Free The Accidental Afterlife of Thomas Marsden by Emma Trevayne

into his bed. Silas hadn’t returned from wherever he’d gone. Thomas knew better than to ask where, even if he’d wished to, and when Silas returned just in time for supper to be put on the table, Thomas pretended to sleep.
    He had to roll over to hide his slight, unwilling smile at Silas’s complaint that the stew was very bland.
    At some point during his busy show of being asleep, Thomas actually did drift off, head filling with jagged dreams of hands on his face, then two pairs of hands on two faces exactly the same. Old ones, old ones, old ones, screamed the fortune-teller’s rich voice.
    When he opened his eyes, the room was empty and Silas’s boots were gone from beside the door. So was his shovel. It was late, then. As the days grew longer, Silas—and usually Thomas as well—waited an extra few minutes every evening for night to fully fall, for the darkness to cover their wicked deeds in whatever graveyard had been chosen that day.
    One of Lucy’s soft snores rattled from the other room.
    Thomas wasn’t going to get a better chance and, beneath the curiosity and oddness of the past days, he was simply fed up. He was going to find out what was happening and who was behind all of this.
    For a brief moment, he wished to be back in the few minutes before he had chosen that fresh, unmarked plot of earth, just so as he could turn away from it and choose a different grave. He would have come home with Silas, hopefully a few trinkets richer, and still thought of them as Mam and Papa. He wouldn’t see a face like his own eachtime he shut his eyes, as if they were lined inside with mirror glass.
    But it was far, far too late for that now, and everything that had happened since had put his thoughts through one of them fancy mangles he sometimes saw in shop windows as he and Silas crept to work and home again.
    No, Thomas could not go back to the way things had been, but he could go back to the spot on which he had stood two nights previous.
    Go back to the grave, old one.
    There wasn’t much hope it would give him any blasted idea what to do next, but it was something. It would get him out of this room that no longer felt like home. Silas wouldn’t be there; he always left at least a fortnight before returning to any given one, enough time for caretakers and policemen to get tired of waiting for the thief to return, what with so many other crimes to occupy the latter and exhaustion to overwhelm the former.
    It worked, because they had never been caught. The previous day was the closest Thomas’d ever come.
    Surely the body would be gone, thanks to the caretaker who had chased him off and most certainly discovered the disturbed grave that was never meant to be there to begin with. Surely Thomas wouldn’t have to go near it, dragged there by the temptation to gaze upon it just one more time.
    A cracked, faded satchel sat in the corner, cast there by Silas when he’d found a better one, in the way Silas found anything. Quiet as he could, Thomas packed every last scrap of clothing he owned, and Lucy’s spare shawl besides.
    The door creaked. They always do, just when a person’s trying to be quiet as a breath.
    The graveyard gates were cold iron in his hand, the metal sucking the last of the chill from the air. They were locked, but it had been many years since such a problem had stood in Thomas’s way. Getting into graveyards had almost been the first thing Silas taught him—for, as Silas had rightly said at the time, without that, there wasn’t much point in teaching Thomas anything else.
    Moonlight turned small white stones to glowing paths. Thomas didn’t need to watch where he was going. He knew, and all was silent. No one would disturb him now.
    A branch creaked.
    Rats skittered, kicking the pebbles.
    â€œHello?” Thomas whispered, for one could never be too careful. Only the wind whispered back, rustling its greeting through the