Furnace 5 - Execution by Alexander Gordon Smith

Author:Alexander Gordon Smith [Smith, Alexander Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571259885
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2011-01-06T08:00:00+00:00

Cruelty

I didn’t remember falling asleep – didn’t even remember where I’d sat down to rest – but I must have done because I was dreaming again.

I was dreaming of the boy.

He gazed down at me from a throne of corpses, their bodies stacked so high that I almost didn’t see him perched on the top. The dead were dressed in clothes that should have belonged in a museum, and I noticed that some of them wore armour, sightless eyes peering out from beneath cone-shaped helmets. All carried horrific wounds, their blood pooled around the mound like a moat. When I looked to my left and right I made out a battlefield filled with piles like this one, cairns of the countless dead.

The boy himself, Alfred Furnace, looked like he had been bathing in blood. It coated every inch of skin, making his hair stand upright, slick with gore, and when he smiled at me I could see it on his teeth. His eyes were empty wells, puncture wounds in his head, their depths endless. And yet I knew he was looking at me.

‘You did this?’ I asked him, my voice whipped away by the wind. I tried to move just to see if I could, but like in my other dreams I was paralysed, stuck fast in the bloodied mud of the field. ‘You killed these people?’

They killed me first, he answered, and it was as if all the dead were speaking, their voices loud enough to crack the earth. He cocked his head, and it felt like a demon was watching me.

‘Is this a memory too?’ I asked, thinking back to the visions I’d had of the orchard. Furnace nodded. He wiped a hand across his face, mopping up the blood, and for a second he looked like a kid again, his features crumpled. Then those eyes came back into view, blazing darkness.

This was my life, he said, making my ears ring.

‘But how could you do this?’ I asked. Not that I needed to. I already knew. I could see the stranger’s blood at work inside him, his veins so dark they looked like tattoos. He followed my line of sight.

He sacrificed his blood so that I could live, he said, and I knew he was speaking about the stranger in the orchard. But he lives within me now. I can feel him there.

‘But what was it, that thing?’ I asked.

Furnace laughed, the sound of a soul tearing in two.

You don’t need me to answer that.

I shook my head, more bewildered than ever, trying to understand what he was saying. But all I could see were the faces of the dead, the people Furnace had killed.

‘There’s … there are so many of them,’ I whispered.

Not yet there aren’t, but there will be.

I felt the ground begin to shake, like an earthquake. I turned as best I could, looking over my shoulder to see what I thought was a tidal wave surging across the field. Then I saw the figures in it, realised that it wasn’t a wave but an army, hundreds of men charging this way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.