The Gift by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

he did the same. Instantly he saw another picture. Night. A clear sky with a few stars. A house with lit windows. Only the stars were too big and bright, and the windows glared as though there were a furnace inside. But the house was a particular house, the Prices’ house, the one where Davy lay at that moment on the floor of his bedroom and Penny was watching Carry on Spying downstairs. So the man who had been in the blue car, who carried the furious squiggles in his mind, had not just been strolling past—he was standing somewhere out there in the dark, watching this house.
    Without putting any more lights on Davy stole into the bathroom, shut the door, and eased the curtains open. Under the pale glare of the streetlamps the scene looked normal, all shades of gray and black. There was no one about.
    Deliberately he relaxed and allowed a picture to form. It was the house again. The downstairs window shattered, then flared with an explosion. All the lights went out, but a searchlight cut a white staring circle in the blackness, with the front door as its center. Dad rushed out, shouting, and was gunned down. The same happened to a woman and two children, real people but not anybody Davy knew. Then the picture was wiped away and there was the fawny yellow blank, but before the whirling squiggles could rush in, that too was wiped away, and the picture of the house came clear again, dark against the night sky with its two blazing windows. Davy tried not to bother with the explosion and the corpses, but to look where things like the gate and the lampposts were. Then he pushed the picture out of his mind again and studied the same things in the real world; he decided that whoever it was was standing farther off than he had thought, in the shadow of the carport of the empty house one down on the other side of the road. Quietly he went down and locked and bolted the back door and checked the downstairs windows. He couldn’t do the living room windows without making Penny ask questions, and Mum and Dad would want to come in through the front door.
    While he was doing this, he found that the pressure on his mind was much less at the back of the house, so he took his homework into Mum’s room and finished it there, very quickly and badly.
    After that he watched from the bathroom window for twenty minutes, but saw nothing outside his mind. Inside there were the same pictures over and over again, either the house being attacked or the furious squiggles. Only twice was there anything else: The first time it was a man in a coverall huddled sideways on a muddy path, with a booted foot kicking fiercely at him. This had the clear feel of something that had actually happened and was now being remembered. The other thing was very vague and strange, a dark gray rounded mass, veined here and there with white. It looked, compared with everything else, cool and peaceful, but it seemed to have less meaning even than the squiggles.
    Penny had switched off the TV.
    â€œWhat was it?” said Davy.
    â€œA documentary about Bolivia.”
    â€œWhat about the other channel?”
    â€œHuh. This is do-you-good night. It’s all about prisons.”
    â€œOh, Lord! I’ll try that.”
    â€œIn that case I’m going to bed.”
    â€œNot for a minute, Pen.”
    â€œI’m not going to sit up … Are you all right? You look awful.”
    â€œI’m all right.”
    â€œNo, you aren’t. You’d better go to bed.”
    â€œWhen they come home. I’m not ill. It’s …”
    â€œSomething to do with your gift?”
    â€œUng.”
    â€œI don’t want to know then. But I’ll sit up and hold your hand.”
    â€œThanks.”
    The TV was a way of keeping the door of his mind shut, something to wedge against it so that the heavy shoulder outside could not thrust it open and flood him with hideous imaginings. He watched men sitting dully in cells, or moving dully down