Dawn of Fear (13 page)

In an instant Geoffrey was throwing, too, and their speed worked. At the sound of the shouting, the besiegers assumed they had all been seen, and they scrambled up out of their cover and ran headlong into the barrage.

“Tom!” Derek shrieked, and went on throwing. There were five of them coming, running, ducking and dodging, and the middle figure of the five and the first to have risen to his feet was big Johnny Wiggs, hurtling toward them
and looking twice as big as Tom and as menacing as a runaway tank. Instinctively Derek used him as a target, and one mud-ball—he never knew whether it was his own or Geoff's—caught Johnny Wiggs on the side of the chin and sent him staggering comically backward with splashes of mud all over his face and shirt. The other boys, smaller, two of them smaller even than Derek and Geoff, paused as they glimpsed his stumbling and looked first at him and then ahead at the thicket. The pause was enough for Derek and Geoffrey, and now Peter joining them as well, to take better aim and send them, too, ducking to the ground. So the first charge had been stopped, even though the chargers were nearer now than they had been before.

But not for long; for not more than the few seconds in which Peter and Derek and Geoffrey took breath and grinned at one another in excitement and triumph. Johnny Wiggs scrambled to his feet, and with him his followers, and though the barrage from the thicket began hastily again, there is only so much that a few thrown mud-balls can do to stop five charging boys, especially when only three boys are doing the throwing. Tom was still busy behind them in the thicket, trying to keep off the first two attackers, who were coming again now, with wary arms crooked over their charging heads so that even the most accurate mud-ball could do very little to stop them at all.

Still, as Derek happily noticed in the moment before battle broke loose, they were all very muddy indeed.

Then the charge hit the thicket, and the besiegers were on top of the ambushers, and Derek was rolling on the ground twisting wildly to keep off the flailing form of David Wiggs, barely recognizable through the great orange smear of clay across one side of his face. Dimly through the confusion he was aware that two largish boys were trying to pin Pete to the ground, and two smaller ones thumping at a wriggling Geoff, and that big Johnny Wiggs was standing in the midst of it all glaring down at them with both his fists clenched. Then David Wiggs's elbow poked Derek in the eye, and the pain of it was so sudden and infuriating that he gave a great jerk upward and in a wrathful instant found himself sitting on David Wiggs's chest, bringing his knees forward to pin the flapping elbows down.

David Wiggs said furiously and indistinctly, “Get off!” and brought his legs up to kick at Derek's back; but it was another pair of hands that pulled Derek off, as one of the boys attacking Pete left off to come to the rescue. And then the whole thrashing grunting confusion began again, and all of it far nastier than any fight Derek and Peter and Geoff had ever had among themselves, because each of the members of this battle was very angry and wrought-up, and each of them had a grievance that he was remembering with every twist and punch. It was not a very clear remembering, but the grievance was nonetheless there. If Derek had ever been excited enough to enjoy it at the beginning, he was not enjoying it a very few seconds
after it had begun, and even less when it had been going on its scrambling, battering way for longer than that.

Somebody sat down hard on his legs, to join the somebody else who seemed to be sitting on his shoulders, and he grunted into the grass. All around it was now a remarkably silent fight, lacking any of the war whoops and yells with which it had begun. They all seemed to be scrambling around and puffing and blowing without saying anything very much.

But he heard himself say something then, or rather shout in wordless pain, as the boy who had sat on his legs grabbed hold of one of his feet and twisted it hard so that it really hurt. And then Pete was there, shoving aside one assailant and punching angrily at the other.

“Get up, Derry, quick!”

He wriggled up and out, but there was no getting away because the two of them were at Pete now; so then in a moment the four bodies, Peter and he and the two White Road boys, with another hovering, were twisting and wrestling to and fro on the damp spring grass, and writhing away from the hawthorn branches that reached out to scratch at their skin.

And so it might perhaps have gone on indefinitely, in a long, endless grubby confusion, if one or two or all of them had not glanced up out of their wrestling and seen Tom.

Derek only knew that somehow they all fell away from one another as if there had been a signal, and lay there panting and looking across at the wide clear patch of grass beside the thicket. He saw Geoff propped up on his elbows watching, too, and David Wiggs raising his head where he lay beside him, and two other White Road boys standing close by loose-armed and still. And over in the open space, Tommy Hicks was standing facing Johnny Wiggs, the two of them alone.

 

 

They were both slightly crouched, with arms crooked and ready, like wrestlers waiting to spring. They were both disheveled and panting and spattered with clay, and there was no knowing whether all this came from the general rough-and-tumble or whether they had already been fighting there alone, the two of them. But that wasn't it, Derek thought, watching them. This was something about to happen. This was the bomb about to go off. His shoulders twitched in a sudden involuntary shiver, and he felt a prickling in his neck. But he could not keep his eyes off the wire-taut figures of the two big boys. None of them could. Wherever they stood or sat or lay, they were paralyzed into an audience, frozen in expectation and a kind of fear.

