Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes by Jack Lewis Read Free Book Online

learn a
damn thing from me either. Despite deciding I wouldn’t tell him about it,
thoughts of an old foster family rose in my head like worms crawling out of the
dirt.
     
     It was my third foster family. The
bad one. I was six years old, too small to sit properly in my seat. The dining
table was so polished it glinted under the light of the chandelier above.
Expensive watercolours were spread across the walls of the dining room, and the
red velvet curtains were drawn. The watercolours were of family members who had
died over the years, and the further back the line went, the uglier the faces
became.
     
    Foster dad sat at the end of the
dining table, so far away that when he spoke it was like he whispered. Foster
mum was in the middle, keeping as far a distance as she could from both me and
her husband. The light was dim enough so that we could still see each other as
we ate, but the faces of my foster parents were covered in shadow. The
atmosphere was drenched in ice. By this point I had given up asking them to
turn the heating on. I stopped begging for a coat or a jumper. I stopped
expecting them to put me to bed or to even talk to me.
     
    They sat and shovelled morsels of food
into their mouths. Their stares were blank, as though their brains had been
emptied. Sometimes I caught foster dad looking at me with a sneer on his face,
but when I stared at him the expression dropped. Foster mum was a husk, an
empty sack of skin that moved around the house like a ghost.
               
    I looked down at the plate in front
of me. I was so hungry that my stomach felt like it was twisted into a knot. My
last meal had been two nights before, and my tiny body cried out for more food.
I felt like I was wasting away.
     
    The steak on the plate was cold, and
I picked up my fork and poked it. The sides of it moved, and I saw that maggots
twisted and turned along the meat. I let my knife and fork clatter onto the
table. I pushed my chair back. My stomach felt like it had liquefied.
     
    “Sit down,” said foster dad.
     
    I gulped. The maggots crawled along
the beef.
     
    “Sit down,” he said, his voice
firmer. “Get in your seat and eat your meat.”
     
    My stomach sent an anguished tremor
through my body, and I nearly doubled over in pain. I knew I had to eat it. I
picked up my knife and fork and flicked away the twisting maggots. I cut a
piece of the meat and brought it to my lips, the smell getting worse the closer
it got. I closed my eyes and wished I were dead.
     
    “Earth to Ella.”
     
    Jeremiah leaned in close to me. He
snapped his fingers, and the clicking sound punctured my thoughts and brought
me back to the pub, back to the flickering hearth and hushed conversations. He
folded his arms and breathed out a sigh.
     
    “I’m going to the library,” he said.
     
    “It’s pitch black and it’s eight in
the evening. It’ll be shut.”
     
    He shook his head. “I made a deal
with the librarian. A bottle of whiskey goes a long way around here.”
     
    I  stood up out of my seat. As I
moved away from the stew, my stomach beat against my skin as though it were
trying to break through and dive into the bowl.
     
    “I’ll come with you.”
     
    “Not a chance in hell,” he said. “You
look like the crypt keeper. Go upstairs and get some sleep. I’m hoping I’ll
have a lead for us tomorrow.”

 
    9
     
    When I shut my bedroom door behind me
I felt alone. The timber floorboards creaked when the slightest weight was
applied to them, and walking barefoot across my room made them sound like
someone was opening a coffin. Dusty wooden beams ran across the roof, the wood
thick enough to slip a noose around and high enough to finish the job.
     
    Paintings hung on the wall of
woodland areas that I assumed were somewhere nearby, because the art work
reeked of being from the paintbrush of a local artist. Their technique wasn’t
the best, but they’d managed to capture darkness in the trees that looked