To Dream of the Dead by Phil Rickman Read Free Book Online Page B

thought cameras could steal your soul.
    Merrily thought the picture looked unusually grey and flat this morning, lifeless.

     
    The river was still frothing like cappuccino in the lamplight, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere new.
    And the rain had eased. There was some ground mist, but the sky was clearing. Looking up, Jane saw the morning star pulsing like a distant lamp.
    A breathing space. She walked slowly back up Church Street towards the square. Most of the guys at school hated getting up in the morning, but she’d never found it a problem. Around dawn you were more receptive to . . . impressions.
    Was that weird? Was
she
weird? Over the last couple of years, she’d done all the usual stuff – been totally hammered on cider, got laid – but somehow it wasn’t enough. Was she alone at Moorfield High in thinking it wasn’t enough?
    Probably.
    There were very few lights in Church Street, none in Lucy’s old house where Lol lived now. Sometimes, pre-dawn, you’d see him by lamplight, working on a song for his second solo album, at his desk under the window. But Lol had been at the meeting with Mum, listening to Pierce’s New Ledwardine bullshit, which was enough to sap anybody’s creativity.
    A breeze blundered into the square, ripping away the mist like a lace-curtain and rattling the stacks of morning papers barricading the doorway of the Eight Till Late. The only sign of life. Not long ago, even in the bleak midwinter, you’d have had clinking milk bottles and the warm aroma of baking bread. Preparations for a day. Now even the morning post wouldn’t be here for hours, and the milk came in plastic bottles in the supermarkets, and soon nobody would be seen on the streets of Ledwardine until about ten when the dinky delicatessen opened for croissants.
    Jane stopped on the edge of the square and looked out, over the crooked, 16th-century black and white houses and shuttered shops, towards Cole Hill, the first point of contact with each new day. Hearing Mum again, from last night.
    I won’t dress this up, flower. When the stones are exposed and studied or measured or whatever happens, they want them taken away. Possibly erected somewhere else. Or . . . not erected
.
    This was Lyndon Pierce plus transient scum like Ward Savitch, of pheasant-holocaust fame. Mum had admitted she’d managed to saynothing; as the meeting was supposed to be for public information only, the words
powder
and
dry
had seemed appropriate. Jane was aware of trembling.
    The church clock said 6.30, just gone. Still a while off daylight, and Mum wouldn’t be up for another half-hour. Jane walked under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, switching on her lamp, cutting an ochre channel through the mist which put ghostly wreaths around the graves.
    The beam seemed to find its own way to the only stone with a quotation from Thomas Traherne:
No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures
Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures
. . .
     
    Jane knelt. If she was late for breakfast, late for school, it didn’t matter. This was important. This was the person to whom she’d have to answer if the village lost its ancient heart.
    ‘Lucy,’ she whispered to the headstone, ‘the bastards want to have them ripped out. Put on a flatbed truck and taken away.’
    Sometimes, when she was on her own in the early morning or at twilight, calm and focused, she’d almost see Lucy Devenish, eagle-faced and huddled in her poncho on the edge of some folkloric otherworld.
    ‘So, like, if there’s anything you can do?’
    She’d been coming here every day for weeks now, far longer than she’d been going to the river. Talking to Lucy, keeping her up to date. It was important.
    Jane looked up to see only steeple, mist and morning star, felt damp seeping through the knees of her jeans. She stood up, on the edge of the old coffin path along which the dead of Ledwardine had once been carried.
    As she walked away, there was a tiny sound like a snapping