4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Dead Men Don't Grab
Henri doesn't bark at nothing. When Paul follows the sound to the river's edge, he finds something floating that transforms the morning from embarrassment over a failed watch into a horror that rewrites everything he thought he knew about his brother. Luke's face tells the story before his mouth does — recognition where there should be confusion, secrets spilling out in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Some bodies don't stay still.
The throat has been cut ear to ear. That much is obvious even before Paul wades into the water, before his hands make contact with cold flesh, before his mind fully registers that murder has arrived in their sanctuary. What isn't obvious — what changes everything — is the look on Luke's face. Not shock. Not confusion. Recognition.
Jamie's son. The words land like blows. Luke has been keeping secrets that make the Portal seem like a minor omission, and now one of those secrets is floating toward the lagoon where Jamie went walking this morning.
The race to hide the body before Jamie sees it is desperate, futile, doomed from the start. But the true horror doesn't arrive until Paul stands over the corpse in the shallow water and reaches down to push it downstream. Dead men don't grab you. Dead men don't open their eyes and stare into yours with impossible focus. Dead men don't dig their fingernails into your flesh with strength that shouldn't exist.
Except this one does. And when Paul finally escapes, gasping and bleeding, he discovers that the skin around his wounds has turned a colour flesh was never meant to be.
