CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘Bleak!’ Quartermain barked into his telephone.
‘Cal?’
‘By God, they got the chess pieces that were sent from Italy the year Lincoln was shot. Shrewd damn idiots! Come here tonight. We must plan our counterattack. I’ll call Gray.’
‘Gray’s busy dying.’
‘Christ, he’s always dying! We’ll have to do it ourselves.’
‘Steady now, Cal. They’re just chess pieces.’
‘It’s what they signify, Bleak! This is a full rebellion.’
‘We’ll buy new chess pieces.’
‘Hell, I might as well be speaking to the dead. Just be here. I’ll call Gray and make him put off dying for one more day.’
Bleak laughed quietly.
‘Why don’t we just chuck all those Bolshevik boys into a pot, boil them down to essence of kid?’
‘So long, Bleak!’
He rang off and called Gray. The line was busy. He slammed the receiver down, picked it up, and tried again. Listening to the signal, he heard the tapping of tree branches on the window, faintly, far away.
My God, Quartermain thought, I can hear what he’s up to. That’s dying all right.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There was this old haunted house on the far edge of the ravine.
How did they know it was haunted?
Because they said so. Everyone knew it.
It had been there for close on to one hundred years and everybody said that while it wasn’t haunted during the day, at nighttime strange things happened there.
; It seemed a perfectly logical place for the boys to run, Doug leading them and Tom bringing up the rear, carrying their wild treasure, the chess pieces.
It was a grand place to hide because no one – except for a pack of wild boys – would dare come to a haunted house, even if it was full daytime.
The storm still raged and if anyone had looked close at the haunted house, chanced walking through the creaky old doors, down the musty old hallways, up even creakier old stairs, they would have found an attic full of old chairs, smelling of ancient bamboo furniture polish and full of boys with fresh faces who had climbed up in the downfall sounds of the storm, accompanied by intermittent cracks of lightning and thunderclaps of applause, the storm taking delight in its ability to make them climb faster and laugh louder as they leapt and settled, one by one, Indian style, in a circle on the floor.
Douglas pulled a candle stub, lit it, and stuffed it in an old glass candlestick holder. At last, from a burlap gunnysack, he pulled forth and set down, one by one, all the captured chess pieces, naming them for Charlie and Will and Tom and Bo and all the rest. He tossed them forth to settle, like dogs called to war.
‘Here’s you, Charlie.’ Lightning cracked.
‘Yeah!’
‘Here’s you, Willie.’ Thunder boomed.
‘Yeah!’
‘And you, Tom.’