Kill It With Fire – Lindsey Kinsella

He shivered as the chilled precipitation dripped from his hair down the back of his shirt collar. By the time he reached the church grounds, the sky was so grey it appeared as night, and the rain fell with such force as to create knee- high splashes upon impact with the ground.

He noticed a broken window on the side of the church but thought little of it, certainly not enough to linger in the downpour any longer. The open door of the manse house was a welcome sight. Now running and holding his suit jacket over his head, Bruce burst inside and breathed a sigh of relief. He shook the rain from his hair and tossed his saturated jacket, which slapped onto the floor. He took in a deep breath and retched.

A putrid odour, unlike anything he had experienced before, filled his nose, his lungs, his every pore. After a moment of adjusting to the overpowering stench, he took notice of the front door. It wasn’t just open; it was almost destroyed. Cracked and misshaped, it hung at an angle from only one hinge. Perhaps part of the renovation works had been to remove it, he thought. They simply hadn’t finished doing so. At the far side of the manse hallway was a white, wooden door dotted with large, black insects.

Slowing his breath with his shirt sleeve over his mouth, he approached the door and pushed. A swarm of flies escaped as it swung open, revealing the desiccating corpse of a young man in blue overalls. Bruce gasped, raising a hand to cover his eyes, but peered through his fingers, unable to look away.

He could tell little about the man other than that he was a construction worker and in an advanced state of decay. The boy still gripped his mobile phone. Out of curiosity, Bruce leant close and tapped the screen. The backlight was dim, due to the two percent battery charge which remained, but bright enough to make out the message. Mum: Call Failed What the hell happened here? he thought. Any thoughts of death by natural causes were silenced by a deep wound on top of the man’s skull.

Bruce’s heart pounded. He scanned the room, searching for what might have killed the young man.

THE APPRENTICE HELD his hammer high, ready to strike a nail into the roof tile, but paused, listening. There was a scuffle from the church below. The scuffle itself wasn’t what he found odd, though. Rather, it was the otherwise silent site which allowed him to hear it at all. The racket of yelling and power tools he had grown accustomed to had ceased. He wasn’t sure how long it had been since the silence fell, but now that he had taken notice, it was unsettling.

He called out for his colleagues, whom he had assumed to be alongside him, merely unseen in the dense mist, yet he was met with silence. He was new, inexperienced, a liability, even. They never left him unsupervised. And yet, he neither saw nor heard a soul. A scream echoed through the fog. From below? He couldn’t be sure, but he had to find out. Had someone fallen? He hastily replaced the hammer into his tool belt and ran down the scaffolding used to access the historic church roof.

The mist cool and the air still, he heard nothing beyond the creaking of the ladder beneath his feet. So poor was the visibility, only now did he realise the sun was setting, betrayed by the red glow barely finding its way through the fog. Once on the ground, he flinched at the shatter of glass nearby. He paused, breathing deeply, listening for further commotion.

When it never came, he told himself it was likely a roof tile falling or, perhaps, a dropped coffee mug. “Someone hurt?” he called. “I can’t see a bloody thing—tell me where you are.” The island answered only with silence. Even being amongst his construction team had felt lonely on such a remote site—he was the new apprentice, after all. But it was more acute as he stood on his own, unable to see more than a few metres ahead.

Something rustled. Taking sharp, unsteady breaths, he edged towards the source of the sound, cursing as he tripped over a carelessly abandoned wooden board. He wondered if someone had fallen from the roof; perhaps they needed assistance. He cursed the site manager for insisting they work in such poor visibility, even if it had been during a rare let-up in the vicious Outer Hebridean wind.

“Is someone there?” he asked. At the sound of his voice, the rustling stopped.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: eb0467e1d476ee79
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 776,847 bytes (0.741 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 143
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 144.94 minutes
• Total Words: 28,988
• Total Characters: 166,717
• Average Words per Page: 202.71
• Average Characters per Page: 1165.85

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