by Tim O'Rourke
“I know you did,” he said. “I found them while you were in her room and read them. I know all about you and Sophie.”
“You read them?” I glared.
“Yeah,” Murphy shrugged and carried on buttoning up his shirt. “I think parts of this world are overlapping – merging – with the world we once knew.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“Those letters shouldn’t be here,” he said, sliding his feet back into his slippers. “Imagine laying a piece of tracing paper over a map of the world. You make an exact copy, but then you move that piece of tracing paper to the right – just a fraction. It still looks like the world, but you can still see the one underneath; however faint, it’s still there. Well, that’s what I think has happened.
Someone has moved the tracing paper but didn’t expect the world underneath to start shining through. Get it?”
“I think so,” I said, looking down at the envelopes with the smudged ink on them. It did look as if my handwriting was hidden beneath a piece of tracing paper.
“Those letters slowly made Sophie remember you,” Murphy said. “Then when you showed up, she remembered completely. It was as if her two worlds had been merged, laid on top of one another.”
I looked up from the letters and stared at Murphy.
“Get your stuff together,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“Just get your stuff,” he ordered, and left the farmhouse.
I placed the picture of Kiera and her father in the bottom of the rucksack along with her police badge and the roll of money I had taken from the cookie jar. Over these, I placed the small amount of clothes I’d managed to swipe before the Skin-walkers had shown up at her flat. I took Sophie’s iPod and earphones and placed them in my jeans pocket. Then, I picked up her dress, rolled the letters up inside it and tossed them into the fire. I stood for a moment and watched it start to burn. Like Murphy had said, those letters had no business being in this world. They were written in another where – in another when.
I put on the scarecrow’s coat, turned my back on the fire, and left the farmhouse.
20
Potter
We raced through the night sky and it felt great to be flying alongside Murphy again. I’d missed his friendship, even if he could be an annoying old fart at times. I couldn’t wait to take him back to the manor; Kiera and the others wouldn’t believe who I had found again – although I got the feeling he had found me. The thought of having the old team back together again made me feel, for the first time, that coming back from the dead hadn’t been so bad after all. But the old team, the one we had before wouldn’t be the same, as there was someone missing.
Murphy dropped through the night and I followed. The very first rays of the morning sun lit the underbellies of the rain clouds that were starting to form around us. I raced alongside Murphy and could see the spire of a church some way off in the distance and we headed towards it.
I glanced sideways at Murphy, and his face looked grim, as if there was something troubling him, and I knew there was stuff about this world that he had yet to tell me.
With our wings arching behind us like giant black sails, we dropped out of the sky and landed in the grounds of the church with the spire, which shone like a giant needle in the dawn light.
Dead leaves rustled amongst the gravestones that lay before us in neat rows. Some of the headstones looked ancient and tilted to the right, more green than grey now where moss had spread over them. The early morning was quiet, and only the sound of the wind could be heard as Murphy led me to a small plot of land at the back of the graveyard. There was a tree with twisted black branches and roots that poked up through the ground like snakes.
“Where are we going?” I whispered, the rucksack swinging from my fist.
“Shhh!” he said. “Show some respect, we’re amongst the dead here.”
“We are dead, remember?”
Ignoring me, Murphy weaved his way amongst the headstones, his wings brushing against the fallen leaves. Beneath the tree, he came to a sudden stop between two small headstones. Unlike most of the others that we had passed, these were newer-looking and didn’t have the moss and ivy covering them. Murphy remained silent as I read the names that had been chiselled into the headstone.
The first read Kayla Hunt and the second Isidor Hunt.
Feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach, I looked at Murphy and said, “I thought Isidor’s surname was Smith.”
“He was raised with his sister here,”
Murphy said, his head bowed, as if in respect.
“What happened to them?” I asked, and although I knew both Kayla and Isidor were both safe and well back at Hallowed Manor, I couldn’t help but feel a massive sense of loss – it was like I was grieving for them all over again, just like I had in The Hollows.
“They were both murdered,” Murphy said, his cold, blue eyes fixed on their graves.
“I know that, I was there,” I told him.
“Luke murdered them.”
“Elias Munn,” he said bitterly.
“Yes,” I said. “He fooled all of us.
Luke...”
“I don’t want to speak of him,” Murphy barked. “He sold us all out, and was the person behind the deaths of my daughters.”
“And your death,” I reminded him.
Then turning to face me, he said, “You were right about Jack Seth. I should have listened to you.”
To hear Murphy say that – to give me credit at long last – made me feel that I had finally achieved something, and that I was not a no-hoper after all. I couldn’t tell him how those few words of his made me feel, but I would never forget them. “Thanks,” I said to him.
“For what?” he asked, cocking one of his silver eyebrows.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, then added, “So what happened to them here?”
“They weren’t murdered by Elias Munn here,” Murphy said. “They were murdered by their father, Lord Hunt.”
“Get the fuck out of here!” I gasped.
“Shut your filthy mouth! You’re in a graveyard, for fuck’s sake!” Murphy shot back at me.
