The Fly Guy Read Online Free PDF Page A

of the city’s gaps without drawing a look.
    Henry followed him to the docklands. This was the city’s forgotten dream, an abandoned beginning, where the houses stood like old broken promises. Some buildings slumped against each other like starved prisoners, chained together and close to death; others crumbled into the ground, collapsed into their hollow selves.
    Henry followed, watching the man’s strange movements, and every jerky step he saw loosened something inside him, like a screw unwinding at the front of his brain. Colours bled from their outlines as he saw the odd man push open a door of a derelict house and go inside.
    As soon as he pushed open the door Henry covered his mouth and nose, but it was too late, a sharp rotting smell hit him hard. Tears streamed down his face and he gagged and heaved as his stomach turned.
    The strange figure disappeared down a dark stairwell, and Henry followed. His skin was stinging from the stench as he crept down to the basement. As he crouched at the bottom of the old stone steps in the shadow of the doorway and watched, he felt his insides freeze over.
    A single light bulb hung from the damp ceiling, casting a pus-hued light onto the stone walls and the cold stone floor. In the middle of the room several bodies were piled in a heap. They were all naked. He saw the face of a young girl, eyes closed at peace, and mouth open in an eternal scream, but it was hard to tell what it was connected to, the bodies were dismembered and jumbled together.
    Henry held his breath as with sharp, spasming steps the bizarre man circled the gruesome heap. Squeezed organs and entrails oozed and leaked, lank clumps and strands of different coloured hair sprouted and hung from the tangle of limbs, wounds, blood, shadows, hands, bruises.
    Every instinct within Henry told him to run, to get as far away as possible from this horror. His stomach heaved, sending waves of gripping cold through him. His eyes burned. He backed away. The man then started to undress.
    Henry froze.
    Like a nightmare slowly opening, he watched as thin hands with fingers like gnarled roots peeled clothes off, and grey skin fell in loose creases on the skeletal frame. His limbs were too long. His torso was the size of a child’s, with a tiny ribcage and a distended belly, the one place where his smoky skin was tight. Where his navel should be was a nipple, sticking out like an arrowhead, and leaking drips of yellow sticky pus. Between his legs a lumpy growth hung like a rotten piece of fruit. His neck, thin like the stalk of a plant, bowed under the weight of his oversized head. His mouth was small and perfectly circular. He stood there in the cold yellow light, a hideous distortion of the human form, naked but for his big sunglasses, and when he took them off Henry saw the eyes of a fly.
    Then he crawled onto the dead bodies. He pushed his face into the bodies to feed. He chewed in a frenzy, violently, his head shaking as he pushed deeper. Henry backed away again, feeling behind him for the steps. The Fly Guy lifted his skinny neck from the broken and open chest of a bleach-blonde girl, turned his head, and looked directly at Henry. It was a pale face that was spattered with blood and skin, its mouth like a vicious O with tiny razor sharp teeth, and its eyes, black domes separated into hundreds of tiny circles, flecked with spots of blood.
    It spoke, and Henry felt the voice inside him again.
    “Sssstop me. Bloomburg. Sssstop me.”
    Terror overtook Henry; a screaming lightning bolt through his brain, and he turned and fled.
    Henry didn’t sleep that night. The horror turned and twisted within him. His heart raced, and he rolled and wrapped the sheets around him. Soon they were damp with sweat.
    As soon as light soaked through his curtains, he dressed and returned to the derelict house. But there was no house. There in front of him was an old parking lot, where weeds and tendrils reached up from the cracks in the concrete, like