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<h2>38</h2>
<p>Two levels below, Lorna heard the booming clatter. Jack said
something she couldn't make out and in her own mind she heard the
grating response. She shrank back from it, trying to close her mind
off against the mental onslaught. It was as if something had
reached inside her head, scoured her brain. Revulsion flooded
through her and she shuddered violently as a tide of nausea
swelled.</p>
<p>An appalling perception of wrongness washed over her and she bit
back the cry that almost blurted out.</p>
<p>Then from somewhere close by, a white hot flash of child-pain
came ripping through the mental barrier, so fierce and sharp it
shattered the images which were beginning to form in the dark in
front of her eyes. An augur of pure pain drilled into her shoulder,
twisting her body to the side and an involuntary gasp hissed
between her teeth.</p>
<p>It was as if her mind was being torn and stretched in every
direction. The boy's pain lanced through her, overlaying Jack's
horror and disgust, and beneath it all, scuttering like poison
scorpions, the malignant mind of the alien thing scratched and
grated. She fought against it, tried to ignore Jack's anguish, and
held on to the child's hurt, drawing it into herself, experiencing
its agony. It was like a light in the darkness, pure physical
sensation, a beacon she could orient by.</p>
<p>Up above, Jack shouted something, maybe a curse. His voice
shattered on the corrugated roof and reverberated across the wide
empty space.</p>
<p>Lorna closed her eyes and ignored the pain shrieking in her
back, concentrating on the source overhead. She found the ladder
where Jack had ascended to the next level, and clambered
upwards.</p>
<p>Off to the right, over her head, something hit a support pillar
with a massive thump that shook the entire roof and caused the
ladder to thrum under her fingers. Jack bawled incoherently again,
but she could not afford to listen. She reached the first level,
groped until she found the next set of rungs and climbed quickly,
blindly, drawn towards the blaring beacon of the boy's pain. At the
topmost level, where the roof slanted towards the west wall, she
turned away. Off to the right, something was moving fast, but away
from her. A light flickered briefly, a weak circle of luminescence.
Jack groaned aloud.</p>
<p>Lorna made it to the end of the gangway, letting the blast of
pain wash through her, feeling it intensify with every step.</p>
<p>Davy was hooked onto a twisted bracket, one foot dangling
limply, the other jittering with involuntary nervous motion. His
eyes were open, though she could not see them in the gloom. His
mind was awash with pain.</p>
<p>She came to the end of the skywalk and stopped at the retaining
barrier.</p>
<p>Six feet away from her, impaled on the stanchion, the boy hung
well out of her reach over the black emptiness.</p>
<p>He was too far away. Even if she swung out over the void, she
would never reach him. Despair and anger clawed with each other.
Lorna groped out along the wall, trying to find a beam or a spar
which would give her enough purchase to ease out over the drop and
drag the boy back to safety, but in the dark, her fingers only
rapped against the rusting metal sides of the hangar.</p>
<p>She pulled herself back, exhausted and defeated, and behind her
something sniggered. Lorna spun round. It crouched on the beam over
the walkway, a shadow inside blackness, a contorted thing, limbs
spread, each of them hooked onto a spar or a rod, oddly elongated,
strangely jointed. In a tumble of impressions she thought of an
insect, a reptile, a spindly crab, but she knew it was none of
these.</p>
<p>The thing sniggered again, a guttural gurgle of sound that
conveyed chilling glee and frightful contempt, and a sudden
terrible realisation broke on her.</p>
<p>It did not want Jack. It cared nothing for the boy. It had
tricked her.</p>
<p>The thing Blair Bryden had named the <em>Shrike</em> wanted only
one thing. It needed a warm place to stay, a hot, living place to
wait out the daylight hours. It had used the boy to bring Jack,
knowing that he would use her to find his nephew, and that's what
it wanted.</p>
<p><em>Step into my parlour.</em></p>
<p>The mental invasion made her recoil in revulsion. It was like a
rotting necrosis inside her skull. Behind her, Davy's pain blared.
