Dead Flesh (6 page)

Potter threw
away his cigarette end and looking at me, he said, “Kiera, you
can’t have that life back – it’s gone. Can’t you
see
that? You ain’t a cop no more and neither am I.
We’re nothing more than ghosts. We shouldn’t even be here – we’re
dead.”

“But we are
here in this fucked up world that we’ve come back to!” I yelled at
him, my fists clenched. “And I think us coming back has changed
things and only we can put them right again.”

Potter looked
back at me, then rolling back his shoulders, his wings unfolded
from his back. “You stay and do the whole Murder-She-Wrote thing,
but I need to get away from here.”

I reached out,
but before I’d had the chance to touch him, Potter had rocketed
away, up into the clouds, which covered the sky like a dark
blanket. I looked at the statue again and knew that I was right,
however odd my theory was. Whoever the girl had once been – she had
now turned to stone. What she had been doing in the grounds of
Hallowed Manor, I didn’t know. But something told me that finding
her out by the summerhouse was a sign. A sign of what? I didn’t
know that, either. Until I found out, I decided that I would keep
this to myself. I didn’t want to alarm Isidor or Kayla any more
than I had to. Whoever the girl had been, she was now just a
harmless piece of stone, and it wasn’t as if she was going
anywhere.

Kiera

After Potter
had flown away, I headed back to the manor to find Isidor slumped
on the sofa reading a book, and Kayla folded up in an armchair,
listening to my iPod. She had it up so loud that I could hear that
she was listening to
The Wanted
sing
Lightning
.

As I entered,
Kayla yanked the earphones out and looked at me. “You look
upset.”

“Potter’s
gone,” I told them and Isidor glanced over the top of his book at
me.

“Gone where?”
he asked.

“Don’t know,” I
said and flopped into one of the armchairs.

“When is he
gonna be back?” Kayla asked, turning off the iPod.

“Don’t know
that either,” I shrugged.

“Why did he
go?” Kayla shot back, and I could see the glint of intrigue in her
eyes. I couldn’t blame her; Potter deciding to take off was
probably the most exciting thing that had happened to her since
coming back.

“I think, like
all of us, he’s having problems adjusting,” I said.

“I’d have
problems adjusting too if I came back from the dead to discover
that my name was
Gabriel
,” Isidor smirked
from around the edge of his book.

Ignoring his
comment, I said, “What are you reading?”

“The Adventures
of Sherlock Holmes,” he said, holding the book in the air so I
could see the front cover.

“Good,” I
smiled.

“Good?” Isidor
said, cocking the eyebrow with the piercing.

“It might come
in handy,” I said back.

“How come?”
Kayla asked, shooting a quizzical look in my direction.

“I don’t know
about you guys,” I said, “but I’m getting fed up with sitting
around here every day, twiddling my thumbs. I need something more
than that - I need to get the old brain matter working again.”

“So what have
you got in mind, Kiera?” Isidor asked, placing the book to one
side.

“I’m going to
write an advert offering to help people with their problems,” I
explained to them.

“What sort of
problems?” Kayla asked me, screwing up her face.

“I don’t know –
anything I guess,” I said.

“You know
you’re just gonna attract a whole bunch of pervs,” Kayla
grimaced.

“We don’t have
to respond to their emails,” I said. “We pick the cases that sound
most interesting - unusual!”

“When you say
‘cases’,” Isidor asked, his interest now picking up, “Do you mean
like investigations?”

“I guess,” I
answered. “We’ll just have to see what comes up.”

So over dinner
that evening, we decided what our advert should say. We sat bunched
together at the end of the vast kitchen table, our voices echoing
off the huge stone walls. It was more like a banqueting hall than a
kitchen. We didn’t eat much, which was another thing about being
dead – we had all lost our appetites. It wasn’t as if we needed
food to stay alive. Everything had the same bland taste to it -
like toast without butter and jam - just dull and boring. Food just
got pushed to the edges of our plates, as if we were trying to kid
ourselves that we had eaten. Maybe we only bothered to cook a meal
each night to try and keep some normality to our newfound
existence; after all, the only thing that any of us truly enjoyed
was the taste of human blood.

