When the Wind Blows

Auteur

John Saul

Texte du rabat

The terrifying bestseller from the author of House of Reckoning

The children were waiting.
Waiting for centuries.
Waiting for someone to hear their cries.

Now nine-year-old Christine Lyons has come to live in the house on the hill-the house where no children have lived for fifty years.

Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor. Now Christie's terror will begin.

A sound was coming to her. Her mind began to drift . . .

Usually it came to her at night, when the wind was blowing. But today it was bright and clear; the wind was still.

And yet the sound was there. A baby, crying out for its mother.

Instinctively Diana knelt next to Christie and took the child in her arms. "It's all right," she whispered. "Everything's going to be all right."

Perplexed, Christie looked into Diana's eyes. "I am all right, Aunt Diana. Really, I am," Christie insisted.

"But you were crying. I heard you. Good girls never cry. Only bad children cry. They cry. And cry. And then they must be punished. . . ."

Résumé
The terrifying bestseller from the author of House of Reckoning

The children were waiting.
Waiting for centuries.  
Waiting for someone to hear their cries.

Now  nine-year-old Christine Lyons has come to live in the  house on the hill—the house where no children  have lived for fifty years.

Now little Christie will sleep in the old-fashioned nursery on the third floor. Now Christie's terror will begin.

*A sound was coming to her. Her mind began to drift . . . 

Usually it came to her at night, when the wind was blowing. But today it was bright and clear; the wind was still.

And yet the sound was there. A baby, crying out for its mother.

Instinctively Diana knelt next to Christie and took the child in her arms. “It's all right,” she whispered. “Everything's going to be all right.”

Perplexed, Christie looked into Diana's eyes. “I am all right, Aunt Diana. Really, I am,” Christie insisted.

“But you were crying. I heard you. Good girls never cry. Only bad children cry. They cry. And cry. And then they must be punished. . . .”

Échantillon de lecture
Esperanza Rodriguez, her dark eyes set deep in her lined face, watched silently as the body of Elliot Lyons was brought up from the depths of the mine. All her life she had been expecting something like this to happen. Over and over her mother had told her the story of what had happened when she was only a few days old, and the gringos, in their stupidity, had disturbed the cave of the lost children. They had died that day—many of them—and the mine had been closed. For fifty years it had remained undisturbed, its depths flooded with water, until a month ago, when Señor Lyons had come from Chicago and begun poking around. And now he, too, was dead. Dead like Amos Amber, who had owned the mine and died in the flood; dead like her own father, who had also been in the mine that day.
 
Esperanza had no memory of the flood, but in the half-century since, as she had grown up near the mine, her mother had been careful to warn her of what would happen if the mine were ever reopened. It was part of the sacred cave now, the cave of the lost children. Though the gringos claimed the cave was only a legend, what the gringos thought didn’t matter to Esperanza, for she knew the cave was real, as did all her friends. It was real, and it had to be left alone.
 
Elliot Lyons had not left it alone, and now he was dead.
 
Esperanza waited until they’d taken the body away, nodded briefly when the doctor whispered in her ear, then wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, told her son to stay at home, and started walking toward town, where, before obeying the doctor’s instructions, she would go to church and pray.
 
Amberton had never been much of a town—not like the other Mineral Belt settlements, which had boomed for years with gold and silver. Amberton had prospered only mildly, its coal providing a fortune only for the Ambers, who owned the mine and most of the land as well.
 
And then, in 1910, the mine had flooded, and the people of Amberton wondered what had happened.
 
Esperanza Rodriguez knew what had happened.
 
As she paused in the little park at the center of town, she looked up at the bronze statue of Amos Amber that kept watch over the village. Her own father, whom she had never known, had tried to warn Amos Amber of what could happen to the mine. But Amos had never been one to listen to the superstitious mumblings of a Mexican married to a Ute.
 
And because Amos Amber had not listened to Esperanza Rodriguez’s father, Amberton had suffered.
 
It didn’t show on the surface. The village was a pretty place, nestled in a valley low in the Rockies, its Victorian houses neatly painted in the bright colors that had been fashionable a century ago. Its streets, though never paved, were well-kept, and shaded by aspens that had long ago replaced the firs that once thrived there. It seemed, at a glance, to be prospering. Its shops were busy, selling memorabilia of days long gone when the town had been a center of commerce, and its old railroad depot, restored and turned into a restaurant, was, during the summer months, constantly filled with tourists who paused on their way to Aspen or Denver, spent a few minutes absorbing the quaint atmosphere of the village, then “moved on to the next stop on their Triple A tourist maps.
 
The tourists never went where Esperanza was going, for the tiny Catholic Church was near the edge of town, in the midst of the shacks that were occupied by Esperanza’s friends, the few mixed-breed Indians whose Mexican, Indian, and white blood left them fitting into no easily identifiable group. They existed in poverty, scratching out a living as best they could by doing the menial jobs that the shop owners tossed to them. Esperanza herself did not live in Shacktown—she still lived in the caretaker’s cabin near the entrance to the mine, where she’d lived most of her life—but every week she came to the church to pray for the children who, though their graves were marked in the tiny churchyard, were buried somewhere else.
 
Today, she didn’t stay long.
 
Today, she wasn’t praying for the dead children.
 
Today, she was praying for the one who was still alive.
 
Christie Lyons stared straight ahead, her eyes unseeing, her tiny white hand lost in Esperanza Rodriguez’s large brown one. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and her chin quivered as she struggled not to sob out loud.
 
She hadn’t believed it at first. Her father was all she had, and she was sure that what was happening was all a bad dream, that any minute now her father would wake her up and tell her it was only a nightmare.
 
Dimly, she wondered if they were going to send her to an orphanage. She supposed they probably were. If you didn’t have any family, where else could you go?
 
Though she was only nine years old, Christie knew exactly what had happened. Her father had gone to the mine by himself, and he’d fallen down the shaft. Many times, when she’d gone to mines with him, he’d told her what could happen if you weren’t careful. Now it had happened to him.
 
And now she was alone and going somewhere with people she hardly knew at all.
 
She looked out the window of the car and realized they were driving toward the mine. Was she go…