Read Online Graveyard Shift by Chris Westwood - Free Book Online Page B

blackboard.”
    â€œYes, the message I wrote for your eyes only,” he said. “No one else could have entered that room and seen what you saw. That’s proof enough of your talent for me.”
    â€œAnd what does the Ministry do exactly?”
    â€œEverything that matters,” he said. “But essentially we’re in the business of cleaning. Life is short and messy, and we’re there to tidy up when it’s over. We seek out the lost and the soon-departed and show them where to go. We comfort the living. We work with the dead.”

M r. October’s words clung to me all the way home. He never failed to make an impression on me, but this time he’d put my head in a spin.
    The dead were everywhere among the living. I’d seen them for myself: the nameless burned man; the fire children, Mitch and Molly. I’d known they were lost and needed help, and now Mr. October was giving me a chance to help them.
    I couldn’t have slept after what he’d told me, so it was just as well that we were to begin on the late shift.
    We’d meet at nine, he told me as we parted. I left him standing in the sunshine and ran ahead to the corner. Waiting there for a car to pass, I looked back and saw him step behind a hedge into a house’s front yard. An instant later, with a flurry of feathers and scattered leaves, a raven shot above the hedge and flew up the street in a steeply rising curve.
    It could have been the same bird I’d seen a few minutes ago, or another of Mr. October’s disguises. Then again, I thought as I ran toward home, couldn’t it have been both?
    Â 
    Mum came home at six, more sprightly than usual. She had the weekend off. The businessman customer had visited again, leaving another sizeable tip.
    â€œDoes he wear mirrored shades?” I asked.
    â€œNo idea. Not in the diner,” Mum said.
    I wondered if Mr. October had the idea that by helping her he could help me. But Mum was unclear when it came to describing her customer: kind of stylish, kind of OK-looking, neither short nor tall, not the kind of man who’d stand out in a crowd.
    It might have been him. It could’ve been anyone.
    Apart from when we spoke about the businessman, Mum seemed distracted, nodding as if she were listening to me talk when I knew she wasn’t digesting a word.
    â€œSo everyone loved my picture,” I said. “Things were a lot, lot better today.”
    â€œThat’s good.”
    â€œAnd I think the school could be haunted.”
    â€œIf you say so, darlin’.”
    By eight o’clock she was spread out on the sofa, sleeping with her fists bunched under her chin. Fighting, I thought. Fighting to survive, for us, for me. But with no fight left by the time she finished work each day.
    I waited for nine o’clock to come. It took, or seemed to take, forever. I sat in my room, watching the hands on the bedside clock for signs of movement. For half an hour, our downstairs neighbor played drum and bass loud enough to crack the plaster. When it finally stopped, sounds of angry voices and breaking glass drifted up from a nearby street. The start of the weekend. Oh joy. If Mum slept through it, she’d sleep through anything.
    I fixed my bed, placing pillows end to end under the blankets to resemble a sleeping figure. It had worked for Frank Morris and the others who’d escaped from Alcatraz in the 1960s, and if Mum came to check on me later on, then she might be fooled as the prison guards were.
    The clock’s hands were at two minutes past when I heard it: a soft but rapid beating of wings followed by a solid thud as something touched down on the balcony.
    I went to the window, leaned out, and looked down. In the pool of darkness on the floor below there was movement, a small huddled shape slowly inflating itself into something larger. I heard a rattling noise like the scraping together of old dry bones. Then I caught my first sight of