And then the bomb did go off. Johnny Wiggs lunged sideways at Tom and brought his back fist swinging forward, and Tom dodged so that the fist hit his arm, and dived with the same arm stretched out and pulled Johnny Wiggs off balance and down to the ground, where they rolled over and over in a horrible, furious confusion of flailing arms and kicking legs. Then somehow they were up again, weaving silently about in the same ominous pause as before. And then the heads came down and the arms swung, and Derek winced as he heard a muffled thump from Johnny Wiggs's fist connecting with part of Tom, and he ducked his head and shook it and felt sick. The fight went on, and they sat mesmerized, and as it went on, it grew worse and more bitter and malevolent, and Derek knew that each of the watching boys, both friend and enemy, felt as he did himself: caught up in a great unmanageable fear at the sight and sound of a fighting that was not like their own kind
of fighting at all, but something much older and bigger and with emotions behind it of a kind they did not know. These two big boys were engaged in something that made him suddenly feel very small. He could hardly bear to look at their faces, each now and then visible for a flaring second out of the whirl of angry limbs or the wary, watchful circling that punctuated the scuffling bursts. The look on these faces was not a look he had ever seen on the face of any boy he had ever fought. He had glimpsed, often enough, plain anger and the vengeful concentration of wanting to hurt, but he had never seen this. This was something different. Tom Hicks and Johnny Wiggs these two still were, but their faces had changed utterly; they were twisted up in some vast adult emotion as if they were fighting some fight that was not about themselves only, but about far bigger things. There was the sneer of real hatred on the faces. He had never seen hating before. He remembered Pete saying that the two had often fought, but even so, this looked like more than a kind of climax to years of enmity; almost as if the whole world had suddenly divided into two and the two halves were here flinging themselves one against the other.

They were both big boys, and neither was showing any sign of tiring. The fight seemed to go on and on, the punching and the wrestling and the rolling over and around, and the boys watching began gradually to murmur like trees in the wind. Gazing, obsessed with the
need for one or the other to win, they began to stir uneasily as their own champion was rocked by a blow, or to murmur in support if he landed a punch or twisted the other boy out of range; and listening, Derek found these sounds even nastier than the silence had been, and the more so because he knew he was making them himself.

It was Johnny Wiggs who brought the end of it, and he did it by breaking the silence: the silence that had seemed magical, a spell cast in such a way that so long as no sound was made, except a gasp or a wordless grunt, the fight would go on and on without end. Johnny Wiggs had begun to look as though he were winning; in their last long scuffle he had managed to hold Tom pinned down helplessly long enough to thump at him viciously several times and to send the breath gasping out of him and begin a trickle of blood from his nose. But at the last moment Tom had curved his back and given a great jerk, and tumbled Johnny Wiggs sideways into a particularly thorny bramble clump; and then they were apart again and stumbling, panting, to their feet.

They stood a yard or two apart, glaring, ready; but Tom was clearly winded by the last scuffle and swaying where he stood. Johnny Wiggs clenched his fists and bobbed lightly on the balls of his feet and laughed jeeringly at Tom with the confidence of the one who was about to win.

“Hey, sailor boy,” he said softly. “Running out of steam, sailor boy? You're not much good, are you, sailor
boy, not without your sailor suit? Need a nice uniform like Daddy's to prove what a brave boy you are.”

In the group watching, David Wiggs laughed loudly, and his cronies sniggered; Derek felt his cheeks grow suddenly hot and saw Pete jump angrily to his feet. But before either of them moved, Tom moved, did more than move. He leaped at Johnny Wiggs with his mouth clenched tight and his eyes open very wide, and he seemed to shake him as a cat shakes a new-caught mouse before he hit him, once, very hard and very fast. Nobody saw the fist move or even land, but they heard a horrible clicking sound as Johnny Wiggs's jaw rammed shut, and they saw Tom's arm drop down, and Johnny Wiggs stagger for a moment and suddenly fall down in a heap on the ground.

Tom stood where he was, looking down, breathing heavily, and his face relaxed and smoothed itself out so that for the first time since the fight had begun, he looked like himself again. The boys from the White Road were murmuring like bees around Johnny Wiggs's prostrate form. Peter and Derek and Geoffrey hovered, fascinated and a little scared, behind them, and after a moment Tom shook his head as if to dislodge something from the top of it and came and stood over the group and pulled two of the boys aside. But at the same moment Johnny Wiggs groaned and put out an arm and pushed at the ground and sat up, rubbing his chin.

Perhaps if the two boys had spoken, or even looked at one another, it would have broken the spell. Perhaps it
would have taken away the huge and awful strangeness of the mood that still hung over them all: the sense of something unfamiliar and frightening and impossible to understand. Perhaps. But before Johnny Wiggs could even raise his head and look up at Tom, before anyone could do anything, the silence and the sunshine and the whole spring day fell to bits, and out of nowhere into the sky there rose the thin climbing, growing wail of the siren that meant an air raid. Up in its wailing curve of distorted music it went, gathering strength as the note went higher, until it was shrieking its loudest along the waving line,
whooo—ooo—whoooo—ooo,
up, down, up, down, filling the sky, filling the ears, filling the whole world. And as Derek listened to it and flinched beneath it, he was afraid, and he knew he had never been afraid in this way in his life before.

He looked at the others, all the others who had been under the spell of the fighting, too, and he saw the same fear on every face.

He looked up at Tom, and Tom was looking at all three of them.

“Go home,” Tom said. “Go on, it's a raid; you'll have to. Over the gate at the top of Everett. Go on now, run.”

Everyone was scattering. Johnny Wiggs was up on his feet, shaking his head and rubbing the back of his neck, and with the White Road boys clustering around him, he began to move past the thicket toward the back of his house. Tom turned toward his own fence.

“He was smashing,” Derek said softly, even through the alarm buzzing in his head.

“Mmm,” Geoffrey said, and he meant it, but the noise of the siren was dissolving him. “Come on.”

Peter stood still and called, “Tom!”

Tom glanced back over his shoulder.

“You won,” Peter said.

Tom grinned at them and flapped both hands to wave them home. They turned to the gate of the field, and they found themselves face to face with David Wiggs. None of them had noticed that he was still standing there.

Nobody said anything. For a moment they stared. Then David Wiggs puckered his weaselly face and spat, viciously, at Peter's feet. And then he ran.