Jaggy Splinters by Christopher Brookmyre Read Free Book Online Page B

punts
and
piety. In time he’d been forced to remove each heavy stone he’d laid upon Andrew, as surely as his brother was now removing them from the basement wall.
    Edging through the gap, they found themselves in a tiny room, no more than a cupboard, but before Donald could suggest they’d made a mistake and bid they retreat, Andrew had found a door and pushed it open.
    The four bodies lay under colourless sheets, their shapes hazily described against the gloom once Andrew had kindled a wall-mounted oil-lamp. Donald, who had ventured no further than the cupboard’s doorway, wasn’t sure he didn’t prefer the dark.
    ‘Which one?’ he asked, trembling – as though it made a difference.
    Andrew was lifting each sheet in turn to examine the faces beneath, ignoring one corpse which looked too obese to carry, far less squeeze through their narrow aperture.
    ‘This one,’ he decided, and beckoned Donald to approach. As he did so there sounded a low, rumbling belch from somewhere in the room, causing both brothers to cease their breath in startlement. Andrew laughed after a moment’s pause.
    ‘Don’t worry, it’s normal for them to do that, I’m told,’ he assured. ‘Come on. You take the feet.’
    Donald grimaced in anticipation of the cold flesh, then snapped his hands back in fright as the silence was punctured again, this time by a long and piercingly sonorous fart.
    ‘It’s normal for them to do that, too,’ Andrew said, giggling like a schoolboy. ‘Unless, of course, that was you.’
    ‘No it damned well wasn’t me,’ Donald hissed, fastening one reluctant hand around a clammy ankle. ‘It was the big fat one there.’
    ‘True enough. I forgot, yours always slip out in their stockings.’
    ‘Andrew,’ Donald scolded, loud as he dared, ‘can we get this wretched business finished?’
    ‘For sure, dear brother.’
    Andrew took hold of the shoulders beneath the shroud and together they lifted the body from the slab. The sheet fell away from its head to reveal the face of a street-porter Donald recognised, a deep wound encircling the poor man’s neck. He felt very suddenly weak, as though his insides had turned to poison, and at that moment a further flatus trumped boastfully from the adjacent table. Andrew, the sniggering dunderhead, doubled up with laughter and stumbled backwards under the weight of their inglorious prize. Tripping upon his own tangled feet, he fell with a crash upon a wooden trestle bearing a tray of surgical implements, all of which were propelled upwards in response.
    Donald watched the scalpels arc obliquely through the stale air, the moment of their flight seeming to slow and stretch in time as they swooped towards the imposing mound of the posthumously declamatory cadaver. As was to be expected, they embedded themselves to the hilt in the figure’s bloated bulk. As was far less expected, the bloated bulk sprang suddenly upright and unthroated a scream of pain, the sheet falling away from his furious, startled face but remaining pinned bloodily to his otherwise naked body.
    Donald’s legs made faster sense of it than his eyes or ears, and in an instant he turned and ran for the cupboard, Andrew clambering over their abandoned booty to follow him. The screaming turned to roaring as they scrambled up the bookshop’s staircase, then from behind them they heard the almighty clatter of the undead figure’s bludgeoning ingress.
    Donald threw the bookshop’s front door open but had barely passed through it before he was knocked to the floor by his frantically pursuing brother. They struggled, hopelessly tangled on the wet ground as the furious, animal cry approached from within.
    In moments he would be upon them. Donald closed his eyes in terrified wait for his deserved damnation, but instead the figure charged onwards into the street and continued, howling, along South Bridge until he had disappeared into the storm-swept night.
    Donald turned his head to look at his gaping and