunshots.

“Now, now,” Mr. Koenich mumbled. “We don’t want any of that. Just ride your damned Harleys out of town, boys. Go off somewhere else for your target practice.”

“That dog’s out there. That’s what they’re shooting at!” reported the assistant.

Toby jumped to his feet and sprinted across to the window.

“Get away from there!” Mr. Koenich sprang across the room and made to grab him, but Toby eluded him, and pressed his face against the window pane.

“They’re leaving!” the assistant told Toby. “Look, they’re heading straight out of town.”

“They’d better!” Toby said grimly. “If they hurt Ranger, I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them both!”

There was a murmuring behind him; the students were getting up. The crisis was over, but one of the class jokers shouted from the far corner.

“Why you gonna kill them, Toby? Gonna give your daddy a little more burying business?”

“Never mind that stuff,” Mr. Koenich warned the boy, but the class was already breaking up in laughter.

“There goes Toby, back to the homestead,” a wiry, scruffy ten-year-old shouted. “How’s your old man? Still burying all those corpses in the woods?”

Toby turned angrily on his skinny, sneering antagonist, then seemed to think better of it. He shrugged his shoulders, fumbled with the door latch, and at last shoved it open. Cold air struck his face. He shivered, and walked across the porch to the rickety steps.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ranger!” he shouted. When nothing happened, he put his fingers to his lips and whistled loudly. A sharp, clear, and penetrating sound that all his classmates always envied.

He waited, but the dog didn’t come.

“Go see your crazy father! Go see Old Shovelbeard!” a girl called out.

“Old Talby’s got a bone shop!” jeered another.

But Toby was hardly listening. He whistled again, and then stood waiting, gazing up and down the deserted road. Fear possessed him, the sinking, sickening feeling that permeates your mind and soul when you begin to assume the worst.

Mr. Koenich had come out on the steps. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulder and told him, “Don’t pay them any mind, Toby. Look, he’s coming after all! The Reardons didn’t do him any harm.”

A great black Labrador had sprung out from behind a nearby building and was racing straight for the school steps.

Toby ran forward, grabbed the dog, and hugged it. He bent down, stroking Ranger’s smooth brow and back.

“It’s gettin’ real late, boy,” Toby whispered. “We’ve gotta get back to old Talby.”

Toby heard voices and shuffling steps, and felt the presence of his teacher and many of the students behind him milling around on the porch and watching him. But he didn’t turn around. He moved off quickly, while Ranger sprinted back and forth, running circles around him. They hurried down the rutted road, followed it past the shabby fields, then slowly climbed the hill and entered the deep woods.