Dead Flesh (7 page)

We watched her
hurry down the street, her head down as she tried to avoid everyone
else. But a man with an umbrella was heading towards her, and she
crossed the street to avoid him.

Isidor yanked
me by the arm into a nearby shop doorway, and said, “Let’s hide in
here – keep out of her way.”

“Why?” I
hushed.

“Because you
know that smell that babies always have?”

“No, not
really,” I told him, watching from the shadows of the shop doorway
as the woman with the pram headed towards us.

“Believe me,
babies do have a certain odour,” he said, “And I can’t smell
it.”

“So?” I
asked.

“So look!” he
whispered as the woman passed us as we hid in the shop doorway.

I followed
Isidor’s stare and looked into the pram and gasped.

Clamping his
hand over my mouth, he put his lips to my ear and very quietly
said, “Shhh, Kayla.”

Kiera

With the manor
to myself, I could hear every creak and groan it made as the wind
outside began to blow harder about the eaves. It wasn’t that this
spooked me in any way, but just intensified my feelings of
loneliness. I wandered from one room to another on the ground
floor, each one of them dustier than the next. The furniture was
covered in white sheets. Cobwebs hung from the corners of the rooms
and swung down from the light fixtures overhead. Just off the main
hallway, there was a narrow passageway and its walls were lined
with mahogany, which gave it a dark and oppressive feeling. At the
end of it there was a door. I pushed it open and was pleasantly
surprised by what I found behind it, and the sight lifted my
spirits.

I had found a
small study, which could have easily been mistaken for a library by
the amount of leather-bound books that covered the walls. There was
a desk and in the centre of this was a large ink blotter. There
were several silver-coloured pens lined neatly next to one another,
and a photo frame. I picked it up and turned it over. The picture
inside the frame was of Doctor Hunt, Lady Hunt, and Kayla. Kayla
was sitting on her father’s knee and looked happy, her red hair
spilling over her shoulders and down the front of the pretty dress
she was wearing. Kayla looked to be about six-years-old. I looked
at Doctor Hunt as he stared back at me from the picture and I
remembered how I had buried his body beneath the tree on the
outskirts of the town of Wasp Water.

Was his body still there?
I wondered.
Had it been discovered like mine had on the side of that
Cumbria Mountain?
In real time, that had only been about six
weeks ago. Now that the world had been
pushed
, was his body still there? How much had the
world changed on the other side of the manor walls?

Placing the
picture back where I had found it, I looked about the room and with
a bit of dusting, I knew that I had found my consulting room –
that’s if anyone actually came to be consulted with. My brain was
beginning to ache with restlessness. I needed something – a puzzle
– to awaken it again. But what frustrated me the most was that I
knew there was a puzzle to be solved and I was a piece of that
puzzle. As was the girl in my dreams, falling out of the sky – only
to wake and find herself like I had in that mortuary. Then, there
was the statue by the summerhouse – the girl who had been turned to
stone.

Until I had
more pieces of that puzzle, I knew there was little I could do, so
going to the giant kitchen, I found some old dusters and polish and
went back to the study. I polished the desk, the bookshelves, and
the mahogany walls. I shook the dust from the curtains and opened
the large windows to let in some fresh air. When my back had
started to ache and my throat and nose were full of dust, I stood
back and admired my handiwork. I positioned the chair slightly
behind the desk, then sat in it. I wondered if anyone would come –
I wondered if anyone else realised that they had been
pushed
.

I closed the
door to the study, put the dusters and polish back where I had
found them, then left the manor to walk the grounds, needing to
clear the dust that was stuck in the back of my throat. The rain
had eased and looked more like a fine mist than a drizzle. The only
sound was the regular squawk of the crows that flapped their giant
wings overhead. I looked up at them and wondered where Potter was
and what he was doing. I missed him, but I understood why he had
needed to get away.

