The Mysteries of Brambly Hollow

stone wall, and cut through a pasture. Reaching another fence they climbed over.
    Meli felt like a crook as, back lowered, she scooted through the pasture, making good use of the overgrown grasses and bushes for concealment. Reaching the far wall, her fingers crawled slowly up the coarse stonework, then clinging to the top she drew herself up and peered over. She almost took her last breath on coming face to face with Elsa! Meli was felled backwards, her bottom striking the ground with a teeth jarring thump. From her lowly position, she found herself staring wide eyed up at Elsa as she appeared through the gate.
    “Get out of here,” the old woman wailed shrilly, beating the air only inches from the tip of Meli’s nose with her walking stick, locks of matted hair hissing like angry cobras as they were thrashed around her shoulders. Scuttling backwards crablike until the tall blades of grass consumed her, Meli rolled over and in a very undignified getaway, she crawled for several feet before daring to rise onto rubbery legs and taking flight. Her heart was pounding so hard in her ribcage, that she thought it was going to arrest! She hoped that the boys were okay, and she prayed earnestly that they hadn’t witnessed her cowardly encounter.
    How had Elsa known she was there? Stumbling up the trail to the safety of home, she rushed for the door. It was open. A deathly hush fell in Meli’s chest when her heart stopped and missed several beats, before being kick-started when she took a juddering breath. She couldn’t remember for sure whether or not she had secured it. Letting herself in, her gaze sweeping around her, she moved through to the kitchen. Her hand flew to her throat on seeing the little rotting corpse on the kitchen table. Meli let out a scream as she recognised SS. Clasping her hand over her mouth she backed away, fighting to hold down her breakfast, which was yo-yoing up and down her gullet in a consistency resembling sausage meat. How on earth had it got in here? Worse still, what if the boys suddenly came back? Valiantly, she forced her breakfast back down into her stomach. Tearing a black bin liner from the roll, she used it to pick SS up and quickly scooped him inside by turning the bag inside out around him. She felt several fragile bones crack between her fingers. That was just too much. Her breakfast launched itself into the sink. Several seconds later, she prepared to tackle the bag again. Tying up the opening she carried it at arms length between two fingers, and taking it outside, she dropped it in the dustbin.
    Returning to the kitchen she grabbed a bottle of bleach and soaked the table with it. Something, she wasn’t sure what it could be as it certainly wasn’t breakfast, gave a sickening lurch in her sore stomach, when she saw two maggots doing the back stroke. Was there no end to the horrors of the day? Turning away she took several deep calming breaths while trying to picture something pleasant and soothing in her mind. But even the rush of oxygen this provided to her brain wasn’t enough to maintain the picture of a lovely spring garden, and the serene picture kept being over-written by the ghastly sight of swarms of black flies descending onto the corpses of dead animals and children lying amongst the flower beds. Giving up, she decided that the only thing she could do was face her fears and finish clearing away all traces of the outrage. She spent fifteen minutes, cleaning and re cleaning the table, wondering if she would ever be able to eat off it again. When her arms couldn’t scrub any more, she pulled back a chair, and collapsed onto it. She sat there for a moment, before tiredly dragging off her rubber gloves and hurling them over her shoulder in the direction of the sink.
    She closed her eyes. How the devil had the corpse come to be in the kitchen? It couldn’t have been Elsa, much as she would have liked to lay the blame on her. Not unless she had a twin. Maybe that was it. There were two of them. No, that’s just plain daft, she told herself. Be sensible. Suddenly it dawned on her that whoever it was might still be in the house. She thought about the mysterious flies. Was someone upstairs right at this moment tipping a bag of flies into one of the bedrooms? Horror crept over her skin like a burning rampant rash. She rose to her feet and stared out the window, as though hoping to see a white knight in shining armour heading her way, or even Quassi. There was no one. She