Free Stoneheart by Charlie Fletcher Page B

mouth.
    Edie screamed. Her back arched, her eyes screwed shut, her mouth opened wide, her neck tendons snapped tight as violin strings, and a sound that wasn’t a just sound ripped into George’s head. He threw his hands over his ears to protect himself. It didn’t make a difference. The scream was stuck inside his head and just seemed to get louder and louder as it echoed around with no way to escape.
    Edie felt the past slam into her through her hands like a massive electric shock, as if the metal of the statue had been storing the memory of pain and horror deep within it, waiting for her to touch it and receive the full power of it in one distilled jolt.
    Her eyes snapped open. Then shut. Then open. Again and again. And as they did, she saw the past in fast juddering time slices, some freeze-frames, some slow-motion fragments of light and sound. Every time she closed her eyes to escape the unbearable pain that the past seared into her, she found an intolerable pressure built up in her head, and she knew it would burst if she didn’t open her eyes and let the past in once more.
    And what she saw in the jarring slices of her vision was this:
    The Embankment was different. The road was thinner. The trees shorter, and some were in different places. The modern office blocks were gone. The bridges were not as they are now. People stood looking up into the sky. It was bright day. The city did not roar with the sound of thousands of unseen motorcars growling through its entrails. The people wore the long skirts and formal coats of the early twentieth century. A nanny in a uniform was smiling as she tried to fasten the bonnet on a laughing child. A newspaper seller was shouting something about the “British Expeditionary Force” and Flanders, though he stopped shouting and swore when he saw the thing everyone else was looking up at loom into view over the tops of the buildings.
    A long slow rocket shape hummed overhead, whirring propellers pushing it between Edie and the sun. It was almost dreamlike in its slow immensity.
    People stopped shouting and just stared at it. In the sudden calm Edie could hear the clopping of a horse approaching as a hansom cab came out of Adam Street—the cabbie lowering his whip as his mouth fell open at the sight above him. She heard him swear softly, “Bloody hell. A zeppelin!”
    Then small dark dots fell slowly out of the belly of the zeppelin, and time broke into fragments again. But like shards of glass, the fragments seemed to cut deep into Edie’s brain and increase the pain tenfold.
    She saw the dots get bigger. Closer. Resolve into bomb shapes. She saw a woman scream and a man throw her to the ground, covering her body with his.
    She saw the newspaper seller jump over the edge of the Embankment, down into the Thames.
    She saw the first bomb hit the road.
    She saw the flash.
    She felt the blast rip her lips back off her screaming mouth.
    She felt the blast heat sucking into her lungs.
    She screamed louder.
    She saw the holes blown in the side of the Sphinx.
    Saw a child’s bonnet blow into the iron railings of Adam Gardens.
    Saw the man and the woman blown into the top of a tree.
    Saw the horse in two parts, slowly pinwheeling twenty feet into the air; wet bits of it, that should never be seen, ribboning apart in a hideous mind-scarring arc.
    And then it stopped.
    And the present was back.
    George and the Gunner were bent double, shielding themselves. The screaming noise suddenly stopped scouring around George’s head. He convulsed as the rising wave of nausea hit him, and he threw up for the second time that night, a thin spatter of bile all over his feet.
    The Gunner tried to force his face out of the pained grimace it was stuck in.
    “Told you to mind your shoes.”
    George sat down on the pavement. Every joint was aching, and the nausea had changed to something like ancient dread or deep sadness, or the memory of both. Edie was staring at her hand. She sat down suddenly, a plan