Read Eldren: The Book of the Dark for Free Online Page B

get any tea.”
    This elicited just one more grunt from the small man before he left the bus, leaving Brian undisturbed to catch up on Saturday’s football results. He often used his fifteen minutes on the bus to read his newspaper, but today he found it difficult to concentrate.
    The headlines didn’t make it any easier. Yesterday it had been cattle mutilations...today it was an escaped psychopath…KERR ON THE RUN , the headline shouted in bold type…more titillation for the bored masses. His attention wavered, mostly due to his hangover but also partly due to his dreams of the night before.
    His dreams of late had been troubled, not just populated with current acquaintances, but with friends and relatives both alive and dead.
    He spent his dream-time wandering through strange scenes, like one-act plays but with no posh BBC type linkman to tell him what was happening, no titles to let him know who the cast were.
    He felt vaguely aware that he was not sleeping too well. He had dim memories of half waking most nights, punching his pillow into submission. Once or twice he’d woken to voices, shouting almost, before he realized that it was him that was making the noises. Along with that, his sheets and duvet seemed to do a lot of travelling during the nights.
    Last night had been particularly harrowing, as the dreams had concerned his late father.
    Tom Baillie had been a large man. His face, round, white and smooth creased into a patchwork of large irregular shapes when he smiled, his eyes all but obscured by rising cheekbones meeting falling epicanthic folds.
    This transformation paled when compared to that when he opened his mouth, tossed back his head and laughed, a great hearty bellow from the region of his stomach.
    He could be imagined at a medieval banquet, calling for more ale, bashing a pewter mug on the table while cradling a wench or two in the crook of one massive arm.
    At least, that was how Brian remembered him. In his dream however, the laughter had been harsher, eyes blinking pig-like from a red face with an expression more suited to a Roman Emperor attending a slaughter. All sense of humor had left this man, leaving behind a sly predatory cunning, laughing at others trouble.
    Brian could still remember the dreams’ mocking laughter and wondered, not for the first time, if he wasn’t perhaps working himself too hard.
     
    ~-o0O0o-~
     
    The school, although only fifteen years old, looked like it was in a state of terminal decay.
    Large swathes of the walls were liberally daubed with graffiti, windows were broken and holes had been punched into the concrete with a wide variety of blunt instruments. It had been built to replace three separate local schools, becoming a catchments area for children from almost a ten-mile radius.
    Brian remembered the day it had opened up. It had been his first day as a third year pupil, the year where you have to make decisions that could affect the rest of your life. He could remember that time clearly.
    The previous year he had done well in both sciences and languages and had to decide between them soon. He wavered between the two, some days wanting to be a scientist, to discover the secret of old age perhaps or a cure for the common cold. Alternatively he could stick with the languages and become a politician capable of uniting the world. To say that he’d been an idealist would be a bit like saying that Jesus Christ was religious.
    Back then the place had the antiseptic feel of a hospital but it hadn’t taken fifteen hundred kids long to turn it into something which more resembled a bombsite.
    The brush of a football against his leg brought him back to the present. A small group of boys ran past him, screaming, chasing a ball that was little bigger than an orange.
    Elsewhere in the playground small knots of pupils had formed...the same groups of like minds that formed in schools everywhere.
    Brian knew that there would be other small knots in places he couldn’t