Haunted Shadows 1: Sickness Behind Young Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what you want and believe that you’re entitled to it.”
     
    Murray walked into the room, gave us
the file and then left. He had a hundred errands to run, and he was happy for
us to look at the census and then just leave it on his desk before we left.
     
    "You can do the monkey
work," said Jeremiah.
     
    He got out of the seat and then
gestured toward it. Part of him must have been enjoying having an assistant. An
underling there to do the jobs he didn’t want to. I sat down. The chair was
hard on my bum. If Murray ever spent any time in it, I'm sure he'd have
replaced it by now.
     
    I sat with the book in front of me.
     
    “What am I looking for?”
     
    “Try deaths first,” said Jeremiah.
     
    He paced back and forth behind me.
     
    I opened the second half of the
census, which was a record of all the reported deaths in the village. The first
page began in 1946. Presumably the one for the years before that had been
filled. We were looking from the late nineties to present, to make sure we took
in the biggest catchment area possible. I flicked to ninety nine without
waiting for Jeremiah to tell me.
     
    “What information does it give?”
     
    “Name, address, age, cause of death.”
     
    “Okay, look for anyone under ten and
read them all out to me.”
     
    Ignoring his ordering tone, I flicked
through the pages and scanned the age column. The handwriting of the census
stayed the same apart from rare patches where a record was written in a
different hand. Murray had probably recorded them, and the different hand was
from when he took a holiday. I imagined Murray as the kind of guy who had taken
the town hall job when he was sixteen and would stay in it all his life.
     
    I went as quickly as I could, looking
for the death of someone under ten years old. Unsurprisingly, they were rare,
and after twenty pages my concentration started to lag. Then I saw something.
     
    “Got one!” I said. The enthusiasm of
my voice broke the stillness of the office, and when I realised that I was
talking about the death of a young child I lowered my tone.
     
    “What is it?” said Jeremiah.
     
    I looked at the name. “Thomas Wells,
aged seven. Cause of death unknown.”
     
    “Not our kid. Carry on.”
     
    We were looking for a girl, I knew.
She should have been seven years old, but I looked a year either side. The
cause of death had to be suicide. My stomach lurched when I thought about it.
It was something I didn’t think I would ever get my head round, the idea that a
child was capable of committing suicide.
     
    How was it even possible? How would
they know death was even an option? At that age, you’re not supposed to even
know death exists. What could possibly be so terrible for a kid that she would
prefer to bleed into the nothingness of death than face living for her sixth
birthday? I felt sick.
     
    “Ella, are you still with us?”
     
    I shook myself out of my thoughts. I
flicked through the book and watched the names and ages of the dead whizz by.
It was like I was leafing through a clothing catalogue. I wanted to slow down
and give each person the respect they deserved, but at the same time I wanted
to get this horrible book away from me. I reached the year two thousand and
stopped. This wasn’t right.  I flicked forward a page and then back again to
make sure my eyes weren’t messing with me.
     
    “What’s up?” said Jeremiah, moving in
for a closer look.
     
    I held the book out to him. It
skipped from February 18 th to February 20 th , and there
was a jagged line from where the 19 th had been torn out. I held the
book up and shook it to see if any loose papers would fall out, but none came.
     
    “Some sneaky git has been at this,”
said Jeremiah.
     
    I put the book down and stood up. The
room felt cold, as if a sudden draught had started to kick around. There was a
chalky smell in the air like an old school classroom, and it felt like the
walls had moved forward an inch and pressed us