A Prayer For The Broken by Mark Tilbury

Author:Mark Tilbury [Tilbury, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tilbury Publishing
Published: 2020-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Nine

We didn’t sleep at all that night. High on adrenaline, and almost generating as much heat as the fire, we talked about everything ranging from ghosts to the meaning of life.

‘I don’t get it,’ Brendan said. ‘How can you still be alive when you’re dead? I mean, when you die, you die, right? They put you in a coffin and bury you in the ground. That’s it. Over. Kaput.’

‘I know what I saw,’ I said. ‘And it was real.’

‘Like the hedgehog?’

‘But you saw it, too, Bren.’

‘I reckon the torch must have cast a shadow and made it look like a ghost.’

‘A grinning ghost?’

‘Maybe.’

‘With a crewcut?’

Brendan sighed. ‘I know it’s fuckin’ weird, but what else could it have been?’

‘The ghost of some kid who got put in the fridge?’

‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you. If a ghost was gonna come and see us, don’t you suppose it would be one of our mums?’

Fair point, but I wasn’t in charge of ghost trips to farmhouses. ‘I dunno.’

‘I mean, a grinning kid with a crewcut? He didn’t exactly look as if he’d been murdered, did he?’

‘And he didn’t look like a shadow either.’

‘Let’s say it was a ghost, what would he be doing down in the basement?’

Another question I was unable to answer.

‘I mean, seriously, who would wanna haunt that smelly old tip?’

‘A ghost with no sense of smell?’

Brendan laughed. ‘Nice one, Snots. Tell you what, we’ll go back down there tomorrow and take another dekko after we’ve been to Oxford.’

‘I’m not going anywhere near that place again. Anyway, I dropped my torch.’

‘We’ll get you another one in Oxford.’

‘I don’t care if you get me a floodlight from the Kassam Stadium. I ain’t going back down there.’

‘Don’t you want food and water?’

‘Course I do. But I ain’t gonna need food if I have a heart attack and die, am I?’

‘You’re too young to have a heart attack.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’ Another one of my mum’s sayings.

‘You’re just spooked.’

‘I’m fuckin’ terrified.’

Brendan sighed. ‘Say there really was some kid who died down there. What’s the worst thing he can do to us? Grin us to death? Ghosts ain’t solid. They’re like mist or steam. When I lashed out at him with the torch, nothing happened. It passed right through him.’

‘And that’s meant to make me feel better?’

‘Just saying.’

‘But we don’t have a clue what happened here, Bren. Maybe that kid was murdered, and he wants to tell us about it.’

Brendan shrugged. ‘Sorry, I can’t speak fluent grin. Anyway, he seemed like a simpleton to me.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. I just don’t see him as a threat. You know what the biggest problem with people is?’

‘What?’

‘They get scared of what they don’t understand.’

‘Is that why you tried to hit it with your torch?’

‘It took me by surprise, that’s all.’

‘Is the basement door still open?’ I asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘We ought to shut it.’

‘What for? If it’s really a ghost, it’ll be able to pass right through it anyway.’

I hadn’t thought of that.

‘We’ll close it in the morning when we go back to the basement get some food and water.

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