The trees
towered on either side of me as I made my way through the wood and
my feet crunched over the fallen branches and twigs. I hadn’t
intended to head for the graveyard hidden by the weeping willows,
or so I told myself, but it wasn’t long before I found myself
parting their stooped branches with my hands and stepping into that
secret place. Although the area surrounded by the forlorn trees
held so much death, it was tranquil. It had that feeling of
stepping off a busy street into a church. The silence, the mystery
of the place – I was drawn to it.

I made my way
through the headstones of all those half-breeds that, unlike me and
Isidor, hadn’t lived past the age of sixteen. And as I looked down
at some of the graves, I could see that some of them hadn’t even
lived as long as that. Snuffed out too early, like a candle before
dawn that hadn’t had a chance to break and shower the world with
light.

There were
several graves that didn’t have headstones like the rest, but
makeshift crosses made from the branches of the nearby trees, like
the one I had seen Potter make for Murphy. Passing amongst them, I
noticed that one had been inscribed with the name Nessa and the
other Meren and I knew that these were the graves of Murphy’s
daughters. I could remember him saying their names as Potter had
argued with Murphy before going to the Fountain of Souls in search
of the Lycanthrope.

I bent over and
peered at their names.

“Your father
was a good man,” I whispered, “and I know he loved you so very
much. He loved you so much that it blinded him. He wanted revenge
for your murders so greatly that he put his own life in danger and
took us on a journey where he was tricked and betrayed, where he
ended up losing his own life.” Then straightening up, and with
tears standing in my eyes, I added, “But I guess he has told you
everything himself by now. I hope you are all happy together. And
one last thing before I go, can you tell your Dad that although
Potter would never admit this, he really misses him? We all
do.”

Then, turning
my back on the makeshift crosses, I headed back through the
graveyard, passing Murphy’s cross as I went. And it was then that I
saw it, or rather I didn’t. I had hung Murphy’s crucifix on the
cross that Potter had made, but now it was gone. I searched the
earth and grass that surrounded the foot of the cross, wondering if
perhaps the crucifix had fallen off, but it wasn’t there. I stood
up and wondered if perhaps Potter had taken it before we had left
the graveyard that day. I made my way back through the woods.

The wind had
started to pick up again, and the rain became heavier. With my hair
beginning to look like a series of black-coloured rat tails as it
clung to my face, I sped up as I headed back towards the manor.
Following the route that Potter had previously led me, I headed
towards the summerhouse, knowing that to avoid the downpour that
the swollen clouds were threatening, I could always shelter in
there.

I ran from
beneath the trees and into the circular area where the summerhouse
stood. Just before it stood the statue that I had seen the day
before. But there was something different about it. And as I ran
towards it, I was sure that before it had been facing the
summerhouse, but now had its back turned towards it, as if the
stone girl had turned around somehow. As I drew nearer, I could see
that it wasn’t just the position of the girl that had changed,
there was something different about her hands.

I reached the
statue, and with rain running down my face, I looked at Murphy’s
crucifix as it hung from the statue’s cold, stone fist. The
crucifix glistened wetly, and I reached out for it. I pulled on it,
but it was like the statue of the girl didn’t want to give it up.
The crucifix wouldn’t come free of her grasp, so I left her to hold
onto it. Then, looking into her featureless stone face, I
whispered, “What are you? Who are you? I know you can hear me.”

And as I stood
in the driving rain and secretly hoped for a reply, it was me who
screeched as a hand suddenly gripped my shoulder.

Kayla

“That wasn’t a
baby in that pram,” I gasped. “It was a doll! Why would she be
pushing that thing around?”

“Freaky, huh?”
Isidor said, stepping from the doorway and watching the woman with
the pram retreat up the road. “And did you notice how the doll’s
eyes had been removed?”

“Isidor, I
don’t want to state the freaking obvious, but this place is like,
really screwed up,” I said, standing in the rain next to him.
“Maybe we should just head back to the manor.”

“Not before
putting some of these adverts around town,” he said, taking them
from within his coat.

“You’re not
serious!” I said to him.

