Dead Flesh (3 page)

As I sat alone
in the darkness of my room, the only light coming from my
Moon
laptop, the one that had the same
crescent-shaped moon logo as my iPod, I tried to make sense of
these little differences to what I had known before. Where had the
company Apple gone? Ford? McDonalds? The singers and songs that had
disappeared from my iPod?

And what about
the newspaper cuttings that covered my walls, which told the
stories of people waking up six weeks ago to feel that everything
wasn’t quite right? I knew that humans, on a subconscious level,
knew that something was wrong – that something was missing –
something had been knocked slightly off balance.

I read and
reread the stories of how men had woken to find their closets were
full of women’s clothes, shoes, and hats. Where had these things
come from? Who did they belong to? After all, they hadn’t
girlfriends or wives, but why had they woken to find silver and
gold coloured bands around their wedding fingers?

What about the
passenger trains that had stopped suddenly, en route to their
destinations because the drivers had suddenly vanished? The
co-pilots, who suddenly looked up to find that they had taken off
without a pilot, and were now thirty thousand feet above ground.
And the patients who bled to death on operating tables, the medical
team gone.

My walls were
covered in a thousand similar stories, and even though I knew what
had happened to all of those missing people, I still found it hard
to comprehend that so many Vampyrus had infiltrated human
civilisation and made lives for themselves. Those who had been left
behind were now left to stare, dazed and confused. It must have
been similar to being halfway through a conversation only to
suddenly forget what you were talking about. That awful searching,
scrambling of the mind as you tried desperately to remember but
just couldn’t.

Sitting in one
of the dusty armchairs that I had taken from the attic, I looked at
the walls, which were a collage of black and white lines of print
and faces. Why had I collected them? I didn’t really know the
answer to that. Potter said that I had lost my freaking mind. He
either failed to see the changes that had taken place since coming
back from The Hollows – coming back from the dead – or he just
refused to notice them. But I think Isidor and Kayla understood why
I had collected all of those news cuttings and trawled for hours on
the Internet.

Each day, Kayla
and Isidor would make the long drive into the nearest town and a
buy a copy of each available newspaper. They would bring them to
me, and sometimes in silence, but more often than not while
listening to music Kayla selected on my iPod, we would cut the
articles from the newspapers and tack them to my bedroom walls.

Glancing at
them, I could see that they both looked lost, a perpetual look of
confusion engraved across their faces. Isidor was eighteen, Kayla
sixteen, and neither would grow any older. But like me, the
euphoria of being alive again had worn off and the reality of being
dead but alive weighed heavily upon them. Coming back to life where
things
had changed, however slight, had
changed them too.

“What do we
do?” Isidor had asked me as the three of us had sat and cut
articles from the newspapers.

“How do you
mean?” I asked, cutting carefully around an article about how no
one could understand how a Chief of Police had never been appointed
in London. And if there ever had been one, what had been their name
and where were they now?

“What do we do
for the rest of eternity?” Kayla asked, stopping what she was doing
and looking at me. “We didn’t come back to sit on the floor of your
room cutting up newspapers. I mean I love spending time with you
Kiera, but…”

“What did the
Elders tell you?” I asked, peering over the corner of the newspaper
at them.

“They said we
were angels – dark angels – whatever that’s s’posed to mean,”
Isidor said, scratching the tiny beard that jutted from his chin.
“They told me I was to be called
Malachi
,
Kayla,
Uriel
and…” with a smile on his
face, he added, “And Potter was to be called
Gabriel
.”

I smiled back
and said, “I wouldn’t let him hear you call him that.”

“I know – it’s
great,” Isidor grinned. “It really pisses him off.”

“Did they say
anything else?” I asked them.

“Only that you
would need us to help you,” Kayla explained, going back to her
cutting. “But they didn’t say how or with what.”

“They said I’d
been ‘cursed to walk in the shadow of death’, as they described
it,” I told them, laying the scissors on the floor beside me. “They
said I was one of the Dead Flesh – cursed.”

“But a curse
can be lifted, right?” Isidor said.

“The Elders
said that it could be, but they didn’t say how,” I told him.

“So how will
you know?” Kayla pushed. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to
wait,” I told her, taking the newspaper article I had cut out and
tacking it onto the wall along with the others. “I’m just going to
sit in my chair over by the window and wait.”

“But what about
the changes?” Kayla asked me as she knocked her auburn fringe from
her brow. “Why do you think some things are different now?”

“I don’t know,”
I told her, looking straight into her green eyes.

“It’s like
kinda freaky,” Isidor said. “I noticed it as we raced to the
mortuary to get you. We passed a motorway sign which gave
directions to London. Except the sign didn’t say London. It said,
Linden
. I had to look twice because at
first, I thought I had misread the sign.”

“How can London
be called
Linden
?” Kayla asked, sounding
spooked.

“I don’t know
the answer to that either,” I told her, picking up another
newspaper from the pile on the floor. “Like I don’t know why people
are all raving about a book called
Harvey
Trotter
who happens to be a twelve-year-old dragon slayer.”
Then, holding up the paper, I pointed out an advertisement for the
movie of the book. “It appears that
Harvey
Trotter& the Dragon’s Throne
was written by someone
called K.J. Dowling.”

“K.J. who?”
Isidor said, staring at the newspaper advert. “I mean couldn’t J.K
sue this K.J dude? She’s been ripped off.”

“But that’s the
thing that scares me the most,” I said, looking at both Kayla and
Isidor. “I don’t think
Harry Potter
exists
here – a version of those books, yes, but not the ones we know.
Wherever
here
is, they have their own
version of the
Harry Potter
books, like
they have
Moon
instead of
Apple, McDonnell’s
instead of
McDonald’s
and a whole other bunch of stuff.”

