Dawn of Fear by Susan Cooper Read Free Book Online

Mum.”
    She kissed him. “Don’t forget your prayers. Good night, my love.”
    Sleepily he murmured the Lord’s Prayer to himself and added the usual bit about blessing Daddy and Mum and Hughie.
    Hugh coughed, across the room in his cot. There was a muffled sound through the wall, like a shifting chair, from the Robinsons’ house next door. Derek snuggled
down under his quilt and felt earth still gritty under one of his fingernails.
    Please God look after the camp,
he added. It sounded a bit odd, somehow, but he didn’t think there was anything wrong about it.
    Hugh coughed again, twice; stirred, moaned, turned over. “Good night, Derry.”
    â€œGood night. Sleep well.”
    â€œâ€™N you.”
    And please God don’t let there be a raid tonight.
    Â 
    B UT IT WAS the sirens that woke him. They were all going at once: two of them somewhere farther off, well started on their long-drawn-out, eerie rising and falling note; and then breaking into it suddenly, loud and harsh, their own local siren in the village, curving up out of nowhere in that first throat-catching whine that was the most chilling sound of any except the very last, the long, long, long dying-down wail that was the worst of all. But before the last wail came, they were all on their way out to the air-raid shelter, Derek with boots and two sweaters over his pajamas, and a coat over those; Hugh lying in a bundle of blankets in his father’s arms. The night was very cold, and the moon had gone. The guns were already thumping somewhere close by, and planes were rumbling high overhead. As they hurried across the lawn, there was the night-breaking crash of a bomb, and the earth shook.

    â€œBig ones,” John Brand said.
    Mrs. Brand went quickly down the earthen steps behind the sandbag wall at the shelter’s entrance, and he handed Hugh to her and turned to lift Derek down. The noise grew; planes were flying closer, lower, and the world exploded as the guns went into action at the end of the road. “Thunk ... thunk ... thuunk-thunk...”
    Derek gazed upward, openmouthed, as light streaked across the sky and great sudden stars burst; the long white arms of the searchlights were groping to and fro in the black sky from those unknown places across the railway where they always sprang up at night, and one of them seemed to have gone mad. It was darting and weaving like a clumsy giant, and he saw the silhouette of a plane in its white light, a plane flying low, and he thought he could even see the crosses on its wings as another engine screamed and a Spitfire—he could see the pointed nose—came diving toward it through the beam.
    â€œDerek!” John Brand yelled.
    The sky flashed, and somewhere another of the great bombs burst. Derek went to his father, but his head was still back as he moved, the searchlight hypnotically holding his eyes. That plane was out of the light; you could hear it diving, shrieking; it was coming nearer, nearer—
    â€œGet down,” John Brand shouted furiously, and grabbed him and pushed him so roughly inside the shelter door that Derek lurched and fell over his mother’s knees where she sat on one of the bunks. His father
ducked down after him, and the plane roared as it dived over the road, and there was a rapid, horrible clatter sweeping across the world with it at the peak of the noise. The guns everywhere were hammering the sky in an uneven thunder, and close together there were several great blasting crashes as more bombs fell.
    John Brand pulled the wooden cover over the shelter entrance and tugged down the curtain that hung behind it, and Mrs. Brand lit a candle that stood waiting in a wax-scarred saucer on the shelf nailed to the corrugated metal wall. Outside, the bumps and bangs went on. Derek sat down suddenly on the bottom bunk and burst into tears.
    His father sat down beside him and held him tightly. “I’m sorry, Derry. Are you all