Free Silent Children by Ramsey Campbell Page A

done it now."
    "Better say you're sorry quick," Stu advised her.
    "It wasn't sweet." When her complaint brought no response from Ian, not even a blink, she muttered "Sorry."
    "Not to him," Shaun said.
    She tugged at her hair. "Why not him? Who?"
    "The little girl," said Ian. "You've woken her up."
    Crystal tugged so hard her head began to cant as though the floor was drawing it sideways and down. "Where is she?"
    "Under where you spat. You'd better talk to her before she comes to see who spat on her."
    Crystal shoved herself in a single movement to the far end of the bench. Her heel caught an upright of the table, and her sandal flew off, slithering across the concrete toward the stain. "Don't want to," she wailed.
    "You've got to. She knows you're here."
    "If you don't talk to her she'll follow you home and get in your bed," Stu said.
    "You've got to lie on the floor," Baz said, "so you can hear her."
    "If you don't she'll come out," said Shaun, "and you won't like how she looks."
    Crystal stared at him, her mouth pulling itself out of shape and releasing a trickle of red as though she had bitten her tongue. "This is where mum and dad were talking about and they stopped when I came in," she cried.
    "Where the little girl was buried, that's right, under there, and now you're going to see her if she doesn't think you're sorry enough."
    "She's got worms for eyes," Baz assured her.
    "And her entrails are all hanging out with insects crawling on them," said Stu.
    Ian thought the last two were going too far, at least for him, though they were causing Crystal's mouth to wrench itself into progressively more interesting shapes. For him it was sufficient that the new floor and all that it was meant to conceal had grown intensely present, its whiteness vibrating, the stain gleaming like the irrepressible mark of a death. "She made your shoe come off," he said. "She made it go to her. You'd better listen so you hear her. Listen hard and you will."
    Crystal's eyes turned unwillingly toward the stain as though it, or something whose location it marked, had fastened on them. The rest of her appeared to be unable to move except for a slight quivering. Ian willed his friends not to give in to the temptation to make her jump, because he was sure that if they waited she would hear what she'd been told to hear. But he wasn't expecting to hear it—a muffled scraping like the sound of a buried finger trying to draw attention to itself.
    The concrete appeared to flutter, having grown thin as a sheet that was about to be flung off. Then, as his friends swung round to stare along the hall, Ian realised that the sound wasn't in the kitchen. He'd heard car doors slamming near the house, but there was no reason why they should have anything to do with him. He was facing the front door, which was the only course of action his friends seemed able to think of, and there was no sound in the kitchen except for a tentative whimper from Crystal, when the door swung open and a stranger stepped into his house.

TWELVE
    "You mustn't be doing too badly if you can afford to park off Piccadilly," Leslie said.
    "I'm still trying to get my head around some things about England."
    That might include driving on the unfamiliar side of the road, and so, as Jack Lamb turned the hired Nova along Park Lane, she confined herself to directing him. An ambulance racing to the children's hospital nearly made her send him into the wrong lane at Paddington, but once they'd escaped the hot clogged fuming streets under Westway, there wasn't much for her to do except tell him to carry on. The Grand Union Canal came to find the road and swung away again, taking with it a barge brighter than a florist's display, and the car was following an elongated lorry that wagged its drunken rear at them through Kensal Green when Jack said "Say, did I offend you somehow?"
    "Not that I noticed. What makes you ask that?"
    "Just that you've been quiet for a good while, but don't let me intrude if