Darkness, Be My Friend: Tomorrow by John Marsden

Author:John Marsden [Marsden, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781742624495
Google: X9zNAg83QW8C
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2010-09-01T07:55:07.110226+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

We had found maybe the one building left in Wirrawee that was pretty much untouched. A few things in the office had been ripped out but nothing else was damaged. The feeling grew on me that the place had been deserted for a long time. It wasn’t exactly the dust, it wasn’t the silence. It was a lack of people: you just knew as you walked down those deserted corridors that no human had been there for a long time.

I suppose it was also the smell, although I didn’t realise that at the time. Everyone does have their own smell. They say blind people can recognise who’s been in a room by the smell they leave behind. I know I could recognise when my father had been in the bathroom by the smell he left behind. Talk about toxic. If we’d bottled that and released it as nerve gas we’d have won this war in the first week.

Of course, with my infallible judgement I’d found the only room in the school that wasn’t silent. It didn’t help when I was so desperate to get some sleep. It was the sick bay, where they had two beds. I had one and Kevin the other. But there must have been a slight gap between the window and its frame, and the wind whistled and howled through the hole with a note that changed all the time. It was the eeriest noise. It sounded like wild lost creatures crying in the night, their haunting voices begging for someone to save them. Except it was like they were already dead, and they were crying from the grave. Then it would stop for a minute and I’d think, ‘Oh good, at last I can get some sleep’, and sure enough at that moment it’d start up again. Things weren’t helped, either, by the fact that the black smoke from the fire was drifting past and, although there seemed to be less of it now, it did make the whole place feel and sound like a scene out of Hell.

So I didn’t get much sleep. But I guess the real reason for that was my fear. It felt so dangerous to be here in Wirrawee in broad daylight, trying to sleep. Sure I could give myself a hundred rational reasons why we’d be OK. No one had been here for ages, they’d all be busy fighting the fire, they’d think we would have gone bush ...

OK, three rational reasons why we’d be OK. They were good reasons, too. But they weren’t enough. I was still all tensed up, staring through the window at the hot black smoke.

I began to realise that there was one more reason I couldn’t sleep. The ride with the horses through the bush, running down those soldiers, coming so close to death myself: it had only happened twelve hours before. It was like everything else in this war there was no time to react, no chance to think about stuff, to find meaning to it, or put it in a picture that made sense.

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