The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) by SW Fairbrother Read Free Book Online Page A

presence.
    She was eating, and by the remains of food around her, she had been doing so for some time and would continue to do so for even longer. She took a bite of a sandwich. A piece of cheese fell out and was swallowed by her cleavage. Something about her felt familiar, but I’d never seen her before.
    Even so, her obesity wasn’t the most remarkable thing about her. A small green snake with a soft blurry look—a projection of her consciousness—was wrapped around her neck. It was an odd shape, more of a ribbon than a tube. The tip of its tail curled above her left ear, and its head was hidden somewhere in her cleavage. I looked closer. No, not hidden. Its mouth was clamped to her nipple—breastfeeding.
    The serpent raised its head and said, ‘What are you looking at?’
    I raised both my hands in a ‘nope, nothing’ gesture. I didn’t know what had happened to the fat woman, but she clearly hadn’t been eaten by zombies—not enough blood. She picked up a jug of water and gulped it down.
    I began to back out the room, but something slammed into my back and knocked me down onto the tiled floor. It raced towards the fat woman.
    I pulled myself to my feet to see a dead girl on a yellow bicycle. She raced around and around the kitchen, up the walls, over the ceiling and down again, through the table, and around and around again. Her legs pumped so fast they were a blur. The fat woman ignored her.
    A slit in the cyclist’s neck reached from one end of her throat to the other, and blood flowed from it, dripping to the floor. She was in her early teens, round faced, and round bodied in a Lycra cycling outfit that accentuated every bulge. She wore no helmet, and her brown hair was tied back into a tight pony tail. There was a square piece of paper fastened to her shirt with safety pins. My eyes crossed as I tried to read it as she whizzed around.
    I felt the wind on my face and smelt her sweat when she zoomed past me. I turned to see her racing frantically up and down the stairs before she disappeared into a door at the top of the landing. I followed.
    Photographs of Malcolm’s family lined the stairs. Older paintings flickered in and out of view: a ship on a rough sea, stern-faced Victorians, some crocheted wall hangings of cats.
    At the top of the landing, I went left into what appeared to be Malcolm’s bedroom. The wood-framed bed was messy and unmade, a white shirt and pair of socks tangled in the sheets. A pile of magazines and a coffee mug with milk scum sat on a dusty bedside table next to it.
    The girl raced around Malcolm’s bedroom, faster and faster. The bicycle clipped the edge of the bed and disappeared from view before blinking back.
    ‘Hello,’ I said.
    She nodded as she went past.
    ‘Can I ask you some questions?’
    The girl gave me a polite little shake of the head and a smile, as if I were a stranger who’d stopped her on the street to ask for money, then raced out.
    The room blurred, and a blue-cushioned headboard replaced the wooden frame of Malcolm’s bed. The plain white paint on the walls changed to mottled wallpaper. A dead man lay in the bed, a cup of tea at his elbow and a Dick Francis novel in his hands. The woman in curlers next to him was another not-real projection, although her snoring was loud enough. The dead man paused, lay down the book and dug a finger into his not-real wife’s ribs. The not-real woman coughed and rolled over. They were much too relaxed to have been zombie fodder. My guess was previous owner of the house, but I made a mental note of their descriptions anyway.
    I crossed the landing and into the second, smaller bedroom, which was more unstable. Mostly it was a young child’s room, but it alternated: a study, an older child’s bedroom, then a double mattress on the floor lit only by a single flickering gaslight and accompanied by the stench of damp.
    The young cyclist didn’t notice the changes. I’m not sure she noticed anything other than the walls. She