Free Berserk by Tim Lebbon Page A

own mind.
    Don’t leave me again, Daddy, not after so long! It was wretched, this voice, and pathetic, and altogether terrifying.
    Tom fell back into a skeleton’s embrace. The impact shook its arms and they clanked against him. Bones cracked and crumbled. He screamed. It was a full, loud screech that hurt his throat, and the sound and pain brought him briefly up from the dark depths of disbelief that were pulling him down, drowning him. He found his footing again and backed away, treading carefully this time so that he was not tripped, stretching his legs back over the bodies he had dug up and laid out to view. He kept his eyes on what he could see of the corpse wrapped in chains. He could not really think about the chains, not yet. That was for later. Their reason for being there, their intention . . . that was for much later, when he was away from here and crying in Jo’s arms, begging her to go home with him, continue their life, accept the lie and try to find their way with Steven’s memory intact and unsullied.
    Please . . . the voice said in his head, and Tom screamed again. So cold . . . so alone . . . I hurt. It was the accent that terrified Tom the most. The words were bad enough, and their implications, but the accent was one he could not place, a smooth-flowing speech that he was sure he had never heard before. If he were imagining this voice, he could have never envisaged something he did not know.
    “This is real,” he said, and though she did not speak, he knew that somewhere in his mind the dead girl smiled.
     
    * * *
     
    Tom backed farther away, knelt in the heather and stared at the open grave. The bodies he had brought out were catching the setting sun. He could smell their decay, even this far away. Perhaps they would rot faster now that they were uncovered. Some were skeletons, others had traces of skin and flesh . . . and the little girl, with her wrinkled skin and those ping-pong ball eyes loose in their sockets . . .
    Even from where he was now he could see her hand, resting across her chest and ready to grab again. “Tendons tightening,” he whispered, “and muscles contracting, out of the cold ground at last, just something natural that’s making her fingers move like that.” He looked down at the scratch marks on his arm. Almost as if she didn’t want me to go.
    Those words, that accent, the idea that she was not as dead as the others. “That chain.”
    Steven, the voice said, and although he jumped Tom did not stand and run. He should have. Any sane thought would have told him to run as fast as he could. But sanity seemed to be setting with the sun, inviting in its own breed of darkness.
    “My dead son,” he whispered to the air.
    Not dead, Daddy.
    “I’m not your daddy.”
    There were tears, the unmistakeable sound of sobbing inside his head. I know, the voice whispered at last, I just wanted to say it again.
    “Not dead?”
    You didn’t find him, his skelington?
    “No.” She said skeleton like a kid, with a ‘g’ in there. I wouldn’t have made that up, would I? If I were imagining all this?
    Then he’s not dead. He’s . . . gone.
    “Gone where?”
    Silence, loaded with potential. He could feel something in his mind, a presence hanging quietly back.
    “I’m not talking to you,” Tom said, shaking his head and standing.
    Please —
    “No, I don’t mean I don’t want to, I just mean I’m not . I can’t be. This isn’t happening.” Tom turned to leave. He would abandon everything he had done for the sake of his mind; losing it would not help Jo, not on this anniversary of Steven’s death. And he was dead. His son was dead. Thinking any other way would drive Tom mad. He smiled, almost laughed, wondering how true madness compared to what was happening to him now.
    He pinched the back of his hand until his nails drew blood, then wondered what germs would invade his bloodstream from the muck on his skin.
    “I’m going home,” he said, setting out for the hole