Free Berserk by Tim Lebbon

*
     
    For a long time, Tom could not move.
    The corpse of the child still lay where he had found it, wrapped in chains and virtually buried in filth. It had been a girl; he could see her long hair and she wore the rotten remnants of a dress. It may have been pink once, but burial had bled all colour to a uniform brown. Between the chains he could still make out the patterned stitching on the chest, flowers and butterflies and everything a little girl would love. It was a long dress, sleeveless, something for the summer, not this cool autumn day. Her leathery skin seemed unconcerned at the chill in the air. Her face ( it should be looking the other way, not at me, it shouldn’t have turned to me ) was a mummified mask of wrinkles, a dead young girl with an old woman’s skin. The creases around her eyes and the corners of her mouth were deep, home to muck and tiny, squirming white things. Her mouth hung open, filled with mud. Her eye sockets were moist, dark, and not totally empty. The eyes sat like creamy yellowed eggs, waiting to birth something unknowable.
    Her hand still touched his arm. He remained motionless, staring at the places where her fingers squeezed, the slight indentations in his skin, hairs pressed down, redness around where her fingers touched him because she was squeezing him.
    Tom gasped, realising he had not breathed for many seconds. A breath shushed across the Plain, shifting grasses and setting a spread of nearby ferns whispering secrets. He could not take his eyes from the girl.
    “That’s not squeezing me, it’s just touching me,” he whispered, staring down at the bony hand. He raised his other hand, ready to lift her mummified arm and set it down across her chest. “I shifted her . . . she moved . . . her arm lifted and fell, all because I shifted her . . .” He breathed hard between each phrase, trying to force away the dizziness that blurred the edges of his senses, determined to ignore the feeling that the corpse was about to move again. Every instant held the potential of another squeeze, another touch.
    But her fingers are pressing —
    Tom pulled away and the little girl’s nails scratched his skin.
    “No!”
    The girl’s body settled back into the mud, the chains holding her tight. They clinked as she shifted slightly—
    Gravity, it’s gravity.
    —and a small slick thing slipped from a hole in her shoulder and scurried across her body.
    Tom crawled backward out of the grave, pushing with his feet, pulling with his hands. There was no sign of Steven down there, not exposed at least, and he could not go back in to go deeper, he just could not. Jo would be frantic by now – it was mid-afternoon already and the sun was dipping to the west, ready to kiss the horizon and invite in the dark – and he suddenly realised just how many hours he had lost here. His shoulders and arm ached from the exertion, and his heart galloped hard.
    “Oh Jesus God fucking hell,” he moaned, closing his eyes and trying to understand what he had done. It was a moment of reason in madness, clarity in confusion, but the moment was chased away. He felt it leave, lifting its legs and sprinting from his consciousness as a strange voice forced its way inside.
    Are you Mister Wolf?
    Tom’s eyes snapped open. The child’s corpse was shifting. He could not see actual movement, but the moisture across its body reflected and wavered in the light of the sinking sun, the reflections stretching up and down, left and right, repeating their rhythmic movements. As if the body were breathing.
    No . . . no, not Mister Wolf.
    Tom was shaking, his eyes watering. He wondered whether it was that giving the corpse an illusion of movement.
    “No,” he moaned, filthy hands pressed to his face as if to squeeze out the truth. “No, no, no.” He scrabbled to his feet and backed away. His heels tangled in the outstretched legs of one of the excavated skeletons, and as he tumbled backward the voice came again, an invader in his