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Frankie woke up, flat on his back on a hard wooden board. He had a banging headache. That was the first thing he noticed. The second thing he noticed was that he was dead. He wasn’t sure how he knew exactly; he just did. There was that headache for one thing, and a strange “deady” sort of taste in his mouth for another. There was a deathly stillness where his heartbeat should have been. He had never really noticed his heart beating before, but now that it wasn’t, he was suddenly very aware of the empty silence in his chest. And then, of course, there was the hand.
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The hand wasn’t his. The fingers were thick and sausage-like. The skin on the knuckles was scarred and rough. It was a hand built for hitting things, and Frankie had never hit anyone in his life. The arm wasn’t his, either. It was hairier than any arm he had ever seen, with a faded tattoo of a dragon wrapped around it. Neat black stitches criss-crossed the skin above the elbow and above the hand. The other arm was not much better. It was slightly longer, slightly thinner and much less hairy. The fingers were long and tapered, with long nails that had turned a nasty shade of black at the tips. The arms lay on top of a dirty grey sheet, which covered him from just below the neck down. The outline of his body beneath the sheet looked bulkier than normal, but he decided he could worry about that in a minute. One thing at a time.
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He balled both hands into fists and watched all his fingers flex in and out. The arms may not have been his originally, but they clearly belonged to him now. He wasn’t really sure how he felt about that. In fact, he wasn’t really sure how he felt about anything at the moment. There was a fuzziness in his head like a thick fog. It made thinking quite tricky. Frankie closed his eyes and tried to force his brain to work properly. What was the last thing he remembered? He remembered breakfast – cornflakes with slightly sour-tasting milk that probably should have been tipped down the sink the day before. Could that have killed him? Death by milk poisoning? Probably not. He remembered the journey to school – sitting in the back seat while his mum and dad argued up front. There had been … something. A sudden screeching of brakes. A blasting of the horn. 5
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Had he been in a crash? No, because he remembered getting to school and being bored stupid in Maths. Perhaps that had been it. Had he literally been bored to death by Mr Brown’s equations? It was possible, but then he started to remember other things, too. His school lunch. The walk home. That piano falling on him. The ... Wait. Back up. The piano. Yeah, that was probably it. He remembered walking past the fancy new houses that had just been built along Stumm Street. He remembered the frantic shouts from the workmen above. He remembered looking up to see a grand piano grow larger and larger in the space above his head. And then … And then nothing. 6
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So that was it. He had been crushed to death by a falling piano at the age of fifteen. That, Frankie decided, was just typical of his luck. He was being very calm about the whole thing. He had noticed that. He would have expected to be screaming and panicking by this point, and yet he felt quite at peace. He was probably in shock, and any moment now he would … “WAAAAAAARGH!” Yep, there it was – full-scale terror came crashing down on him, in much the same way as that piano had. His scream sounded like crunching gravel, all rough and hoarse and not like his usual voice at all. He tried to sit up, but something was fastened across his chest, pinning him to the board. His new hands grabbed for the dirty sheet and yanked it away. Frankie looked down at himself, and could not believe what he saw. 8
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