Читать книгу Bible of the Dead - Tom Knox - Страница 17

Chapter 11

Rising from the bed Jake slowly approached the door. Hanging from the hook was a terrible thing.

What was it? A tiny dead monkey? A dried fruit bat? What the fuck was this? A brown leathery mammalian corpse just hanging here? Surely it couldn’t be worse, surely it couldn’t be what he most of all feared?

His revulsion mixed with his furious curiosity. He walked closer. And then his stomach surged, with the bile, of confirmed disgust.

This was no monkey. This was unmistakeably not animal.

It was a human embryo.

A human foetus, somehow dried or mummified, was hanging by its own umbilical cord from the coathook on the door.

The foetus stared at him. Its blank open eyes were milky white.

He heard a scream.

He stared.

The scream didn’t register; it was like a distant car alarm, not really meant for him, he was so transfixed by the sight of those eyes, dead eyes rolled back, like his sister, no, don’t think this way, but he couldn’t help it: slowly he pulled on his jeans and a shirt and all the time he kept staring at the baby, the dead foetus, the milky white eyes, like his sister’s, lying in the road; until he realized it was Chemda. Screaming.