Isidor pushed
his plate to one side and said, “I know what the advert could say.
What about something like this: ‘Got a problem? Need some help? Who
you gonna call – Kiera Hudson!’ ”

Kayla almost
choked on her food as she started to laugh. “Isidor, Kiera is meant
to be an investigator – not a freaking
Ghostbuster
!”

“Okay, smart
arse,” he said, looking a little hurt at his sister’s teasing. “You
think of something.”

“Okay,” Kayla
said thoughtfully. “How about, ‘Got a problem that needs to be
shared? Got a secret you can’t tell anyone else? Then contact Kiera
Hudson. Complete discretion assured!’ ”

“If you write
something like that,” Isidor grimaced, “You will get a bunch of
pervs come knocking at the door. There’ll be a queue of them in
dirty raincoats from here to God knows where!”

With a smile
tugging at the corners of my mouth, I looked at them across the
table and said, “We need to keep it simple. You’re quite right, we
don’t want any perverts or ghost hunters…”

“Busters
,” Kayla cut in.

“Them too,” I
nodded, “but we don’t want to be investigating a string of missing
pets, either. We all know that we’ve come back to a slightly
different world than the one we left. Maybe there is someone out
there who hasn’t forgotten everything – someone who remembers what
the world used to be like.”

“So what have
you got in mind?” Isidor asked me.

“How about
this: ‘Has your world been pushed?’ ” I suggested, thinking of how
Potter had described the changes.

“What’s that
s’posed to mean?” Kayla asked glancing at Isidor, then back at
me.

“I don’t know,”
I said, looking at her. “But someone out there might.”

So the
following morning, with a dozen copies of the advert in their
hands, Isidor and Kayla stood in the great hall beneath the
chandelier, their wings out.

“Don’t you
think you should go by car?” I asked them.

“Are you
crazy?” Kayla asked back. “You want us to reach as many towns as
possible, don’t you?”

“I guess,” I
said, “but it’s just that you might be seen by someone. We
shouldn’t be drawing attention to ourselves.”

“Have you seen
outside this morning?” Isidor asked, his wings rippling beneath his
arms. “The sky is full of clouds – no one will see us. And besides,
the nearest town is over ten miles away – we should know, we’ve
driven it enough over the last few weeks collecting those
newspapers for you.”

“Why don’t you
come with us?” Kayla asked me. “You haven’t left the grounds of the
manor since we got here. It would be good for you to get out a
bit.”

The offer was a
kind one, but I knew that if I were to go with them, I would have
to fly and that would mean having to get my wings out and if I did
that, those cracks would appear. I still wasn’t ready for them to
see me like that.

“No, you’re
okay,” I told her. “I think I’ll just bum around here for a
while.”

“And do what?”
Isidor asked me, his fangs shining as brightly as the chandelier
above us.

“I’m going to
sync my iPod to my old email address, make sure that it’s still
working okay, just in case we do get a response to those
adverts.”

“That isn’t
going to take all day,” Kayla pushed. “Go on, Kiera, come with us –
it could be fun.”

I did want to
go with them, not really relishing the thought of spending the day
mooching about the empty manor on my own. But I just couldn’t.
“I’ve got plenty to do – like setting up a room for consulting. We
need to look the part should we get any clients.”

“Your choice,”
Kayla smiled weakly at me, but I could tell she knew that there was
something up with me.

I followed them
to the giant front door, and Isidor had been right, the day was
overcast and miserable-looking. A fine rain was coming down, and
the leaves that Potter had raked into a neat pile now swirled up
and down the drive in the wind.

They both
looked back at me one last time, then without a word, they both
soared up into the dismal-looking sky. Within seconds, I had lost
sight of them amongst the clouds.

“See you in a
while, crocodile,” I whispered, closing the front door of the
manor, and leaving me all alone.

