Dead Flesh by Tim O'Rourke Page A

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