Peacock

'Then came thunder like a rattle of drums. The effect was like the opening of a Punch and Judy show on a monstrous scale, a Punch and Judy show that wasn't for fun. He looked all round. There were no stars. For once the curtains were all drawn in the house and no lights shone. He could see the point of the roof against a patch of sky, but the walls were muffled with darkness, as if it were something real that he would have to struggle through to get back. The garden was not pitch-black, but it seemed covered over with a mass of shadow. There were so many overlapping shadows that he couldn't tell what anything was. He couldn't tell a tree wasn't a shadow till he bumped his face on a branch.
He was alone, and the garden seemed no longer his. He felt like a trespasser as he moved along it.The thought reminded him of Black Ferdie. He wished he had gone straight to Feste's protective stall.His flashlight was growing weaker and weaker. It was only a little pin of light. He shook it. It died out altogether. At that moment he remembered what he had done in the morning. He remembered how he had danced and pointed, and pulled faces. He heard again Toby's voice saying, "Don't go near him," and Alexander's saying, "He is eyeless and horrid," and "the only thing the confounded peacock is good for. ..."
The peacock gave a screech that seemed unending. Tolly could imagine how it would stretch out it's neck, long and thin, in the effort, with curved open beak and wagging tongue. When it stopped, therewas a sound of dragging, of brushing and snapping twigs. The other birds woke and flew out of their roosting places with a panicky twittering. In the dark Tolly could hear them moving from tree to treeacross the garden in agitated bands, as if they were escaping from a forest fire.
He himself remained rooted to the ground. He did not know which way to run, where there would not be entangling branches or the edge of a path to trip him up. How could one hide from the blind? They would not even know you were hiding. The fumbling fingers were just as likely to hit on you behind a bush as in the open.
Then there came a flash of lightening in which the whole scene was clearer than the sharpest thought.By its terrible flicker Tolly saw in the middle of the lawn a tree where no tree should be-a treeshaped roughly like a stooping man, that waved it's arms before it and clutched at the air with its long fingers. In the clap of thunder which followed, Tolly, frozen with terror, raised his thin child's voice in screams of "Linnet! Linnet!"
Perhaps he had no need to call, for as the thunder died away in distant precipices of sky, Linnet's voice like an anxious bird was beating the air, calling: "St. Christopher, St. Christopher, come quickly!'

[Lucy Boston, Green Knowe]