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

television off and aimed the control at his sister as though it might work for her too. "Shut that. Do it, bitch. Leave your drink if you aren't going to finish it or you won't get your surprise."
    The instant he stopped speaking Crystal's tears brought themselves to an end, reminding Ian of the girl he was expected to think of as some kind of sister. "What is it?" Crystal sniffed.
    "Wouldn't be a surprise then, would it? It's at Ian's."
    She downed half her blackcurrant juice so that its place in her plastic mug could be taken by a hollow gasp. "She said I can't go out."
    "Shar did, but she's not here. Now you have to do what I say or you'll never know what your surprise was going to be."
    She hadn't asked to visit Ian's house at all, and Ian might have been angry with Shaun for trying to deceive him, except that all four of them often said things the others were supposed either to know weren't entirely true or to find out soon enough. "It's special," he said. "It'll make you special."
    He knew that would get to her—it might have done so to him. He felt contempt for them both, a contempt that squashed his thoughts. When Crystal emptied her mug, daubing her mouth with purple juice, he grabbed her plump warm sticky hand for as long as it took to pull her out of the chair. "Wipe it," Shaun said in disgust, and Ian felt as if he were obeying as he rubbed his hand dry on his trousers while Crystal smeared her wrist with her mouth.
    The noise of the traffic swallowed the slam of the front door. The boys marched in single file across the road, Crystal in the middle of them with her hands over her ears to shut out the screech of brakes and furious blaring of horns, and into the park, a lot of green with some muddy water cutting through it, and kids walking home across it, and people taking their dogs for a shit. The slab on top of Ian's mind made his surroundings mean less than nothing to him, and sometimes he wondered if his friends felt that way too, not that he was about to ask. They crossed the park so fast that Crystal had very little breath to wail about how much further they were going, but when they reached the gates she stopped to look maltreated. "Hurry up," Shaun said, and when that didn't shift her, "or you won't see your new friend."
    "What friend?"
    "A special little girl," Ian offered, and felt a flicker of excitement reach beneath the slab as Shaun said "She wants to play with you."
    Not much was happening in the streets. Kids with keys were letting themselves in, and cartoons were uttering short bursts of words together with a good deal more noise beyond quite a few of the sets of net curtains, but otherwise the houses were keeping their occupants to themselves. The boys had hurried Crystal almost to Jericho Close when a white Astra, its back seat heaped with bags of food, cruised past them and stopped with a gnash of the handbrake. The driver's window slid down to extrude the grey curls and then the crimson-lipped determinedly tanned remainder of the head of Mrs. Lancing, who lived in the corner house. "Ian," she said.
    It wasn't a greeting so much as a summons. "What?" he just about responded.
    "Is that the little one who was making all the fuss outside your house the other day?"
    "No."
    "I hope you won't be upsetting her the way you did the other little girl."
    "Right."
    "What do you mean by that, Ian? Just you wait until I've finished speaking," Mrs. Lancing called after him. He grinned at hearing her voice rise only to find it hadn't quite enough breath, but he was even more pleased by how her comments must have improved his friends' opinion of him, though they couldn't question him in case that put Crystal off. Instead they followed him down Jericho Close to his house.
    Everyone but him stayed behind Crystal on the narrow path as he twisted the key in the lock. When he turned from pushing the door open, however, she had retreated a step and was tugging at her right-hand bunch of hair with one sticky fist.