Rook & Tooth and Claw by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page A

to make sense of their books. Elvin’s sudden absence was more than she could bear.
    Even Ricky Herman was wiping his eyes with his sleeve, and Sherma had her face covered by her hands.
    “Okay,” said Jim, gently. “Let’s have a minute’s silence, shall we, so that we can all say our own private prayers.”
    The class sat with bowed heads. For the first time ever, Mark and Ricky weren’t giggling and shuffling. Russell’s stomach rumbled, but nobody laughed. It just seemed to make the silence even more poignant. Life was going on as normal and Elvin wasn’t here.
    The minute was almost over when Jim’s attention was caught by a flickering shadow on the other side of the yard. It was a bright day, and the porch that led to the main building was deep in darkness. But Jim was sure he had seen something moving. He walked slowly over to the window and peered out. At first he couldn’t see what it was, but gradually he was able to make out the figure of a man, standing close to one of the supporting pillars. He was dressed in black, and against his chest he was holding a black wide-brimmed hat.
    Jim beckoned to Titus Greenspan III. Titus was wearing a T-shirt with bright pink stripes across it. With his bulgy black eyes and his nervous, querulous manner, he looked like an oversized prawn. “Titus … come here. That’s it, get out of your desk and come over here. Now I want you to look out of the window … over there. You see where the porch is? You see the right-hand pillar?”
    “Which one is that?” asked Titus, blinking.
    “It’s the pillar on the same side as your right hand. No,
this
hand. Now, can you see anybody standing beside that pillar? It’s pretty shadowy, but look hard. A man in a black suit holding a hat.”
    Titus stared and stared, but in the end he slowly shook his head.
    “Is this some kind of intelligence test?” he wanted to know.
    Jim looked back at the porch and the man was still clearly in sight. In fact he had taken a step forward so that he was easier to see.
    “You can’t see a man standing beside that right-hand pillar, with a hat in his hand? Come on, look again.” (For a split-second, Jim was tempted to add, ‘What are you, for Christ’s sake, blind?’ but he managed to bite his tongue.)
    Titus stared across the yard for over half a minute, the tip of his tongue gripped between his teeth. At last, he said, “Nope. I’m sorry, Mr Rook. Hff. No can see.”
    “Ricky, come here,” Jim beckoned him; and then he pointed. “Look over there. You see that man, standing in the porch? Just left of that pillar.”
    Ricky stared across the yard, but then he let out a whinnying noise and said, “No. Sorry, Mr Rook. I don’t see nobody.”
    “All right,” Jim told him. “Go back to your seat. Wait here everybody. Take out your poetry readers and see what you can make of page 26 …
Dead Boy,
by John Crowe Ransom. And don’t just read it,
think
when you read it, think what it means. I’ll be back in a minute.”
    He left the classroom and hurried along the floor-waxed corridor. He pushed open the swing door with its wire-glazed windows, into the sunshine. He ran across the tarmac yard, toward the porch. And the man was still there. The man in the black suit, holding his wide black hat over his heart. But as soon as he saw Jim running toward him, he rolled away from the pillar in a brief kerfuffle of black, and then he was gone. By the time that Jim reached the porch, panting, the door to the main building was slowly easing its way closed with a quiet pneumatic
pifff
! and the man had vanished.
    Jim wrenched open the door and stepped inside. Helistened for the sound of running, but the building echoed with nothing more than the voices of teachers and the slow, plangent echoing of a piano lesson.
Für Elise
played note by hesitant note.
    He walked half-way down the main corridor, looking into every classroom window. His footsteps echoed and re-echoed. This was where the most