Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes Read Online Free Page B

middle.”
     
    I looked at the rows of headstones as
they sat in the grim morning light. The east side seemed much darker than the
west.
     
    “We’re splitting up?”
     
    Jeremiah nodded. “Look for a girl
buried here. Check the birth and death dates for a seven year old, or someone
around that age. There will probably be some sort of poem carved into the head
stone too. You find that with anything this tragic.”
     
    Jeremiah walked away from me and
toward the west side of the plot, scanning the graves as he went. I pulled my
hood down from over my head and let it rest on my shoulders. The wind bit my
ears and made them raw, and I felt my nose getting bunged up. But having the
hood up drowned the outside world and blunted my hearing, and I felt like I
needed all my senses intact in this place.
     
    I walked from grave to grave. At
first the ages and descriptions made me sad. Loving father, husband, wife,
mother. Died aged 50, 48, 39, 20. After walking passed a few hundred, I
developed a mental callous for it. They became just words and numbers, and I
was looking for two; 'daughter' and seven.
     
    It seemed strange that a little girl
could be buried here, surrounded by the bodies of people much older than her.
People who had been given a shot at life, had been given a chance at living
some sort of existence before they ended up in the ground. But the little girl
didn’t even have a decade to her name. No chance to develop her own thoughts
about things, her own ideas, carve out some sort of life for herself.
     
    I got the stupid idea that maybe the
girl would wake up in her coffin six feet under and wonder where the hell she
was. Or that maybe dying aged you beyond normal comprehension, and that in
death this girl took on wisdom beyond her years. That she knew something I
didn’t.
     
    There was a faint burning smell as
though someone had lit a fire. I glanced back at the church and saw who must
have been the caretaker burning a pile of twigs. As I smelt the smoke from the
fire I realised I would have loved to have the heat from it too.
     
    I walked through my section of the
graveyard but I didn’t see anything. I doubted Jeremiah had either, because
surely he would have shouted me over. He walked slower than me, taking time to
read every gravestone thoroughly as though it was a respect he owed the dead.
     
    I looked across to the church. The
fire still burnt, but I was too far away to feel it. I could do with some of
that heat , I thought.
     
    The caretaker looked up as I
approached. He was evidently not used to seeing people at this time in the
morning, because he had a look of shock on his face.
     
    “Morning, didn’t mean to scare you,” I
said.
     
    He wore blue overalls and muddy
wellington boots. These were not just flecked, they were absolutely caked, as
though the onslaught of mud on them was inevitable and he had long ago given up
washing them. His face was red from the fire, or possibly through
embarrassment, and his cheeks stretched gauntly up to his ears. He didn’t look
like a guy who did well in social interactions, which was maybe why he was
burning twigs behind a church at this time in the morning. He took a glove off
and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
     
    “Didn’t scare me, lovey,” he said.
     
    “I was wondering if I could ask you
something.”
     
    “Not from round ‘ere, are you?” he
said. He bent to his side and picked up a pile of twigs. He saw my eyes follow
him, and he gestured toward me with twigs. “Want a go?”
     
    I shook my head.
     
    He threw the wood on the fire. The
heat felt good on my face, comforting somehow. I remembered being at a bonfire
with a foster dad, one of the good ones. We stood thirty metres back and
watched the giant pile of furniture and tree branches as they were enveloped in
fire. It grew until the flames reached up into the sky. A wretched Guy Fawkes
doll drowned in fire, the orange spikes of heat going down his throat.