Free The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory

of the car was a huge rounded boulder, dropped by a prehistoric glacier. I blew on my hands, which were burning from the coarseness of the bark, and I continued to climb.
    And my legs were shaking. I wasn’t afraid, exposed like a rock-climber on a slabby cliff; I was comfortable with the height because the darkness around me was like a cage, through which I couldn’t fall even if I lost my grip and slipped. But the pressure of notching my feet into smaller and smaller spaces as the branches thinned out had started my legs quivering. I pulled myself up with my arms and saw Lawrence up there, already adjusting his frame onto the spars of the tree-house.
    At last I clambered on board beside him... on board, because the tree-house was nothing more than the pieces of an old wooden pallet which had somehow been manhandled up and lashed onto the flimsy topmost branches... it felt like the debris of a shipwreck, a makeshift raft adrift on an ocean. I lugged myself onto it. I closed my eyes and hung on, to calm the thudding in my chest, and was alarmed when I opened my eyes again to see the vastness of the sky and feel the tree swaying.
    ‘You did alright.’ Lawrence was grinning at me. He was sitting cross-legged, quite at ease in his eyrie. I crouched beside him, and he must have seen my knuckles whiten as I gripped the knotted ropes which barely held the structure together. A little bit begrudgingly, he admitted, ‘You did alright, I didn’t think you’d make it...’ and, his idea of fun, he shook the thing with all his strength so that it creaked and groaned.
    The swifts. We were in their world. There were scores of them, and the sky was full of their screaming. They hurtled around us. They were black, like chips of jet, and they were breath-taking... the agility of their swerving, the rush and flicker of their wings, as though the air gave no resistance but was a vacuum through which they sped like fragments of pure energy.
    ‘A good idea?’ the boy said. ‘Ever given a lesson in a classroom like this before?’
    ‘It’s marvellous...’ I managed to say, ‘and the birds are marvellous...’ I found some more breath, despite the frailty of the bits and pieces I was hanging onto and the yawning space around me. ‘I’ve got a colony of them, swiftlets, maybe a hundred of them nesting under my house in Borneo... and there are millions, or maybe hundreds of thousands, in the limestone caves in the jungle...’
    He was looking sideways at me. ‘I was joking,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean you had to start doing a lesson up here.’
    ‘Devil birds...’ I went on perversely. ‘There’s a lot of spooky folklore about them... because they’re black, I suppose, and because they scream like mad, and because they fly so fast and so high and never seem to rest... in the old days people weren’t sure where they roosted, and they made up stories that the swifts could sleep and fly at the same time, and mate and fly at the same time, or else they...’
    The tree was swaying more and more. I squeezed my eyes shut again, opened them narrowly and saw through my lashes that we were higher than the boy’s tower. I rolled my head the other way and saw nothing but sky as far as a foam of cloud which might have been the North Sea horizon. I felt my stomach lurch and a bubble of nausea in my throat. Fighting it, swallowing it, determined to keep up a pretence of confidence, I heard myself muttering, ‘Tiny feet, almost nothing feet... their Latin name “apodidae” meaning “footless”... that’s the family name of the swifts and swiftlets...’
    Enough. I gingerly edged off the pallet and grappled with the tree again, to try and start climbing down. The boy was watching me, unwittingly impressed by a teacher so determined to impart his dried-up pellets of knowledge. With a show of youthful bravado, he stood up, just as I was slithering down, and he flapped his arms at the birds which dashed around his head. There seemed to