Dead Flesh (5 page)

“Perhaps
nothing changed while we were away,” he said, fixing me with a
stare. “Perhaps we’ve come back to a different world, one that has
been
pushed
sideways a little.”

“But how come
no one else has noticed the changes?” I asked him. “I mean, people
would notice if Disneyland just vanished, wouldn’t they?”

“Not if it was
never here in the first place,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“Not if it had always been this Drizzle dude.”

“You said
Grizzel before,” I reminded him.

“Whatever!
Grizzel or Drizzle – it all amounts to the same thing,” he said. “I
don’t think the humans have ever known any different.”

“But why aren’t
the changes bigger?”

“I think the
capital of England suddenly having a new name is a pretty big
deal,” he said, looking at me.

“No, I don’t
mean like that,” I sighed. “I mean things could be completely
different instead of changing a few place names, songs, books, and
movies. Whole continents could have changed, Kings and Queens could
be different, and landscapes could have changed.”

“Perhaps they
have,” he said thoughtfully. “We haven’t been the most sociable of
people since coming back from the dead. We haven’t even stuck our
noses beyond the front gate. There could be a whole new world
waiting on the other side of those giant walls.”

“I don’t think
so,” I told him. “Isidor and Kayla have been bringing me newspapers
and I’ve been on the net. I would have noticed any big changes like
that – they would have noticed, too. The changes that we’re talking
about are subtle. It’s like coming back from holiday and finding
that the furniture has been moved slightly and a few new pots and
pans have been added to the cupboards. It’s the same house, in the
same street, but stuff has been
pushed
from where you left it.”

Then, taking me
by the hand, Potter said, “let me show you something. I’ve got a
subtle change to show you,” and he set off through the trees.

Kiera

Potter led me
by the hand through the woods. Pale shards of wintry sun cut
through the leafy overhead canopy and the smell of the pine needles
smelt fresh and sweet. Our walk through the woods was quiet, the
only sound was the odd squawk from a crow as we startled it by our
progress.

We walked hand
in hand and for the first time since returning from the dead and
back to the manor, it felt as if we were a real couple taking a
stroll on a winter’s afternoon. But to think of this only made me
long for what we could have had if we had met someplace else other
than the Ragged Cove – in another time surrounded by a different
set of circumstances.

The treeline
ahead began to thin, the gaps between them growing bigger. Potter
led me out into the clearing where the summerhouse stood.

“Notice
anything different?” Potter almost seemed to whisper. “Can you see
anything that has been
pushed
?”

Just as I had
remembered it, the summerhouse was a small, squat building, painted
white, which stood on a raised wooden platform with a small set of
steps leading up to its wooden front door. But there was something
different – something had been pushed into place that hadn’t been
there before. There was a statue. Letting go of Potter’s hand, I
stepped into the clearing and walked slowly towards it. To see the
statue just standing there made me feel uneasy – on edge – and if I
still had a heart, I knew that it would be quickening in my
chest.

I came to rest
before it. It was made of grey coloured stone and even though its
face was featureless, I knew that it was a statue of a girl. She
was bent forward slightly and had her fingers laced together as if
in prayer. To look at her reminded me of the many statues of St.
Bernadette I had seen. Whoever had sculpted this life-sized statue
of the girl had gone to tremendous detail. Her hair looked so real
that at any moment, I thought it might just flutter back from her
shoulders. She was dressed in what looked like a shroud, which came
to rest against her marble-looking toes. I say marble as her face,
hands, and feet were covered in the faintest of cracks. To look at
her was, in some freaky way, like looking back at my own reflection
as I stood alone before the mirror in my room, studying the cracks
and lines in my naked flesh.

“Freaky, don’t
you think?” Potter asked.

I gasped and
spun around, unaware that he had joined me by the statue.

“Where did it
come from?” I breathed. “Who put it here?”

