Read Online Silent Children by Ramsey Campbell - Free Book Online Page A

she would mind having both as a friend and a tenant, she no longer felt watched.

ELEVEN
    They had almost reached Shaun's when he shouted at Ian. "Our Crys wants to see in your house."
    "Wants to lie on the floor in the kitchen," Baz improvised at the top of his voice, "and stick her ear on it and listen to the worms."
    "Wants to see the kid's head come up out of your sink," yelled Stu.
    They were having to bellow because Shaun lived on the North Circular Road. Ian might have objected to how they nearly always ended up at Shaun's, where the traffic noise and the smell of petrol followed you into the house, if Shaun didn't have most of their good ideas. Baz stole a magazine from just inside a different Soho sex shop every weekend and hadn't been grabbed once, Stu had already dropped acid several times and said things like "Where's the fucking focus on this thing?" while he clutched at the sides of his head, but it was Shaun whose right cheek bore the scar from shoving his face through the glass of a bus shelter when he was twelve to show a gang he wasn't scared of anything they could do to him. "Let's show her," Ian hollered.
    A lorry several times the size of Shaun's house rattled the insecure glass of the windows as Shaun stabbed the lock with his key on a chain with a skull. Ian was first after him into the token hall, where they had to sidle past a bicycle with one wheel missing and some bits of the furniture Shaun's father kept attempting to build so that he would have another kind of job to try for. Baz heeled the door shut as they followed Shaun into the front room, where shabby chairs faced a television crowned with a video recorder and cable box. The furniture left space only for a plasterboard bar in one corner, where three bottles of spirits hung their heads on the wall. On top of the bar a quartet of crumpled empty cans of Skol guarded the corners of a car repair manual bristling with yellow slips of paper. The boys had hardly thrown themselves into a chair each as Shaun set about switching channels when his big sister Sharon appeared from the kitchen, pushing seven-year-old Crystal ahead of her. "Someone let her sit before she spills her juice," Sharon shrilled, and more directly to her brother "They haven't kept you back at school for once, then, so I needn't rush to work."
    "Don't know what you'd have to rush for. They must be hard up, anyone who'd pay to watch you wag your arse on a table."
    "Never mind joking someone who's got a paying job, Shaun Nolan." Since she'd ducked to pat her elaborately careless heap of blonde hair in front of the mirror above the electric fire, she appeared to be addressing herself. "You wait till you finish school and you're out of work like dad."
    "At least he doesn't have men looking up his arse, and I won't either."
    "We'll see, won't we. Turn that down and let her sit before she stains her dress, and you've got to stay in with her till mum gets home." Without waiting to see if any of this was likely to be obeyed, Sharon stalked out ahead of her hot spicy perfume and was gone with a slam.
    Baz shoved himself out of his chair, writhing his shoulders as if someone might need to be punched. "Sit here," he told Crystal. "We don't want you messing your pretty white dress."
    Stu looked at the ceiling and found nobody there to observe his grin. "Not yet," he added.
    "Just park your arse there, Crys, and finish that," Shaun said, flicking through the channels. Crackpot Jackpot flashed by, and Driving Me Crazy with its harassed clown of a driving instructor, and a talk show in which teenagers were screaming and bleeping at their weepy obese parents while an audience howled and catcalled to prove themselves normal. When Crystal glimpsed Hocus Focus and the camera that magicked its owner into the scenes of its old photographs, she perched on the vacated chair before Baz could reclaim it and began to wail. "Put it back on. Mum says you have to let me see my programmes."
    Shaun switched the