Dead Flesh

by Tim O'Rourke

  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 cou
ple 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?”

  Potter threw away his cigarette end and looking at me, he said, “Kiera, you can’t have that life back – it’s gone. Can’t you see that? You ain’t a cop no more and neither am I. We’re nothing more than ghosts. We shouldn’t even be here – we’re dead.”

  “But we are here in this fucked up world that we’ve come back to!” I yelled at him, my fists clenched. “And I think us coming back has changed things and only we can put them right again.”

  Potter looked back at me, then rolling back his shoulders, his wings unfolded from his back. “You stay and do the whole Murder-She-Wrote thing, but I need to get away from here.”

  I reached out, but before I’d had the chance to touch him, Potter had rocketed away, up into the clouds, which covered the sky like a dark blanket. I looked at the statue again and knew that I was right, however odd my theory was. Whoever the girl had once been – she had now turned to stone. What she had been doing in the grounds of Hallowed Manor, I didn’t know. But something told me that finding her out by the summerhouse was a sign. A sign of what? I didn’t know that, either. Until I found out, I decided that I would keep this to myself. I didn’t want to alarm Isidor or Kayla any more than I had to. Whoever the girl had been, she was now just a harmless piece of stone, and it wasn’t as if she was going anywhere.

  Chapter Eight

  Kiera

  After Potter had flown away, I headed back to the manor to find Isidor slumped on the sofa reading a book, and Kayla folded up in an armchair, listening to my iPod. She had it up so loud that I could hear that she was listening to The Wanted sing Lightning.

  As I entered, Kayla yanked the earphones out and looked at me. “You look upset.”

  “Potter’s gone,” I told them and Isidor glanced over the top of his book at me.

  “Gone where?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said and flopped into one of the armchairs.

  “When is he gonna be back?” Kayla asked, turning off the iPod.

  “Don’t know that either,” I shrugged.

  “Why did he go?” Kayla shot back, and I could see the glint of intrigue in her eyes. I couldn’t blame her; Potter deciding to take off was probably the most exciting thing that had happened to her since coming back.

  “I think, like all of us, he’s having problems adjusting,” I said.

  “I’d have problems adjusting too if I came back from the dead to discover that my name was Gabriel,” Isidor smirked from around the edge of his book.

  Ignoring his comment, I said, “What are you reading?”

  “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” he said, holding the book in the air so I could see the front cover.

  “Good,” I smiled.

  “Good?” Isidor said, cocking the eyebrow with the piercing.

  “It might come in handy,” I said back.

  “How come?” Kayla asked, shooting a quizzical look in my direction.

  “I don’t know about you guys,” I said, “but I’m getting fed up with sitting around here every day, twiddling my thumbs. I need something more than that - I need to get the old brain matter working again.”

  “So what have you got in mind, Kiera?” Isidor asked, placing the book to one side.

  “I’m going to write an advert offering to help people with their problems,” I explained to them.

  “What sort of problems?” Kayla asked me, screwing up her face.

  “I don’t know – anything I guess,” I said.

  “You know you’re just gonna attract a whole bunch of pervs,” Kayla grimaced.

  “We don’t have to respond to their emails,” I said. “We pick the cases that sound most interesting - unusual!”

  “When you say ‘cases’,” Isidor asked, his interest now picking up, “Do you mean like investigations?”

  “I guess,” I answered. “We’ll just have to see what comes up.”

  So over dinner that evening, we decided what our advert should say. We sat bunched together at the end of the vast kitchen table, our voices echoing off the huge stone walls. It was more like a banqueting hall than a kitchen. We didn’t eat much, which was another thing about being dead – we had all lost our appetites. It wasn’t as if we needed food to stay alive. Everything had the same bland taste to it - like toast without butter and jam - just dull and boring. Food just got pushed to the edges of our plates, as if we were trying to kid ourselves that we had eaten. Maybe we only bothered to cook a meal each night to try and keep some normality to our newfound existence; after all, the only thing that any of us truly enjoyed was the taste of human blood.

  Isidor pushed his plate to one side and said, “I know what the advert could say. What about something like this: ‘Got a problem? Need some help? Who you gonna call – Kiera Hudson!’ ”

  Kayla almost choked on her food as she started to laugh. “Isidor, Kiera is meant to be an investigator – not a fre
aking Ghostbuster!”

  “Okay, smart arse,” he said, looking a little hurt at his sister’s teasing. “You think of something.”

  “Okay,” Kayla said thoughtfully. “How about, ‘Got a problem that needs to be shared? Got a secret you can’t tell anyone else? Then contact Kiera Hudson. Complete discretion assured!’ ”

  “If you write something like that,” Isidor grimaced, “You will get a bunch of pervs come knocking at the door. There’ll be a queue of them in dirty raincoats from here to God knows where!”

  With a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth, I looked at them across the table and said, “We need to keep it simple. You’re quite right, we don’t want any perverts or ghost hunters…”

  “Busters,” Kayla cut in.

  “Them too,” I nodded, “but we don’t want to be investigating a string of missing pets, either. We all know that we’ve come back to a slightly different world than the one we left. Maybe there is someone out there who hasn’t forgotten everything – someone who remembers what the world used to be like.”

  “So what have you got in mind?” Isidor asked me.

  “How about this: ‘Has your world been pushed?’ ” I suggested, thinking of how Potter had described the changes.

  “What’s that s’posed to mean?” Kayla asked glancing at Isidor, then back at me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at her. “But someone out there might.”

  So the following morning, with a dozen copies of the advert in their hands, Isidor and Kayla stood in the great hall beneath the chandelier, their wings out.

  “Don’t you think you should go by car?” I asked them.

  “Are you crazy?” Kayla asked back. “You want us to reach as many towns as possible, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” I said, “but it’s just that you might be seen by someone. We shouldn’t be drawing attention to ourselves.”

  “Have you seen outside this morning?” Isidor asked, his wings rippling beneath his arms. “The sky is full of clouds – no one will see us. And besides, the nearest town is over ten miles away – we should know, we’ve driven it enough over the last few weeks collecting those newspapers for you.”