I did want to go with them, not really relishing the thought of spending the day mooching about the empty manor on my own. But I just couldn’t. “I’ve got plenty to do – like setting up a room for consulting. We need to look the part should we get any clients.”
“Your choice,” Kayla smiled weakly at me, but I could tell she knew that there was something up with me.
I followed them to the giant front door, and Isidor had been right, the day was overcast and miserable-looking. A fine rain was coming down, and the leaves that Potter had raked into a neat pile now swirled up and down the drive in the wind.
They both looked back at me one last time, then without a word, they both soared up into the dismal-looking sky. Within seconds, I had lost sight of them amongst the clouds.
“See you in a while, crocodile,” I whispered, closing the front door of the manor, and leaving me all alone.
Chapter Nine
Kayla
It felt cool to be flying again. The rain that struck my face was cold but refreshing, as if waking me up. I hadn’t flown since The Hollows. For pretty much my whole life, I had resented being different from those girls who had called me ‘stickleback’ at boarding school. But I had learnt that my wings were just another part of me, like my arms and legs. Those girls back at school would never know the freedom my wings gave me.
Isidor flew beside me, his arms outstretched on either side of him, his wings rippling beneath them. He glanced at me and winked, and I knew that he was enjoying the freedom again as much as I was. The wind roared past us, and the sound of it was wonderful, it deafened the other noises – my soundtrack.
The clouds broke beneath us, and I could see the town of Wood Hill, the one that we had been visiting daily for Kiera. We swooped over it, circled, and spying a small wooded area on its outskirts, we raced towards them. We landed, and rolling back my shoulders, I put on the sweatshirt that I’d tied about my waist, covering my back and the crop-top that I was wearing. Unlike me, Isidor couldn’t fold his wings away, he had to hide them, and so he zipped up the front of his jacket.
“Ready?” he asked me.
` “You bet,” I nodded and followed him out of the small wooded area and up the hill to the town. As we walked together, I wondered if we stood out. Did we look freaky? We were definitely very pale, looking like we had been ill or something. Maybe it was my imagination, but as we headed into town and passed some of the people on the road, they seemed to look away from us, casting their heads down, and some even crossed the road as if to avoid us.
I wondered why I hadn’t noticed this before on our trips to Wood Hill, but we had always come by car. I had waited inside, parked at the curb, while Isidor had taken the papers from the newspaper stand outside the store and left the money for them in the honesty tin outside. We had never actually spoken to anyone in the town. Driving through a place was always different than walking through it. You saw more when you walked, noticed things that you wouldn’t have while in a car.
Well, I was definitely noticing stuff now. Like how the streets didn’t seem that busy at all, and those people who were on them seemed to be in a hurry. It was as if they were all late for a meeting or something. But what was freaking me out more than that, was it wasn’t just me and Isidor that they were ignoring, they were ignoring each other. For such a small town, not one of them looked at each other as they passed by. There were no ‘good mornings’, or ‘Hey, how you doing today?’ It was like they didn’t really see each other – but they did. It was weird to watch how they almost seemed to shy away from one another. I stared in amazement as they crisscrossed back and forth in an almost desperate attempt not to come in contact. One guy, elderly with a stick, stepped off the curb to avoid a scrawny-looking woman who was coming down the street towards him. But then another guy, mid-forties with a belly that hung over the top of his trousers, stepped into the road from the other side of the street as he tried to avoid someone else. On seeing this, the old guy turned, then turned again as if trapped. He shuffled around in a full circle as if trying to figure out which way to go – how to escape.
The thin, homemade cigarette that hung from the corner of his wrinkled old mouth fell out and he swore. Then looking up, he saw me watching him and he cried out. He turned away and covered his face with his arm, as if he didn’t want us to see him - or was it that he didn’t want to see us? The old guy saw a gap and shuffled away, flinching as someone else came too close to him.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I whispered, as we made our way through the town. “This place is fucked up.”
“What day is it today?” Isidor asked, not looking at me, but watching the crazy people on the street all around us.
“Saturday, I think,” I said back. “Why?”
“So it’s not a school day then,” he whispered, as one of the people toppled from the edge of the curb in a desperate attempt to avoid us.
“I guess,” I breathed. “Why?”
“Where are all the kids?” he said, and this time he did look at me. “Shouldn’t they be hanging about on street corners with their mates, out shopping, stuff like that?”
