It was clear that there was something not right about the figure. It wasn’t just the clothing that seemed to be torn along the edges, as if the boy had ripped them somehow, maybe by pushing himself through the middle of a load of brambles, but also the fact that he was slumped forwards, his head seemingly resting on the outstretched branch of a tree and his legs frozen into a half crouch.
“Matt…,” I called, trying to take a couple of steps forward.
“Ellie…” Josh chided, “leave the man be.” But then he seemed to change his tone as he started to see what I saw. “Hang on a minute,” he said. “He’s not moving. Is he okay?”
“Matt?” I called again. But the boy didn’t turn around. He didn’t even register our presence.
“Hey!” shouted Josh. And then he pushed in front of me to put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. At which point the figure in front of him just gave way. It crumpled into the earth like a collection of bones in a bag.
“Whoa!”
Matt fell forwards, his arms swinging helplessly to his sides, his knees buckling in front of him, as he bounced sideways off a partially fallen tree trunk and ended up face-first on the ground. His clothes fluttered behind him until they covered him like a shroud.
“Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” muttered Josh as his friend just lay there before him. “What just happened? What’s the matter with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, scrambling through a mound of fallen leaves and over some tangled roots to try to get to his side. “You need to help me turn him over.” I don’t know what possessed me; perhaps I was concerned that he couldn’t breath, perhaps I was thinking that we needed to get him into a recovery position - something that I’d always read was an important issue in this kind of situation; but equally, there was something about the way that he’d fallen, something about the way that his body had been moving on the way down, that made me want to see him more closely.
It was as if he’d become nothing more than a marionette that had suddenly had its strings cut.
I took a few more steps until I was finally level with his fallen body. Then I knelt down by his side and, with Josh’s help, I managed to flip him over onto his front.
That was when the true horror of what we were looking at became sickeningly apparent.
It was clear that Matt was dead.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God…!” mumbled Josh.
He was clutching his hand to his mouth as if he was trying to prevent the words from tumbling out, but before he could say any more, before he could even make the tiniest noise, he stumbled away from the remnants of his friend and spilt his guts onto a tree trunk.
I wanted to go and to do the same. I wanted to try to console him but I couldn’t seem to drag my eyes away from the fallen boy.
I’d never seen a dead body before, but I was sure that it shouldn’t have looked like this.
The clothes that we’d seen from the back were now lying under him like a ragged blanket as if they had been sliced open down the front. And his body, if that was what you could call it, had been eviscerated: literally scooped out and desiccated like a dry fruit.
There was nothing left to identify it. Where the chest should have been, there was a concave bowl exposing parts of the ribcage that were sticking out like the remains of an abandoned ship, the lower abdomen was completely empty save for a thick carpet of skin that seemed to have turned a deathly grey and the face, along with the inside of the head, had vanished so completely that all I could see was the back of his skull, a grey basin filled with dust.
And yet there was no blood, no guts or congealing pools of liquid like you saw in the films. No red or yellow gunk. Instead, everything was grey and dusty.
There was not much of a smell either. Just the faint hint of decay amid the hollowed-out body; while the outer layers of skin, the back and the neck and the back of the head, along with most of the arms and legs were still intact. That was how the body had managed to stand up for so long. It had been propped on the ground like an empty figurine leaning on the branch of a tree, with its legs barely holding it upright, the whole thing only visible from the rear as a human-shaped body.
I turned to look at Josh. He was leaning against the tree trunk wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“What’s happened to him…?” he finally managed to mutter.
“I don’t know,” I told him truthfully. “I can’t imagine what could have done this to him.”
“Is it Matt?” he said’ unwilling to believe it. “Is it really him?”
I shrugged. There was no way of knowing for sure. So little of the body was left.
“It certainly looks like his clothing,” I said.
Josh just nodded helplessly.
He seemed somehow smaller, shrunken by the sight of what lay between us. He stared uncomprehendingly at the back of the fallen body, as if he was looking for any sign of his friend in the dusty remains. But there was nothing of the boy left. Nothing but a hollowed out carcass.
And soon Josh couldn’t stand to look at him any longer.
With a groan despair, he stumbled away from the body, back into the clearing and back into the moonlight. He whimpered as he went, a hollow, helpless sound, until he staggered into the open fields and then, when the terrible sight was no longer within his line of sight, he broke down into a series of long and uncompromising sobs.
And that was when I went after him. Around the corpse and away from the forest, over the fallen branches and through the knee-high nettles, until I finally found him, sitting in a broken heap on the grass, his whole body shaking uncontrollably. And with no further words, I sat down beside him, put my arms around his shoulders and did what little I could do to comfort him.
#timetravel #sci-fi #YA
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