The boy whimpered and his heel drummed against the steel wall, a
soft booming sound which twisted the hurt and made it scream. The
blast of agony was powerful enough to fade out, if only for a
moment, the foul touch of the fiendish thing hunched on the
cross-ties.</p>
<p>She shook her head, trying to negate the pain, attempting to
deny the knowledge of what the thing wanted. Lorna staggered
backwards until her back thumped against the safety rail.</p>
<p>"No!" The word blurted out of its own volition.</p>
<p>The faultline in her own mind, the one which had opened up on
the night she had dreamed of the terrible thing in cairn House, was
what it needed to get inside her, to invade and take her over. In
that instant of clarity, she sensed its own desperation. Its time
was short. Its human havens had been used up, were almost gone, and
it had nowhere else to go except back to where it came from, unless
it could invade her own mind.</p>
<p>Another image bloomed in her mind. She saw a place of
unfathomable depths, a place of dread cold and dark where scaled
things with spiked tails and gaping mouths filed with glass-shard
teeth roiled in their obscene legions. She sensed the reek of the
place and the barren emptiness, felt the hunger and the hate and
the overpowering radiation of pure evil. This was where it had come
from, she knew instantly, drawn from this festering abyss to a
world of life and plenty. It had feasted here, glutting itself on
the hot emotions of fear and despair, sucking the life-light from
the eyes of children. It had been called, by accident or design,
into the bodies of the people who had sat round the table in Marta
Herkik's house.</p>
<p>And unless it found shelter, it would have to return.</p>
<p><em>Ask and it shall be yours.</em></p>
<p>The voice wheedled.</p>
<p>Lorna tried to back away, shaking her head, huge fear twisting
in her belly. She saw herself like the others, forced to creep from
hole to shadow, carrying the evil inside it.</p>
<p><em>Be one with me.</em></p>
<p>"No," she managed to gasp.</p>
<p>The thing moved then, limbs reaching out to the slope of the
roof. She saw its humped form clamber onto the corrugated sheets,
creeping upside down, head twisted impossibly on a reptilian neck,
eyes now open and fixed poisonously on her, glaring right into her
soul. She could see the puckered dark spot close to the bottom of
the left one, like a ragged pupil where the orb had been punctured.
The thing reached the support pillar, twisted itself round until it
was head down, and descended like a black mantis to the walkway.
She could hear its gurgling breath and smell the reek of
putrescence.</p>
<p>It reached out a long limb, holding it low, a gesture of
harmlessness. Even in the dark she could see the hugely elongated
fingers and the curve of claws.</p>
<p>"Get away from me," Lorna hissed.</p>
<p>It took two steps forward, spearing her with those venomous
eyes. It laughed again, with the sound of crushing stones. The long
limb stretched towards her, came up in front of her face. There was
no escape.</p>
<p>Lorna found her willpower draining away. The darkness deepened
and a dreadful numbness began to steal slowly up from her feet,
turning her legs to ice, freezing her belly. Under the glare of
those mesmeric eyes, she was an exhausted swimmer fighting against
the undertow of a rip tide. She struggled desperately, in a futile
attempt to push back the force of the thing's will. She felt the
fault-line in her mind give under the pressure. A coldness pushed
in on her and she felt her own sense of self fragment and dissolve.
Something hard and scaly touched her just under her neck. Just as
the blackness closed in on her, she felt a wrench as the front of
her winter jacket was ripped away in one violent jerk, exposing her
pale skin to the winter cold.</p>
<hr />
<p>Jack coughed and a gout of bloody bile spurted from the back of
his throat leaving a filthy acid burn in his gullet. Somewhere in
the distance a pain was throbbing and his ribs felt as if they'd
been squeezed in a crusher.</p>
<p>Consciousness returned in rolling waves. His head was throbbing,
felt as if it was twice its normal size. Inside his ears he could
hear the slow pounding of his pulse. His eyelids opened slowly,
puling back across eyes which felt as if they were popping out of
their sockets. Dizziness spun at him, then the pain screamed in his
thigh.</p>
<p>For a moment he was completely disoriented. It was too dark to
see. A warm wetness trickled across his chest, flowing up towards
his neck.</p>
<p>A grunt escaped him as he tried to move, and the augur of pain
twisted in his thigh, causing him to cry out in the dark.</p>
<p>He was upside down, and he was stuck on something. He could feel
a sharp shard brutally tearing into his muscle. He was impaled,
pinned like an insect over a black void.</p>
<p>Sudden recollection, instant realisation, came back to him. He
recalled the shadowy thing, impossibly agile, spider fast, leaping
from gantry to beam to cross-tie, a blur of black on black. It had
hit him and he'd fallen and then it had slammed into him again.</p>
<p><em>David.</em></p>
<p>He had to get the boy. He was still alive. It hadn't killed
him.</p>
<p>And as soon as that thought came, another one batted it
away.</p>
<p><em>Lorna</em>.</p>
<p>What had happened? How did he get here. The thoughts blasted
over the terrible hurt in his thigh.</p>
<p>Numb despair squeezed at him. It had them both. Like a fool he'd
played the hero and come up here with a faulty torch and no weapon
and it had taken him in the blink of an eye.</p>
<p>And now it had Davy and the girl.</p>
<p>He twisted again, trying to raise his body, fell back, tried
again, reaching out in the darkness, trying to overcome the molten
lava searing through his body. His fingers jarred on a spar and
automatically clenched. He got another hand on to it, every
movement causing a pain in his chest or a river of agony in his
leg. He pulled and felt something scrape wetly inside him, close to
his hip. His teeth snapped on his tongue, but there was no pain
there. It was all in his leg and on his ribs. He groaned against
it, hauling himself slowly, excruciatingly off the metal spike.