“It is cold and it’s raining,” I reminded him.
“Didn’t bother that old guy,” Isidor said, his voice still low, just above a whisper.
Then looking across the street, I said, “Over there! That woman, see her? She’s pushing a pram and there’s a baby in it.”
We watched her hurry down the street, her head down as she tried to avoid everyone else. But a man with an umbrella was heading towards her, and she crossed the street to avoid him.
Isidor yanked me by the arm into a nearby shop doorway, and said, “Let’s hide in here – keep out of her way.”
“Why?” I hushed.
“Because you know that smell that babies always have?”
“No, not really,” I told him, watching from the shadows of the shop doorway as the woman with the pram headed towards us.
“Believe me, babies do have a certain odour,” he said, “And I can’t smell it.”
“So?” I asked.
“So look!” he whispered as the woman passed us as we hid in the shop doorway.
I followed Isidor’s stare and looked into the pram and gasped.
Clamping his hand over my mouth, he put his lips to my ear and very quietly said, “Shhh, Kayla.”
Chapter Ten
Kiera
With the manor to myself, I could hear every creak and groan it made as the wind outside began to blow harder about the eaves. It wasn’t that this spooked me in any way, but just intensified my feelings of loneliness. I wandered from one room to another on the ground floor, each one of them dustier than the next. The furniture was covered in white sheets. Cobwebs hung from the corners of the rooms and swung down from the light fixtures overhead. Just off the main hallway, there was a narrow passageway and its walls were lined with mahogany, which gave it a dark and oppressive feeling. At the end of it there was a door. I pushed it open and was pleasantly surprised by what I found behind it, and the sight lifted my spirits.
I had found a small study, which could have easily been mistaken for a library by the amount of leather-bound books that covered the walls. There was a desk and in the centre of this was a large ink blotter. There were several silver-coloured pens lined neatly next to one another, and a photo frame. I picked it up and turned it over. The picture inside the frame was of Doctor Hunt, Lady Hunt, and Kayla. Kayla was sitting on her father’s knee and looked happy, her red hair spilling over her shoulders and down the front of the pretty dress she was wearing. Kayla looked to be about six-years-old. I looked at Doctor Hunt as he stared back at me from the picture and I remembered how I had buried his body beneath the tree on the outskirts of the town of Wasp Water.
Was his body still there? I wondered. Had it been discovered like mine had on the side of that Cumbria Mountain? In real time, that had only been about six weeks ago. Now that the world had been pushed, was his body still there? How much had the world changed on the other side of the manor walls?
Placing the picture back where I had found it, I looked about the room and with a bit of dusting, I knew that I had found my consulting room – that’s if anyone actually came to be consulted with. My brain was beginning to ache with restlessness. I needed something – a puzzle – to awaken it again. But what frustrated me the most was that I knew there was a puzzle to be solved and I was a piece of that puzzle. As was the girl in my dreams, falling out of the sky – only to wake and find herself like I had in that mortuary. Then, there was the statue by the summerhouse – the girl who had been turned to stone.
Until I had more pieces of that puzzle, I knew there was little I could do, so going to the giant kitchen, I found some old dusters and polish and went back to the study. I polished the desk, the bookshelves, and the mahogany walls. I shook the dust from the curtains and opened the large windows to let in some fresh air. When my back had started to ache and my throat and nose were full of dust, I stood back and admired my handiwork. I positioned the chair slightly behind the desk, then sat in it. I wondered if anyone would come – I wondered if anyone else realised that they had been pushed.
I closed the door to the study, put the dusters and polish back where I had found them, then left the manor to walk the grounds, needing to clear the dust that was stuck in the back of my throat. The rain had eased and looked more like a fine mist than a drizzle. The only sound was the regular squawk of the crows that flapped their giant wings overhead. I looked up at them and wondered where Potter was and what he was doing. I missed him, but I understood why he had needed to get away.
The trees towered on either side of me as I made my way through the wood and my feet crunched over the fallen branches and twigs. I hadn’t intended to head for the graveyard hidden by the weeping willows, or so I told myself, but it wasn’t long before I found myself parting their stooped branches with my hands and stepping into that secret place. Although the area surrounded by the forlorn trees held so much death, it was tranquil. It had that feeling of stepping off a busy street into a church. The silence, the mystery of the place – I was drawn to it.
