Dawn of Fear Read Online Free

Peter, Derek, and Geoffrey referred to them formally as the Children from the White Road. The two groups had never clashed, but they avoided one another. The invisible gang boundary ran across the near end of the White Road, and the Everett Avenue boys stayed on their own side of it, in Everett Avenue itself and the Ditch. The Children from the White Road seldom trespassed there, but remained in unseen haunts of their own.
    Derek turned right, past the Robinsons’ front wall, into the Ditch. None of them had ever thought of it as anything but a natural feature of the landscape; it had been there as long as they had, and that was forever. To anyone else, no doubt, it was obviously the beginnings of a road, because of its width, stretching between the two solid creosoted fences of the Robinsons’ and the Twyfords’ house just beyond, and because of the eight-foot-deep central trench dug to take pipes that had never arrived. But for the boys, the Ditch had no purpose but their
own. The pipe-trench had widened over the years into a miniature valley, with a path on either side running precariously along the ridges cast up when the earth had first been dug out; hardly earth, really, but orange-brown clay. In summer it hardened into a brick-like substance reamed by cracks and fissures, cloudy with orange dust; but now, in spring, it was soft and muddy, lush with long green grass everywhere but in the paths.
    Derek knew the pattern of each path as he knew the puddles of the road; he could have walked blindfolded along either and still dodged the flat orange patches of mud and trodden accurately on the clumps of grass. But he balanced his way along one edge now on his toes, playing tightrope walker, until he came to the place they had chosen for their camp. It was part of the Ditch wall that was clear of grass. They had begun to dig there, a little, but they had never yet really reached the point of deciding what the camp should be like. So far, it had mostly been talk, and the only thing properly dug, and that very small, was the secret hole.
    Derek slipped his hand into the narrow gap cut into the clay wall, masked by a clump of grass. They were still there. He pulled out the rusted, broken spade-stump purloined from his father’s trashcan, the blowpipe, and the darts. The spade was pretty useful; it was their only real digging tool, even though it hadn’t much of a handle left. There was less use for the blowpipe and darts; none at all really, because even if there had been anything to
fire the darts at, the blowpipe would not yet propel them more than a couple of feet. That was his fault. He was the dart-maker; more for the pleasure of the making than for any effect they had. Still you never knew; one day they would work. He fingered a dart now critically. That was a good one: smooth and tough.
    Peter and Geoff came whooping toward him along the narrow path. He snatched up the blowpipe hastily and fitted the dart into one end. “Halt! Who goes there!”
    â€œFriends,” Geoffrey yelled.
    â€œProve it.”
    â€œDon’t be so daft. You know we are.”
    â€œAll right then, if you can’t prove it—” He put the blowpipe to his lips and blew mightily, tightening his lips in the spitting position that his father had taught him as the only way to blow a trumpet or fire a peashooter. He aimed at their feet, but he need hardly have bothered; the dart, as usual, did nothing but curve in a small sad arc as it fell weakly from the end of the pipe. He glared at it, wondering for the hundredth time how natives managed in jungles; and the others jeered.
    â€œYou spend ages making those things,” Peter said, rubbing the scar on his nose where he had fallen off the back of a truck the year before, “and they never work.”
    â€œI don’t care. They’ll work one day. Hey!” Derek grabbed at Geoffrey, who had retrieved the fallen dart and was trying to take it to