Read The Waking That Kills for Free Online

his lips, not quite a sneer, ‘You mean you didn’t ask her? You arrived here and she dropped a hammer onto your car from high up in a tree and you didn’t ask her what she was doing up there?’ The smile slid off his mouth, as sudden as the slither of the cat from the bonnet of the car. ‘She told me she was hoping you’d ask me. She knew you would. She was up there trying to fix my tree-house. I think she already thinks you’ll have a go at helping her.’
    I did a deliberately comic blink at the roundabout way in which the information was being imparted. ‘I like to go up there,’ he went on. ‘It’s the view from my tower, only better. Not really a tree-house, but a kind of platform right at the top. My Dad built it so that I could see the planes as they take off from Coningsby and come back in. He likes to know that I’m watching him. He waggles his wings a bit when he comes in, so I know it’s him and he’s back safe and sound from manoeuvres...’
    I was opening the back of the hearse, for no real reason except to let in a bit of air or maybe intrigue the boy to keep on talking. He’d been talking about his father, so I thought he might be interested in mine, not a dashing daredevil who hurtled himself through the skies in a million-pounds worth of jet plane, but a cranky old man who’d spent his life hunched over the gravestones of a hundred cemeteries or peering over the huge black steering wheel of a hearse.
    Lawrence leaned into the gloom of the car and he sniffed. Then he inhaled very slowly, holding each breath in his chest for a second before letting it out of his nose again... slowly, as though to capture the scent in the whiskery tunnels of his nostrils. He inhaled and exhaled a few times, like a bear or a badger investigating the lair of another creature it had discovered on its territory, almost as though, having gathered all the information he could from the smells in this strange dark den, he would cock a leg and piss onto the mottled paintwork of the hearse...
    He didn’t, of course. He cocked his head, politely, like a jackdaw listening to an unfamiliar sound – or, for me just back from Borneo, like a mynah trying to catch the strangeness of a sound in order to mimic it – as I told him about my father’s work as a mason and the purpose of having the Daimler as his workshop and hidey-hole and home-on-wheels. The boy was attentive and deferential. Indeed, he affected the mannerisms of a grown-up so exactly that I wasn’t sure whether he was really interested or just humouring me... he examined the tools in the tool-box, handling them very carefully as if they were my most precious family heirlooms, he hefted them from hand to hand and sniffed the oil on their blades and the decades of sweat ingrained into their wooden handles, he stroked the nap on the leathery gloves and...
    When he unfolded the flaps of the cardboard box – a boring old cardboard box which had been shoved into a corner by the couch – he recoiled from it as if there was a cobra coiled inside it.
    And then he was off. Before I could come out with a sudden ‘What’s up?’ or ‘Hey Lawrence, what’s the matter?’ he’d spun away from the car and was striding very fast and purposefully through the woodland, back towards the house. He paused and turned once, as though he’d bethought himself for being rude, and he shouted... not words, but a braying kind of noise such as grown-ups make when they leave a room to answer a telephone or switch off a forgotten frying-pan. In any case, he was gone in a moment.
    The grasses and nettles swished where he’d hurried off. And then the woodland was utterly still.
    I peered into the cardboard box which seemed to have startled the boy so much. No cobra. Only a heap of newspapers, a glimpse of headlines about a miners’ strike, a sensational murder, a Hollywood divorce...
    I swung the door of the hearse shut. It was so heavy, the hinges so sweetly oiled, that it closed