“But you just said the ‘F’ word too, didn’t you?”
“Look, Potter, I’m in no mood for trick questions,” Murphy snapped at me. “Do you want to know what happened to our friends here or not?”
“Of course I do,” I told him.
Taking his pipe, and knocking out the old ash against Isidor’s headstone, Murphy started to explain what had happened to our friends. “Lord Hunt was a scientist, just like we knew him to be.
But most people thought him to be just some crazy old man. He believed that winged demons lived beneath the earth.”
“Not so crazy,” I said, watching Murphy push a lump of tobacco into his pipe and light it.
“Not to us perhaps,” he said, “but to the people in this world, his theories were just insane ramblings. His wife wasn’t as crazy, but over time he got her to come around to his way of thinking.
Lord Hunt believed that these winged demons were building an army, which would rise up out of the ground and attack the humans. He thought they would join forces with the wolves and destroy the human race – if they didn’t turn them all into vampires first by feeding off them. So convinced was he by his theory, that he spent his life’s work designing a synthetic blood, which by chance – or not – he called Lot 13.”
“So that’s why there are bottles and bottles of the stuff left at the manor,” I said. “So where are Lord and Lady Hunt now?”
“I’m coming to that, be patient, Potter,” he mumbled as he sucked on his pipe. “Lord and Lady Hunt had two children, Kayla and Isidor. As they grew up, Hunt, in his paranoid state, began to suspect that his children were, in fact, winged demons sent from beneath ground to start the infiltration of the human race. When his wife refused to follow him down this path, he became suspicious of her, suspecti
ng that she had been impregnated by one of these winged demons, who he believed lived below ground.
“Of course, no one believed in his insane ramblings, and he spent some time incarcerated in mental institutions. While Hunt was locked away, his children flourished and lived semi-normal lives, both attending boarding schools, as their mother often struggled to cope on her own. Just a few weeks before their deaths, Lord Hunt was released and considered fit and well to return home, his delusional state now under control with the aid of medication. But he had only been home a few weeks when the paranoia returned. He started to argue with his wife, accusing her again of falling pregnant to one of these winged demons.
Then, one night, as Lady Hunt slept restlessly in her bed, Lord Hunt crept into her room and slit her throat. Knowing that he would suffer the death penalty unless he proved to the world his wife’s adultery and the existence of the winged demons, he took his two children up into the mountains.
“Telling Isidor and Kayla that their mother was in bed with a fever and needed to rest, he invited them to join him on a short camping trip up into the Cambrian Mountains. Believing that their father had been cured, and both desperate to spend time with him, they went willingly with him up into the mountains. After setting up camp for the night, they ate their supper by the fire. But unbeknown to both Isidor and Kayla, Lord Hunt had laced their food with a strong tranquiliser. It wasn’t long before both had fallen into a deep sleep by the fire.
“Desperate to prove to the world that he wasn’t mad, and that both of his children were, in fact, demons from the underworld, he took the surgical knives that he had hidden in his sleeping bag and murdered both Kayla and Isidor. He worked on Isidor first, slicing open his back and removing his spine in search of the wings that he believed were hidden inside his son. When he failed to find any, he turned to his daughter. The attack on her was brutal – savage. He opened up her back, looking for clawed wings that he was sure were hidden inside of her. When he failed to find them, he cut off her ears, believing that he would find pointed ones underneath. But there were none. He then removed her teeth, desperately in search of fangs. He pulled out her fingernails with a pair of pliers, looking for her claws.
With Kayla’s body scattered about him, he sunk into a total fit of madness. Panicking, he wrapped Kayla’s remains in her sleeping bag and dragged her up the mountainside, believing that he might be able to hide the bodies. But even in his deluded state, he must have known that his efforts were pointless. His wife lay dead back at the manor, her throat slit open, and his two children lay hacked to pieces and scattered over the mountain.
“Lady Hunt was eventually found a week later by a friend of the family. There had been a heavy snow during that time and Kayla’s remains were eventually discovered a week later, then her brother’s almost two weeks after that. Eventually Lord Hunt was found frozen to death, ten miles from where he had left Kayla’s body. It’s believed that he walked aimlessly into the blizzard and died of hypothermia,” Murphy said. “So, in the same way they were murdered in The Hollows, they were murdered here, too,” I said, looking down at their graves. “But while they were both murdered there by Luke, here they were murdered by their father.”
“Just like I said,” Murphy grunted.
“Almost the same, but different – pushed somehow. But Kayla and Isidor must never find out what happened to them here – they shouldn’t even be here! ”
“So why have you shown me this?” I asked him, frowning.
“This isn’t the sole reason I brought you here,” Murphy said, “there is something else.”
Without saying another word and keeping close to the trees, Murphy led me around the edge of the graveyard. We hadn’t gone very far when he flapped his hand at me, signalling me to get down. I crouched behind a gravestone that tilted slightly to the right and peered over the top.
“What am I meant to be looking at?” I whispered to Murphy, who was hiding behind a gravestone to my left.