“If anyone has
been pushed, as Kiera describes it,” Isidor replied thoughtfully,
“the people of this town must have. Someone has got to respond to
these adverts.”

I followed
Isidor up the rain-drenched streets, as water raced along the
gutter and sloshed into the storm drains. We hadn’t gone far when
we came to a small newsagent, the shop where Isidor had bought the
papers from on previous visits to Wood Hill.

With his hand
pressed against the door, he looked back at me and said,
“Ready?”

“Ready for
what?” I asked him, my eyes wide.

“Anything, I
guess,” he said, pushing open the door and stepping inside.

A bell chimed
above our heads as the door swung shut behind us. The shop was
dimly lit and dust motes hovered in the air. Two narrow racks ran
the length of the shop, and these were filled with groceries, which
looked to be covered with as much dust as the air about us. Some of
the shelves were littered with magazines, which looked dog-eared,
their covers yellowed with age. The shop smelt of sweat, stale
cigar smoke, and beer. At the end of one of the aisles was one of
those tall displays that turned. It was full of postcards, and just
like the magazines had, they looked creased up and old. I turned
the display round, and as I did, it made a creaking sound and
toppled over. I tried to grab hold of it, but it slipped through my
fingers and toppled over onto the floor. The postcards scattered,
some of them disappearing beneath the shelves and racks.

“What’s going
on back there?” a deep voice boomed, and it almost seemed to shake
the whole shop.

Together,
Isidor and I peered around the edge of the nearest shelf and could
see a counter at the back of the shop. Someone was sitting behind
it, but I couldn’t see who as that part of the shop was covered in
shadows. The voice spoke again and said, “What do you want?”

Isidor glanced
at me, then, with the adverts in his hand, he made his way towards
the counter. I followed him, and as we drew near, I could hear
heavy breathing. It sounded out of breath. And as I drew nearer
still, I could hear the heartbeat. It was weak sounding as it
struggled to push the blood around this person’s body. As we
stepped towards the counter and through the shadows, I understood
why the breathing had sounded like a clapped-out old engine and the
heart like a weak drum beat.

The man who sat
behind the counter was huge – a giant. His head was the size of a
basketball, round with cheeks that glowed red as if it had just
been pulled from a fire. Sweat rolled from his brow and down the
side of his face and he mopped it away with one of his meaty hands.
The fingers looked like overstuffed sausages, and the fingernails
were yellow with a black rind of dirt under each one. He wore a
vest which was stained yellow with sweat and old food, his belly
sat on his lap like a stuffed cushion.

“What do you
want?’ he asked again, his eyes looking bloodshot. A fat cigar hung
from the corner of his mouth, and the end of it was black with
spit.

“I was
wondering if you could display one of these pictures in your shop
window?” Isidor smiled.

“What is it?”
the man asked, snatching the advert from Isidor’s hand. But before
Isidor had a chance to say anything, the man screwed up his flabby
face and said, “‘Have you been pushed?’ What’s that s’posed to
mean?”

“That’s what we
wondered,” I whispered to myself, checking out the tuffs of thick,
black hair that covered the man’s arms and shoulders.

“No can do,”
the man grunted and pushed the advert back across the counter. “Is
it some kinda joke?”

“No joke,” I
said.

“Please,”
Isidor said.

“But what does
it mean?” the man asked again, chewing on the end of his cigar, not
taking his eyes from us. “It seems weird to me and weird means
trouble as far as I’m concerned.”

“No weirder
than this town,” Isidor frowned.

The man didn’t
say anything at first, he just stared straight back at Isidor.
Then, he took back the advert, looked down at it and said, “The
wolves came and they changed everything.”

“The wolves?”
Isidor asked, shooting a glance at me.

“You musta
heard of the wolves?’” the man huffed, sounding out of breath.

“I guess,” I
breathed, thinking of the Lycanthrope – the wolves that I had known
from my past life. “What about them?”

“They took our
children,” he whispered. “They took all of them.”