Thicker Than Water

Okay, some people could walk through walls and some couldn’t, but there are lots of things that work like that when you’re a kid: aspects of experience that you don’t understand and mostly can’t ask the adults around you to explain.

And there again, some people could move, the same way I could move, while some were inexplicably chained to one place. And some people grew older while some never changed at all: but the ones who stayed put and didn’t change were often terrifyingly marked by violence or disease, to the point where it was hard to look at them.

Gradually I followed these clues to a great and unsuspected truth: that the word dead, spoken in whispers around us children and dripping with finality, didn’t denote an ending at all but a transition. What happened when you died was that you slipped away from the people you’d known and entered this other state: this state where you could look but not touch and where your appearance froze in the aspect of death as though you were a moving but unchanging photograph of what you’d been before.

"I realised, too, that this was something most other people didn’t know, couldn’t see. In my snot-nosed innocence, I tried to fill in the dots for them, but that turned out to be harder than it looked. A lot of harsh language and a few smacks to the head taught me that nobody wants the mysteries of the universe explained to them by a kid with a tidemark on his neck and scabs on his knees.

Nobody ever did come up with a word that defined us for what we were - the sensitives, the dark-adapted eyes, the ones with the built-in death-sense. Later, by virtue of what we did, we were called exorcists: but back then that game hadn’t got started yet, and nobody could see it coming. As for the other stuff - the zombies, the were-kin, the demons - that was more than twenty years away. We were a bunch of John the Baptists who’d turned up to the party before the balloons and streamers had

So if we were smart we learned not to talk about it.

Kind of a shame, then, that I let my guard down and said what I said to Kenny Seddon - the last person in the world who was going to take it lying down.

Kenny was one of those scary psychopaths you just have to work around when you’re a kid.