With the pipe hanging from the corner of his mouth, Murphy pointed into the distance. From my hiding place, I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a man standing alone in the middle of the graveyard. He was staring down at one of the headstones. He was tall, with black hair that was swept back from his brow. It was as I looked at his drawn and ashen face that I recognised him, and my stomach knotted. The man I was spying on was Kiera’s father. Hadn’t he died of cancer a few years back? I wondered.
I shot a look at Murphy and as if reading my thoughts, he whispered. “He is still very much alive here.”
Turning my head, I peered over the top of the grave again and watched as he gently rested a tiny bunch of flowers on top of the headstone; he then lent forward and kissed it. With his head cast down, he turned and walked slowly back across the graveyard. When he had gone, Murphy stood up and rubbed the small of his back with his hands.
“C’mon,” he said.
As I set off after him, I started to fear what it was that he wanted to show me.
Murphy stood before the headstone, and not wanting to look at the name carved into the face of it, I stared at the flowers that Kiera’s father had left behind. Some of the petals broke loose in the wind and scattered over the grave like confetti.
“Look at the grave,” Murphy whispered.
“I am,” I said.
“Look at the name.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
Lowering my eyes, I looked down at the headstone, and read the name written across it: Kiera Hudson. It made me feel sad to look at her name, and although I knew Kiera was dead – she wasn’t to me; she was still very much alive.
“How did she die?” I whispered, now unable to tear my eyes from her grave. The smell of his tobacco smoke made me half-crazy for a cigarette, but I couldn’t, not here.
“In this world, Kiera was similar to the Kiera we know and love. She was a twenty-year-old rookie cop. She lived just around the corner from the flat where she once lived, but you know that already.”
“So apart from her father still being alive, what else is different?”
“Kiera was shot in the line of duty while attending a robbery,” Murphy explained. “It was no big deal in this world, as cops die all the time; it didn’t even make the newspapers.”
“But I thought her body was discovered on the side of a mountain, just like the others,” I said, feeling confused.
“A completely different mountain,”
Murphy said. “Miles from where Kayla and Isidor were discovered. Her death was never connected to theirs. Besides, apart from your friend Sophie, no one knew the name of the body that was brought down from the side of that mountain. As far as this world is concerned – Kiera Hudson, the young rookie cop, was shot in the line of duty. No one really cared, the robber was human, so no Treaty conflicts there, and every morning before setting off to work, her broken-hearted father comes and lays flowers on her grave.”
“What about her mother?” I asked him.
“She died giving birth to Kiera,” Murphy told me. “Her father raised his daughter on his own. She meant everything to him.”
“But Kiera will want to see her father – she loves him – she made him a promise...” I started.
“No!” Murphy snapped. “She must never find out that her father is still alive here.”
“So why have you brought me here?”
“You must make sure that she never finds out, Potter,” he said. “If Kiera finds out that her father is still alive, then like you say, she will want to see him, speak with him, it would only be natural. But she can’t. Our Kiera is not his Kiera.”
“They come from two different whens, ” I said, trying to make sense of everything.
“Exactly,” Murphy grunted. “And what if Kiera were to meet her father? Would she then want to push the world back and lose him all over again?”
“But I can’t keep a secret like that from her,” I told him. “She has a right to k
now that her father is still alive.”
“She has no rights!” Murphy glared. “She doesn’t have the right to be here – none of us do.”
“So why are we here?” I snapped back at him.
“Beats the shit out of me,” Murphy said.
“But until we figure out why we are here, none of us must get involved with our past lives.
“Like me and Sophie?”
“Yeah, just like you and Sophie,” he said.
“Look what happened. She remembered you. All those feelings she had for you weren’t really her feelings. They were the feelings of the Sophie from the world trying to shine through the tracing paper. Those feelings that she suddenly had, broken memories and half dreams, would have driven her mad in the end. This world is all that these people know and care about. Kiera’s father believes his daughter is dead, and she is, as far as this world is concerned. What would happen if he knew that she was living again on the other side of the country? It’s not her – it’s not the Kiera that you are in love with; it’s the Kiera who was brought up in a world where wolves live amongst humans. It’s a world where she is dead.”
“I don’t know if I can keep something like this from her,” I said.
“You must keep her away from her old life, Potter,” he warned. “If her father should see her, then perhaps the world will merge just a little bit more, then a little bit more, and I fear that could be catastrophic for all of us.”
“How come?”
“I think Lord Hunt went mad because some part of him remembered the Vampyrus.
Perhaps on a subconscious level, he knew that he had been a Vampyrus. Remember, he couldn’t be taken back into The Hollows because he died above ground. Maybe this world and the other one started to merge and it sent him mad. We know what he was babbling on about is true. There was a race of winged demons living below ground – us, Potter. What if enough people start to remember their other existence? What if the Vampyrus were to come back into this world? What would the world be like then? We’ve got to find a way of pushing that sheet of tracing paper back into place – get things back to how they were. So you can’t risk Kiera, Kayla, or Isidor finding out what happened to them here.”