Dead Angels by Tim O'Rourke Page A

fading daylight. Both of us bent forward against the cold, icy wind that had crept up and twisted itself around the streets. It was gone eight p.m. and the town had closed down for the night. We were the only people on the streets apart from the occasional car which drove slowly past, the tyres crunching over the cobbled roads.
    “Where are you taking me?” I asked her.
    “Home,” she said, not letting go of my hand.
    “Will your mum mind me coming over?”
    “She won’t know. She’s at a prayer meeting tonight.”
    Although I had never met Melody’s mother and I only had the snippets of information that she had told me about her, I still felt incredibly apprehensive about going to her home. Even though I knew she wouldn’t be there, I couldn’t help but get cramps in my stomach with nerves. Just as we reached the outskirts of town, Melody took a sudden turn to the right off the main road and led me up a narrow track and into the darkness. We walked silently in the dark for several minutes, until I could just make out the shape of a squat-looking house on the horizon. Melody steered me towards this and I guessed it was her home. The sudden sound of a startled bird screeched and flapped its wings against the night as it soared out of the trees that lined the path on either side of us. I jumped.
    “Jeezus, Isidor! I’m meant to be the girl here,” Melody laughed nervously.
    I could sense that she felt anxious, but I suspected it wasn’t the dark or our current surroundings that made her feel like this, but the act of taking me back to her home for the first time and whatever it was that she wanted to show me.
    Melody’s house sat in a small plot of land which was surrounded by a waist-high wooden fence. She swung open the gate which whined on its frozen hinges and led me across the front yard to the porch. Although it was dark, and the moonlight only shone intermittently through passing clouds, I could see that Melody’s home from the outside looked well-kept. It was only when Melody pushed open the front door and flipped on the hallway light that I immediately got the feeling something was odd about it. 
    “Holy moly!” I whispered through my teeth as I stepped inside and looked around in bewilderment. The short hallway was covered in an array of pictures, twelve in all. Like I’ve already said, I knew a little about the man named Jesus, and each of these pictures was of him. They weren’t beautiful pictures, they were ugly. They depicted him suffering in a way that I hadn’t contemplated before when I had heard stories about him. In each picture, he had been drawn in a skeletal and emaciated fashion. His eyes looked odd, and it was only as I stared at them, I realized they had been penned deliberately to look too big for his face. This gave him an almost alien-looking quality, which I found haunting. These were in stark contrast to paintings that I had seen of Jesus before, in books brought down to The Hollows by those who had adventured above ground. Those books had illustrations of him with a loving smile, locks of honey coloured hair, and angel-blue eyes.
    “This way,” Melody whispered, her voice dragging me out of the weird trance the pictures had placed me in. Beneath the stairs there was a door which Melody opened. I peered over her shoulder and could see a set of wooden stairs leading down into darkness.
    “I’ll show you what’s down here,” she whispered, making her way down into the pitch black. I silently followed. I held onto a rough feeling banister with my left hand and held my other directly out in front of me. The stairs cried out beneath us as we placed our weight on them. At the bottom, my hand struck Melody on the shoulder as she suddenly came to a halt in front of me. For a moment there was silence, stillness, nothing. Then I heard a ‘click’ as Melody pulled on the light switch which hung from the ceiling just above us. My new surroundings appeared dimly before me in the