Free Flip by Martyn Bedford Page A

let Beagle pee, then pressed on. The houses fell away until there were just trees and river. They had the path to themselves apart from an occasional jogger or another dog walker. And a thousand midges. It was still light, the evening sun spilling splinters of brightness through the leaves, and the only sounds were the breeze and birdsong and the shingly whisper of the current.
    Ten minutes or so along the path, Beagle strayed off on a trail of investigative sniffs among the ferns and tree roots. Alex, who had unleashed him a while back, followed. They soon struck upon another track, treacherous with moss beneath the overhanging branches. It fetched them out into a clearing. A graveyard, in fact. The headstones, old and worn, blotched with lichen, poked out of the ground at odd angles. Many of the inscriptions were illegible. The ones which Alex could make out dated back to the 1800s. Buried here were mostly old folk, apart from one: William Edward Gelderd, four years old, “summoned unto sleep” on May 5, 1810.
    Two centuries earlier, the boy’s parents would have wept by this graveside as his tiny coffin was lowered into the ground. Now he was no more than weathered letters on a block of stone. He was nothing. In the soil, after all this time, he would’ve rotted away completely. Dead too young to leave children, or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren to carry his DNA into the future. The thought sent a chill through Alex.
    And he understood then, if he hadn’t known it all along—if he hadn’t been too shocked, too petrified to admit it to himself—that there was only one sure reason that David couldn’t possibly believe the message was from him. One reason Alex hadn’t been able to click “go” when he’d typed his own name into the search box.
    Because Alex Gray was dead.

That night’s nightmare was the worst yet.
    Swarms of disembodied steel hands clawing at his legs as he ran up a slope of molten tar. Talonlike fingers flaying his legs to the bone, the sticky black beneath his feet slick with his own blood. Voices. And a relentless screech, as though the hands scraped the air with the metallic swipe-swipe-swipe of their nails.
    When Alex woke, the images in his head snapped to black. But the screaming continued for a moment before it, too, ceased and all was still and silent.
    Two a.m. He was way beyond sleep by now and, besides, terrified that if he so much as closed his eyes, the nightmare would start up again. But to lie there, awake, thinking of death— his death—was far worse.
    In the morning, the yammering of the alarm clock dragged him, zombielike, out of bed. He didn’t remember going back to sleep, but he must’ve done. He got up and went through his morning routine, more or less on autopilot: shower, put on uniform, go downstairs, eat cereal, drink juice. The mum was in a rush to leave for work and Mr. Garamond was sleeping off his hangover from the departmental dinner. Alex almost bumped into Teri on the landing as she emerged from the bathroom in a billow of steam, wet haired, pink-fleshed, a green and white stripy towel wrapped round her like a sarong.
    “You look awful,” she said. Disgusted more than concerned. “What happened to your face? One of your girlfriends give you a smack in the gob?”
    Alex touched his lip, surprised to find it damaged. Then, “Oh, yeah. Cricket.”
    “Surely the idea is to catch the ball with your hands , not your mouth?”
    Later he would think of a comeback. Just then, spaced from sleep deprivation, he felt words fluttering around in his head like moths bashing against a light.
    I’m dead .
    Could he possibly say that to her? Teri, the thing is, I’m not the person you think I am. My name is Alex. And I’m dead . Of course he couldn’t. Not to her, or to Flip’s mother, or to Ms. Sprake, or Jack or Donna or Billie, or to that girl at school Cherry. Not to anyone. Or to anyone back home, for that matter. Mum, Dad,