The Shrunken Head by Oliver Lauren & Chester H. C

Author:Oliver, Lauren & Chester, H. C. [Oliver, Lauren & Chester, H. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Fantasy, Childrens, Young Adult, Adventure, Historical
ISBN: 9780062270818
Amazon: 0062270818
Goodreads: 23277166
Publisher: Harpercollins Children's Books
Published: 2015-09-29T07:00:00+00:00

The morgue was dark, and colder than Pippa expected. From somewhere in the blackness came the sounds of dripping, as though a faucet had been left on. She took a step forward and Thomas yelped.

“You stepped on my heel,” he said.

“Your heel ran into my toe,” she whispered back.

“What’s that smell?” Thomas said, a little louder.

Pippa inhaled. It smelled a little bit like tub water after someone had just finished bathing or like sweaty feet that had been scrubbed repeatedly with soap.

Suddenly, the electric lights came on with a buzz and a whirr. Sam had found a switch on the wall, and Pippa exhaled a little. She had imagined there would be bodies everywhere. But they were in a large room, very bare, very clean. One wall was fitted with cabinets, each the size of a small refrigerator.

“All right. What now?” Sam said.

They looked instinctively to Thomas, but he shook his head. “I—I’m not sure.”

Pippa took a few steps into the room, lifting her fingers and grazing the wall of large metal cabinets. Immediately, she felt a jolt. She had a sudden vision, like a lightning bolt through her brain: a body, frigid and motionless, and two white feet, bloated as rotten fish. She stumbled backward, holding her head.

“What?” Thomas rushed toward her and grabbed her elbow. “What’s the matter?” It was only then that she realized she’d cried out.

“P—people,” she stuttered, pointing to the wall: a jigsaw pattern of cabinets, all fitted together. Now that she was focusing, she could see beyond them—inside them. She saw bodies, each draped in a sheet, all cold and sad like slabs of beef on a butcher’s counter. “It’s full of people.”

“Over here.” Sam’s voice echoed a little in the big, dim space. He had moved into the adjoining room. Pippa saw three steel-legged tables, each draped in clean white linen, under which she could see more bodies, silhouetted: the lines of the chest and knees and even, in one case, a foot protruding from the sheet. Her stomach turned over. One of them was a woman, and one of them a girl not much older than Pippa herself, with blond hair the color of new straw.

“I wonder if one of them is Potts . . . ?” Even though Sam spoke quietly, his voice was amplified by the emptiness of the room, so Pippa felt as though he were shouting.

“That one,” she said, raising a shaking hand toward the middle of the three tables. Even without lifting the linen she could see. It was effortless, far easier than looking in someone’s pockets—perhaps because she did not have the resistance of another person’s mind to contend with.

Recently, she had noticed a shift, a change in the way that her mind’s vision worked. It was becoming easier to slide behind locked drawers and into suitcases, to feel what was there so strongly that it became a picture in her brain.

Sam peeled back the sheet, holding it carefully between two fingers, as if death were a germ and he were in danger of catching it.

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