Something twisted. He felt skin and flesh drawn outwards, then
there was a sudden jerk, a soft ripping sound and he swung free.
His legs swung out over the emptiness and he hung on desperately,
feeling his strength fail. The rusty spar dug into the curve of his
hooked fingers, threatening to sever then from his hands. The
thought of that summoned up a cold wash of resolution. He couldn't
fall, not now. He had to find a way back to the skywalk, had to
find Davy, needed to find Lorna. With desperate slowness he heaved
himself upwards, feeling his shoulders quiver with the effort of
raising his own weight onto the beam, Finally he got a chin onto
the metal, ignored the pain as the sharp edge ground on his
jawbone, hooked an elbow over, then his undamaged leg, pulled
himself up and lay panting, only inches from the roof.</p>
<p>Sweat ran down the black comma of hair and into his eyes and he
blinked it away. Close by, one of the grey skylights flared into a
rectangle of light and in that brief flash, Jack saw the thing on
the gangway, thirty feet away from him. Even when the light was
gone, the image, which was so sharp, stayed with him.</p>
<p>Lorna Breck was backed up against the rail. Beyond her,
something small and pale hung limp against the wall. In front of
her, something built with impossible geometry had reached out and
drawn a long, deformed limb down from her neck, ripping her clothes
open. Her breasts had jutted, soft and terribly defenceless.</p>
<p>The after-image faded to orange and purple. Without further
thought, he clambered along the beam, ignoring the urgent messages
of pain which seemed to come from all through him, reached the end
gasping for breath, jittery with need for speed, and lowered
himself to the platform. When his feet took his weight, exquisite
agony surged from his ankle to his groin.</p>
<p>The smell of the thing was like a thick cloud in the air. He
could sense her fear and futile struggle and panic welled up. He
groped for the torch on the fretwork of the footplate, thought he'd
found it, but it was only a scaffolding bar. He dropped it, heard
it clang, cursed incoherently to himself. It couldn't stand the
light. That was the blazing message right at the top of all other
thought. If he could use the light, he could make it back off, at
least until he got Davy down from the height, at least until he
dragged Lorna away.</p>
<p>The flashlight was gone. Sour rage bubbled up inside him. The
torch must have fallen, tumbled all the way down to the unseen
floor below. The anger flared even hotter than the pain. He bent,
gasping with the effort, scrabbled for the scaffolding bar. It
needed two hands to heft its weight. He raised it up, ignoring the
noise he made and turned, staggering along the narrow walkway to
the hideous black affront reaching its other hand to Lorna Breck's
face.</p>
<hr />
<p>Her mind was caving in from the pressure, unable to resist any
longer. Somewhere else, behind her and in front of her, she could
feel <em>other</em> pain, child suffering, man hurt, throbbing
through the wave of darkness that pressed in on her. She tried to
hold the pain, a lifeline to her own world while the relentless
frozen force of the thing's will pressed in on her like a black
glacier. Her volition crumpled, imploded. It reached her
<em>self</em> through the faultline and began to flood into her, a
crawling obscenity, filthy as rot.</p>
<p>She dimly felt the heavy cloth rip down and the cold wash of icy
air then her whole body jerked upwards and back, almost throwing
her off the platform as a hideous mental blast seared through her.