“That’s the
million-dollar question,” he said, staring at the statue. “It
wasn’t here before. I should know – I spent long enough hobbling
around these grounds like the bleeding Hunchback of Notre Dame when
I was disguised as Marshall. Remember that?”

“How could I
forget,” I half-smiled, unable to take my eyes from the statue of
the girl.“Why do you think its here?”

“Haven’t a
clue,” Potter said. “You’re the Miss Marple around here, I was
hoping you might be able to do your
thing
– you know – look for bent-over blades of grass and God knows what
else it is that you can see.”

Ignoring his
sarcasm, which believe it or not was quite refreshing as it was
more like the Potter I had fallen in love with, I turned to him and
said, “Although the statue looks ancient, it hasn’t been here long,
which is a curious thing.”

“How curious?”
he asked me and smiled, as if he too were enjoying seeing that
glimmer of my old self reappearing.

“Because we’ve
been here six weeks, okay,” I started, feeling that buzz I got when
I had a problem to solve. “The grass is about four inches long, but
none of it has grown up and over the toes of the statue, indicating
that it was placed here recently. But how could that have happened?
I mean this is made of solid stone, it’s not something that one
person could have thrown over the wall, then carried so deep into
the woods and placed here.”

“Maybe more
than just one person brought it here,” he said. “What makes you
think that it was carried here by just one person?”

I knelt down,
and brushing my fingertips over the grass, I said, “can’t you see
the faint impressions of where the grass has been disturbed? They
are almost gone, but they are still just visible if you look for
them. There are only one set of footprints.”

“Maybe this
person worked out a lot,” he half-joked.

“No one carried
it here,” I told him, standing up again as I had
seen
enough. “The footprints would have been deeper if
someone had carried it here from the sheer weight of it in their
arms.

“So what are
you saying?” Potter asked, looking at me like I had all the answers
written down somewhere.

I pointed down
at the faint footprints that led up to the statue and said, “The
tracks only lead up to the statue, they don’t lead away. Whoever it
was never left this spot.”

“So where is
this person now?” Potter asked me, searching my eyes with his.

“She’s still
here,” I whispered.

Potter looked
back over his shoulder as if checking out the treeline, then the
summerhouse. Turning to face me again, he said, “What makes you so
sure that this person was a
she
?”

“The footprints
are too small to be that of a man, and I’d put her height at
about…” Glancing at the statue, I added, “Five-foot-four.”

“You’ve done
that measurement thing again haven’t you?” he said. “The distance
between each stride gives you their height, right?”

“Wrong,” I
smiled, and slapped my forehead with the flat of my head. “You just
don’t see it, do you?”

“See what,
Sherlock?” Potter snapped, starting to sound pissed off with
me.

“Just think
about it for a moment,” I said back. “There’s a set of girl’s
footprints leading to a statue that wasn’t here before. The statue
is way too heavy to be carried and we know that it hasn’t been here
for very long. There are no tracks leading away from the statue –
they stop where the statue now stands.”

“So what you
saying?”

“Oh come on,
Potter!” I gasped. “Do you need me to spell it out for you?”

“Now listen
here, sweet-cheeks, don’t take that tone with me,” Potter barked
gruffly and inside I smiled.

“Tone?” I
snapped back. “What tone? I don’t have a tone. “It’s not my fault
you just don’t
see
it!”

“See what?” he
growled at me.

“No one brought
the statue out here!” I yelled, secretly enjoying this fiery moment
between us. It reminded me of how we used to be before coming back
from the dead. “Those footprints belong to the statue!”

As if I had
just punched him in the guts, Potter’s mouth fell open. “Have you
finally lost your freaking mind? Jeez, I’ve heard you come up with
some shit in the past, but this takes the piss! So what you’re
suggesting is that this statue came to life, and for some unknown
reason decided to take a stroll out to the summerhouse? Is that
what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Whoever she
is, I don’t think she was a statue when she came to the
summerhouse,” I said, looking back at the faceless girl. “I think
she suddenly turned to stone.”

