The Death House Read Free Page B

the covers. The house is drowsy warm during the day, whatever the weather is like outside. I yawn and my eyes close. I listen to the patter of rain against the old glass and let it drown out my thoughts as I drift off. I always sleep after lunch. This is my routine and the others never disturb me. I don’t want to socialise anyway. What’s the point?
    There is no point , I think as I sink into the darkness. And then, just before I drown into nothing, They say it makes your eyes bleed.
     
    I’m so fast asleep when the gong wakes me that for a moment I think I’m back in school and a fire alarm is going. I tumble off the bed and stare, confused for a few moments until the house settles into place around me. I blink, not yet ready to move, and the gong falls silent. My mouth is dry and I’m still too sleepy to be hungry but I know I have to go to tea. Matron and the nurses might seem to vanish for most of the day, hidden in the walls of the house somewhere, but I know they still account for each child and, like ghosts, they watch us quietly without us really seeing them. I stretch and then head to the door. Halfway down the stairs, I’m greeted by the rest coming the other way, filled with excited chattering that I’m not awake enough to really absorb.
    ‘We’ve got to stay in our room!’ Will says. ‘We’ve got to stay there until tea!’ He flies past with Louis at his heels and my tiredness vanishes into their energy and my own confusion. The stairs thump with feet heading to dorms, and for a moment the house is alive. The nurses have appeared, standing at each landing and watching silently as we hurry past them. Their eyes follow each of us, mentally ticking us off. They don’t smile, though, or offer any words of encouragement. That’s not what the nurses are here for.
    Ashley is the last up the stairs and by the time he closes the dorm door behind him, the rest of us are at the window.
    ‘Look,’ Louis says, so close his breath fogs the glass. ‘New people. That’s what it is.’
    There are two black vans outside, pulled up right by the doors to the house. Someone’s standing on the steps under a big umbrella and we all know it’s Matron. It was Matron who greeted us when we arrived. There had been more than two vans then, though. There had been a seemingly endless line of them, eight or nine stretching out back through the high electric solid gates at the end of the drive.
    ‘New kids,’ Will breathes. His eyes are wide. We’ve got used to our numbers going down, not up.
    ‘Can you see how many there are?’ Ashley asks, touching the glass with fingers green-streaked from the coloured pens. Even he is intrigued. Although the others find activities to fill their afternoons, they’re all as bored as I am.
    ‘Not many, by the looks of it,’ I say. Below, the door of one van slides back, but Matron has stepped forward with her umbrella and it’s blocking our limited view.
    ‘I wonder where they’ve come from?’ Louis asks, already thinking of his useless data survey.
    ‘They’ll be getting the talk in a minute, I guess,’ Will says. ‘Like we did.’
     
    His legs had been stiff when he climbed down from the van. The uniformed men who’d dragged him away from his screaming mother and strapped him into his seat had injected him with something as they sped away, and much of the trip passed in a haze. He hadn’t slept but neither had he felt like talking. For a while he thought he might be having a bad dream, but then the drug slowly wore off and although there were no windows to see out through, at one point he could feel the thrum of a bigger engine and the tilt of waves beneath them before the van started up again and cooler, fresher air crept in through the gaps around the door. He asked questions then but the men didn’t answer him, staring ahead as if he wasn’t there. In the end he gave up.
    The men didn’t climb down with him from the van, and as soon as he stood blinking on the