Free More Than This by Patrick Ness Page B

in the room he left as a child.
    But no coffin for Owen. And nothing for his parents.
    Just him.
    “Because I’m the only one who died,” he whispers.
    He puts his hand on the open lid. It’s cool, just how he’d expect the metal to feel, but he’s surprised to find a thin layer of dust on his hand when he takes it away. The inside, though, is almost a blazing white, even in the low light from the blind-covered window. It’s cushioned with contoured pillows on all sides, vaguely in the shape of a person.
    There are torn metallic bandages –“conductive tape” – all the way down the length of it. And tubes, too, big and small, some disappearing into the sides of the coffin, their stray ends having left stains here and there against the whiteness of the pillows.
    He thinks of the abrasions along his body and how it hurt to pee.
    Had the tubes been connected to
him
?
    Why?
    He crouches down, shining the torch underneath. The coffin sits on four short rounded legs, and from the very middle of the bottom of it, a small pipe goes straight down into the floor. Seth touches it. It seems slightly warmer than the rest of the coffin, like there might even be power running into it somehow, but he can’t be sure.
    He stands up again, hands on his hips.
    “Seriously,” he says loudly. “What the
hell
?”
    He angrily flips up the blind on the skylight. Annoyed, he looks down again to the street below.
    To all the houses that line it.
    All the houses that look as closed up as this one.
    “No,” he whispers. “There can’t be.”
    The next instant, he’s running back down his stairs as fast as his exhaustion will let him.

He heaves a garden gnome as hard as he can at the front window of the house next door. It flies through with a satisfyingly loud smash. He clears away the remaining shards with the torch and climbs inside. He remembers nothing about the people who lived here when he was a child, except maybe they had a pair of older daughters. Or maybe just one.
    Either way, there might have been people here who died.
    Their front room is as dusty and untended as the one in his own house. The layout is more or less the same, and he walks quickly back through their dining room and kitchen, finding nothing out of the ordinary, just more dusty furniture.
    He runs up the stairs. There’s only one landing in this house – the owners not bothering to make the attic conversion – and Seth is in the first of the bedrooms before he can even stop to think.
    It’s a girl’s room, probably a teenager. There are posters for singers Seth’s distantly heard of, a bureau with some tidied-away makeup on it, a bed with a lavender bedspread, and an obviously much-loved and cried-upon Saint Bernard plush toy.
    No coffin, though.
    The story is the same in the master bedroom, a stuffier, overcramped version of his parents’. A bed, a chest of drawers, a closet full of clothes. Nothing that shouldn’t be there.
    He uses the torch to push open the access hatch to the attic. He has to leap a few times to catch the lower rung of the ladder, but it finally clatters down. He climbs up, shining the torch into the open space.
    He falls back rapidly from a congregation of surprised pigeons, who coo in alarm and flap wildly out through a hole that’s come open in the back roof. When it all calms down – and Seth wipes the pigeon mess from his hands, suddenly less happy to discover there are birds here – the torch and the light from the hole reveal only packed up boxes and broken appliances and more startled pigeons.
    No coffins with anyone inside.
    “All right,” he says.
    He tries the house across the street, for no particular reason taking the same garden gnome with him to smash through the front window.
    “Jesus,” Seth says as he climbs inside.
    It’s phenomenally messy. Newspapers piled in every corner, every clear space heaving with food wrappers, coffee cups, books, figurines, and dust, dust, dust. He picks his way through.