The Last of the Spirits by Chris Priestley Read Free Book Online Page B

straight at Sam as though expecting to see him there, and then looked away. Sam stared back and looked into his own face.
    Lizzie screamed when she saw him come out of that door and had to be stopped from running to him. A man scaled the steps and inspected the thick hemp noose that now hung from the beam above the platform.
    The other Sam cried out when he saw the noose and pushed back against his guards. He got no sympathy from them or the small crowd by the platform. Only Lizzie wept as he was pushed up the wooden steps towards the hangman.
    ‘No!’ murmured Sam as he saw the shadow of himself shoved towards his fate – their fate.
    The hangman asked if he had anything to say but the other Sam could only howl and whine like an animal, tears streaming down his face, snot from his nose, his mouth twisting into a dozen shapes and his eyes alternating from tight shut to bulging despair.
    The horror of seeing himself so reduced was almost as terrible as seeing the dangling noose. Sam saw himself broken, wretched, crippled by fear and self-pity.
    The hangman put the ragged noose round the other Sam’s throat and tightened the huge knot against the back of his neck. A parson standing on the platform began to read from the Bible, his eyes and heart closed to Sam’s suffering. His voice sounded bored, trembling on the edge of a yawn. A filthy cloth hood was placed over the other Sam’s head.
    ‘No!’
    The hangman walked to the side of the stage and, while the crowd murmured, he grabbed hold of a lever with both hands. Sam could see the hood billowing rhythmically with the short breaths from his future self.
    After what seemed an age, the hangman received a nod from a tall, smartly dressed man below, and he pulled with all his might.
    ‘No!’
    A trapdoor opened: the other Sam dropped like a sack and was almost immediately yanked back by the noose. He cavorted horribly about for a while like a deranged puppet, and then settled to swinging gently.
    He swung there, half in, half out of the hole, like a theatre trick gone wrong. All was silent save for the nautical creak of hemp rope, and then Lizzie sank to the ground in a faint and a great cheer went up from the crowd.
    Sam moved to run towards her, but something seemed to hold him back. An invisible wall stood between them. He could not affect that world. Lizzie was helped to her feet and then the guards dispersed the crowd, leaving only a handful of men who stood beside the scaffold and lit up clay pipes as though they were leaning against a stall in the market.
    The body had ceased to swing and hung there, grim and unmoving – as dead a thing as anything could be. For nothing is deader than a body that once had life and has it no more.
    Sam stared at it, trying to take in the full sense of it, trying to restrain any attempt by his mind to imagine the face beneath that hood. Tears filled his eyes. It was some time before he could speak.
    ‘Why are you showing me this?’ he asked. ‘What am I supposed to have done?’
    The spirit did not reply.
    ‘I ain’t no killer,’ said Sam, suddenly aware of the weight of the lead piping in his pocket.
    The spirit pointed at the hanging corpse of Sam’s future self.
    ‘I ain’t no killer!’ repeated Sam. ‘I ain’t killed no one. Who am I supposed to have killed? Answer me that!’
    Then all at once they were no longer in that awful place, but were instead standing outside an iron gate – a gate Sam recognised, for it was the gate to the little churchyard he and Lizzie had slept in.
    But they seemed to have gone further into the future, because the churchyard was neglected and overgrown, with toppled headstones and monuments so cloaked in ivy their inscriptions could not be seen.
    The spirit entered and Sam followed behind. Standing among the graves like an eruption from hell, the spirit jabbed its bony finger towards a small and neglected corner and to a modest headstone there, weathered, moss-grown, chipped.
    Sam took a