The Crowsbrook Demons

Chapter 9

At 7:26 the next morning, Sarah's phone rang. She cursed and rolled over and picked it up. A spider ran out of her hair, across her pillow, and disappeared down the side of her bed.

"Yes?" she said, frowning.

"Something else happened," said a voice on the other end.

"Huh," said Sarah. "Yes. Like what?"

Jez explained about the vision she'd had of Marina's corpse.

"Can I come over?" she finished. "I have something to show you."

"Don't you have school?"

"It's Saturday," said Jez, patiently. "So no. I'm going to a protest against this maggot factory later, though."

"I'm not up yet," said Sarah. She yawned. "Give me thirty minutes."

At 7:55, there was a knock on the door. Sarah cursed again and ran her fingers through her still-wet hair, pushing it out of her face. When she opened the door, she found Jez neatly dressed in jeans and a dark grey coat.

"I have to show you something," said Jez.

"Yes," said Sarah, rubbing her eyes. "You said that on the phone." She moved aside so that Jez could come in. "So what's going on?"

Jez produced a glass jar from her green bag.

"This," she said. "It's dead. I found it in my room."

Sarah peered through the curved glass of the jar. At the bottom of the jar, on its back with its legs jutting upwards at improbable angles, was a large fly, obviously dead. It had the iridescent sheen of a bluebottle, but it was significantly larger— about three-quarters of an inch from head to tail—and shone a deep, eerie green as the light caught it.

"What kind of fly is it?" asked Sarah. "You're the science kid."

"I don't know," said Jez. "I did some online research and looked in the books I do have that have entomology sections, but I couldn't find anything. Maybe it's nothing," she finished, lamely, "but I thought you might want to see it."

"I don't think it's necessarily nothing," said Sarah. She thought back to the meeting and the man in the immaculate suit. "Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe it's not. Given that we don't really know a lot about anything that's going on, it might be worth taking a closer look. Although I'm not really sure

how."

Sarah and Jez looked at each other and then back to the fly.

"Can I dissect it?" said Jez. "Will it be dangerous? I brought the things with me."

"If you're not careful with the scalpel, it will be," said Sarah. "How do you dissect something as small as this?"

"You can do it," said Jez. "I mean, it's possible." She pulled her green bag onto her knees. "I know that correlation isn't causation and all that," she went on, "but seeing Marina—or whatever it was that looked like it used to be Marina—really freaked me out, and I've never seen a fly like this around here before. Well, really, I hadn't before all this started happening. But there was one in the biology lab the other day, and my teacher was acting all weird. Which is probably just a coincidence. It shouldn't take very long. But I didn't want to do it by myself in case something else happened."

"Good call," said Sarah. She looked directly at Jez. "You know this is getting dangerous, right?"

Jez avoided her gaze, studying the fly in the jar intently. "It's just a fly."

"You shouldn't be involved."

"But I'm up to my ears in it now, aren't I?" Jez set the jar down on the table in the living room and dug in her bag for a cloth roll of dissection tools. "And they know."