Beast Read Online Free Page A

I’d eaten anything. I needed drink and I needed food and that meant I needed to move from the bed.
    I looked around me. I was on a bed up against a wall on one side of what must have been a front room in an old farmhouse. The walls were of grey stone with some peeling paint and the floor was stone too great slabs of it. In the centre of the room was a wooden table and a battered old chair. Up against another wall not far from the front door was the stove and beyond that to one side of a window that looked out into the yard was an old wooden cupboard.
    What would happen when I tried to cross the room? I remembered the collapse inside my chest that I had felt out in the yard. How was it now and what would it do when I got out of the bed? If I couldn’t move now if I rolled out of bed and the pain was anything like it had been when I had fallen if my chest kept shifting inside me I didn’t know what I would do. Something bad had happened to me some accident but I had survived it. I had survived these days in bed I had drunk and my body had slept. I felt better but I was still broken. I felt like I was floating above everything like I was floating above the ground like a spirit like mist over fields in the morning. Sometimes I had felt like I was floating above the pain. But now I had to move.
    I rolled over onto my left side. I felt something shift inside me but I kept going. I swung my legs slowly down onto the floor still in the sleeping bag. I pushed myself up slowly with my arms. The pain in my head became worse I could feel the throbbing now I could hear it. Something was hammering on the inside of my skull. Pain shot down the left side of my chest and down my left leg. I pushed myself slowly up with my hands and I slid the sleeping bag down under my legs and onto the floor.
    It was time to try and stand up. Things had beenslipping around inside me again as I sat up but they seemed to have settled now that I was sitting still. The shifting had not been as big nor as painful nor as fearful as it had been out in the yard. Perhaps I would come through. I swung my legs around gently to the head of the bed and I sat on the pillow so that I could balance myself against the wall as I stood. And then gently and slowly I tried to stand.
    My left leg would not support me. The knee bent at the wrong angle again it bent outwards and my foot shook if I put any weight on it. But my right leg worked. I pulled myself up against the wall slowly standing on my right leg and putting as little pressure on my left as possible. The pain in the left side of my chest grew in intensity. But now I was leaning against the wall. I was standing.
    I turned around so that my back was to the wall and I leaned on it. I had one hand supporting me on the head of the bed and the other still on the wall. I took breaths. Breathing hurt but I began to breathe deeper to see what my chest would do. I couldn’t manage really deep breaths. If I tried there would be a great shrieking pain in the left side of my chest. But I could breathe. The pain in my head was worse now and the pains in my chest and my left knee and alldown my left leg were real and terrible. But I found I could bear them.
    Gently and nervously I moved my right hand away from the bed and over to the left side of my chest and I began to press. Everything was bruised. The five long scratches down my chest were beginning to scab over. They were deeper than they had looked. I worked my way systematically from the bottom of my ribcage upwards pressing gently on everything. About halfway up there was a sharp give in two of my ribs. I nearly fell over when I touched them. They must have broken. They felt wrong but I supposed they couldn’t have punctured anything important or I wouldn’t have survived. I could still breathe and I had not bled to death in the night. How did ribs work? I didn’t know anything about medicine. Did they just heal? I knew that bones would heal themselves in time. Maybe