Midnight Murders by Katherine John

Author:Katherine John
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Accent Press
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Vanessa was cold. Freezing but not shivering. There was no feeling in her body other than cold. Nothing – no sensation at all. Not the slightest tingle, the slightest pain – only numbness, as though her mind was floating, disembodied in an icy, black void. She strained her eyes and stared intently into the darkness. She knew her eyes were open because she could hear the whisper of her eyelashes. The single, alarming sound in a vacuum of silence. All around was frosty, enveloping darkness unpunctuated by the slightest glimmer of grey shadow. She wondered if the air itself had changed colour.

She tried to move, but there seemed to be no physical form for her brain to command. Her mind sent messages to nerves that no longer existed. She had no limbs, no body, only eyelashes. She heard her eyelashes again, and concentrated on her facial muscles. She screamed, but the screech resounded only in her imagination. Her lips refused to open, and the only sound born in the back of her throat was a grunt that conveyed terror and panic. She forced herself to think – to remember!

A scene from a horror film flooded her mind. A brain in a jar? No, she had to be more than a brain in jar. A head – but a head without a body. Or was she already dead? Was this what death was like? Cold, black, wakeful, aware, nothingness.

She concentrated on her immediate past. She had been – where? The day room. Roland, disgusting, fat, lecherous Roland, who put his damp sweaty hands on her knees and tried to move them higher every chance he got. She saw the small half-moon slivers of skin she’d gouged out of the back of his hand with her fingernails when he’d tried to touch her thighs.

Lucy, sweet naïve Lucy, her eyes wide open, agog with a mixture of wonder, terror, and morbid curiosity as she’d related the embroidered version of the phantom burying the body. The phantom! The phantom who buried live woman, after – if Roland was to be believed – gross violation of their bodies. Was she in the earth? Was that why she couldn’t feel anything?

No. She could hear her own breath. Soft, quiet, but there; in – out – in – out. If she was buried, she wouldn’t be breathing. She would be suffocated. Dead! Was this hell? No, she was cold, and hell was hot; devils hammering red hot spears of metal. She listened for the blacksmith sounds, her eardrums straining to breaking point. But the only noise was a droning that came from inside her fevered brain. Then faintly in the background the tired jingle of an old pop song. ‘Bop, bop, bop, de bop’ – as incessant and irritating as a dripping tap. Was that also a product of her imagination? She could no longer tell what was real and what was not.

Panic again. Hysteria when she remembered the woman at the bottom of the pit. Was she planted? Dead? A people tree? she had said something about a people tree.

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