“Linden instead
of
London
?” Isidor said.

“That’s right,”
I nodded.

“So
where
are we then?” Isidor asked.

“Are we like in
a different time or something?” Kayla added.

“No – not a
different time,” I said looking down at the newspaper in my hands.
“Look at the date – its twenty-twelve all right – but just a
different version of it.”

“But how has
that happened?” Kayla pushed, as if I knew all the answers. “I
mean, I know I died and all, but those Elders had brought me back
within hours. How come so much has changed?”

“I wish I knew
the answer to that,” I told her softly.

“So what do we
do?” Isidor asked me again.

“We wait,” I
said looking at him. “We just wait.”

“For what?”
Kayla asked, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind.

“The
answer.”

“And how do you
know it will come?” Isidor asked, shooting a glance at me, then
back at his sister, as if he too couldn’t believe what he was
hearing.

“I don’t know
where the answer will come from,” I told them, getting up and
crossing my room to the chair I had positioned by the large window
with the balcony. Then, sitting and looking out the window, I added
thoughtfully, “The answers will come – I’ve been brought back for a
reason – we all have.”

Kiera

All I’d been
doing for the last six weeks had been waiting. But I didn’t know
for how much longer I could bear it. It wasn’t only the waiting –
it was the cracks. How long did I have before those cracks became
splits, fractures, and then complete breaks? Either way – if I sat
and did nothing, I would fall apart.

So, as I sat
alone in my room, staring out of the window at the leafless trees
that surrounded the grounds of Hallowed Manor, I knew that I had to
do something – anything that would break the monotony of being
dead. It wasn’t like being in a book or a movie. There was no
glamour to being immortal. It was a curse. And I had to do
something until I was told what I needed to do to lift it.

My thoughts
were broken by the sight of Potter below. Even though it was
mid-January, and the temperature was close to zero outside, I could
see him stripped to the waist as he raked the leaves, which had
fallen onto the wide gravel drive, into a mushy pile. Potter was
restless, just like the rest of us. I watched him as he worked. His
face was ashen and hard-looking, a cigarette dangling from the
corner of his mouth. I could see that although he was keeping
himself busy, his mind wasn’t on the job at hand, but on something
else. His eyes were dark, and he seemed to stare down at the copper
and gold coloured leaves as if they weren’t even there.

On returning to
the manor, I wondered if Potter and I would at last be together –
just like other couples. Share the same bed, the same likes and
dislikes - but that hadn’t happened. Any daydreams I might have had
of us curled up together on the sofa watching movies, strolling
hand-in-hand on long meandering walks had failed to materialise. At
first we shared the same room – the same bed – but as the cracks
started to appear in me and on me – so they started in our
relationship. It wasn’t that I found myself loving Potter less, in
fact, now free of The Hollows and the nightmare that I had
journeyed over the last year, I felt as if I could breathe again –
for a short time at least.

But the
nightmares came – the girl forever being chased – her desperate
escape – the school named Ravenwood – and deep inside of me, I knew
there was trouble coming for me again. Just like how you know that
a storm is brewing on a warm summer’s evening. The sky starts to
darken, almost thicken. The atmosphere feels almost electric.
That’s how I had started to feel, as if a storm were coming and I
didn’t know when, from what direction, and if I could find shelter
from it.

So gradually,
Potter and I had stopped holding each other during the night. I
would lay on my side, watching the gentle rise and fall of his
chest as he slept, his strong arms enveloping me. But gradually we
had started to sleep apart, back to back, until eventually Potter
moved out of my room and then from the manor, taking up residence
again in the Gate House. Somewhere inside of me, where my cravings
for the red stuff kept me from sleeping, I was grateful for that.
If I were to be honest with myself, I didn’t know how long I could
fight the urge – need – or was it pure desire, to sink my fangs
into him and feed again.

But I missed
him and my heart ached to think of him alone in the Gate House, so
I often went to see him there, only to find him sitting quietly,
deep in thought, and I would remember how we had shared our first
kiss in that rickety shack. I would sit opposite him on the
flea-bitten sofa and talk was light. But you know, I needed to be
with him and I knew that he needed to be with me. Sometimes we lay
before the fire that he had roaring in the hearth, and I would lie
in his arms and fight the tears that stood in my eyes. But before
the talk turned to anything meaningful between us, I would slip
away, back to the manor, leaving him to his private thoughts.

It was as if
just being together was enough, during those intimate moments we
were showing how much we loved each other; but for whatever reason,
words were more difficult to find when trying to express how we
felt.

I knew in my
heart that Potter was hurting and I suspected now that he was away
from The Hollows, he had found time to reflect on what had happened
there. The betrayal by his best friend, Luke and the death of
Murphy, I figured, were weighing heavily upon his soul. And like
Potter, now away from The Hollows, I too was able to look back on
everything that had happened. I too had been betrayed by Luke – we
all had. I’d lost my mother and Murphy had been like a father to
me. Sometimes, I would stand alone in the quiet of the night before
the mirror in my room and look at the maze of hairline cracks that
covered me. I would stare at those little black fingers that
wriggled at the tips of my wings, my claws, and fangs and knew that
I truly had been cursed. So many times, as I’d lain in Potter’s
arms before the fire in the Gate House, I had fought the crippling
urge to tell him about the cracks that covered my body when in my
half-breed form. But I just couldn’t tell him. I could
see
he was consumed by his own worries, doubts, and
grief, and being back from the dead wasn’t easy to deal with – like
I said – it isn’t like being in the movies.

So I sat at my
window and watched him rake the leaves away, both of us lost to our
thoughts. For how long I sat there, I don’t know – that is another
thing about being dead – time kind of just stands still. Nights
could seem to last fifty or sixty hours and days only moments. Like
I’ve already said, the world had been shoved to the left a bit.