No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

the shed, and his head was bouncing off the metal hose bracket with a dull clonk and then he was coming at Bram again, growling low in his throat like an animal.

And like an animal, Bram felt something primeval overwhelm him.

Rage.

It flooded his brain, it swept away all fear, it swept away everything, everything Bram had ever felt or thought or been.

There was only the rage.

He launched himself forward and saw, as if from a great distance, his own hands on the bastard’s shoulders as his head bounced off the metal bracket, crack, crack, crack, until he was limp, until he slumped forward and Bram stepped back and let him fall to the ground.

He drew back his foot to kick him.

And then the rage was gone.

And there was only silence.

Silence, apart from the sound of his own ragged breathing, the cool night air ripping in and out of his lungs as he stood there staring down at the still shape. The torch he’d dropped was there on the grass. He stooped to grab it, but his hand was shaking so much he dropped it again.

‘Oh Christ, oh Christ,’ he whispered.

He fumbled for the torch and managed to switch it on. Made himself shine the beam on the guy. It shook all over the place, giving the illusion, at first, of movement.

But the man was still. Lying half on his side, face upwards. Mask upwards.

Choking on a sob, Bram dropped to his knees and pulled up the mask.

Finn.

It was Finn Taylor.

Bram put a trembling hand to the boy’s chest.

‘Finn? Finn?’

17

Bram shook Kirsty awake. In the gloom of the Walton Room she squinted up at him, shifting in the armchair. ‘I wasn’t asleep,’ she said with a little smile.

‘He’s dead.’ Bram’s voice was strangely calm. ‘I’ve killed him.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve killed Finn Taylor.’

She didn’t believe him. Of course, she didn’t believe him. He didn’t believe it himself as he told her what had happened, that he’d thought it was Max, about the shock of seeing the mask, the out-of-body experience when he’d found himself bashing the guy’s head against the hose bracket – the realisation that he wasn’t moving, the realisation that he was dead –

And then they were running, out onto the verandah and down the steps and across the moon-washed grass to the shed.

Bram stood sobbing as Kirsty dropped to her knees beside the still figure. She used the flashlight app on her phone, shaking in her hand, to illuminate Finn’s face, the dead, staring eyes, the sticky head wounds, the blood on the grass, brightly, improbably red in the harsh white light. She put the fingers of her left hand, shrinkingly, against his neck.

‘We need to call an ambulance,’ Bram got out. ‘But he’s dead. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and powered it up. But then Kirsty was grabbing it from him.

‘Yes. He’s dead. There’s no pulse. There’s no point calling an ambulance.’

‘But he – he might not be–’

‘Look at him, Bram! Of course he’s dead!’

‘But we still – we still have to–’ He put out a hand for his phone.

She pushed it into her pocket. ‘Let’s just think this through.’ She took a shuddering breath, turning away from Finn’s body. ‘He’s dead. There’s nothing anyone can do for him. Is there? If we call an ambulance, you’ll be arrested.’

The harsh light from her phone lit up her face from below, like she was a kid with a torch trying to freak people out, trying to make herself look weird and scary. For a long moment, Bram couldn’t speak. Then:

‘I killed him.’

He had killed someone. He had killed that boy.

‘You’ll be arrested and the charge will be murder because it wasn’t self-defence, was it? He didn’t hurt you? There won’t be any defensive injuries on you?’

‘He came at me, he grabbed me, but… No. He didn’t hurt me.’

In the eery light from her phone, he could see that Kirsty’s face was stiff with shock but that she must have been soundlessly crying. There were tears shining on her cheeks, on her chin. ‘We could – make some? I could hit you? But forensics these days, they can tell all kinds of things, they can probably tell the size of the fist that made an injury… And even if we could mock something up, even if we could make it seem like self-defence… Look at him, Bram!’

Bram made himself look.

‘Look at all the blood! That’s not a result of self-defence! How many times did you whack his head on that bracket?’

Bram was sobbing again. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Way more than you needed to to defend yourself!’

‘I – it was like – it was as if I was possessed! As if it wasn’t me! I couldn’t stop myself!’

It was David. It was David who’d possessed him.

Are you a man or a mouse, Bram?

This was all David’s fault.

No it wasn’t.

He couldn’t shift the blame for this onto David. He’d done this.

He’d done this.

‘You were possessed?’ Kirsty’s voice shook. ‘How’s that going to sound in court?’

For a long moment they stood there staring at each other. It was as if they’d stepped out of their normal life into a twilight zone world which couldn’t possibly exist, which must surely be something they were imagining, something they watched on Netflix late at night and could switch off any time it got too disturbing, shivering and laughing at themselves and getting up to make some hot chocolate.

But this was really happening.

‘Bram?’ she said, finally.

‘We need to call an ambulance and the police.’

‘No one knows,’ Kirsty said, her voice now urgent. ‘No one knows it was Finn who was terrorising us, do they? If he disappeared, there’d be no reason for the police to think we were involved. If we dispose of the body–’

‘We can’t do that!’

‘– there’ll be nothing tying you to his disappearance. Who’s going to suspect you, unless we hand it to them on a plate? And why should we do that? Finn was terrorising us. It was his