The Thief of Time by John Boyne Page B

just cry out for the doing, am I right?’
    Sleep came quickly to me for I had not managed to get a moment to myself the whole day long, and the distance we had covered, along with the groaning of my empty stomach, brought me to the point where my whole body wanted to be finished with this day for good.
    I dreamed first of Paris and of my mother and of a time when I was a child when she had made me hold the end of a huge, colourful rug while she beat it soundly with a carpet-beater. The dust which rose off it had made me cough and had gone down my throat, producing tears, much like the tobacco had done earlier on. Paris gave way to another city, an unknown one, where a man led me by the hand through a bazaar and handed me a candle which he lit with a golden lighter. And here is a light that only you can see, he told me in mid-conversation. As it burned, the marketplace surrendered to a horse fair, where men shouted to outbid each other, and a fight ensued. A man rushed towards me, his fist pulled back, his whole face grim with determined anger, and as he made to hit me I jerked back into consciousness, my legs stabbing into the air and for a moment I knew not where I was.
    It was still dark – despite all I had dreamed, it was perhaps no more than fifteen minutes after I had gone to sleep – but I was freezing with the cold and my stomach pained me. I heard a thumping sound from the other side of the barn and hoped that it would lull me back to sleep quickly. It was joined by a throaty breathing and a muffled complaint, the sound of a mouth trying to scream while a hand holds it tight. I sat and listened as full consciousness returned to me and then jumped, in sudden recognition, as I looked around, my eyes trying to grow accustomed to the blackness. There was Tomas, shifting slightly in his sleep, a finger in his mouth, emitting a sigh of contentment. And there was an empty corner, which Furlong had left. And there was a struggle opposite me and the picture of a man above a woman, still clothed but with a hand missing, a hand working its way between them somewhere to undo clothing, to break through. I threw myself at him and he gasped but recovered quickly, a hand lashing out to hit me which sent me sprawling across the barn in a daze. He was strong and powerful, much more than I had ever imagined, and I lay there struggling to pull myself back into action. I heard Dominique shout in agony and then her cry became muffled again as he whispered to her and sent his hand beneath her dress once again. I stood up, my hands in my hair, knowing not what to do, aware that another attempt on my part to pull him off could lead to my death and possibly hers and Tomas too. Instead, I ran outside the barn into the cold night, where the moon threw a thin prism of light on to the cart, which I threw myself at before running back inside, back behind Furlong who by the relaxed motions of his hand and his release of Dominique’s mouth appeared to be getting closer to his intention. He lifted himself off her slightly, positioned his body back a little and was about to fall inside her when my hands came down, and the sharp serrated edge of the knife he had shown me earlier slid, as if through melting butter, between his powerful shoulder blades. His body drew a deep intake of breath -hollow and animal-like – as he jerked upwards, his shoulders bouncing backwards to relieve the pain as his hands grasped aimlessly in the air. I jumped back towards the wall of the barn, knowing that this was it, that I had only one chance to finish Furlong off and that chance was already behind me and if I had not succeeded we would all pay the price within minutes. Dominique scrambled out from beneath him and also plastered herself to the opposite wall as he slowly stood and spun around, staring at us with wide, disbelieving eyes, before swaying and falling backwards, the knife making a wretched sound as it pushed up inside his body – even