Dawn of Fear Read Online Free Page A

pieces.
    â€œAll right, all right, keep your shirt on. What you really
need is a deadly poison on the point; then it wouldn’t have to do more than just scratch someone.” He looked around at the mud and long grass. “What’s poisonous? Deadly nightshade, laburnum pods...”
    â€œThose squishy round white berries at the end of the road.”
    â€œSnowballs, they’re called.”
    â€œIt’s too early for any of those things anyway,” Peter said. He pulled up one of his long gray socks, found it covered in mud, and pushed it down again. “Use dandelion milk—that’s just as good. The white stuff that comes out of the stalks.”
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    â€œThat’s not poisonous,” Geoff said loftily, making his chicken face.
    â€œBet you it is.” Peter pushed his way through the long grass at the bottom of the Ditch, spraying rainwater over his legs and trousers, and pulled a handful of flower stalks from a clump of dandelions. They grew tall there; the picked stalks drooped long, white-green and naked. “Hey,” he said to Derek, “rub the darts on them,” and together they wetted the sharp wooden points with the white sap that welled in circles from the hollow juicy stems. They took exaggerated care to keep it from their fingers.
    â€œWouldn’t hurt a fly, that stuff,” Geoffrey said persistently, with a shade less conviction than before. “You’re dippy.”
    â€œAll right, if you’re so clever, then you eat some!” Peter lunged at him with the dandelion stalks; Geoff scrambled just in time up the muddy slope to the side of the Ditch, and they made off in a yelling chase along the muddy path, all the way to where the high wire fence, level with the end of the Robinsons’ back garden, cut straight across the Ditch and barred their way. Then slithering down and up again they went, and back along the path on the opposite side. With his pipe and darts stowed safely back in the secret hole, Derek contemplated
jumping across to upset Geoffrey in flight, but decided against it. Not fair, really. Too muddy, anyway.
    â€œAh, leave him be, Pete,” he called. “It’s too wet.” Then as they jumped back down to a laughing halt, “He knows it is poisonous anyway, or he wouldn’t have run.”
    â€œWell,” Geoff said. “Whose idea was it to put stuff on the darts in the first place?”
    He was always like that, Derek thought: he could always twist things around so that even when he was in the wrong, he made it look as though he were in the right. He wouldn’t ever be like other people, wouldn’t ever admit he could be soft, too. That was the way Geoff was, always wriggling around things. He wasn’t sure whether he admired it as persistence or scorned it as cheating.
    â€œWant to dig?” he said at large, fingering the spade.
    â€œNo—too sticky,” Peter said. “Be like toffee. That’s why I didn’t bring the boxes up yet.”
    â€œWhat shall we do, then?”
    â€œPlan the camp.”
    â€œWe’re always planning it.”
    â€œNot properly. We haven’t drawn a plan.”
    Peter seized a piece of stick from the Ditch bottom and squatted down, making marks on the mud. “Here’s the side of the Ditch, see, and there’s the hole we dug. And we want the walls to come out here, like this—” The stick, which was frail and rotted, broke as he dug it into the mud.
    â€œThat’s no good. Why not make proper marks, in the place we’re going to do the digging?” said Geoff.
    The sense of this was unanswerable; yet Peter, halted in first spate, seemed to be casting about for objections. Derek felt the same reluctance; after all the planning was fun, the planning was always the best part of anything, to be savored, not to be cut short. He said, “They wouldn’t last. The rain would wash them