The Messengers Read Online Free

little queasy, but I didn’t start to really freak out until the woman opened the trunk of her car and hefted a big box onto her thigh.
    “No,” I said to myself. “This is stupid. It can’t be.”
    Then the traffic warden ambled around the corner, checking his little handheld machine.
    Up above, there was the noise of a man unlocking one of the flaky old windows on the top floor of a whitewashed house.
    The image from the postcard was slowly emerging into real life. And it was almost complete. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. I felt as if I were making it all happen somehow, although I couldn’t do a thing about it. I could barely even move.
    The man leaned over his windowsill, lighting the cigarette.
    The traffic warden stopped by the white van to examine the parking permit in the window.
    The thin woman with the plaited hair hauled the box a little higher and began to struggle across the road, and with one last act, the scene that I remembered from Peter Kennedy’s postcard came together:
    A blue car swerved from the main road into the street and smacked the lamppost at speed, the bonnet crumpling around it like a grasping fist.
    I was already running. I could not speak or call out. All I could hear was my own breathing, loud and frantic. The thin woman dropped her box, and books skidded across the road. A man came out of one of the houses and ran down the steps from his door. “I’m a doctor,” he said to the other people in the street, who were moving toward the car. “I’ve called an ambulance.”
    I stopped a few meters from the front of the car and stared through the windscreen. The driver was motionless, his head resting on his shoulder in a way that didn’t look right. I managed to gasp out some words. “I think it’s too late.”
    The doctor stopped and frowned at me. Then he turned back to the car. He opened the door, and the driver’s arm slipped out. The doctor crouched down and held the driver’s wrist, checking for a pulse.
    The doctor slowly bowed his head.
    “This can’t be happening,” I whispered to myself, waiting for a sudden wave of nausea to pass as a crowd gathered around the car. I tried to track back. An image of Peter Kennedy’s face came to me, half bright in the light from his desk lamp.
You will need to talk
, he had said after giving me the postcard. Thinking of those words, I was flooded with anger. He knew. Somehow, he knew. I didn’t know what was going on, and I wanted to dismiss the whole thing as some kind of prank. But the man in the car was real. And he was dead. I straightened myself up and started walking toward the seafront. Then I began to run.
    It had been a long time since I had run so fast and with such fury. The sea rose up, its horizon not wavy, but a hard ruled line. I sprinted past the big white houses and the pretty lawns, the Coffee Shack and the skateboarders, the noise of sirens already ringing out. A man with a gray whippet and a takeaway coffee stumbled out of my way. I ran until I reached the beach huts, which were colorful in the daylight, bright and sickly.

His beach hut was closed and locked, but I could smell recent cigarette smoke. I knocked. Nothing. I wasn’t in the mood to wait. I wanted answers. Stones from the beach had spilled onto the path. I picked some up and hurled one at the door.
    “Jesus!” he shouted from inside. I heard something topple over.
Good
, I thought.
    “You’re in there, I take it?” I shouted. I cocked my arm, ready to throw the next stone.
    “Just a minute, for God’s sake,” he said.
    He opened the door and raised his arm to his face, thinking I was going to throw the stone. I dropped it and he relaxed.
    “You owe me an explanation,” I said.
    “Look, come inside, will you?”
    “No way. You’re in no position to tell me what to do.”
    He straightened up. I felt the power shift in his favor. “I think I am,” he said.
    I paused and closed my eyes. In my mind, I saw the driver of the car with