Free The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory Page A

be more of them, they mobbed him as if he were a trespasser in their space. Preoccupied with my own safety, finding it harder to climb down than it had been climbing up, I glimpsed him towering above me: an alien in the sky-world of the swifts, a lanky teenage boy in shorts and a smelly t-shirt. A bird banged into his face, and he swiped at it as though it were a wasp. For a second, by sheer chance he caught it in his fist, but then it squirmed out and away and tried to regain its control of the air... but one of its wings was damaged and it tumbled past me, down and down through the branches of the Scots pine, disappearing somewhere far below.
    ‘Be careful, Lawrence!’ I called to him. ‘Get down! Come on, I’m going down now...’
    Yes, it was harder. I couldn’t see my feet in the gloom. Time and again I lodged a foot between branch and trunk, and then my weight would either crunch my toes or the branch would sickeningly creak. Slowly, painfully, with the boy huffing impatiently just above my head, I got halfway down and paused. Daring as an ape, he skirted past me, and the smell of his stale shirt and adolescent sweat was strong in my nostrils. He swung easily downwards. My sickness had gone, it had been the movement of the treetop, like the swell of a lazy ocean, which had moved my stomach... but my hands were burning and my legs were jumping. Closer and closer to the ground, I glanced down to see the humped outline of the car and hear Juliet and Lawrence in a heated exchange. Just then, when she called up to me, ‘Are you alright, Christopher?’ and I called down, ‘Yes,’ my left foot was jammed against the trunk with all my weight excruciatingly on it. I tried to shift some of the pressure to my other foot...
    The branch I was holding snapped off. The one under my foot snapped off. For a split-second, there was a blissful relief from the pain... and then I was falling.
    My fall was slowed by one crunching impact after another, until I landed in a wreckage of branches and twigs and showering needles.
    Juliet knelt to me. I couldn’t speak. ‘Oh my god, are you alright?’ she was asking again, and I was nodding and heaving for breath. I was fine, I was fine, I wanted to tell her, because the boy was looming over me with a wolfish smile and his Adam’s apple bobbing, and he was chuckling a lot of hilarious nonsense about the wild man of Borneo and orang-utans and...
    I wasn’t completely fine. At first I’d felt nothing, because of the shock of my crash-landing. But when I tried to sit up, there was a dazzle, a blaze of white light in my head.
    I cried out, a high, almost animal yelp. The pain rippled through my chest and into my brain.
     
     
    T HEY GOT ME up to the house. Lawrence tugged me upright, arranged my arm across his shoulder, and I hopped agonisingly beside him, through the woodland.
    Every hop was a torture. I’d turned an ankle... annoying, niggling... but it was the hurt in my chest which made me bite my lips and cry out again. Juliet said I’d cracked a rib; she’d heard, from other people who’d done it, that it was the most painful injury you could sustain. I didn’t need her to tell me. I could hardly breathe. The pain made me retch, and the pain of retching was worse.
    A bizarre procession, through the dappled sunlight of a lovely June morning...
    Me and the boy, conjoined, a wheezing, stumbling three-legged creature. A few paces behind us, a little light-footed woman, a kind of sprite or a faery huntress. And leading the way, the orange cat. It had emerged from the undergrowth as we’d started our journey from the Scots pine. Perfectly uninterested in what the ridiculous humans were doing, it had seen something much more fascinating. It had pounced on the disabled swift... pressed it firmly into the long grass and then caught it in its jaws. Now, with the bird in its mouth, the long black wings fluttering feebly, the cat was wonderfully exotic... a miniature tiger with a