Suddenly the mind-force was gone, shattered. Her eyes flicked open
and she saw the fuzzed outline of the fiend shrinking back, its
elongated scaly arm twitching back to merge with the rest of its
black mass. Its malignant mind was blaring in agony, so powerful
she could feel it in her own body. The shape lurched back, eyes now
clamped shut, shrinking away from her. She felt a warmth between
her breasts and glanced down. A faint blip of lightning flickered
somewhere high and picked out the plain shape of the cross on the
rosary, lying between her breasts. In the weird green flicker, she
thought she saw it glow.</p>
<p>Exultant hope bubbled up inside her. She freed her hand from the
barrier, reached up and grasped the heavy gold crucifix, gripping
it tight, holding it up the way she'd seen folk do in the old scary
horror films. This was no vampire she faced, no creature of this
world, yet instinctively she sensed the power of the talisman and
felt the creature's anguish.</p>
<p>It had power, this cross, power maybe enough to beat this devil.
Jack had given it to her, laughing his disbeliever's scorn. He'd
told her O'Day had believed it protected him from the thing that
stalked Levenford. He'd told her jokingly that it wouldn't harm her
to wear it, and she'd kept it and later she'd slipped the beads
around her neck. It had been an inert lump of metal then. Yet now,
in the sudden flare of hope, of lack of <em>despair,</em> it seemed
to be riven with power.</p>
<p>She held it in front of her, praying for another flash of
lightning to add to the holy force. She took a step forward and
another while inside her head she could hear the jittery screech of
the thing.</p>
<p>She walked another two steps then something came lurching along
the gangway. At first she thought it was another one, a second
gargoyle creature and the surge of hope evaporated. Behind her,
Davy whimpered, a little shuddery noise among all the commotion.
She turned involuntarily, forgetting the crucifix, cutting it off
from the thing and as she did, the monster leapt for her. She heard
its rush, froze....</p>
<p>And Jack swung the scaffolding bar. The six feet of heavy steel
came whooping round in an arc and smashed into the humped,
misshapen back.</p>
<p>The force of the contact jarred right up his arm with such force
it numbed his fingers and almost made him drop the weapon. It was
like hitting solid stone. A huge clang rang out and scattered
amongst the girders. The black creature fell forward, hitting the
walkway with a solid thump. In the blink of an eye it was up again,
spitting in fury. It whirled like a black tarantula, shot out an
incredible arm, grabbed a spar hauled itself forward and launched
straight at him. Jack twisted his body, pulling the hollow bar
back, gauged his moment and swung with all his strength.</p>
<p>The thing blurred up and over the club, faster than the eye
could follow. An arm, piston quick, jabbed out and caught him a
massive blow on the chest. The scaffold-bar whipped out of his hand
and went tumbling away. Jack was thrown backwards. The back of his
thighs hit the rail, unbelievable pain exploded in his leg, and
then he was over the edge and tumbling.</p>
<p>Lorna screamed. She saw him topple and tried to call out to him,
but all that came out was a screech of anguish. His feet
disappeared from view and the thing spun, incredibly fast, and came
clambering along the railing, a demonic tightrope walker, a
grotesque spider on a web, straight towards her.</p>
<p>Jack flipped over. His ankle hit a crossbar and something
snapped there. His hands were in front of him as he fell. In a
brief instant, he saw Julie and Rae smiling at him in a summer
garden and he knew he was about to die.</p>
<p>Then something smacked into his belly. His breath punched out in
one instant whoosh and he bounced, flopping over. Some basic
instinct made him reach in the dark. His hands grabbed the chain
which ran from the wall to a pulley-wheel. One hand slipped, hooked
up again reflexively, found the cold chain, and he hung suspended
over the well of the shed.</p>
<p>Up and to the right, he heard Lorna scream. Sick pain pulsed up
from his ankle, but he ignored it. He pulled himself several feet
along the horizontal chain until he came to the pulley and risked
letting go with one hand while he made a grab for the vertical drop
of links which descended to the far floor. As soon as he gripped
it, he swung his other hand over, then wrapped his undamaged leg
around the pulley chain. As soon as he did so, he felt a lurch, and
a harsh grating sound.</p>
<p>"Oh shit," he grunted.</p>
<p>He dropped five more feet. Something squealed in protest ten
