The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (15 page)

28

I entered the world of the dead, and the heat hit. My neck prickled, and a line of sweat ran down my back. The semi-detacheds and maisonettes flickered in, but the preference of the dead was a row of Edwardian terraces opposite a field. A small, not-real boy raced past me chasing a football. Two dead women stood chatting at the gate to the closest house, dead since the thirties or forties by their clothing, one cradling a baby. The scene was familiar: an old Second World War bomb site. The more violent the death, the more likely it is the dead hang about.

I looked up and saw two figures gliding high above me. Neither flapped. They both soared like they were diving through water. I usually see fliers. Something about flying appeals to the human psyche. Flying when you’re dead is like flying in a dream. Sometimes you struggle to remember how it works, but you usually manage to get off the ground if you’re persistent.

If Ben were dead, he’d probably been killed close by. I couldn’t imagine a murderer going too far out of his way to dump the wings. Unless he didn’t want the police attention focused close to him. It was a lot of ifs.

This was the tricky bit. Finding someone in the death world is about as easy as finding them in the living one. You’ve got to have an idea where they are first.

‘Hi, Viv. You came back.’

My sister appeared in front of me, looking like any other dead person. She was dressed as the person I think she would have been if she had never died. She wore a yellow cotton sundress and flip-flops, her bright hair curled up neatly in a bun.

‘I warned you,’ Sigrid said.

‘No, you didn’t.’ I didn’t knowing what she was talking about. ‘Remind me what I’m being warned about?’

‘I told you.’

It’s probably some sort of psychological defence that makes the dead so annoyingly vague, but that doesn’t stop it being really irritating. Especially since Sigrid knew she was dead. She’d always taken a strong interest in the living world, but wouldn’t ever answer my questions about how she knew what she did. She wasn’t this annoying alive.

I tried another tack. ‘Do you know where Ben is? The boy with wings?’

‘Poor Ben.’ Siggie took my arm in hers. We walked together down the road, dodging the occasional ghost child at play.

‘Have you seen him?’

‘Poor old Ben,’ she said again.

I rolled my eyes. ‘Not helpful, Sig.’

We turned a corner, and I found myself on the high street. In the living world, the road we’d been on had led to more residential roads, but physicality was only an approximation. We were going wherever Siggie was leading.

The heat dialled down a few notches, but I was still sweating. The high street was busy, mostly with not-real people, but enough of the real dead threaded through the throng to support them.

I felt a sudden dampness about my toes. I looked down to see water trickling between my feet. The trickle turned to a flood, and water surged about my ankles. Around me the high street melted away into waves, and I was left treading water in the middle of a vast ocean, brilliant blue sky above. Siggie splashed past me, her tail slapping against the water as she dove deep into the green water. The water was warm, not bathwater warm, but warm enough that I felt comfortable.

She touched my arm, and my legs merged and lengthened. There was a sting at one side of my neck and then the other as gills appeared. ‘How did you do that?’

‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘You did. You’re the one with the power here. I just borrowed some.’

A school of fish with human faces swum past, and I gulped salty water before I remembered that I really didn’t have to. As the gills flapped and my lungs filled with warm salt water, I had to fight the urge to cough, to spit it out. The surface was now high above me, the sun a twinkle on the water.

‘Come on,’ Siggie said, except she didn’t really. Her words were whale song, but I understood them perfectly, and when I answered, the death dream translated those words too.

We undulated through cooling water, past undersea cities and through deep ocean trenches that spurted hot jets that should have broiled us, until we surfaced next to a cliff thick with ocean birds and guano.

‘Up, up, up.’ Siggie pulled me by the hand. We burst out of the water like dolphins at a seaside show. We went higher and higher, and sometime in the rise up from the water, my feet reappeared so that when I finally came down and landed hard on a gravelly path, the stones cut into the balls of my feet, rather than flippers.

We were on an island. Cliffs surrounded the island, with a valley below. Siggie was nowhere to be seen. She’d led me here and disappeared.

An arctic wind blew in from the sea and bit through my wet clothes to my skin. The path I was on led downward, through scraggly trees and rough stone crevices pebbled with sharp stones and dotted with patches of dead grass. Since my only other option was jumping back off the cliff and into the water a few hundred feet down, I kept going. Some of it was walkable, but most I climbed in one way or another. By the time I reached the bottom, my arms and legs were covered with scratches, and my fingernails were bloody.

At the bottom of the cliff, I found a stone cottage, alone on flat scrubland. The roof, too, was stone, although covered in a thick green moss. Very little flickered or shimmered; this place hadn’t changed for a very long time. Only the scraggly vegetable patch outside flickered as plants grew, died back, and grew again.

