Read Online Once by James Herbert - Free Book Online

and hard, hoping to make the bird take flight. It didn’t. The magpie did not even flinch. It continued to watch.
    For a few moments longer, man and bird stared at each other, and it was Thom who broke first. Eric’s waiting below, he reasoned, somewhat ruefully, and here am I trying to face down a bloody bird!
    He shook his head and passed beneath the magpie into the open doorway. The bird made a short hacking sound and Thom muttered, ‘Yeah, and fuck you too,’ as he began to descend the stairs.
    Of course, it was in his own imagination, but the next cry he heard sounded like a challenge, as if the magpie were warning him off its territory.
    Stupid, Thom, he admonished himself, very, very stupid.

NIGHT-TIME AT LITTLE BRACKEN
    HE HAD no idea what had roused him. A noise? He didn’t think so. His sleep had been deep and he was sure that only a sound as loud as thunder would have woken him. It had been a tiring day - the drive up from London, the walk through the woods and the re-exploration of the cottage, then later helping Eric unload his gear from the Jeep and chatting with the old gamekeeper over steaming mugs of coffee, reliving past times, chuckling at most of them, until the sun had turned golden and begun to slip away.
    For some reason, it had been a relief to find the gamekeeper had scarcely changed - perhaps it was because he represented a kind of constant in Thom’s own changing life. In fact, whenever Thom looked back on passing years, he always saw Eric as ‘old’, so that now the most that could be said was that the gamekeeper had ‘grown’ into his proper age: his abundant head of hair was overall white rather than a patchy grey as Thom remembered, his pale blue eyes, a
    little watery these days, rheumy even, squinting so much more that they were almost slits, and the lines and wrinkles of his face, especially the ‘crow’s feet’ that ran from the corners of his eyes to large, stick-out ears, had deepened, become more established rather than increased; thread-veins splayed his ruddy cheeks and hooked nose, and his thin lips were now a purplish colour with clefts at each side. Even Eric’s clothes appeared to be the same - baggy brown corduroy trousers held up by a thick leather belt, green tweed jacket with patched elbows and cuffs over woollen check shirt, knitted brown tie worn on all occasions, and green Wellington boots - although the major items must have worn out over the years to be replaced by exact copies which, due to the nature of his work, must have quickly worn in. Thom knew that Eric had been married once long ago and that his wife had died before Thom was born. He knew also that Eric was the last in a long line of Bracken gamekeepers, for he had no heir of his own, either male or female, to follow on the tradition.
    After Eric had left, he had eaten one of those sad prepacked dinner-for-ones cooked in the mini-microwave he’d brought up with him, followed by a bath, knees and shoulders well above the waterline in the short tub and, finally, he’d taken the weary climb up the creaking stairs to bed.
    If he had needed reminding he was still a convalescent, then the busy day had done the trick. When he’d pulled back the bedsheets he had been almost dead to the world. After taking his routine medication - aspirin to thin his blood, a mild and, by now, probably unnecessary dose of pravastatin to reduce his cholesterol level; he decided the diothiepin to help him sleep and ease any anxiety wasn’t needed (night-time was always bad for stroke victims, for death was always closest when others slept and shadows seemed to beckon the invalid), because he was too exhausted not to sleep - Thom had turned off the bedside
    lamp, laid his head on the pillow, and had been instantly out.
    If he had dreamed, he could not remember, for the sudden awakening had wiped the dream-slate clean.
    He regarded the underneath of the four-poster’s sagging canopy, the corner curtains and pelmets