The Dead of Night by John Marsden Read Free Book Online

careful."
    I didn't really need that advice. I wasn't about to go cooeeing down the corridor, or playing Demolition Derby with the trolleys.
    We slithered out from under our bed, like snakes from a blackberry bush.
    "Good luck," Nell said.
    "We'll come and see you before we go."
    "Righto love."
    I opened the door gingerly, and peered out. The passageway was quite dark, and empty. It was cold, after the close warm human smell of B8. As lightly as possible I fled along the corridor, knowing Lee was with me. But when we got to Corrie's door I didn't have the courage to open it. Since the invasion I'd had to reach for courage many times. Surprisingly to myself, it had
always been there, even if sometimes I'd had to dredge deeply, even if sometimes there hadn't been much left to draw on.

    Now I just leaned weakly against the door, my head pressed into it. That was not a smart thing to do, not quite as bad as yelling cooee or going for rides in the wheelchairs, but not far off it. Lee put his arm around me and I turned and buried my head in his chest. I didn't cry, but I was grateful for his strong hold and his silent understanding. Deep inside Lee there seemed to be a place that I didn't think I had. Maybe it was the place his music came from. Whatever it was, I connected with it then for a few seconds and gained a little strength. It was like a blood transfusion.
    "Would you go first?" I asked, lifting my head out of his nice warm chest.
    He did, letting me go, twisting the handle of the door and opening it. He went in and held the door open for me. I slipped in there, into the darkness. A frightened voice gasped "Who's there?" For a moment I thought it was Corrie and I too gasped. I thought it was a ghost, or a miracle, that Corrie had suddenly recovered consciousness and was talking to us. Then I remembered Mrs Slater.
    "It's me, Mrs Slater. Ellie. And Lee's here too."
    "Ellie! Oh! Lee!" She jumped up, knocking something over.
    We knew Mrs Slater pretty well. She was one of those people who packed about thirty-two hours into every twenty-four. Her husband had died in a tractor accident years ago, and since then she'd run the farm, raised the kids, written two gardening books, learnt calligraphy
and quilting, and done half an Arts degree through the Open University. She even found time to do canteen duty at school: her last kid, Jason, was in Year 10.

    She'd said to me once, "There are two kinds of people in the world, Ellie. The ones who watch TV and the ones who get things done."
    Now she gave me the biggest hug of my career, and finally I cried. It had been a long time since the last tear. But she was the first adult I'd seen who I knew, the first one to hug me, the first link with my old, loved, happy world. The first link with my parents, because she was such a good friend of Mum's.
    "Oh Ellie," she said. "You poor kid. And you smell terrible."
    "Oh Mrs Slater!" She made me laugh, and I thumped her in the chest in protest. Then she hugged Lee.
    I guess we'd been living together so long we didn't notice how bad we smelt. We took regular baths in the creek, but with the water getting so cold we hadn't been doing it a lot lately.
    "Don't worry," she said. "They all smell worse at the Showground. A lot worse. But we patients get a shower every second day, so we forget."
    But I wasn't listening any more. I'd turned to the bed, where Corrie lay so silently. The only light in the room came from the car park, through the windows. You could see where condensation had misted the glass. The room itself was very dim, like a church in the late afternoon before the lights come on. The things that stood out were the things that were very dark and the things that were very light. A cupboard door was like a dark scar on the wall. The bedside locker was a
white shape crouching watchfully beside Corrie's bed. It seemed quite bright. The sheet that covered Corrie glowed with a quiet luminosity. Her head on the pillow was a little black