Flesh and Blood by Simon Cheshire Read Free Book Online

was pulled back into the darkness.
    In a flash, it was gone! It let out a brief, feeble yelp of fright, and then there was silence once more.
    Terror froze me to the spot. I’d heard nothing else, I’d heard nobody approaching. I caught a brief glimpse of a figure, quite tall, scooping the dog up in its arms. My hands were gripping the railings so tightly that my fingers hurt. I couldn’t utter a sound. I wanted to shout out at whoever it was. I wanted to yell at them to stop, but my chest felt as if there was an immense weight pressing down on it, and I simply couldn’t form the words.
    An intruder? Had someone got into the garden, over the fence, from the park?
    A dozen possibilities ran through my head. Of all of them, the most likely seemed to be the relatively innocent one, that someone had been walking their dog through the park. It had run off, been injured by something, and slipped through the railings into the Priory’s grounds. Its owner had climbed over the fence to retrieve the animal.
    Was that the source of the scream? Half asleep, had I mistaken the high-pitched sound of the dog’s cries for a woman’s scream?
    For a moment, I was almost reassured. This seemed a logical explanation. If, that is, I set aside the oddity of someone taking their pet for a walk at two in the morning, and the creepiness of their snatching it up like that, not to mention the presence of some hazard in the park sufficient to badly injure a large dog in the first place. Yes, that was the logical explanation.
    I’ll tell Emma in the morning
, I thought.
There was someone in your garden last night
. I’d tell her I saw it all from my window, and hope she wouldn’t realize how impossibly good my eyesight must have been. Had she been woken by that dreadful sound the poor dog made?
Yes, perhaps you should install some of those motion-sensitive security lights; you can’t be too careful.
    Just as I was calming myself down with the full story, I caught another momentary glimpse of the tall figure.
    It wasn’t heading away, back to the park. It was striding towards the Priory.
    I could hear footsteps clearly now, swishing against the grass. Its outline was bulky, the limp form of the dog hanging out to either side. The figure faded into the darkness. Seconds later, I heard a clicking sound coming from the direction of the Priory. A key in a lock?
    Not a dog walker, and not an intruder. Someone from the Priory itself.
    Whoever it was hadn’t seen me. They can’t have, or they’d have said something, or done something. They wouldn’t just turn and walk back, not when they’d obviously crept up behind the dog so stealthily. No, they couldn’t have seen me.
    My heart was running like a steam engine. Who the hell had that been? Had the scream been the dog, then? What was going on?
    I couldn’t hold my breathing back any longer. Mist fogged around my face, the night air rasping at my throat and lungs. I was shivering even morenow, from cold and from horror.
    At least they hadn’t seen me.
    I felt my way back along the fence, holding on to the railings just to stop my hands trembling. I could feel the dampness of the grass soaking into the sides of my socks and the hems of my pyjamas.
    I wanted to run. Back home, into my bed, under the covers, into oblivion.
    I don’t know what made me look up at that moment. It might have been some confused effort to find clues as to what was going on with the dog. Perhaps it was a sixth sense, warning me. Whatever made me do it, I wish I hadn’t.
    There was a single light on in the Priory. Way up, at one of the top-floor windows. It was faint, shadowy and yellowish, the illumination of a small table lamp or a wall light.
    My blood turned cold and my stomach knotted.
    There was a face at the window.
    It was peculiar and distorted; a strange, twisted grimace that seemed to float in the shadows. It was narrow but its actual shape was indistinct, a horrible shifting mix of darkness and flesh. I was