Free The Waking That Kills by Stephen Gregory Page B

magnificent moustache.
    So Lawrence lugged me to the house and lowered me onto the sofa. He couldn’t wait to get away. He affected concern for his stricken tutor, but it wasn’t very convincing. I was going to snarl at him about the car and whether he’d been in it... but he did his shifty sloping-off, again. I saw him grab the cat and prise the bird from its fangs; the swift was still alive, the terrified creature, and the boy cupped it in his hands and disappeared upstairs. I was going to growl at Juliet, that I’d arrived intact at Chalke House a fortnight ago and now I’d got a car with a shattered windscreen and a flat battery and myself excruciatingly crippled... but she was ministering to me, plumping me into a pile of cushions. I lay back and sipped the air. I watched the quick, nimble movements of her fingers and saw the anxiety on her face.
    ‘I’m so sorry, Christopher, I’m so sorry...’ she was whispering. The sibilance reminded me of the way her voice had altered the previous evening, when we’d shared this very sofa and swigged the gin together. ‘I’m so sorry, so sorry...’ and although it was only mid-morning, I thought how good it might be to share a stiff drink right now with this dizzy, fragile woman. ‘I tried to put him off, you heard me trying to put him off, it was such a silly idea to go up the tree, but he’s so selfish and stubborn and a show-off...’ She was holding my hands in hers. She had dust in her lashes and pine needles in her hair and twiggy smudges on her face. ‘Like his father, just like his father, just selfish and stubborn and showing-off...’
    ‘Did he go into my car last night?’ My voice was feeble.
    The question stopped her dead. She said, ‘What?’ although she’d heard what I’d said.
    ‘I saw a light in the trees. I got up and looked out of the window, I saw a light in the trees and thought I was dreaming or it was fireflies or something...’ She let go of my hands. She was staring at me. I managed to wheeze a few more words. ‘I mean, what was he doing? What was the idea? To open the door and leave on the light and run down the battery so that...’
    ‘So that what?’ She pulled away from me and blinked, a bit too theatrically. ‘So your car couldn’t start and you’d be stuck here and couldn’t get away? Do you really think he’d do that to keep you here?’
    ‘Or was he looking for something? What? What was he looking for?’
    She stood up very suddenly. She did the squirrel thing, smearing the moss and dust into her face with the backs of her hands. ‘I know you don’t know him,’ she said. ‘How could you, after just a few days here? Lawrence has dreams, he dreams of his father... and they’re more than just dreams, they’re a kind of unreality he’s created to help him forget the madness of his real world...’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. ‘I’m sorry, Christopher, I’m sorry you’ve blundered into all this... and now this has happened and...’
    She spun away, out of the room.
    I lay back and stared at the ceiling. In my fall, my foot had caught in the branches and wrenched my ankle skew-whiff. Much worse, I might’ve cracked a rib. I lay as still as I could, breathing as shallowly as possible, and wondered at what the woman had said, the muddle of messages I’d got from her. Did she want me to stay and befriend her son, or was she sorry I’d come and she wanted me to go away? Was she angry with me, was I angry with her, were we angry with each other? The boy too, his moody sulky brooding, his explosion of anger, the glowering darkness in his manner... hard to explain, but it was more threatening than teenage truculence.
    I shifted my weight on the sofa, I suddenly felt as though the mounded cushions were a quagmire into which I was sinking... but when I moved, the pain in my chest dazzled in my brain. I clenched my teeth, relaxed and sank back... and when the pain stopped, my head cleared and I realised there were two