The Gift by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

long corridors, or working dully in the workshops. Sometimes they chatted, or laughed, but there was a deadness about the way they moved. At first Davy thought that this was something to do with the pictures being filmed so that you never saw any of the prisoners’ faces, but then he decided it was real. To be in prison was a sort of being dead.
    â€œYou don’t really want to watch this,” sighed Penny. “I’ll play you racing demon. I’ll have the pack that hasn’t got the five of spades missing.”
    It wasn’t quite such an effective wedge as TV, but it worked well enough till Mum and Dad came back, a little tight but in good tempers and very lovey-dovey. Davy watched Dad lock and bolt the door, and sighed with relief.
    But when he went up to bed, he found he could not begin to drowse without the pictures flooding through his mind again. He turned on his light and read Greenmantle for a while. Then he decided that the watcher might simply be waiting till the last light went out, so he switched it off, put on his sweater and trousers over his pajamas, drew the curtains open, and watched the street, standing well back from the window so that the streetlamp would not reflect from his face. The pictures came more weakly and confusedly now, as though the watcher himself were sleepy, but the fragments Davy saw were much the same except that the woman who ran out of the house was now Mum.
    After about twenty minutes the darkness under the carport moved. Davy tensed for a dash to Mum’s room, to shout to Dad that the house was being attacked; but the man who came down the driveway of the empty house swung off straight along the sidewalk. He was wearing a hat, so his face was in shadow; and the angle from the bedroom window made it hard to judge his height—about five foot six? Anyway, not tall. But big. Though his short overcoat was padded at the shoulders, even so Davy could see that he was really very broad across the back. The coat made him look like a soldier, and his hair seemed to be cut quite short, too.
    But there was one thing, even in that tricky light, that made Davy sure he would know the man again: He walked with a curious, springy, balanced step, as though he had an extra set of muscles in his legs which made him walk with that tense wariness, poised, like a tennis player waiting for the serve or a hunter in the jungle ready for the spring of the tiger. Watching that walk, Davy decided that the man’s name was Wolf. It would be easier to think about him if he had a name.
    A minute later, well down the road, a car started. Its engine note muttered into the distance. Davy felt his way into bed, relishing the dreamless dark, and soon was deep asleep.
    He didn’t see Wolf again for more than a month.
    It was rather a good month. Davy played regularly in the school Under Fifteen side; he joined a group of six boys who were making an SF film about the mice in the biology lab suddenly becoming superintelligent; Ted Kauffman discovered an old BSA bike at a dump, and Davy helped him drag it home and start trying to repair it. And at home Dad eased up a bit, back to what he’d been before the bad week when Wolf was about.
    â€œI think it might be because he’s actually doing a job he’s quite good at,” said Penny.
    â€œHe’d say that anyway—being good at it, I mean.”
    â€œI’m not talking about what he says. But he really is pretty clever about people. And this job seems to be mostly that—interviewing them, taking them on, sending them off to the places they’re needed.”
    â€œAt least he’d know all the dodges for interviews,” said Davy. “He’s flanneled his way through enough of his own.”
    â€œYou’ve got to stop talking like that,” said Penny seriously. “Stop thinking like that, even. I mean, we’ve got a chance of his being the sort of father other people have. We