Dawn of Fear (10 page)

“Are you really sure it's dead?” Derek looked again at the small black heap.

Tom picked it up. The body, as it suddenly became, was stiff and very small in his large hand. “Quite sure,” he said. “Come on, then. Dig a hole. Over here.”

They buried the cat close to the tall fence and the bramble thicket, in a spot where no one normally would walk; they had first to dig out several hummocks of grass and a great many tough, stringy roots, and when they had finished, they replaced the grass so that even they had difficulty in seeing the place. Derek wondered whether they should not have had some sort of ceremonial, but hadn't
the nerve to say so. It was Peter who provided a kind of substitute: he stamped down the grass with his heel, stepped back, and said bitterly, “At least now maybe they'll leave the poor thing in peace.”

“We ought to challenge them to a battle,” Geoffrey said.

“I'll tell you what we'll do,” said Tom. He smoothed a patch of earth with his foot, took a piece of Derek's broken blowpipe, and drew some lines. “You wouldn't know this,” he said, “because you live in the wrong bit of the road. But this line here, see, is the end of the back gardens of the houses on the White Road. And here at this end of it, the line going off at a right angle, is the end of my back garden. Our back fence overlooks their back fences, and from my bedroom window I can see whatever's going on in their back gardens. And all this space on the other side of the fences, between the houses and the railway line, is the field where the anti-aircraft camp is.”

They stirred with interest. “I never knew that,” Peter said.

“Well, you can't see much because the field's full of trees and bushes, and anyway the camp's a fair way off in the middle of it and all wired off. Nobody can get near it. Actually nobody's supposed to even go in the field at all—there are notices all over—but those White Road kids go there all the time.”

“I never really thought where they went apart from the road,” Derek said. “I thought it was just their own
gardens.” Now that he came to think about it, he realized he had never wondered very much about the Children from the White Road at all.

“Well, listen anyway,” Tom said. “The point is this. The Wiggs garden is about halfway up the White Road, and their back fence has been all broken down for ages. It leans right down to the ground in the middle, and they can just walk out into the field over it. Old man Wiggs is away half the time driving his truck, and anyway he's a lazy old bugger and he's never done anything to mend the fence. So the Wiggs boys have propped up one bit of it and turned it into a kind of hut, and they use that as their base. All the White Road kids do. It's their camp, if you like. Just the same as yours. Or the same as yours would have been. They keep all kinds of stuff in there; I've watched them from the top window sometimes. And they have an old tarpaulin over the bit of the fence that makes their roof. I don't know where that came from; I dare say they pinched it from someone.”

Geoffrey said enviously, “It sounds a jolly good way of making a camp.”

Peter looked down at Tom's drawing and rubbed the scar on his nose. “You mean, if they've wrecked our camp, then we could wreck theirs?”

Derek made an uneasy sound of protest and felt ashamed of it, but still uneasy.

Tom glanced at him. “Well,” he said noncommittally, “it's worth thinking about.”

“We couldn't just sneak in when they weren't there and knock it down,” Derek said. “I mean, that wouldn't be fair.”

“I don't see why not,” said Geoffrey. “That's just what they did to us.”

“I know they did.” Derek fidgeted, trying to find words. “But that's why. I mean, they're sneaky and we aren't. I mean, we don't pinch other people's things, like Pete's six-shooter, and drown cats just for fun. So we have to do something different.”

Peter said reasonably, “Well, we can't attack their camp when they're in it. That would be just as hopeless as trying to fight them anywhere else.”

“Yes,” Tom said. “But there are all sorts of ways of attacking. You don't always have to just run up and jump on someone. They're always going out from their camp into the big field. We could ambush them on their way back.”

“Ambush?”

“I told you there were lots of trees. Lots of cover. They'd never see us until it was too late.”

“Mud-balls,” said Geoffrey.

“What?” said Tom.

