Silent Children by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online

bench in a shelter, only his right arm in the raincoat he must have struggled to pull off because of the heat, and had relieved the man of it. He'd spent the night feeling the salt dry on him in a hollow on some wasteland, having pulled bricks out of the earth to make himself something like comfortable. By the time shops started opening nearby on the edge of town, his clothes had been sufficiently dry, and sufficiently concealed by the long raincoat, for him to risk buying a new outfit and a rucksack in a charity shop. An incinerator on a rubbish tip had taken care of his old clothes once he'd changed in a public convenience, and then he'd been well on the way to becoming his new public self.
    Tonight would see it finished. Though he seemed to be alone in the woods, he followed the gravelled waymarked path until he was miles from the road and the twilight started filling in the cracks in all the trees around him. He sat on a grassy hillock facing a fallen tree, having planted two large stones to brace his heels against. Even if nobody could be looking for him, he wanted to be certain nobody thought they saw him. He fished out of the rucksack the pliers he'd snatched from a do-it-yourself shop and clamped them to the outermost of his remaining lower teeth. As he bore down on the pliers with both hands he began to sing, soon more indistinctly and higher and higher. When he wasn't able to keep up the gurgling lullaby he did his best to laugh.

EIGHT
    When Ian came home from school he could tell that his mother had got ready to say something serious to him. What she said, however, was "Do you want to help me shop?"
    He hated that—her making him wait to find out which of the things he'd done she was going to bring up. He hadn't been caught smoking since they'd moved back to the house; he hadn't skipped detention either, and the couple of stupid detentions he'd been given for nothing at all had been short enough that he'd arrived home before her. He'd hung around with Shaun and Stu and Baz nearly every night, but he knew she was hoping he would grow out of them if she didn't go on about them. Maybe the subject she was holding back might even turn out to be interesting, if that wasn't too much to expect. "All right," he mumbled, though it was more of a wish.
    On the way to the supermarket, she only asked him boring stuff, what kind of a day he'd had at school and whether he'd thought any more about what he wanted to do with his life. Two women gossipping across the gate of a front garden with a Victorian streetlamp in it fell silent before resuming their chat, and he knew they recognised him and his mother from all the publicity—knew that was why his mother raised her voice just slightly to suggest he ought to work toward staying at school after he was sixteen so as to qualify for a better job. The games adults played with one another bored him even more than most of the stuff they talked about, and why should they expect him to grow out of anything when they never grew out of those? His answers were growing shorter until they hardly emerged at all, though he didn't particularly want to make her feel bad: it was just that since his father had found himself another family to live with, and for quite a while leading up to that, Ian had kept experiencing the sensation that a slab had been laid on top of his mind, a weight as dark and heavy as it was insubstantial. Thoughts could lift it if it didn't squash them into pointlessness, but more often he needed something outside himself to free him of it—right now, swinging a supermarket trolley up the ramp and driving it at the automatic doors to see if they were fast enough to get out of his way. It might have been more interesting if they hadn't, but they did.
    He was following his mother out of Frugo twenty minutes later—minutes that had felt slowed down by hushed thin music and the pace of all the trolleys, not to mention how half the customers had seemed not to want to be