Voices in Stone - Emily Diamand Page 0,61
curling out from inside his hood.
“You were at Gil’s house that time,” she said. “You’re…”
“Shhh!” He flapped his hands at her. “Don’t say my name!”
“Why not?”
Stu pointed up at the windows of her building, then vaguely at the air. “You don’t know when they’re watching. Listening.”
“Who?” Were they in the air, these ghosts?
She noticed another flash of colour from the corner of her eye: like seeing through tears, except she wasn’t crying.
“I can’t tell you out here!” said Stu, pointing at the flats. “CCTV is everywhere. We live in a surveillance state!”
Isis glanced back but couldn’t see any cameras, only Gray peering out of the door of the flats.
“Are they there?” Gray called.
She shook her head, but then another flash of colour flickered, this time along the pavement, like a goldfish in dark water. It curved in a wide arc away from her, or maybe towards her, it was hard to tell. Another colour in the stones, green this time, swirled around her then darted away, and almost at the edge of hearing she heard a wordless sound, like the wind through leaves.
“Can you see anything?” asked Gray. He’d stepped out of the flats, his face anxious and sweat-sheened.
“I don’t know…” Slivers of colour sliced through the tarmac, like oil on water. Were they just a trick of the light? She looked down at the paving slab beneath her. Was it moving?
Suddenly everything twisted, upside down. For a moment she was looking at herself from underneath: the soles of her shoes, her dangling fingertips, her body foreshortened by the strange perspective.
“Look out!” shouted Gray. His hand was on her arm, pulling her into the flats. She stumbled with him through the doorway, coming out of the ground and back into her body.
“They were all around us!” gasped Gray. “Worse than ever! They reached out, grabbed hold of you.” He sounded close to terror. “Didn’t you see?”
Stu came through the door, looking pleased. “I told you. Psycho-active contamination. Think of it as brain poisoning. Like when the US government wanted to create supersoldiers and gave them loads of drugs.”
“Is that meant to make me feel better?” snapped Gray.
Isis looked back through the doorway. Gray was scared of these… whatever they were. Had they really grabbed her? And if it was ghosts, why were they pulling her into the ground? Were they dragging her back to their buried bodies?
A true psychic sees what’s really there. She’d thrown that back at Mandeville; now she had to use it.
She took a step outside and tried to concentrate. Her brain was showing her colours and whispers, swirling in patterns around her feet, but that wasn’t really what she was seeing.
“What’s up with her?” said Stu behind her. “Why’s she squinting that way? Are you sure she isn’t contaminated like the rest of you? Just because she didn’t go right into the quarry…”
“Shhh!” said Gray. “She’s…” He paused, then muttered, “Psychic.”
“What is wrong with you, Gray?” said Stu. “Have you swallowed a gullibility pill or something?”
Isis shut him out, focusing on what she could really see. But her mind kept shying away, as she fumbled for the truth.
A boat lost at sea.
An abandoned child, frightened and alone.
A hand reaching for her own, out of the deep water.
She shook her head. None of those were right. She went deeper than words, feeling it in the hairs on the back of her neck and the shiver in the soles of her feet, while Stu ranted about the impossibility of ghosts.
“We need to get there,” she said, cutting through.
Gray looked at her. “Where?”
And she was certain, just as she had been in the woods. Here was a part of the message she could understand. “The quarry.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Isis
They were about a mile from the quarry entrance when they came to a long queue of almost stationary traffic. Stu slapped the steering wheel and launched into furious muttering.
“It’s Thursday afternoon! What are you all doing? Come on, we haven’t got all day.”
Isis and Gray were squashed in the back between the clutter. Stu had moved all the papers, bags, plastic boxes, shoes, long bits of metal and other assorted junk onto the front seat in an attempt to make room for an extra person in his car, but they were still surrounded. In her seat, Isis could only find the ragged end of a seat belt, the clips cut off it.
“Oh, yeah. I cut the seat belts,” said Stu, when she showed him, “to make it easier when the seats are