Dead Angels by Tim O'Rourke Page B

had always had a heightened sense of smell, but now my nose tingled with the new wave of scents that wafted down the tunnel. Although the scent was sweet – almost fresh – I could also detect a metallic smell in the air. 
    I poked my fingers through the holes in the grate and felt the wind sweep over my fingers. It felt cold, just like the air in The Hollows. Gritting my teeth together, I lifted up the grate and slid it to one side. The sunlight showered my face. I closed my eyes and let it shine upon me. I stayed like that for several minutes, my head sticking up out of the hole, while the sun and wind touched my face. It felt incredible. With my heart racing, I opened my eyes and hoisted myself out of the hole. I pushed the grate back into place, then looked about me. I found myself standing in a large wooded area. The trees were similar to those in The Hollows, and they stretched up into the sky. The sky! Oh my God – the sky. I had only ever seen it in pictures and now I was actually standing beneath it. I stared upwards through the canopy of fine green leaves and drew a breath. To get a better look, I made my way through the trees until I found myself out in the open and standing on a narrow road. The sky was a pale blue and wispy clouds covered it like big white scratches. I heard from my friends that if you stared at the clouds long enough, you would see pictures in them, like faces, monsters, and all sorts of other weird stuff.
    So with my head tilted back, I stood in the road and gazed up at the sky. But before any of those faces and monsters had had a chance to appear for me, there was a bellowing sound. I span around to see a car bearing down on me. I had seen cars in picture books, but nothing could have prepared me for the speed with which they travelled. Stumbling backwards, the car raced past in a streak of silver. I could smell that metallic scent again and it came from a pipe which jutted out from the back of the car.  As it passed me by, the driver jabbed his middle finger into the air and screamed, “Get out of the fucking road, arsehole!” 
    I wasn’t too familiar with how humans greeted one another, but I got the feeling that the guy driving the car wasn’t too pleased to see me. The car disappeared into the distance, and taking more care, I headed down the road in the direction that the car had gone. I’d walked for some time, stopping every now and then when something caught my eye. There seemed to be so much to take in that my mind started to race, and I couldn’t wait to get back to The Hollows and tell my friends my own stories. But the thing that caught my imagination the most was the birds. We had flying creatures in The Hollows, I was one of them.
    I knew from the stories I had been told, that unlike us, humans couldn’t fly. They wanted to – they dreamt about it all the time. So they had invented machines called aeroplanes which they sat in and travelled through the air with. Listening to these stories, I had learnt from a very young age that any Vampyrus venturing above ground should never reveal their wings to the humans.
    “Remember, humans don’t like anything that is different,” my mother had often warned me, her green eyes growing wide as if she were telling me a scary bedtime story. “If they were to ever find out that winged creatures were living just beneath them, they would come in search of us.”
    “But why?” I would ask her.
    “Because, they don’t like different , Isidor. They like everyone to be the same,” she would whisper while stoking the fire. Then, looking back over her shoulder at me with the flames dancing in her eyes, she would add, “They would capture us, put us in cages, and open us up to see how we worked.” 
    I would often lie awake at night, my fingertips tracing the angry-looking scars that ran down the inside of my arms. Behind them hid my wings. When my wings were out, the scars disappeared, but my mother would warn me not to get them