Dead Angels by Tim O'Rourke

back at him. “But who really gives a shit about Scooby-Doo, Captain-fucking-Caveman, or some stupid mouse?”
    “Stuart Little,” Potter smiled.
    “Who gives a shit!” Isidor almost screamed and stood up. “You don’t know anything about me. You only know what I’ve told you.”
    “So why haven’t you told us?” I asked softly, seeing that Isidor was really upset.
    “Because people never listen to me!” he roared. “Everyone just thinks I’m dumb. Good old Isidor. He’s good to have around in a fight – but I’m not much more than that. But I am more. I know I’m more.”
    “Like what?” I asked him, my voice still soft and compassionate.
    “Like I knew that Luke was really Elias Munn,” he said. “I knew it was him back in The Hollows, but I was too scared to say anything."
    “Why?” I asked him.
    “Would you have believed me?” Isidor shouted. “No – you would’ve just taken the piss. Potter would have taken the piss. He would’ve called me numb nuts.” Then, turning on Potter, Isidor said, “You wouldn’t have believed me because Luke was your friend – he was your best mate – and I wasn’t. I was just the joker in the pack – Shaggy-fucking-Doo. Just like Shaggy-Doo, I provide the laughs. He never gets to solve the mystery, does he? It’s always the others – the clever ones. Well, I did solve the mystery way before any of you, but I sat back and let that animal kill my sister, then murder me, because I was just too fucking scared to speak up.”
    “Scared of what?” I asked, starting to feel ashamed of myself for not knowing that he had been feeling like this for so long.
    “I was scared that you wouldn’t believe me – that you would call me stupid,” and he looked at Potter, who sat on the floor, that look of arrogance wiped from his face. “But I do know stuff and I can’t stay silent again. I don’t care if you laugh and take the piss out of me. I don’t care what you call me. I won’t watch my friends walk into danger again.”
    “What do you know?” Potter asked him, and for once, Potter spoke to him as his equal.
    Taking a deep breath as if trying to calm himself, Isidor finally said, “I’ve seen that word push before.”
    “Where?” Potter asked, his eyes narrowing.
    “I saw it before the world was even pushed , if that makes sense,” Isidor told us. “And I have the proof right here.”
    “What proof?” I asked him gently.
    Patting his chest, Isidor said, “Right in here.”
    Then, sitting down again on the bench, and with the storm howling outside, Isidor began to talk. This is what he told us.

 
    Chapter Nine
     
     
    Isidor
     
    Melody Rose stood out from the rest. Not because of anything she said or did, it was her ordinariness, that’s what drew attention to her.
    I was fourteen, and had never dared leave The Hollows, not once. Some of the other Vampyrus I hung out with had shared stories of how they had snuck above ground. I was fascinated by what they told me, although some of what I heard I wondered if it was even true. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know anything about how the humans lived and the inventions that they had created. Over hundreds of years, other Vampyrus who had ventured above ground had returned with picture books, magazines, and newspapers. One Vampyrus, he was just a kid, I think his name was Burton, had returned one day with this odd-looking contraption, which shone moving pictures against the cave walls. It was like magic. He said the humans called it a movie projector .
    My mum, well, the woman who I believed to be my mother, told me how many years before I’d been born, Burton had returned below ground with a magical roll of pictures. Claiming that he had magic moving pictures of the most beautiful creature that had ever existed below or above ground, he gathered as many Vampyrus into the great chamber beneath the Dewy Pyramids and projected the magic pictures of this most beautiful human. As he stood before the