Different Kinds of Darkness by Langford David

Author:Langford, David [Langford, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Sci-fi, Short Story
Publisher: Unofficial e-book edition
Published: 2001-01-01T02:00:00+00:00

Thursday came, and after an eternity of history and double physics there was a free period that you were supposed to spend reading or in computer studies. Nobody knew it would be the Shudderers’ last initiation, although Julie—who read heaps of fantasy novels—insisted later that she’d felt all doom-laden and could sense a powerful reek of wrongness. Julie tended to say things like that.

The session in the musty storeroom began pretty well, with Khalid reaching his twenty seconds at last, Jonathan sailing beyond the count of ten which only a few weeks ago had felt like an impossible Everest, and (to carefully muted clapping) Heather finally becoming a full member of the Club. Then the trouble began, as Harry the first-timer adjusted his little round glasses, set his shoulders, opened the tatty ritual ring-binder, and went rigid. Not twitchy or shuddery, but stiff. He made horrible grunts and pig-squeals, and fell sideways. Blood trickled from his mouth.

‘He’s bitten his tongue,’ said Heather. ‘Oh lord, what’s first aid for biting your tongue?’

At this point the storeroom door opened and Mr Whitcutt came in. He looked older and sadder. ‘I might have known it would be like this.’ Suddenly he turned his eyes sideways and shaded them with one hand, as though blinded by strong light. ‘Cover it up. Shut your eyes, Patel, don’t look at it, and just cover that damned thing up.’

Khalid did as he was told. They helped Harry to his feet: he kept saying ‘Sorry, sorry,’ in a thick voice, and dribbling like a vampire with awful table manners. The long march through the uncarpeted, echoey corridors to the school’s little sickroom, and then onward to the Principal’s office, seemed to go on for endless grim hours.

Ms Fortmayne the Principal was an iron-grey woman who according to school rumours was kind to animals but could reduce any pupil to ashes with a few sharp sentences—a kind of human BLIT. She looked across her desk at the Shudder Club for one eternity of a moment, and said sharply: ‘Whose idea was it?’

Khalid slowly put up a brown hand, but no higher than his shoulder. Jonathan remembered the Three Musketeers’s motto, One for all and all for one, and said, ‘It was all of us really.’ So Julie added, ‘That’s right.’

‘I really don’t know,’ said the Principal, tapping the closed ring-binder that lay in front of her. ‘The single most insidious weapon on Earth—the information-war equivalent of a neutron bomb—and you were playing with it. I don’t often say that words fail me . . .’

‘Someone left it in the photocopier. Here. Downstairs,’ Khalid pointed out.

‘Yes. Mistakes do happen.’ Her face softened a little. ‘And I’m getting carried away, because we do actually use that BLIT image as part of a little talk I have with older children when they’re about to leave school. They’re exposed to it for just two seconds, with proper medical supervision. Its nickname is the Trembler, and some countries use big posters of it for riot control—but not Britain or America, naturally.

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