The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams Page A

to one side was a distinct surface mostly buried beneath a dune of ash, a smoothness where everything else was rough. An odd note.

    Hadrian hefted the shovel in his hands, wondering how far he could reach into the oven. If he was quick, he decided that he would just about make it. Taking off the cotton uniform top and feeling the heat roll in waves up his exposed skin, he gripped the shovel by its handle and lunged into the furnace.

    He missed with his first attempt. The second only pushed the object further back into the ash. The third didn’t quite uncover it, but did make it tilt on its burning bed. He was about to try a fourth time when the heat became too much for him and he had to withdraw.

    His eyeballs felt as though they had been baked in their sockets. All he could smell was burning hair. He breathed deeply of relative coolness before turning back and raising the shovel to try again.

    Staring at him from the furnace’s hatchway was the black eye of a skull. Just one. The rest of the skull was buried in ash. The smooth surface of the skull’s temple wasn’t what he had initially seen in the ash; that lay to the skull’s right and looked more like a leg bone or rib. The skull had been accidentally exposed by his blind flailing.

    He froze, knowing deep down that it belonged to Seth. He didn’t need an autopsy to tell him that. He didn’t need to hear the calm, sympathetic voice of a doctor or a policeman explaining in layperson’s terms that his brother’s body had been dismembered and stuffed into the furnace, where fire would eventually get rid of the evidence. He didn’t need to sit through an endless inquest debating the finer points of dental records and molten blobs that had once been a watch, a belt buckle, a monogrammed pocketknife. Hadrian knew.

    He sank down on the oil-stained floor and leaned on the shovel for support. Tears evaporated in the blast-furnace heat before they reached his cheeks. He had his proof that his brother was dead. He knew it as surely as if it was his own skeleton in the furnace, slowly cremating. Seth was gone.

    He always liked the heat, Hadrian thought, with a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh. He put a hand over his mouth to keep in the noise.

    Distantly he could still hear Lascowicz repeating his demand for Hadrian to show himself, turn himself in, do the right thing. Soon all pretence of friendliness was gone from the detective’s voice.

    ‘ Do not think you can run, boy. Your chances of lasting a day on your own are slim. And getting away from us, even if you do survive, is unlikely.’

    There was a leering, cruel edge to the words. They wound their way into Hadrian’s head and sapped the will from him. Lascowicz was right. What was the point of fighting? He was just one person against a world of uncertainty. He didn’t know who he was any more without his brother — his mirror, his nemesis — to define him.

    (‘He’s all you talk about,’ Ellis complained, once. ‘You say that he gets on your nerves, that sometimes you hate him and long to be free of him. Are you sure that’s what you really want?’

    ‘Do I have any choice?’ Seth asked.

    Hadrian held his breath, listening to their conversation surreptitiously. They thought he was asleep. Or maybe they didn’t care.

    ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she said. ‘You might just get it.’)

    ‘Give in now,’’ said Lascowicz, ‘and deny us the pleasure of hunting you. I dare you.’

    Hadrian shook his head, brushing the detective’s influence off him like dandruff. He wouldn’t give in until he found out what had happened to Ellis. He still had no idea where she was. If he poked deeper in the furnace, would he find another skull?

    He forced himself to move. His knees unbent like rusted joints. Ash and burnt hair stuck to sweat streaming down his arms and chest.

    With breath held tightly in his chest and eyes in slits, he stabbed deep into the coals with the shovel’s stained