Rook & Tooth and Claw Read Free Page B

toward the boiler-house door. He cut right through the middle of the basketball game, and smacked away the ball as it came bouncing toward him.
    He reached the boiler-house and peered inside. He could see the handrail and the concrete steps that led down to the boilers themselves; but the rest was in darkness. He called out, “Hallo! Is there anybody in there?”
    He listened, but there was no answer, only the deep whistling noise of the gas-fired burners. He called out again, and there was still no reply. He guessed that the man in the Elmer Gantry hat must have gone down there to steal something; or maybe to do some damage. There had been several incidents of former students coming back to take their revenge on the college which they thought had failed them. They had to blame somebody or something for their inability to make it in the world outside.
    Jim switched on the overhead lights and looked down over the railings. The boiler-room smelled strongly of heat and gas, but the two large grey-painted boilers appeared to be undamaged. No broken gauges; no pipes sabotaged; nothing like that. Jim was about to switch off the light and go back outside when he glimpsed something glistening in the shadows between the boilers. A black, viscous trickle making its way across the floor. It looked like an oil leak, quite a bad one. He went down the steps, his shoes chuffing on the concrete, approached the boilers and hunkered down so that he could see between them.
    The glistening fluid had crept so far across the floor that it was almost touching his toe. He dipped his finger into it and held it up; and it was then that he felt achilly, tingling feeling all the way down his back. This wasn’t an oil-leak. The liquid had looked black against the concrete, but on his fingertip it was dark, congealed crimson.
    Jim strained his eyes to see into the shadows. He fumbled in his pocket and found half a book of matches from the El Torito Mexican Restaurant. He struck one, and it flared up briefly, but it did little more than burn his thumb. He wished to hell he had a flashlight. There was
something
there – a dark, lumpy shape – but that was all that he could make out.
    With his knees bent, he edged his way between the boilers, feeling his way with his hands. It was so hot in there that sweat was dripping from his forehead before he had even managed to shuffle six feet forward, and his shirt was clinging to his back.
    He thought he heard a bubbling, groaning noise, and he stopped and listened, although the sound of the boilers was deafening.
    He struck another match, and shouted, “Anybody there? This is Mr Rook! Is there anybody there?”
    Again, that agonised, bubbling noise. It sounded like somebody trying to talk while they were drinking a glass of water.
    Jim inched forward a little more, and suddenly he was touching something heavy and warm and wet. He shouted out, “
Ah
!” and recoiled violently.
    Shaking, he struck another match; and used it to ignite the last few remaining matches in the book, to give himself a brief flare of bright light. Lying on the concrete in front of him was Elvin, recognisable only by his Dodgers T-shirt, plastered in blood. He had wounds everywhere: all over his arms, all over his face, all over his body, as if somebody had been determined to stabevery inch of him. They looked like the gaping mouths of a shoal of stranded fish.
    Sensing the heat from the matches, Elvin tried to lift his hand up. He let out another groaning sound; but it was the last gargling exhalation of air and blood from punctured lungs. As the matches burned down, and the light died, so Elvin died, too, and Jim was left in darkness, with the boilers roaring on either side of him.
    He took hold of Elvin’s sticky hand, and squeezed it, and whispered, “God be with you, Elvin. So goddamned young,” and that was all he could manage to say.

Chapter Two
    Lieutenant Harris knocked on the open classroom door, and stepped inside. He was