Читать книгу Demon in My View - Tom Henighan - Страница 9

They walked up through the woods, the boy leading the way, holding tight to his father’s wet sleeve. Toby balanced the old man’s shovel on one shoulder. There was no sound of intruders, no machines, though the birds started up in quick bursts as the two of them trudged by. Easing the old man through the pines, around damp rotted stumps, past glazed, mossy boulders that lay across the path, Toby led the way back. He said nothing about the two corpses he had stumbled on just before finding his father, but when they drew near the place of the murder, he saw how old Talby paused for a moment, turning his sightless eyes on the bodies, as if some deep instinct in his soul had made him aware of them.

The home clearing was quiet; smoke rising from the cabin. While Toby groped at the door, his father stood by helplessly.

“Am I never to see my house again?” he asked in a trembling voice.

The boy helped his father into the low bunk bed near the fireplace. Quickly, he boiled water, threw in some tea, let it cool. Then, taking great care, he used clean cloths to bathe the old man’s eyes.

“It’s no good,” Talby said, “I can’t see.” And he lay back groaning on the bunk.

Mechanically, Toby went about making supper for them both. After a while Talby ceased to complain and lay quietly staring up at the roof. Toby did not know what to say to him. There was a terrible anger in his heart; he wanted revenge, to strike out at those who had done this to his father. Every time the boy slipped out of the cabin — to fetch wood, or to look around the clearing with an anxious, nervous glance — his father’s voice pursued him. “Don’t leave me alone, Toby. Don’t leave me alone now.”

Toby sat beside his father, took hold of one of the old man’s gnarled hands, and attempted to distract him. “I don’t know what to do, Father. Tell me what to do. I don’t understand anything. You told me once you would explain everything. You would tell me about how this awful world happened.”

Talby groaned, and for long minutes he was silent. “I can’t face it, Son.” He said at last. “What’s the use of talking about those evil days?”

“You said you’d tell me when I was of age,” Toby cried. “‘All the Old Believers pass on the word,’ you said. Remember that? Now I have to try to be of age whether I am or not. You’ve got to help me understand.”

His father groaned again; he started to sit up, then collapsed back on his bunk. After a few minutes, however, he began to speak.

“There’s a trunk by the bed here. It contains some of your mother’s special clothes and things, you know that. But there’s a smaller box inside it. The key for that’s hung up there behind the clock. Fetch me the key now, Son. You’re right — it’s time to pass on the scripture copy, the commission, to you, to set you on the path. It wasn’t supposed to be until you were twenty-one, but that’s all changed now.”

Toby opened the large chest — which wasn’t locked — rummaged through the piles of clothes, old slippers, sweaters, and gloves, and at the bottom found a wooden box, about the size of a briefcase. He handed the box to his father and fetched him the key. Talby fumbled, opened the lock, and handed the box back to him.

“You’ll find what you need to know in there,” his father sighed. “I pray it helps you, because I have an idea that you’ll soon have to go away from here.”

“I’d never leave you, Father. I’ll take care of you. I’m strong and I can do chores — anything. And I’ll get the Reardons, too, for what they’ve done to you.”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” warned old Talby, quoting the ancient scripture. “Now open the box and read the papers.”

Toby laid the box on the table and carefully lifted the lid. Inside was a bundle of papers, tied with a frayed red ribbon. There might have been a hundred sheets altogether. Some few, he noticed, had been written by hand in a fine old cursive; others were covered with elaborate drawings. The rest of the sheets were pasted over with clippings from newspapers and magazines.

Toby turned to the handwritten pages first. He laid the document flat on the table and began reading.