Dawn of Fear by Susan Cooper

Author:Susan Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448196012
Publisher: RHCP

6

Sunday

SUNDAY BREAKFAST WAS scarcely over when Peter and Geoffrey came knocking at Derek’s door. ‘Let’s go and get Tom,’ Peter said. ‘Show him the camp. He said he wanted to see it when it was finished.’

‘It rained last night. Shouldn’t we go and check up first, to see if anything got washed away?’

‘Ah no, it wasn’t much. Look, the path’s dry already. Come on.’

They trooped out into Everett Avenue, absently kicking stones into puddles in the way that was forbidden as being hard on their shoes, and went up into the unfamiliar territory at the top of the road, past the Ditch on one hand and the White Road on the other. David Wiggs and a few of the White Road gang were kicking a ball about in the distance, halfway up the road, with a bigger boy lounging against a fence watching them, a boy so big that they would have taken him for Tom if that had not been unthinkable. David Wiggs and his cronies yelled and capered and gibbered at them and were loftily ignored.

‘Who’s that boy?’ Derek said.

‘David Wiggs has a big brother,’ Peter said. ‘Must be him. Tommy hates him. I think they were at school together; they used to fight all the time. Tom said the Wiggs boy is older than him and he ought to be in the Army, but he got out of it somehow, and he sells things on the black market instead.’

‘Bet that’s what David Wiggs’ll do, too.’

They chanted the iniquities of the Wiggs family all the way to and through the Hickses’ front gate, and then Geoffrey and Derek fell silent in the unfamiliarity of a strange house and garden. It was not a pretty garden. There were no crocuses or daffodils or shrubs as there were elsewhere in the road; only a small lawn bordered by blank flower beds. Tommy Hicks had no father, Derek remembered; he had died or vanished or something, years before.

Peter led them confidently to the back door and knocked. ‘Morning, Mrs. Hicks,’ he said to the turbanned head that appeared round the edge of the door. ‘Is Tommy there? It’s me and Derry and Geoff, and we promised to show him something.’

The head, which had looked anxious and cross, glanced briefly at all of them and then back to Peter, and softened into a faint smile. A hand appeared and smoothed back a few greying curls that had escaped from the turban. ‘All right, dear,’ said Mrs. Hicks. ‘I’ll see.’

They waited for what seemed a long time, and they were sitting in a row on the back doorstep playing fivestones when Tom Hicks came out, combing his hair. ‘Gang way,’ he said, and he put the comb in his pocket and tipped Peter off the step with one foot. Peter rolled on the ground, with his arms wrapped around his head, and did an elaborate and noisy dying act. They saw Mrs. Hicks’s head, anxious again, pop up at the window over the kitchen sink and disappear again.

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