Dark Farm by Dean Raven

Author:Dean Raven [Raven, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, horror
ISBN: 9780645099515
Publisher: 939 Publishing
Published: 2021-05-04T22:00:00+00:00

28

Where there’s a will …

“Are you sure it was a baby?”

Arika was standing at a pile of books, waving a parchment in the air. She’d been rifling through a stack of papers, but hadn’t found anything of interest. Most of the papers were detailed records of conversations, presumably between Wilfred and whoever he brought down here to interrogate, written verbatim, regardless of substance or interest. Most documented day-to-day chores, interactions with friends and neighbours, trips to the city, records of livestock purchases and the like.

“Dylan?”

Dylan didn’t look up. This was the third time she’d asked the question, and she’d probably keep on asking it until he said, “No, it was a cat.” He shouldn’t have told her about the baby. It was just that Kane had been gone for so long, and he was getting frustrated they hadn’t found anything. He turned over the page. He was browsing through a green cloth-bound book that had pages crammed with long strings of text that looked like spells.

“Pretty sure,” he said at last, though in reality he wasn’t. He was dazed after popping back into his body, up there on the hill. The squirming thing wrapped in a dirty jacket might have been an animal, the hand he thought he saw, a paw.

“It couldn’t have been a baby. Really.”

Dylan shrugged as he thumbed through the book. The text was small and crabbed, written in a foreign language, so it was impossible to tell whether these were spells or just the attempts of a wannabe poet. He clapped the book shut. Probably the Necronomicon was just as indecipherable, and this whole expedition would end up being a complete waste of time. A tear of frustration rolled in a line down his cheek and dropped with a splat on the book.

“We’d have heard something if babies were going missing,” Arika said.

“Suppose so,” shrugged Dylan.

She had a point there. People tended to make a big thing of it when their kids went missing. It was probably a cat. But what type of divine being did Wilfred expect to conjure through sacrificing a boring old housecat? He changed his mind again. It must have been a baby.

Arika dropped the parchment and lifted a bulldog-clipped set of papers from the shelf. “Can you imagine the things Waite gets up to down here, all alone?” she asked, her eyes roaming the room.

Dylan shrugged again. He laid the book on the table and picked up another.

“The thought of … well, you – here – doing God knows what … makes my stomach churn.”

“Aw, thanks. Just the thing a red-blooded teenager wants to hear from a girl.”

“Sorry,” smiled Arika. “You know what I mean.”

“Don’t worry about it. My stomach churns whenever I look at me too.”

Replacing the papers on the shelf, she stepped towards him and pulled out a chair. “How does it feel? Being in that body?”

Dylan glanced down at his rumpled clothes, at the squat, shrunken, wrinkled body inside them that didn’t make any sense. “Just … weird.”

“It would be a researcher’s dream to study this.

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