Movement caught my eye through the cottage window, and a young man appeared in the doorway. It was low enough he had to crouch, although he couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall.

Stubby little wings sprouted from his back, so small they didn’t even reach the breadth of his skinny shoulders. The seagull grey-white of them matched his colourless eyes and hair. He wore a string of blue beads identical to the one on Ben’s wings. The man’s nose and cheeks were red with cold, but despite the biting wind, he wore nothing but a pair of green shorts.

He also wasn’t real. Some dead person was projecting him, although there was no one in sight. The not-real man got to his knees and began pulling weeds from the scraggly vegetable patch.

I had to bend almost double to get under the low lintel. Inside, the air was hot and stuffy and thick with the smell of wood smoke from a low-burning fire centred on the right-side wall. A large double bed with straw mattress occupied one corner on the left wall. A makeshift table with rough wooden chairs stood in the other. The only decoration was a large iron crucifix on the wall opposite the door.

Cast-iron pans and pots hung over the fireplace, and plates and mugs were stacked neatly on a shelf above them. Three wooden chairs were arranged around the fireplace. None would be out of place in the sort of country furniture shop that prided itself on its arty rustic look.

There were three occupants. One was a dead woman sitting on one of the chairs in front of the fire. She was old as sin with a face like a raisin and a head saved from being bald by a few scraggly long white hairs that lay limp over her ears. The others were a not-real Annie Laradus and a not-real Benjamin Brannick.

The not-reals appeared younger, and I realised that sometime before she’d become wrung out, Annie had had thick honey-coloured hair and creamy skin.

Not-real Ben was aged about six and was occupied with spearing small fish from a basket onto a metal spit one by one. His chest was bare, and his wings were tucked neatly against his back.

The language the old woman spoke was unfamiliar, although I understood it as well as if she were speaking English. It’s a skill I wish I could take into the living world—one much more useful than being able to drop down dead.

‘Bennie, love. You mustn’t worry your mama like that. Home before sunset’s the rule.’

‘I was tucked up in the cliffs, Granny. The puffins let me snuggle with them. I was fine. And you need to be early to get the best fish. The light’s wrong if I set out too late.’

The old woman reached out and ruffled the boy’s hair, and the scene reset itself.

‘Bennie, love. You mustn’t worry your mama like that. Home before sunset’s the rule.’

Ben began threading the same fish back onto the spit. I ducked outside. A scene from a life—one that had worried Ben’s granny enough that she relived it in her death.

The little cottage had felt very isolated. I hadn’t seen anyone else on my trek down from the cliffs, but a church bell began ringing. Stone cottages appeared in the mists. Endless streams of winged people emerged from each one, far more than would fit in the small rooms. Some had been dead a long time judging by their dress, but I was beginning to think that might not make much of a difference here.

Some gave me curious looks, others paid no attention. I got the impression I was watching a centuries-old ritual, one that had played out over and over again over the years. Despite the sudden crowds, no one stepped around another or stood back to let someone else pass. They’d all worked out an individual path, a dance worn neatly into the grooves of village life.

Something else struck me about the people. Many of them were old. This might not sound strange, but it was. People in the death world take on the face they think they had, not the one they actually had.

The elderly fall more naturally into middle age. It’s unusual for them to keep their wrinkles and age spots. Most people think of age as something that happens to them, not something that is intrinsically part of them. The elderly winged didn’t look right either—more like someone prematurely aged in a bad movie. It wasn’t natural. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but I had a suspicion. These looked like people who wanted to grow old but never had. I’d read that the life expectancy for the winged was low, but this was new to me. Maybe if I’d been dying a hundred years before the NHS and modern medicine it would have been more familiar. It was interesting, but the most important thing was that Ben wasn’t among them.

29

Dunne’s voice said, ‘Is he dead?’

I didn’t reply, but I did make a noise. I missed the sick bag and threw up in the footwell.

‘Oh, eeuw! Eeeuw! Jeez, I just had it cleaned!’

I scooped up the bag and held it up to my mouth, but it was too late. Everything that was going to come up had already. It didn’t stop me from dry heaving with an involuntary shudder that felt as if it started in my pelvis and rolled all the way up to my ribs. My bones ached, and pain pulsated through my brain.

The heat in the car was stifling. Dunne pressed a button next to his seat, the window next to me slid open, and freezing air hit my face. It helped. I lay back and waited for the queasiness to subside.

When I sat up, the forensic tent was gone, as were all the other police cars. There wasn’t a single constable in sight. The pavement was covered in a thin layer of sugar-like snow. My queasiness increased at the sight of it.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I had no evidence. Just because I didn’t find him didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but when I thought of the winged boy, I didn’t have that feeling that he belonged with the dead. My instincts had been wrong before, but not when it came to death.