feet from where he hung. Without even trying, he spun on the
down-chain and a long line of light came into being right in front
of his eyes. He had no time to think, he was just trying not to
fall, suspended close to the far wall of the hangar. The chain
rattled and he plummeted his own height and the line of light
became a blazing rectangle.</p>
<p>Up above, a ferocious caterwauling sound ripped the air, so loud
it rattled the metal roof and made his ears ring. Jack dangled
swinging and revolving, gripping the rope so tight it burned. The
chain rattled again and the service door opened even wider, rolling
back on its wheels, protesting all the way. His weight on the
chain, along with the counterweight which swung in the darkness
along the wall, was just enough to drag the massive door open.</p>
<p>The night floodlights from the Rig Yard across the fence glared
in through the gap, sending strange cross-hatched shadows on
everything, dazzling Jack where he hung. He screwed up his eyes
against the blinding light and dropped another four feet to the
next level. He could now see what he was doing. When he came level
to the platform, he swung his weight back, biting down the tide of
pain running from shoulders to feet, got him close enough to the
rail to get a grip and hooked a hand round the bar. Very carefully
he hauled himself over, slipped to the walkway with a crunch of
pure hurt and lay gasping.</p>
<p>On the top deck, Lorna watched the thing come for her, limbs
pistoning, a blurred monstrosity. She cringed back, half turned,
forgetting the cross in her hand.</p>
<p>Then metal had screamed in protest and a miraculous pillar of
light had seared the gloom.</p>
<p>Instantly the thing skidded to a halt. Its monstrous eyes
thudded shut and a shriek of agony brayed out in a high, ululating
shudder.</p>
<p>Lorna's own eyes flooded with tears. She wiped her sleeve across
them, shaking her head to clear her vision. Then she saw it in the
light.</p>
<p>It was a nightmare creature. Its squat body was humped and
warted. Oddly bent bones, like deformed ribs poked out against a
taught reptilian skin. Its shoulders were wide and upwardly curved
and from them, two impossibly long arms stretched out on either
side, hooked spatulate fingers clenched on the rail. Its head was
large and ridged with nobbled scales. Leathery eyelids squeezed
shut over popping eyes. Its face was almost flat, and there was no
nose, just two ragged holes which flickered spasmodically. Below
them, its mouth gaped open, drooling green ropes of saliva.</p>
<p>It hung on the rail, shivering in agony and as she watched, its
whole shape began to crumble. Lorna stood frozen, mesmerised, as
the edges of the creature began to blur and run. Its skin bubbled,
wavered, started to evaporate in black wisps.</p>
<p>It made an obscene growling sound from behind its amphibious
lips, so deep the metal vibrated in sympathetic resonance.</p>
<p>Inside her head, Lorna felt its panic and pain and a second wave
of exultation overtook her. The door opened wider, allowing even
more light into the vast covered yard. The thing screeched, a
devilish animal caught in a trap. Its warty hide frothed. Murky
clouds of vapour started to trail off, fuzzing its outlines. It
scuttled back, heading for the corner. Droplets of its skin, or
pieces of flesh hit the steel walkway and sizzled there, sending up
orange puffs of mist. Metal creaked and the great door swung ever
wider, sending the light into every corner.</p>
<p>The thing howled, then took off. It leapt out from the corner,
swung on a beam, then hit a pillar, head down. Without stopping it
scrambled downwards, bunched itself then sprang for the stairway,
trailing a grey-black cloud around itself.</p>
<p>It passed close to Jack, screeching all the while, as he was
getting onto his sound foot. He straightened up, his whole body a
world of hurt, and saw the thing coming straight at him. Its mouth
was agape, a huge maw, barbed with row upon row of shiny teeth.</p>
<p>He flinched back, expecting it to leap at its throat, but
instead it shot out an arm, hooked an upright and spun down the
next flight. Its thickening cloud of vapour clung to it as it
moved. It reached the third level, tumbled and hit the landing with
a crash. Jack followed its motion unable to take his eyes off the
thing as the lights boiled it away.</p>
<p>It got to the second level, scrambled over the bannister,
dropped fifteen feet to the first, then crabbed along the flat. By
this time, it was hardly solid at all. At the bottom, he saw a
rolling black cloud, pulsing with motion, but boneless and
limbless, roll down to the foot of the stairs to disappear into the
faint shade.</p>
