Mayhem Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside.’
    His mother grabbed his hands and rubbed warmth into them, and he saw how red her skin was from all the scrubbing in the freezing air. There were cracks on her palms. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time in a long while. Loose strands of hair had fallen free of the cap she slept in and they were run through with grey. His mother was getting old, but if they did not leave this place she would die withoutgetting older. He felt the truth of that in every beat of his heart.
    ‘I told you.’ Matilda leaned against the wall, a frown forming lines between her eyebrows. ‘The same dream: four nights he’s woken up shouting about fire and hate.’
    ‘Your grandmother used to have dreams.’ Aaron’s mother pulled him in to her breast and held his head there. ‘When I was a little girl she dreamed of us leaving Kiev. She dreamed of old Abramanov killing his wife – no one knew what he had done apart from your grandmother, not until they found the poor woman rotting under the bed.’ She said sagely, ‘Some dreams are more than dreams.’
    Matilda snorted again, though her mother constantly chided her about it. Aaron could understand why: his eldest sister was a pleasant-looking woman, even in the grime and hard living that aged women fast in the Pale, but this mannerism had led to the young men calling her ‘horse’ as they’d grown up, and that in turn had fixed her mouth in a constant expression of down-turned displeasure.
    Aaron kept quiet and waited for the trembling that had gripped him to subside. He hugged his mother back, less out of a need for affection than for warmth. His bones were cold to their marrow. As he shook against the familiar stale smell of his mother’s nightclothes, the vivid images that had overwhelmed him faded, but the underlying sensations remained: hatred, fear andthe desperate need to run. He didn’t need his mother to tell him that these were no ordinary dreams. He feared the visions even more when they came when he was awake, helping Mr Anscher cut hair from liceridden heads, or over at the hospital cleaning up after the doctors and patients.
    There was never any warning, his head just filled with something other : terrible sights and sounds, like tonight’s, a forewarning of the towns and villages pouring down upon them in the night and destroying or stealing everything they had. He had almost cut a man’s ear off yesterday morning when the images had hit him. If he wasn’t careful, Mr Anscher would find another young man to help him and then they would lose these rooms, poor as they were.
    He had been assaulted by another vision over the past three days – one that made him realise that none of this was normal. In it he saw a vast city, bigger even than the Kiev he knew from the stories his mother and the old people of the shtetl would tell during the long summer evenings, when they gathered in the marketplace and remembered better times. Perhaps his mind had made the city up from those stories, but he knew he did not have the imagination to invent the luxury he had seen surrounding the screaming man at the centre of the explosion in his vision. The cramped shtetl with its poverty-stricken residents was all he had ever known; he’d never seen a palace, let alone stepped inside one.
    ‘Grandmother’s gift?’ Betsy’s eyes were bleary with broken sleep. ‘It can’t be.’ Her words came out through a yawn and she shuffled forward and sat on the edge of the bed, tugging an edge of blanket over her. ‘You always said the gift came to women.’
    This wasn’t the first time Mother had talked of the foresight that was supposed to be in their blood. When their grandmother was alive, she herself had told them about the rotting wife, how when she had touched the baker’s hand buying bread from him, she’d seen exactly what he would do later that night. The children had enjoyed the scary bedtime tales, but as they had grown and their grandmother had died, the