Dead Flesh

“She’s still here,” I whispered.

Potter looked back over his shoulder as if checking out the treeline, then the summerhouse. Turning to face me again, he said, “What makes you so sure that this person was a she?”

“The footprints are too small to be that of a man, and I’d put her height at about…” Glancing at the statue, I added, “Five-foot-four.”

“You’ve done that measurement thing again haven’t you?” he said. “The distance between each stride gives you their height, right?”

“Wrong,” I smiled, and slapped my forehead with the flat of my head. “You just don’t see it, do you?”

“See what, Sherlock?” Potter snapped, starting to sound pissed off with me.

“Just think about it for a moment,” I said back. “There’s a set of girl’s footprints leading to a statue that wasn’t here before. The statue is way too heavy to be carried and we know that it hasn’t been here for very long. There are no tracks leading away from the statue — they stop where the statue now stands.”

“So what you saying?”

“Oh come on, Potter!” I gasped. “Do you need me to spell it out for you?”

“Now listen here, sweet-cheeks, don’t take that tone with me,” Potter barked gruffly and inside I smiled.

“Tone?” I snapped back. “What tone? I don’t have a tone. “It’s not my fault you just don’t see it!”

“See what?” he growled at me.

“No one brought the statue out here!” I yelled, secretly enjoying this fiery moment between us. It reminded me of how we used to be before coming back from the dead. “Those footprints belong to the statue!”

As if I had just punched him in the guts, Potter’s mouth fell open. “Have you finally lost your freaking mind? Jeez, I’ve heard you come up with some shit in the past, but this takes the piss! So what you’re suggesting is that this statue came to life, and for some unknown reason decided to take a stroll out to the summerhouse? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

“Whoever she is, I don’t think she was a statue when she came to the summerhouse,” I said, looking back at the faceless girl. “I think she suddenly turned to stone.”

“That is the craziest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard,” Potter said, shaking his head and fumbling his pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket.

Then looking him straight in the eye, I said, “Any crazier than coming back from the dead? Any crazier than waking to discover London isn’t called London anymore and U2 are now called Feedback and my iPod has a crescent-shaped moon on the…”

“What do you mean U2 aren’t called U2 anymore?” Potter suddenly cut in. “This is worse than I thought. You mean I can’t listen to their songs anymore?”

I shook my head and said, “No — I don’t think so.”

“What about, Where The Streets Have No Name?”

“Look can we just stop discussing U2 — Feedback — for a moment and focus on the statue,” I snapped.

“But there’s a world of difference between a few names changing and a young girl turning to stone,” he argued.

Then, thinking of me standing naked before the mirror, my body covered in those cracks, which wept that white, powdery ash, I said, “Is there a difference? Maybe when everything got pushed, as you call it, this young girl turned to stone.”

“Okay let’s just say I’m prepared to take a stroll down insanity beach with you for a moment or two,” Potter said, “There are still a couple of unanswered questions.”

“Okay?” I said. “Like what?”

“One, what was this girl doing out here?” Potter asked me. “And secondly, who is she?”

I looked at the statue, and slowly shaking my head, I whispered, “I don’t know.”

Potter came towards me, and placing his hands on my hips, he looked into my eyes and said, “See, Kiera, I told you we need to get away from here.”

“And go where?” I asked, knocking his hands from me. “We have nowhere else to go. And besides, I’ve been doing some thinking.”

“About what?” he asked, lighting another cigarette.

“It’s not good for Isidor and Kayla to have nothing to do; they need something to take their minds off what has happened to them.”

“Perhaps we can find a game of Scrabble tucked away in the manor somewhere…” Potter started.

“I’m not joking,” I said. “We all need something to take our minds off what has become of us. I don’t know about you, but I can’t just sit and stare at the walls any longer. Whether you believe it or not, everything that has happened — been pushed — while we were away, has happened for a reason and I believe that’s why we’re back.”

“So what you’re saying is that we’ve got to push it all back into place,” Potter seemed to scoff at me. “Good luck, sweet-cheeks.”

“Why do you have to be so impossible at times?” I asked him.

“What you’re suggesting is impossible,” he said back, chewing the end of his cigarette.

“I thought at first that maybe we should wait for the Elders to give us some sign,” I said. “But look around you, there are plenty of signs that things aren’t right.”

“So what are you gonna do?” he smiled at me with that smug grin of his and I remembered how often I’d wanted to knock it clean off his face. “Investigate?”

With my fist clenched and knowing that he was trying to bait me, I said smiling back at him, “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“How?”

“I’m going to advertise — I did it once before,” I told him.

“What, like a private detective?” he chuckled to himself. “You are taking this whole Miss Marple thing way too seriously.”

“Well anything has got to be better than just moping around this place and sweeping leaves up off the drive,” I snipped back at him. “I haven’t been raised from the dead to do nothing. While I’m about it, perhaps I should advertise your gardening services?”

“I ain’t no gardener!” Potter growled at me.

“No?” I smiled smugly at him. “Where has your fire gone, Potter? Where’s the fight gone? These days you’re as wet as those leaves you stand and rake into a pile. I need more than that. I might be dead but I need a life. I miss my old life. I don’t have any of my belongings, they’re all back at my flat in Havensfield — along with my old life where I was once a cop, but that’s hundreds of miles away from here. I don’t even have my badge anymore. I just want a little bit of that life back — I want to feel like Kiera Hudson again. Can’t you understand that?”

Potter threw away his cigarette end and looking at me, he said, “Kiera, you can’t have that life back — it’s gone. Can’t you see that? You ain’t a cop no more and neither am I. We’re nothing more than ghosts. We shouldn’t even be here — we’re dead.”

“But we are here in this fucked up world that we’ve come back to!” I yelled at him, my fists clenched. “And I think us coming back has changed things and only we can put them right again.”

Potter looked back at me, then rolling back his shoulders, his wings unfolded from his back. “You stay and do the whole Murder-She-Wrote thing, but I need to get away from here.”

I reached out, but before I’d had the chance to touch him, Potter had rocketed away, up into the clouds, which covered the sky like a dark blanket. I looked at the statue again and knew that I was right, however odd my theory was. Whoever the girl had once been — she had now turned to stone. What she had been doing in the grounds of Hallowed Manor, I didn’t know. But something told me that finding her out by the summerhouse was a sign. A sign of what? I didn’t know that, either. Until I found out, I decided that I would keep this to myself. I didn’t want to alarm Isidor or Kayla any more than I had to. Whoever the girl had been, she was now just a harmless piece of stone, and it wasn’t as if she was going anywhere.