<p>For several moments, he stood there, transfixed. Up above, he
heard Lorna call out his name. Jack slowly forced himself to move,
gasping with the enormity of the pain, and hobbled up the
stairs.</p>
<p>He found her at the end of the skyway. She didn't seem to notice
that her breasts were bared to the light.</p>
<p>"He's here, Jack," he cried, pointing behind where she
stood.</p>
<p>"I can't reach him. Oh, he's so hurt."</p>
<p>Jack made it to the far end. Davy's eyes were open and his mouth
was moving, though there was no sound. He was stuck to the wall,
one foot still shivering as if the nerves had been cut. Jack got to
the rail and leaned over. Way down there, jagged piles of
machinery, old boxes of rivets, rusty spikes of metal awaited to
kill anybody who fell.</p>
<p>He estimated the distance, measuring the gap between the barrier
and the first of the roof spars. He still had one good leg and two
working arms. Jack got himself over the first obstacle, leaned out
until he could grip the spar, swung himself over until he got his
foot on a support beam on the wall.</p>
<p>Davy's eyes followed him. Tears were streaming down his face,
but he still made no sound.</p>
<p>"It's alright, Davy boy," Jack whispered as he edged himself
closer. He reached the boy and felt the pulse in his neck. It was
fast, too fast, but strong. He eased a hand behind his nephew's
back, edging it up against the metal wall and found the hook of
steel. The thing had punctured the corrugated sheet and torn back a
spike of flimsy metal. It impaled the boy just under the
shoulder-blade. Jack could not understand how the youngster could
be alive, never mind conscious, hanging there like that. His hand
worked its way along the slithery coagulation of blood. He eased
himself closer, got his arm right round the boy's chest, and gently
eased him off the spike. Davy sighed, then his eyes rolled upwards
and his head flopped to the side.</p>
<p>Very carefully and very slowly, Jack retraced his steps. It took
ten minutes to edge back to the skywalk. When he got there, Lorna
reached out over the drop and took Davy from his hands and swung
him to the relative safety of the gangway.</p>
<p>The movement had caused the gash in Davy's back to bled freely
again. Jack fished a handkerchief from his pocket and jammed it
against the ragged hole. Between the two of them, they managed to
carry the boy down the stairs, flight by flight until they reached
the bottom. Lorna stayed close on the last short section, ready to
support Jack if he stumbled. They reached the bottom, turned
towards the door, and something came lurching out from under the
stairs.</p>
<p>Lorna yelled in fright. Jack hadn't even seen the movement. He
turned, put his weight on his broken ankle, bellowed in pain and
began to topple.</p>
<p>The apparition that had been Michael O'Day came staggering
towards them. The white hair was almost completely gone from the
narrow head. The eyes were shadowed pits. Two emaciated hands, the
fingers elongated and skeletal, reached out, groping, towards
Lorna.</p>
<p>Jack twisted as he fell, trying to keep Davy up, hit the floor
with a jarring thump, hard enough to clash his teeth together. Davy
tumbled out and rolled.</p>
<p>The thing that O'Day had become lunged forward and clamped its
hands around Lorna's neck. She made a loud gulping sound.</p>
<p>Jack turned over, unable to take his eyes of the scene. He
groped for anything on the floor and by a sheer miracle found the
scaffolding bar that he'd used up close to the roof. He used it to
get to his good foot, hopping awkwardly, then swung it under and
then over his shoulder.</p>
<p>Lorna was struggling, pulling away, trying to kick out at the
thing. She made a horrible gurgling noise as the fingers squeezed
on her throat. Jack pivoted and brought the hollow steel pole down
in a scything arc. It hit O'Day just above his ear with a pulpy
thud. The crazed man's hands flew out to the sides, then he flopped
like a rag doll, hit the ground and was still.</p>
<p>Overhead, lightning flashed and thunder cracked in a
simultaneous burst. In seconds, huge hailstones bulleted down to
rattle on the metal roof in a deafening roar.</p>
<p>"I think you killed him." Lorna said.</p>
<p>"I hope to Christ I did," Jack replied wearily.</p>
<p>He hobbled to where Davy lay, eased himself down to get his arm
around the boy, then gently lifted him up off the ground.</p>
<p>They got to the door just as one of the workmen from the rig
yard came walking towards them, swinging the beam of a powerful
torch in through the opening.</p>
<p>"Hello?" he called out. "Is anybody there?"</p>
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