Kayla

It felt cool to
be flying again. The rain that struck my face was cold but
refreshing, as if waking me up. I hadn’t flown since The Hollows.
For pretty much my whole life, I had resented being different from
those girls who had called me ‘stickleback’ at boarding school. But
I had learnt that my wings were just another part of me, like my
arms and legs. Those girls back at school would never know the
freedom my wings gave me.

Isidor flew
beside me, his arms outstretched on either side of him, his wings
rippling beneath them. He glanced at me and winked, and I knew that
he was enjoying the freedom again as much as I was. The wind roared
past us, and the sound of it was wonderful, it deafened the other
noises – my soundtrack.

The clouds
broke beneath us, and I could see the town of Wood Hill, the one
that we had been visiting daily for Kiera. We swooped over it,
circled, and spying a small wooded area on its outskirts, we raced
towards them. We landed, and rolling back my shoulders, I put on
the sweatshirt that I’d tied about my waist, covering my back and
the crop-top that I was wearing. Unlike me, Isidor couldn’t fold
his wings away, he had to hide them, and so he zipped up the front
of his jacket.

“Ready?” he
asked me.

` “You bet,” I
nodded and followed him out of the small wooded area and up the
hill to the town. As we walked together, I wondered if we stood
out. Did we look freaky? We were definitely very pale, looking like
we had been ill or something. Maybe it was my imagination, but as
we headed into town and passed some of the people on the road, they
seemed to look away from us, casting their heads down, and some
even crossed the road as if to avoid us.

I wondered why
I hadn’t noticed this before on our trips to Wood Hill, but we had
always come by car. I had waited inside, parked at the curb, while
Isidor had taken the papers from the newspaper stand outside the
store and left the money for them in the honesty tin outside. We
had never actually spoken to anyone in the town. Driving through a
place was always different than walking through it. You saw more
when you walked, noticed things that you wouldn’t have while in a
car.

Well, I was
definitely noticing stuff now. Like how the streets didn’t seem
that busy at all, and those people who were on them seemed to be in
a hurry. It was as if they were all late for a meeting or
something. But what was freaking me out more than that, was it
wasn’t just me and Isidor that they were ignoring, they were
ignoring each other. For such a small town, not one of them looked
at each other as they passed by. There were no ‘good mornings’, or
‘Hey, how you doing today?’ It was like they didn’t really see each
other – but they did. It was weird to watch how they almost seemed
to shy away from one another. I stared in amazement as they
crisscrossed back and forth in an almost desperate attempt not to
come in contact. One guy, elderly with a stick, stepped off the
curb to avoid a scrawny-looking woman who was coming down the
street towards him. But then another guy, mid-forties with a belly
that hung over the top of his trousers, stepped into the road from
the other side of the street as he tried to avoid someone else. On
seeing this, the old guy turned, then turned again as if trapped.
He shuffled around in a full circle as if trying to figure out
which way to go – how to escape.

The thin,
homemade cigarette that hung from the corner of his wrinkled old
mouth fell out and he swore. Then looking up, he saw me watching
him and he cried out. He turned away and covered his face with his
arm, as if he didn’t want us to see him - or was it that he didn’t
want to see us? The old guy saw a gap and shuffled away, flinching
as someone else came too close to him.

“Are you seeing
what I’m seeing?” I whispered, as we made our way through the town.
“This place is fucked up.”

“What day is it
today?” Isidor asked, not looking at me, but watching the crazy
people on the street all around us.

“Saturday, I
think,” I said back. “Why?”

“So it’s not a
school day then,” he whispered, as one of the people toppled from
the edge of the curb in a desperate attempt to avoid us.

“I guess,” I
breathed. “Why?”

“Where are all
the kids?” he said, and this time he did look at me. “Shouldn’t
they be hanging about on street corners with their mates, out
shopping, stuff like that?”

“It is cold and
it’s raining,” I reminded him.

“Didn’t bother
that old guy,” Isidor said, his voice still low, just above a
whisper.

Then looking
across the street, I said, “Over there! That woman, see her? She’s
pushing a pram and there’s a baby in it.”