“Mud-balls.” Geoffrey looked at the other two, and they looked at him, and each of them stooped to the trampled wall of their lost camp and picked up a double handful of red-brown sticky mud and shaped it into a ball.

“Watch,” Peter said. He swung back his arm, and the mud-ball went sailing heavily through the air to the back fence of the house on the other side of the Ditch, where it exploded in a dull squelch to leave a flattened muddy patch on the dark wood. Derek and Geoffrey sent theirs flying after it, and there were three orange patches messily scarring the wood.

“We had a mud-ball fight once, in the other bit of the Ditch,” Derek said in happy remembering. “It was smashing. But we all got into such a row that we've never been able to do it again. You end up in an awful mess.”

“I can imagine,” Tom said. He dug his fingers into the mud of the Ditch and looked at it thoughtfully. “Clay. Sticky. Funny, there isn't any of it anywhere else around here. The soil in our garden is more like gravel. It is in the big field, too, and up there.” He gestured widely at the rows of seedlings in the cabbage field and the dark turned earth.

“So it is in our garden,” said Derek. “And on the allotments. My dad says the Ditch is clay because they went so deep when it was first dug. He says there's a layer of clay down underneath everything around here, but that you never see it usually because it's all covered up with other sorts of earth. And I asked Mrs. Wilson once in geography, and she said so, too.”

“Mud-balls,” Tom said. He grinned at them. “How do you think the Wiggs kids would look covered in mud?”

“They wouldn't half get into trouble,” Geoffrey said.

Peter said, with rising enthusiasm, “We could make lots of mud-balls here, hundreds of them, and take them up to your field.”

“And have stacks of them behind a tree,” Derek said.

“And ambush them.”

“When they'd be coming back to their camp to go home for tea or something—all of a sudden—splat!”

“And their camp, too. Everything all covered with mud.”

Geoffrey said hopefully, “Tomorrow? It's Easter holiday this week.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Tom said.

7

T
HEY BEGAN
their preparations the next morning and went on for most of the day. After some discussion of their own past mud fight, they had decided that it would be better not to make the mud-balls in advance, but to transport a stock of clay ready to be molded into ammunition on the spot. If you made mud-balls too soon, they reminded one another, they would either ooze into flat nothings or dry out enough to break into useless bits. The business of carrying clay from the Ditch to the battlefield was a problem, but only until Tom miraculously produced a wheelbarrow from his garden shed. They wondered what his mother would say, but they had seen her going down the road early in the morning, carrying a shopping bag, and they did not ask. In any case, one did not ask Tommy Hicks about things; he was the man of his house.

It was a gray day again, and for most of the morning
few people were visible in the road. They filled the wheelbarrow laboriously with mud three times, digging it from their old original campsite in the front half of the Ditch and wheeling it up Everett Avenue to the front gate of Tom's house. They peered carefully each time down into the White Road as they passed, but there was no sign at all of the Wiggs boys and their gang.

“They're back there in their camp,” Peter said.

Geoffrey said, giggling nervously, “They wouldn't be if they knew.”

The arrival of the wheelbarrow was the most nerve-twitching moment each time. Tom would be waiting for them in his front garden, take it from them, and disappear. He said he had a way from his garden to what he called the point of ambush. They had no idea what he meant, but they waited quietly in his garden until he came back again with the empty barrow and the spade, which he had provided, at the same time.

Peter said once, “Don't you think people must be wondering what we're doing?”

“If anybody asks,” said Tom, “I'm just taking a bit of earth from the Ditch to put in the garden, and you're helping me.”

“There's nobody about anyway,” Derek said easily, though he knew he was the most nervous of them all.

“Isn't there any way we could bring it without anyone seeing?”

Tom said, “The only other way is the way the White
Road kids must have gone when they went to raid your camp.”

They stared at him. After a moment Peter said, “Isn't that nutty? We never even wondered. How could they have got there? They couldn't just have come up straight through the Ditch from Everett, because the big fence cuts across it between the ends of the back gardens.”

