Free Wake Wood by KA John

later.’ Desperate to leave, Mary pushed past Louise and shepherded Deirdre out of the door and down the street.
    Louise wanted to follow them but the middle-aged woman who’d been examining the bath attachments accosted her again. ‘I think I will take this shower attachment, if you don’t mind. If it doesn’t fit, I can bring it back, can’t I?’
    ‘If you haven’t used it and the box is intact, yes, of course.’ Louise took the box from her and went to the till.
    When she was free to look through the window again, the street was devoid of people. There was no sign of Deirdre, Mary Brogan, or the young couple, only the snow, pristine and glistening in the thin watery sunlight.
    The rush of customers was short-lived. By lunchtime the shop was empty. There was no doctor’s surgery that day, so Louise decided to take advantage of the lull to tidy the shop. While she was restocking the shelves she was startled by a peculiar noise, accompanied by the steady tramping of feet.
    She opened the door.
    A procession of townsfolk was heading down the main street towards her. A few people in the front row were rattling sticks in hollow bamboo tubes, those behind simply banging sticks together. There was no musical rhythm to the din they were making and the sound that filled the air was discordant, weird, almost primitive in its intensity.
    Wondering what the procession was in aid of, Louise walked towards them. No one in the column of people met her eye or appeared to notice her existence. They looked straight through her as though she was invisible.
    Every one of them kept their sights fixed straight ahead as they continued on their way past Louise, the open door of the pharmacy and the shuttered shops that lined the street. She noticed that all the people, men as well as women, wore black feathers in their lapels or affixed to their clothes or hats.
    Mary Brogan was the last but one to pass her. Her niece Deirdre brought up the rear.
    Mary alone turned to look at Louise as she passed. She gave Louise a wan smile before walking on.
    Deirdre slowed her pace. She was wearing the rope-and-stick contraption Mary had strung around her neck and wrists, and the new sunglasses concealed her eyes. She lifted her hands and lowered the glasses as she drew alongside Louise. For the first time Louise noticed the colour of Deirdre’s eyes, a startlingly clear brown.
    Louise stared back, noting the braces cemented on to Deirdre’s teeth and her childish, undeveloped figure. The girl she had placed in her mid to late teens was clearly younger than she’d first thought. No more than twelve or thirteen years old.
    Deirdre smiled, displaying the metalwork on her teeth. Her voice was quiet but it cut through Louise like a knife.
    ‘Alice has a lovely voice.’
    Devastated, Louise reeled back into the pharmacy window.
    ‘What did you say?’
    Deirdre didn’t answer. Simply carried on smiling as she followed the rest of the residents of Wake Wood down the street.
    Louise closed her eyes. Images whirled through her mind’s eye at breakneck speed.
    Alice as she had last seen her in her coffin. Her skin a deathly pale grey – the exact same shade as Deirdre’s. Her hair unnaturally black in comparison to her face.
    The prescription Mary had handed her for Deirdre’s Ventolin. A prescription that bore Mary Brogan’s Wake Wood address and was more than a year out of date.
    The ceremony in Arthur’s yard, culminating in the emergence of a fully grown, fully developed man from a womb-like chrysalis. The umbilical cord Arthur had cut with a blade. The man, naked, covered in blood, just like a newborn baby.
    The black feathers attached to the clothes of the people marching in the procession. The strange object Mary had fastened around her niece’s neck.
    Alice has a lovely voice .
    Alice had been dead and buried for over a year. How would Deirdre know that Alice had a lovely voice unless she were dead too?
    How did Deirdre know Alice’s