Free Kit's Wilderness by David Almond Page B

that was once in him. The strength that in him is fading.”
    Lak watched his father in the flickering light.
    “And where is the love he held for me?” he whispered.
    “Hush, my son. Leave these thoughts alone. There will come a time when you alone must be our strength and guide. Prepare yours4ffor it.” She stroked his brow. “Lean on me, my son. Sleep. I will watch the entrance.”
    And Lak slept, and dreamed of his grandfather, of the old man’s tales of the time when the sun shone warm, and green grass and trees filled the valleys.
    The snarling woke him, then the sound of his mother’s screams . . .
     
    I stopped writing and watched the falling snow. I ran my fingers across the fossilized black tree on my desk. I went downstairs to find Grandpa. He was in the living room, in front of the television. Mum stood in the doorway with her arms folded, watching him. She put her finger to her lips. He was fast asleep. I sat on the sofa beside him. He snored gently, evenly. His eyes flickered beneath his eyelids. There was rubbish on the telly, some game show where they had to answer questions to stop a bucket of black gunge from falling on them. I grinned. There’d be much more interesting things going on behind Grandpa’s closed eyes.
    I waited for him to wake.
    He woke slowly, ever so slowly. Even when his eyes were open his dream continued. He continued to see it, even as his eyes looked toward the nonsense on the telly.
    “Kit,” he murmured at last. “Kit, lad.” His eyes softened, he smiled at me. “Rubbish, eh?”
    “Aye, rubbish.” I switched it off.
    “Not out in the snow today, son?”
    I shook my head. “I need to know about John Askew’s family,” I said.
    “The Askews?” Grandpa rubbed his eyes, pondered. “Wait till I get it straight. Everything’s such a clutter in me head these days. The Askews, aye. I see them now. The grandfather was a good’n. Tough as old boots and a mouthful of curses and too much of a taste for the drink. But gentle enough beneath. Spent many a shift at his side, got to know his ways. He was a man that scared many around him, specially the new lads, but the true nature of him came out when the roof collapsed in 1948. Askew was the man that burrowed through till his hands was bleeding. It was him that carried out the lad that lay in there. Him that saved the lad’s life. The father? He’s just one of them that’s been wasted, son. No proper work for him to do, nothing to control him. Wild as a lad, got wilder as a man. A fighting man. Spent six months in Durham jail for thumping a lad half to death outside The Fox one night. Afterward, just took to the drink. Takes it out on his own boy now, and I suspect on his wife. He’s a bitter soul, Kit. In another world he might have been fine, but in this one . . .” He shrugged. “Ah, well. And I hear the boy’s heading the same way too, eh?”
    “Could be,” I said.
    “Thing is, he’s never had a proper childhood, not with that for a father. The baby inside him never had a chance to grow. You understand?”
    I nodded. “I think so.”
    Grandpa smiled. “Maybe the baby’s inside him still, still waiting for its chance to show itself and grow.”
    I thought of Askew, of the fear and revulsion he caused around him. I recalled the desperation that could be felt within his violent grip, the yearning that could be seen in his violent eyes. Such a strange boy, such a strange mixture of darkness and light. Where
was
the baby in him? And I thought of Lak, whose baby was so obvious, held inside the bearskin.
    “Everybody’s got the seam of goodness in them, Kit,” said Grandpa. “Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.”

 

    A llie was evil. There was ice in her eye. She’d been enticed, cast under a spell. All the goodness was frozen in her.
    She tiptoed toward me with her hands raised like claws.
    “Here’s evil come for good Kit,” she hissed. “Here’s icy cold