“That is the
craziest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” Potter said, shaking
his head and fumbling his pack of cigarettes from his trouser
pocket.

Then looking
him straight in the eye, I said, “Any crazier than coming back from
the dead? Any crazier than waking to discover London isn’t called
London
anymore and U2 are now called
Feedback and my iPod has a crescent-shaped moon on the…”

“What do you
mean U2 aren’t called
U2
anymore?” Potter
suddenly cut in. “This is worse than I thought. You mean I can’t
listen to their songs anymore?”

I shook my head
and said, “No – I don’t think so.”

“What about,
Where The Streets Have No Name
?”

“Look can we
just stop discussing U2 –
Feedback
– for a
moment and focus on the statue,” I snapped.

“But there’s a
world of difference between a few names changing and a young girl
turning to stone,” he argued.

Then, thinking
of me standing naked before the mirror, my body covered in those
cracks, which wept that white, powdery ash, I said, “Is there a
difference? Maybe when everything got
pushed
, as you call it, this young girl turned to
stone.”

“Okay let’s
just say I’m prepared to take a stroll down insanity beach with you
for a moment or two,” Potter said, “There are still a couple of
unanswered questions.”

“Okay?” I said.
“Like what?”

“One, what was
this girl doing out here?” Potter asked me. “And secondly, who is
she?”

I looked at the
statue, and slowly shaking my head, I whispered, “I don’t
know.”

Potter came
towards me, and placing his hands on my hips, he looked into my
eyes and said, “See, Kiera, I told you we need to get away from
here.”

“And go where?”
I asked, knocking his hands from me. “We have nowhere else to go.
And besides, I’ve been doing some thinking.”

“About what?”
he asked, lighting another cigarette.

“It’s not good
for Isidor and Kayla to have nothing to do; they need something to
take their minds off what has happened to them.”

“Perhaps we can
find a game of Scrabble tucked away in the manor somewhere…” Potter
started.

“I’m not
joking,” I said. “We all need something to take our minds off what
has become of us. I don’t know about you, but I can’t just sit and
stare at the walls any longer. Whether you believe it or not,
everything that has happened – been
pushed
– while we were away, has happened for a reason and I believe
that’s why we’re back.”

“So what you’re
saying is that we’ve got to push it all back into place,” Potter
seemed to scoff at me. “Good luck, sweet-cheeks.”

“Why do you
have to be so impossible at times?” I asked him.

“What you’re
suggesting is
impossible
,” he said back,
chewing the end of his cigarette.

“I thought at
first that maybe we should wait for the Elders to give us some
sign,” I said. “But look around you, there are plenty of signs that
things aren’t right.”

“So what are
you gonna do?” he smiled at me with that smug grin of his and I
remembered how often I’d wanted to knock it clean off his face.
“Investigate?”

With my fist
clenched and knowing that he was trying to bait me, I said smiling
back at him, “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“How?”

“I’m going to
advertise – I did it once before,” I told him.

“What, like a
private detective?” he chuckled to himself. “You are taking this
whole Miss Marple thing way too seriously.”

“Well anything
has got to be better than just moping around this place and
sweeping leaves up off the drive,” I snipped back at him. “I
haven’t been raised from the dead to do nothing. While I’m about
it, perhaps I should advertise your gardening services?”

“I ain’t no
gardener!” Potter growled at me.

“No?” I smiled
smugly at him. “Where has your fire gone, Potter? Where’s the fight
gone? These days you’re as wet as those leaves you stand and rake
into a pile. I need more than that. I might be dead but I need a
life. I miss my old life. I don’t have any of my belongings,
they’re all back at my flat in Havensfield – along with my old life
where I was once a cop, but that’s hundreds of miles away from
here. I don’t even have my badge anymore. I just want a little bit
of that life back – I want to feel like Kiera Hudson again. Can’t
you understand that?”