Human Remains

pleasant.
    ‘Sorry, mate. Will do.’
    I wince at the familiarity.
    ‘Leave him alone,’ Martha says, looking up from her computer screen. ‘He’s not a well man.’
    And then her phone rings before she can say more or I can provide a response, and I’m forced to listen to her chatting away to one of her cronies in Accounts, laughing and joking as though they are at a bar rather than in a professional working environment. Why are they all so incessantly LOUD?
    I stare at the spreadsheet but cannot tune them out, and now Garth has started on a productive coughing fit that makes me feel decidedly unwell. I can almost see the germs crossing the room towards me. I stand up, slamming my pen down upon the desk, and go to the kitchen. None of them notices.
    In the kitchen, having disinfected the surfaces, filled the kettle with fresh water and washed my hands, I stand at the table waiting for it to boil. Someone has left a copy of the
Briarstone Chronicle
behind, again, and despite the ache of worry that still lingers in my chest I find myself reading the article over.
    Twenty-six, it says. Have there really been so many? But then, there will have been some I had nothing at all to do with, and the newspaper and the police wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.
    Looking at the pictures, I remember the ones I’ve known… how delicious the sensation of leaving them behind to transform: the earthy, the filthy disgusting specimens of humanity hovering between the misery of life and the emptiness of death. After I leave them, they have the moment of transition and then everything is good, pure; no decisions remaining for them; everything that follows is as Nature dictates. Their transformations follow immutable laws of decay, rules they cannot deviate from. It has a beauty and a simplicity to it that would have been exactly the same five hundred years ago. Unchanging as the course of the earth. The unnatural processes of the modern world, finally overtaken by the natural, as glorious and unstoppable as life itself.

Annabel
     
     
    I was lying on my bed looking up at the patterns of the light dancing on the ceiling. It felt as if I had been asleep and had woken up, but I couldn’t remember waking up. The sun was bright outside and it was reflecting off something and shining up into my room. It must be daytime. It must be the afternoon, maybe.
    I looked at the clock by my bed and registered that it said 12.05. I must have been tired and decided to take a nap, but I had only vague recollection of coming home. This morning I had been… somewhere… in the car. I parked the car, and I saw a rainbow. I remembered that bit, definitely. Frosty had phoned me. I spoke to him and I was in the car park and I was looking at the rainbow. And then… where did I go?
    I was talking to someone. I remember talking to a woman, inside somewhere, for a long time – but was that last night or this morning? It had been dark outside – so it must have been last night.
    It didn’t matter, anyway, did it?
    I sat up in bed, slowly, feeling dizziness and a wave of nausea. My stomach was making noises and I thought about going downstairs and making something to eat, but then I had no real need to do it. There was no need for anything like that.
    Six o’clock, he said.
    For some reason I kept thinking about it. Six o’clock. What was going to happen then? Something I had to remember… something I had to do. At six o’clock. He said I didn’t need to worry and I wasn’t worried, but I thought I should know something that didn’t seem to be there any more. It was gone, whatever it was, fleeting and slippery like a fish darting through silky weeds.
    From downstairs I could hear a sound that I recognised, a scratching that was annoying and persistent. A banging, far off, as though someone was trying to get in. Scratching.
    It would wait, whatever it was. It could wait until six o’clock and then something was going to happen. I turned the sound of the scratching down in my head, tuned it out. Focused on the rainbow and the angel, my angel.
    I watched the clock until nearly six. Then I got out of bed, awake and ready for whatever it was I was supposed to do. I was dressed already but I felt cold. I found my coat hanging over the banister at the top of the stairs and put that on.
    I went down to the kitchen and at the back door I could see the shape of a cat through the cat flap. When it saw me it stood up on its hind legs and