Private English Tuition/Tutor Bolton Manchester and Bury: Narrative Writing-The Anticlockwise Tale Two

Amber again. Where the amber melts, the prison houses of the past give up their dead. Are we ready to face our predecessors so unused to sharing the earth with us?

The dead woman’s hands were washed in sticky amber. A grotesque honey .  But the scent was different, something new with this one.  We must be prepared. The recording voice stopped. My own voice returned, hoarse but me.

Aniseed. I lisped out the word. It’s aniseed. For some reason the woman smelt of liquorice and whatever the reason, it was the scent of death.

Not Like the last one then?

 

She stepped into my arms and vanished again. Humans were only bothered  about what they could see. Their problem of course. The breathing from the other faded into the distance.  Peace for a time, its hunger satisfied.  The sore throat would keep it harmless for a few days. No appetite. Would want only to rest and wait.

We knelt together with our small collectors’ bag. This was our ritual, we knew what to do. Like a pair of carrion crows we scooped up the different parts of the scene.  Not in your order, but in ours.  Do not try to imagine.

The shadow watched too from afar. Now warm, aware of a rival but too sore now to act. We were all in tense harmony. Only the human remained outside. Lights flashing. Whitecoats.  The noises of reporters and radios.  What could they know. They were trained to fit things in; to look for a coherent tale and to name what they found. Fitting things in helps make the world explicable. Even the most abhorrent crime can be explained if you were prepared to enter into unchartred minds and accept their dreadful premise.

But we were from a different place.  Deals had been struck and the veils lifted between this world and the other. So now there was this settling in and ironically things were not quite settling in. They were rather settling out. And things were getting in…amber time had arrived. The poor woman must have stumbled up on a cross over moment. Humans cannot interfere without protection.

Dr Kate Senna.  Her bag full of documents testifying to her life. Worked in museums across the world. Originally from California. The police would notify her family. All that life come to this piece of bloody tarmac and we two the only pair in the world to find out why.  Beware of curiosity without your guardians.