“That was why we thought it was a good place for a camp in the beginning,” Derek said gloomily.

“I worked it out,” Tom said. “I reckon they just came up to the end of Everett, outside my house, and over the gate into the big field and around the backs of the Everett Avenue houses through the cabbages. Easy. All they had to do was make sure none of the soldiers happened to be watching them.”

They took two more loads across the road, and when the last was delivered, Tom took them with him to see the point of ambush. He showed them a break in his own back garden fence, and beyond it, in the big tree-scattered field that they had never seen before, a thicket of scrub and bushes in the middle of which they could just make out a reddish-brown glimmer that was the heap of mud from the Ditch. It was clear that the heap could only be visible from where they stood; the thicket seemed to curve toward them in a sort of arc, and the thick tangle of branches and trunks would easily shield anything within the arc from being seen by even the keenest eyes looking from the other side.

Derek saw this and approved it, but at the same time he reflected with a faint sinking feeling that this ideal thicket seemed to be a very long way from Tom's garden fence. To reach it, they would have to cross a lot of open field. He looked across to the left at the back fences of the houses of the White Road, lined there with the untidy, unbeautiful, somehow private look that the backs of houses always have. When he found the fence that was bent downward, a break in the long line, and must therefore belong to the Wiggs house, he thought that it seemed very likely indeed that the Wiggs gang could, if they were looking, have an easy view of anyone crossing the field from Tom's house to the curving thicket.

He said, “Are you sure you really got it all over there without them seeing you? I mean with the wheelbarrow and all, weren't you awfully easy for them to spot from over there?”

Tommy Hicks grinned. “You'd be surprised,” he said. “I used to get across this field every day without being seen when I was a kid your age, and there's a lot more cover now than there was then. Now listen. The first bit is the most difficult, after you've got out through the fence into the field. Nobody can see you while you're actually getting out, because the top corner of our garden blocks the view, but after that you have to dart very quickly for a yard or two to get to the first bit of cover. That is, you have to dart, run for it, if you're my size, but four people running across one after the other would be
a bit of a risk, and I reckon you three are small enough to do it better by wriggling through the grass. Indian style. Are you good at that?”

“Course,” they said, not without pride.

He looked from one to another of them and nodded seriously, though Derek had the feeling he would have preferred to be laughing at them. Or perhaps not; he was obviously enjoying all of this quite as much as they were.

“Well,” Tom said. “I'll go first. This is a practice run. Derek, you come after me. Then Geoff, then Pete. We go from one bit of cover to the next, and each of you must watch the one in front of him very carefully to see where he goes to and how he does it. And copy it exactly. Specially you, Derek, because you'll be watching me and sending back what I do, and I'm the only one who knows the way. You watch me get to the first cover, and then the second, and when I'm there, you leave here for the first. Then when I see you're at the first, I leave the second for the third, and when I'm there, you leave for the second. And so on. The same for all of you. All right? That means that each of us is always one stage away from the one in front. It sounds a bit slow, but there isn't enough room behind each bit of cover for more than one person, so the first one has to leave it before the next one gets there.”

“Um,” Geoffrey said doubtfully.

“Oh, come on,” Pete said. “That's not hard.”

“Sounds awful complicated.”

“Only the first time,” Tom said. “Try it anyway. All right? Here we go then.”

He squeezed out through the gap in the planks and crouched at the other side of the fence; the others stood back so that Derek had a clear view of him. The way was a surprise from the beginning; Tom slipped suddenly sideways, to the right, as if he were making not for the thicket but almost in the opposite direction. Derek saw him run, crouching low, and pause beside a bush that was not much bigger than he was himself—“That's the first piece of cover,” he thought—and then drop to his hands and knees and crawl rapidly through the long grass to a group of three small trees. Once he was there, they could no longer see him, but it was obviously the second stage.