Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [43]
Opening her eyes again, she hurried in what she hoped was the right direction - drawing in breath sharply as the shed suddenly loomed out of the dark above her, even though she was expecting it. A step further and she yelped in pain and shock: nettles as high as her head had brushed her face, and stumbling back she saw they surrounded the small building entirely. She danced forward ridiculously, trying to stamp the stingers out of the way with solid boots, flicking them away from her face where necessary but unwilling to rely on the dubious protection of the woolly gloves she‟d borrowed from the landlord‟s wife, the knitting loose and holey. Still, by the time she made it to the door, three of her fingers were stung, and there was another raft of welts on her cheekbone.
The pain of a nettle sting is nothing compared to that of, say, a broken arm, but at the time - especially for a recipient who is under considerable emotional stress - it feels like the end of the world. Sarah sank to the floor of the shed and put her head in her hands.
And heard the scratching.
Scritch, scratch, scritch, scratch.
She raised her head; held up the lantern. The mice exploded at her: hundreds, thousands of mice, scotching and scratching and squeaking, running up her arms, her legs, through her hair. She threw herself to her feet, pirouetting wildly, eyes and mouth clamped shut to stop the twitching tails from gaining entry. As fast as the mice flew from her spinning form, more launched themselves upwards; there were tiny scampering paws, so cold they felt wet, running between her coat and her jumper, her jumper and her blouse, somehow finding the way between her blouse and waistband to run down inside her trousers; no exit through the cuffs jammed tight in her boots so they stayed trapped, a mountain of mice building up her bare flesh.
Until a minute ago, Sarah had liked mice.
She pulled her jacket off, ripped off her jumper, frantically brushing herself with one hand as she fumbled at her belt with the other, spinning all the time.
And then as quickly as they had come, the mice left. She redressed, shivering, dizzy, compulsively flicking non-existent paws and tails from back and arms and face. Then Sarah raised the lantern to see a murky brown tide receding through the open door. By the side of the door lay a shovel.
She picked it up and left the shed, resolutely thinking about what was to come and not what had just been. Of course, what was to come might be the disinterment of her friend‟s corpse. Really, that didn‟t help.
But she had to know.
A rotting Harry, a Harry with worm-filled sockets and bloated flesh would be better than a Harry in her mind, not dead but abandoned forever in the past, or trapped, tortured, waiting for a rescue that never came. It would be better than the creeping doubts that would be with her, she knew, for the rest of her life, because she lived in a world where friends seemed dead and then rose again with a new face, or walked out of explosions unsinged, or crawled from under an avalanche with barely a scratch. That was the world she lived in, and so she would only be sure that Harry was dead when it was in front of her eyes.
An owl hooted as she stuck the blade into the ground; for a moment her mind was convinced it was a howling wolf even though her ears and brain knew perfectly well it was not. The ground was still loose from the recent burial, but hardened with the winter frost, so her task was both easier and more difficult than it could have been.
She dug for hours. At first freezing, she did up every button she could, pulled her collar high and her hat over her ears. A short time later she could not imagine being cold, thought it ludicrous that she ever had been anything other than baking hot. Her jacket came off, and then twenty minutes later her jumper too. She kept on her gloves, to protect her hands from blisters and to stop the shovel‟s wooden handle from rubbing on her painful nettle rash, but her palms were slippery with sweat and she could already smell the damp wool. She could see