frozen within time

chapter four

Alex had heard his sister scream quite a lot. she was a girl, after all. But had never, in twelve years, heard her scream like this. He jumped violently and grabbed at her and saw that her eyes were bulging with shock and horror. She was pointing and screaming: 'a body! Oh, Alex! It's a dead body!'

Alex stared into the glass and saw a face. eyes closed, pale pink lips very slightly open, revealing milk white teeth. dark hair curled across an alabaster forehead. it was a girl----about the same age as Kirsten.
It made him think of snow white and her glass coffin.

A shudder of fear went through him, making his heart thud and his legs feel weak. Kristen has stopped screaming now, and was holding her hands across her mouth, her eyes shut, shaking and crying. they should get out of her----now! And yet, something inside him couldn't let him walk away, just as it had barley allowed him to walk in a few minutes earlier. this girl . . . . This cool, s, sleeping girl . . .

'She doesn't look dead,' He said, finally, still holding in to kristens shoulder. 'Maybe they had a way of p-preserving them. you know----embalming----like they did with Lenin and Eva m-Mendes . . . .
Kristen stared at him. 'What are you talking about?' She gasped.

'I mean---that she looks . . . . Pretty good for a dead girl.'

'Oh-----my-----God . . .' Said Kristen 'you fancy a corpse!'

'Don't be stupid,' He said, with an exasperated click of the tongue, and suddenly he realized he wasn't really that scared anymore. he was more fascinated----as I'd he'd stumbled into tutankhamun's cave. 'Come on---- we can't go back now. We have to know . . .'

Kristen gave a little shriek as he vigorously wiped the top of the last torpedo chamber. Alex caught his breath in shock, even though he'd been half expecting it this time. Another face lay beneath the curved glass window. Also dark haired. his eyes, too, were closed, and his features were similar to the girl's. Perhaps they were related. he seemed, thought Alex, to be smiling. as if he was having a bit of a joke. at any moment his eyes might spring open and he might shout 'SUPRISE!!!'

'He looks like her,' breathed Kristen, who had overcome her fear to move around to lean on Alex's shoulder. 'A bit older. He's probably her brother. Maybe this is some kind of weird mausoleum . . . You know . . . Like when they buried Egyptian kinds and put all the stuff they'd need in with them, to take them into the afterlife.' Alex nodded----he'd been thinking the same thoughts.

'But if someone took this much care of burying their kids,' He pondered, 'you'd think they'd've put up a headstone or something like that . . . . Wouldn't you?'

'Its creepy,' shivered Kristen. 'I can't believe I'm still standing here.'

'Well, they're hardly going to spring up and bite you, are they?' Said Alex. 'They must have been dead for decades. I wonder what killed them . . . And who they were . . . Maybe . . . .'  He walked back to the console, ducking past the pipes and wires that went into the top of the torpedo chambers. 'Maybe there's something about who they were in these notebooks.'

Kristen hurried after him. She did not want to be standing on her own between two dead bodies, no matter how healthy they looked. Alex was flipping threw the notebook, coughing now and then as the dust from it caught in his throat. she glanced at the other books, but they looked like textbooks---- the kind of stuff she hoped never to have to get down odd the shelves in maths class. she studied the console with all its old buttons and levers. everything looked as dead as the boy and girl in the torpedos. As if it had lain there for centuries. She could probably press all the buttons and flick all the levers without anything happening but a bit of a dust storm.