Our Lady of the Streets by Tom Pollock

Author:Tom Pollock
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Urban, Young Adult, Fantasy
Publisher: Flux
Published: 2014-08-07T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I can’t see.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t open my eyes.

There’s a weight on my chest and hands on my throat.

Where in Thames’ name is Naphtha?

… there’s something …

My dreamless sleep clings to me like river mud. I panic, pulling against it, desperately fighting to wake up. My spear is in my hand and I lash out on instinct, laying about myself with it, not caring what I hit.

… there’s something else …

The floor smells of concrete, but I can’t feel it. I reach out for it to sense its pulse, but I’m sealed off from it somehow. My spear-point connects with something solid and I can feel it grating along bone. The hands gripping me come loose and I lever myself to my feet, gasping.

Why can’t I open my eyes? My eyelids won’t answer me, won’t respond to my brain. There’s something else – some … other influence … It’s holding them shut. My skin feels wrong, like my whole body’s too small and too heavy. The rhythm of my pulse is too complex …

There’s something else in my head, I think.

I reach for it, trying to remember, but it flees me like the memory of a dream.

At last my eyes flicker open. I gape around me at carnage.

There are Masonry Men everywhere, squirming and bleeding at my feet, swarming over flickering statues and glass-skinned bodies – I can see the glow is ebbing from their filaments. I stare but I can’t make sense of it …

The Masonry Men are attacking us.

I don’t understand. I can taste the panic in the back of my throat. I hold my hands in front of my face and they’re riddled with streets and scaled in rooftops; they’re washed in green light.

In the stories, this was how my Mother’s hands looked.

Screams jar the air and someone’s bellowing frantic instructions. My ears find a familiar sound in the cacophony: Petris’ voice.

‘My Lady!’ he’s calling. ‘Lady Bradley!’

Beth? Her sullen face under messy hair fills my mind. Is she here? I cast around, but I can’t see her. I see the squirming, scrapping mass of clayling bodies on the floor and my heart clenches at the thought of her suffocating under them.

Beth! I yell, in case she can hear me. Beth! Beth! – but no sound comes out. My lips are shaping the syllable; I can feel the air moving past my teeth, but no voice emerges.

There’s something else in my head …

I can feel it on the edge of my consciousness, a knot of memory. I touch it, and it unravels inside my mind.

For an instant, I reel, nauseous and terrified – I have no sense of who or where I am – and then my awareness rushes into all the little crevices of memory like water flooding a cave and I remember—

—I remember where and how and whose body this is.

There’s something else in my head.

No, someone.

I can feel Beth in here with me. I can remember everything she remembers; I know everything she knows. I hear myself counting to three and never getting there.

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