He waited with Murfin until a taxi came to take him home, and then walked back to his flat. Once away from the town centre, the streets were very quiet. Cooper knew that he’d have to face up to his own death some time. Like most people, he’d always thought he could avoid it for ever. And perhaps he’d read too many stories in which people didn’t actually die. Instead, they passed away, breathed their last, or were no more. In polite conversation, death was skated over rapidly, like thin ice.

Sometimes, he could sense that thin ice beneath his feet, and he didn’t want to look down. There was too much dark water lying just below the surface.

MY JOURNAL OF THE DEAD, PHASE THREE

So here is the reality. People change shape when they die. The muscles go slack, and gravity drags down the skin. It sinks into the cheeks and pools in the eye sockets. Our flesh forms new contours, like a tide going out and exposing submerged islands. The body cools, our extremities shrivel. Blood settles towards to the ground as the earth begins to draw us closer. Then the skin discolours from red to purple, from green to black. Our final transformation is a Technicolor performance.

When the heart stops pumping blood and the cells have no oxygen, we say a person is dead. Well, the brain might die, but the body doesn’t – not really. Our intestines are packed with micro-organisms, digestive enzymes and bacteria, and they don’t die with the cells. When there’s nothing left for those enzymes to digest, what do our organs do? They start to digest themselves. In the end, we are our own flesh eaters.

Ah, decomposition. The classic two-act play. But the final act is drawn out too long. There’s a weathering away of the flesh from the bones, bit by bit, shred by shred. A peck of a beak, the nibble of an insect, a slow disintegration. There’s no grand finale, no great denouement. There’s no bang in our ending, you see; there’s barely a whimper. Only a cry in the night that goes unheard.

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

On the way into Cressbrook next morning, Ben Cooper caught a glint of sun on the cupola of the old mill, where a bell had once summoned labourers to work from their cottages in Apprentice Row. But that was the last glimpse of the sun he would get this morning. Before he reached the mill, the clouds had closed again, and the rain was back.

The roads down here were single track, with passing places cut into the bank where two cars could just get by with care. It called for a good deal of courtesy between drivers, of course. But as long as tourists didn’t park in the passing places to take photographs, the system worked fine.