Free Yuki chan in Brontë Country by Mick Jackson

explosive energy. She glances up and down the lane to check that no one’s coming, takes a breath, then just sort of hurls herself at it. She throws her good arm up and over. Her hand takes a hold of wet moss, with cold stone beneath. Well, it’s too late now, she thinks, to be bothering about such unpleasantness. From here on in it may very well be nothing but wet moss and cold, cold stone.
    Her feet keep on scrambling until she manages to get one knee over the top. Then the rest of her, so she’s just kind of lying there hugging the wall, with a leg and arm hanging down on either side. She takes a breath, slowly swings her ass over and lowers herself into what feels like a very dark pit.
    When both feet finally reach the ground she turns and stands in the solid darkness. Maybe this wasn’t such a neat idea, she thinks.
    She’s waiting for her eyes to adjust – to begin to pickout any sort of form or features. Then she has an idea. Pulls out her phone, taps the screen and its dim blue light almost lifts the graves from the gloom. She plots a vague course, braces herself and sets off between the gravestones. You see, Mother, she says to herself. You see what I am prepared to do for you?
    Yuki has no way of knowing where each foot is falling. Whether it will find something firm or just keep falling, through the leaves and soft, wet earth. She edges round the first headstone and is heading on to the next one when the light on her phone cuts out and she’s dropped back into darkness. She stops. Fumbles for another button. Tells herself, Just don’t drop the goddamned phone. And when the blue light returns and she has steadied herself, she goes on again, on towards the next grave, with the phone held up in one hand and the other sweeping left and right before her, trying to fend off anything that might be in her way.
    She creeps between the gravestones, tapping at the screen of her phone at regular intervals until another wall slowly takes shape in the distance – a wall that is thankfully nowhere near as tall as the one by the gate. She hauls herself up onto it, swings both legs over and drops down into the garden on the other side.
    She stands and waits – for blinding floodlights to clank into action. For some mind-jangling alarm to be triggered and tear the night apart. But it’s still just Yuki in the dark and the silence. And now that she’s clear of the graveyard’s trees she has a little more sky above her andher surroundings are a little better known to her. There must be creatures, she thinks, tiny night-time creatures. Yuki imagines them, standing frozen in the darkness – wondering who the hell this is, crashing through their private habitat. For a moment she stands among them, listening. Then creeps across the lawns and gardens and on up to the house.
    The parsonage looks even grimmer in the dark than it does by daylight. Like a colossal Brontë gravestone, set back from all the rest. It stands so grand and arrogant that Yuki is sorely tempted to inflict upon it some minor act of desecration. To chip away at one of its walls, say. Or scrape off a little sliver of paintwork. If she had the courage she’d find a rock and throw it at one of the windows. She likes to imagine that she would. But the house has such an almighty malevolent presence Yuki is sure if she went within a metre of it she’d be dragged in, swallowed up and never heard of again.
    She tiptoes up onto the flagstones. Keeps glancing back over at the churchyard – to try and get her bearings and be sure of her means of escape. She finds the spot where she crouched this morning and clung to her inhaler. Then the place where her mother stood and posed for the photograph. And she takes up her position again, with her back to the parsonage. Is quite sure that some trace of her mother must be maintained here somewhere – in the old stone beneath her feet, or some remnant of breath, caught in a web beneath a window sill. And though she can