Читать книгу Demon in My View - Tom Henighan - Страница 8

On a clear day late in spring, during one of the last six weeks of school, while Toby was sitting dreaming in one of Froats’s apple trees, chopping at a grey, brittle branch with his jackknife, he heard the roar of the motorcycles.

Within minutes two riders appeared, cutting deep tracks in the soft road. Toby shrank back.

It was Mal and Whit Reardon, the oldest of the brothers, burly riders in black leather and jackboots — Mal with a shining bald head and a shotgun strapped to his back, Whit in a fur vest-coat, and wearing the green-tinted goggles that, even at some distance, gave his eyes a cold, snaky cast.

While Toby held his breath, the two riders stopped in the road just opposite the orchard. They rocked to and fro on their Harleys, gunning their engines, the sharp rasping sounds like snarls of anxious irritation. Leaning their heads close, they exchanged a few words, then glanced once or twice in his direction. Toby thought he saw them smiling, and half-expected them to come roaring across the field after him. Suddenly, they did move, but wheeled away down the road and soon disappeared behind a line of trees.

The boy slid slowly down the grey, twisted trunk. Had he mistaken their look? Had the riders come there to find him, to make sure of where he was? But to what purpose?

In a sudden panic, Toby looked around. The main path to the homestead lay behind him, twisting up through the new sprouting brush, through the maples and birch, to the clearing. But there were other paths, and beside one of them his father was surely at work. He and Toby had heard the bikers riding all night, and there had been gunfire and shouting and low moaning cries until dawn.

Toby started to run. He dodged through the trees, leapt a ditch, crossed a small scrubby field, and bounded away up the narrow track, breathing hard as he jumped over loose stones and small trenches gouged out by the spring rain.

The familiar woods and its features flowed past his eyes like pictures on a moving screen: there was the pool, spilling water; the ancient split rock; the ash tree, still thin-leafed and bare; the lone tamarack.

Out of breath, he burst into the clearing and stopped short. The cabin lay peaceful, untouched. A thin thread of smoke rose from the chimney; swallows wheeled out of the shed. The woods were almost silent, except for a thin, distant buzzing of bikes muffled down to a faint, bee-like hum.

“Ranger?” the boy called in a tentative voice

He walked slowly up to the cabin and entered. He felt, as always, the sense of a quiet sanctuary within, everything in its place, and the fire lit. The dog, though, was nowhere in sight.

Outside, the boy raised his voice in a series of calls; then he listened, half-expecting to hear the patient, steady thrust of his father’s shovel at work in the nearby woods, afraid that the silence might explode with the roar of machinery.

He called at the top of his voice, and at last heard a faint bark. Within minutes he was tracking the sound, beating down through the stiff underbrush that lay to the north of the homestead. There were a few trails there where the bikers, on certain nights, ran their quarry. Mal and Whit Reardon, he knew, could have circled and entered the woods from the road on the other side.

Toby pushed on, his glazed eyes steady. Nonetheless, he felt fear at the bone. Then the dog barked, not far off.

Toby crashed through a small stand of pines and saw the first body: a thin old man in the overalls of a farmer, sprawled under a branch. Part of his head had been shot away and one hand, twisted and crushed, reached across the dark needles, the fingers poking down at the earth.

Toby bent over, retching. He clawed violently at the branches, slowly circling the place, trying not to look at the shattered head. He knew it was Jacob Brent, the grandfather of his friend David. They had killed him, but surely he had never harmed anyone, never threatened the bikers.

It was horrible. Toby struggled forward, beating back the branches, trying to reach a clear space. Then, as he turned to run away, he tripped over the second body: a woman, shot through the chest, bound roughly with half-rotten rope to the stump of an old pine. Her face was white, waxen, grotesque. She was clearly dead. Toby did not know who she was.

For a few moments the boy stood there, overcome by the terrifying stillness that surrounded the place. Then, with a start, he realized that the dog was barking furiously close by, that a fresh breeze had stirred up the branches, that his own heart was beating wildly, though the bodies lay in a silence nothing human could break.

It was what his father had wished to spare him: this vision of the unburied dead; this violation of the flesh. The boy, overcome by deep sadness, went mechanically forward.

He wandered dazedly out on the path. With its deep-scored ruts, it ran like a raw strip up into the trees. The earth seemed to crumble beneath him; here, tires had flung stray pebbles and sheered off thick clods of caked earth. Plunged deep in the soft green bank was his father’s best shovel.

From behind, all at once, something leapt. Startled, Toby grabbed and held Ranger, and the dog rubbed its nose on his cheek. He kept jumping against Toby and barking.

Talby’s voice called out his son’s name.

Fifty feet up the trail, Toby saw the old man, crouched down among a small stand of birch trees. Some of the branches had been hacked at and snapped off; they tapered down around Talby like the bars of a cage. He bent over, pressing his eyes with his hands, moaning softly.

Toby ran forward. His father stretched out awkwardly to embrace him. His eyes, slits of pain, oozed flecks of white foam. Toby kicked away a prisoning branch and clung hard to his father, who straightened up, revealing his torn clothes and bruised cheeks and forehead. The boy hugged him close.

“I’m blind,” said the old man. “They’ve blinded me.”

He wrenched himself away, brushing at his eyelids with his stubby gnarled fingers. A grey-white foam ran in the hollows underneath his eyes; he blinked helplessly.

“Quick, Father!” Toby felt the tears scald his own eyes as he pulled the old man along the path. The dog criss-crossed wildly ahead of them. Toby half-dragged, half-coaxed his father up the sharp slope to where a clear stream bubbled out from the rocks.

“Bend over!” the boy commanded, pressing his father down close to the stream. Cupping the water in his hands, he splashed a rough handful in the old man’s squinting eyes. Talby cried out in protest, sputtering and wheezing, and rubbing his eyes all the harder.

“Don’t do that!” the boy cried, and scooped up the water all the faster. Ranger jumped up and down beside them, barking loudly and catching the splashed water with his tongue. The old man sat blinking, drenched, his hands moving restlessly at his side. The boy hurled more and more water in the old man’s face.

“Enough!” cried the old man at last. He sat there, his torn grey worksuit soaked through, his eyes blinking, clear of the foam, flashing grey.

Toby reached out and gently touched his father’s eyes, as if trying to make them focus on him, but they looked somewhere beyond, their clear, grey intensity blurred.

“They’ve blinded me. Shot some foul stuff in my eyes,” the old man said, in a harsh, trembling voice. “Now who will bury the dead?” He bowed his head, seeming to retreat into his own misery.

Toby would not believe it. He jumped up, crying, “No! No!” and began hurling stones at the trees. “You’ve got to see, Father. You’ve got to!” His sobs broke the clear air; the dog whined at his heels.

But after a few minutes the boy felt the anger go out of him. He looked down at his father, whose glance failed to meet his. Then Toby felt a great weight on his shoulders, something pressing the breath and the life from his body. Slowly, he sank down on the turf where his father sat mumbling, still wrapped in his own thoughts.

“It was the Reardons that did it,” his father said. “They care nothing for the old laws.”

“I’ll kill them. I’ll kill them if it’s the last thing I do,” the boy said, and his voice cracked with passion, his hands making impotent fists at his side.

Talby took hold of his son’s arm. “Come,” he said softly. “You must help me get home.”