Free Flesh and Blood by Nick Gifford Page B

now.
    The faces are pressing hard against the windows now, as if sensing his weakness. Hands press at the windows, and he can hear their fingernails – hundreds of fingernails – scratching down the glass, the sound like some mad, warped string section tuning up. Just waiting.
    And suddenly, he knows where he is. This isn’t Bathside, it’s an alternative, a Bathside that has never existed, but contains all the darker, twisted Bathsides that might have existed if things had been different, if things had been far, far worse.
    He’s crossing the mental bridge. He’s out jogging in Alternity, and his feet are getting heavier and heavier again.
    He stares at all the ghoulish, eager faces.
    He’ll have to stop running soon. He won’t be able to go on for much longer. He’ll have to...
    ~
    He woke, his body soaked in sweat, his head aching as if someone had been trying to break out of his skull with a pneumatic drill. He sat up straight, hugging himself, willing the mad images to go away, willing the pain to stop.
    He was going insane, he knew. Almost every night now, he was having these dark, terrifying dreams. Even now that he had some kind of explanation – even if it was one that transformed everything he had ever understood about the world – he feared that it would end in madness.
    How had Gramps lasted so long if he had suffered like this, he wondered? And how did a child of Kirsty’s age cope with it? Little wonder she had so many ‘turns’, as Aunt Carol called them.
    These thoughts offered a morsel of comfort to him: Kirsty survived, Gramps had lived with it for more than eighty years. There must be a way of coping. He remembered the letter, Gramps’ phrase: your talent must be mastered .
    He had to find some way of controlling it, whatever it was. He had to master this gift, this affliction. The alternative, he knew, was insanity. Or maybe something worse.
    ~
    The following afternoon presented Matt with his first opportunity to learn. It was the first time he had been alone with Kirsty for more than a few seconds, the first time he had had the chance to talk to her.
    Vince and Mike were at work, his mother and aunt were at the hospital with Gramps, and Tina had gone to a friend’s birthday party. That had come as a surprise to Matt: he couldn’t imagine Tina having any kind of life outside the small circle of her family. Perhaps they weren’t very close friends, he decided. She hadn’t been at all keen to go to this party, after all, but Carol had insisted. “You accepted the invitation,” she told her. “You have to learn to meet your obligations. You’re going to go to this party, my girl, and what’s more, you’re going to enjoy it.”
    Kirsty seemed to be trying to avoid him. There were just the two of them in the house, yet he didn’t see her for nearly an hour. She was up in her room, he guessed.
    He settled down at the end of the sofa with one of his grandparents’ old photograph albums. This one dated back to the early 1950s. Gran and Gramps would have been about the same age as his parents were now, he realised. Next to each of the pictures was a label, written in his grandmother’s flowing script, identifying the place and time. Alhambra Palace, Granada, July 12th 1953. Toledo, August 4th 1953. The Prado, Madrid, August 6th 1953 .
    The small girl in the pictures must be Carol, he thought. The baby would have been his mother. His grandparents looked so contented, so at one with their world. The young doctor and his wife.
    It seemed like a golden age to Matt. He wondered what it was really like: what had been going through the mind of that man? What fears, what worries? What night terrors did he endure?
    Perhaps that was why he had travelled so much: distance offering the only respite from the madness, and the danger. Had he been running away?
    He looked up as the TV leapt into life. Kirsty had come into the room without a sound, and now she was setting up one of her video games. She