Free Sin by Shaun Allan Page A

pleasant. Not
insipid by any means, but restful. Even with the raindrops drumming
along to their rock-steady-beat, peace seemed to reign beneath the
blanket of leaves.
    It was nice. Sorry Mr.
Staniforth, but it was.
    There weren't any birds
whistling or whooping, but I did hear the odd scurry of a squirrel
or rabbit hidden nearby. I didn't really know where they'd be
hiding, as the ground between the trees was covered in a thick but
neat carpet of grass, as if it had been a football pitch a couple
of days ago and someone had accidentally dropped the trees here and
hadn't got round to picking them up. But they scampered thither and
to, keeping their distance from me and from the downpour beyond. I
didn't mind them staying away from me. I wasn't in the mood for
company, and trying to hold a conversation with a squirrel was
something I was too tired to bother trying. They can be skittish
creatures and tend to have a short attention span, so any chat is
liable to dip and dive from subject to subject faster than I could
make a banoffee pie disappear. Rabbits are different but just as
hard to please. They simply look at you with blank faces, making it
obvious that, no matter how riveting your conversation might be,
they just wanted to know where you kept the carrots. I couldn't
blame them. My stomach was starting to growl so a carrot or two,
while not banoffee pie, would have been quite welcome.
    I wondered if anything was
happening anywhere else. By that I meant did the Grim Reaper owe me
any thanks for chucking a few more shredded souls his way. I
thought not. I'd know. I wondered if the boy in the car had been
missed yet. Or had he been found. I wondered if I'd get some sleep.
Then I slept.
    Do you remember your dreams? I
didn’t. Not very often anyway. Sometimes, if I woke in the early
hours then drifted back off to sleep again, I'd have snatches of a
dream still clinging to me when I awoke properly. Occasionally
those snatches would be full episodes and I'd recall them for a few
hours or so before they would fade. Usually, though, I didn’t.
Sleep is a coma that only the insistent blaring of an alarm or the
not too gentle shaking of a burly hospital orderly can rouse me
from. And if I still retained glimpses from a dream, I rarely
believed it to be my subconscious trying to communicate some hidden
message to me. I'd like to, really. It would be good to have your
brain ticking over problems while you're out for the count,
supplying you with the answers in the form of little soap operas
ready for when you wake up. I'd like the human brain to be capable
of stuff like that. Perhaps it is, Who knows? In my case, though,
it didn’t happen, or if it did, my subconscious kept the solutions
to itself. Maybe my dilemmas were too much for me to handle and I
didn’t realise it? Or maybe there aren't any actual solutions. My
inner demons wouldn’t stay inner enough for me to resolve them.
They had a habit of escaping every so often and people died. I
always wished I could dream more - or at least remember them. That
would mean that things were getting better. That would mean the
Reaper was doing his own dirty work.
    "Hey, Sin," said Joy.
     
    * * * *
     

Chapter Four
    I looked up. The trunk was
obviously not as smooth as it had first appeared. Knots as big as
fists were digging their knuckles into my back and no amount of
squirming on my part could ease the discomfort. Even so, I didn't
bother standing or moving away. I supposed I could have lain on the
ground, but I knew I'd have felt exposed. With my back against the
bark, as much as the bark tried to put me off, at least I felt I
had some protection. Protection from what, I didn't know. I was
fairly sure that, if I didn't know where I was then Dr. Connors and
the rest of the 'sane' world wouldn't know either. That was unless
they'd subcutaneously implanted a tracking chip somewhere on my
body and satellites were currently spinning across the sky, homing
in on my location so the