‘How can he not be dead?’ Dunne asked. ‘Losing his wings must have been a major trauma. Are you sure?’

‘Sureish.’

‘Sureish?’

‘He wasn’t where he was supposed to be,’ I said, although that wasn’t the truth of it. I wasn’t sure Ben Brannick would head to that island after he died. That didn’t feel right either, but it was as good an answer as I had.

‘He could be a zombie.’

‘Could be.’ I tested my head by moving it from side to side. ‘I better go. I’ve got to get Stanley’s van back.’

‘But...’

‘That’s it, really.’

Dunne pressed the lock button on the doors just as I pulled the handle. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Don’t forget I’ve arranged for you to see Berenice’s foster parents and house this afternoon at three. I’ll pick you up at two thirty.’

‘Right.’

I wondered if I should call Haddad and ask her about it, but I didn’t want to get Dunne into trouble, and I wanted to see what connection Ben had to the missing girl.

I was aware of Dunne’s eyes following me as I crunched back to the van. The snow had stopped, but the sky still had a yellow tinge: more to come. I shuffled into the driver’s seat and pulled out my mobile while I waited for the engine to warm up.

When I’d told Dunne I wasn’t knowledgeable on Homo Penna physiology, I was telling the truth. I’d done a couple of courses on meta-natural physiology, and the winged had been included in one of the few lectures I’d actually attended. I just didn’t remember any of it. It was a little like trying to remember the facts about sabre-toothed tigers—all you really remember is the teeth.

I scrolled to the number on my phone attached to the name Gretel Hopewell, the professor who’d run the course. No one answered. I took a chance and decided to visit her directly.

It took me an hour to drive from Mitcham to the UCL Anthropology Department near Euston Square, another half an hour to find parking, and another half to find my way through the maze of the building to Dr Hopewell’s office.

She had what should have been a coveted corner office, but it was small enough that the trestle table functioning as a desk stopped the door from opening all the way. Bookshelves took up three walls. There was only one chair, and it was occupied. Dr Hopewell watched me with an amused look on her face. She’d let her grey hair grow since we’d last met. It suited her.

I twisted into the empty space in front of her desk. ‘You still haven’t got them to move you?’

‘Deters the students.’ She smiled, showing teeth too white to be real. ‘What are you doing here, Vivia? Finally going to sign up for a proper degree?’

I’d enjoyed the course, but what with Sigrid, Stanley, and the ever-present necessity of needing to make money, I didn’t have the option of doing much more. I figured I was learning enough about all the weird and wonderful working for the Lipscombe.

‘No, actually I wanted you to take a look at something.’ I passed over my phone. She scrolled through the photos and cringed.

‘Ow. I assume these belonged to the winged boy who’s been all over the papers.’

I nodded.

‘And the rest of him?’

‘That’s the question,’ I said, taking the phone back. ‘What are the chances of him surviving something like this?’

‘You understand I’ve got nothing to refer to? We had to bury the only winged specimen we had—court order.’

I made a sympathetic noise. She turned in one movement and got a book off the shelf behind her without getting out of her chair.

‘The wings themselves aren’t much more than cartilage and small bones. Most of the muscle is in the chest and back, and there are no major arteries involved. Even so, there’d be quite a bit of blood loss, so he’d have been left weak. The biggest danger is probably infection.’

‘That’s assuming he got immediate medical attention. And if he didn’t?’

‘Then he needs it ASAP. Like I said, infection is a real risk. He’s going to have open wounds on his back. He’ll need them cleaned properly, and a strong dose of antibiotics. If it were an operation, I would expect the surgeon to put him on an antibiotic drip for something like that.’

In other words, if he was still alive, find him damned fast. I thanked Dr Hopewell and left her marking assignments. She was only swearing slightly, which was likely an improvement on any work she’d ever had from me.

I walked back to the van, thoughtful. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do something like that to Ben. If they’d wanted to kill him, where was the rest of his body? I was so absorbed in my thoughts, I almost missed the newspaper.

It was stuck between two railings, dumped by some commuter too lazy to drop it in the recycling. The cover was almost completely taken up by a blown-up photo of Berenice Nazarak’s face. It was the same picture Dunne had shown me in the ZDC.

The headline read ‘Murdered for Daddy.’

Oh no.
I tugged it out and smoothed it flat with my hand. Somehow the tabloid media had got wind of the idea that Ben might have supplied the human flesh by pretending it was rabbit. Page two was nothing but speculation as to how Ben might have done it, and page three contained a photo collage of known child murderers.

I balled it up and hurled it into the nearest bin in a fury.