by Ryan Casey
He went back to the front door and knocked again. The old woman in the open window waved at Ashley, doing all she could to get him to maintain eye contact with her as she blew toxic fag smoke out of the window, the wind carrying it in Ashley’s direction along with the rain.
He knocked again. “Susan?” he called.
Still no movement. Nothing.
His stomach tightened up. He turned around to Steve, who was sat peeking out of his car window, and he shrugged. Maybe something had happened to her. Maybe Grace, wherever she was, had got here already.
Ashley took a deep breath and grabbed the cold golden handle. He tried to bring it down, but it was locked in place. Shit. He’d had enough luck with one unlocked door today. He looked back up at Susan’s living-room window. She had to be in there. She had to be in that darkness, somewhere.
And then he spotted something. An opening in the window upstairs. These windows were big, too, and if he could get himself up onto the sloping roof, he could work his way up. His heart pounded. He’d never been one for being too risky. He’d almost shat his pants when he’d got stuck atop a small shed on holiday in the Lake District once.
But that window was open. And as mad as it might make him look, he needed to see what was behind it. To see that Susan was still okay.
He looked around at Steve’s car. Steve was staring into the distance, the windscreen wiper sliding across every few seconds. Then, he looked at the old woman in the downstairs window, who was still waving at him with her thin, witchlike little hands.
Ashley smiled. He took a deep breath. Then, he put his finger across his lips.
The woman stopped waving. She put her spindly finger across her lips too.
Right. This is it. Now or never.
Ashley stepped onto the doorstep of Susan’s flat and jumped up above the door. He got a grip of the section of the sloping roof just above her doorway. He tensed. Bit into his lip as he pulled himself up with his fully outstretched biceps. He didn’t care anymore. Didn’t care who saw, didn’t care what they thought. He had to know Susan was okay. He had to know Grace hadn’t done anything.
He tensed with all his strength and after a few moments, ignoring a few unintelligible curses from Steve somewhere behind him, he was on Susan’s roof.
He looked over at Susan’s window. He couldn’t see what was behind it, not from this distance. He felt the cool rain crashing down onto him as he perched there on this roof. Okay, one step at a time, one step at a time. He didn’t look back. Didn’t look down as he got higher and higher, closer and closer to Susan’s window. He was getting inside this flat. He had to.
When he was just a matter of feet away, the ends of his fingers and his knees aching with gripping onto the rough roof, he felt something give way under his hand. His body thumped against the sloping roof. He felt himself falling. Sliding back down. Sliding to a broken neck. He’d never know. He’d never…
He got a grip of the roof again. Got a grip. Took a few shaky breaths. Ignored the beads of sweat dripping down his forehead, pooling under his armpits. He took a few more shaky breaths, steadied himself, then started climbing back towards Susan’s window.
This time, he got further than last. But when he was just an arm’s distance from Susan’s window, he noticed something in the window of the upper ground flat next door. A chubby, grey-haired man standing in the window, his mouth ajar. He had a phone to his ear. He stared at Ashley for a few seconds, then shuffled out of sight. Fuck. He could be on to the police. He could be reporting Ashley. He had to get this done with. Quick.
Ashley moved those final few lengths towards Susan’s window. He could feel it getting windier the higher up he was. His head started to ache and, as he caught a glimpse of the top of a tree at the same height as him just down the road, he felt immediately sick and dizzy.
Just keep breathing. Just keep going. All over soon.
He slid himself further up the roof. He was so close to the glass now. So close to the open window. He reached out. Reached out with all his strength towards the window, and…
His fingers touched the glass.
His stomach leaped. He felt like he’d been injected with a new bout of energy. It didn’t matter that he could hear shouting and muffled voices on the street below. He was here. He’d made it. He could get in and out and then he could explain himself, but that wasn’t the priority right now.
He yanked the window further open, realising it was harder to do than it looked. He got a grip of the edge of the windowsill, and he took another few deep breaths as he blinked and tried to make sense of the still-dark living area.
“Susan?” he called, peering in through the window, the cold rain still crashing down on him. He looked at her brown sofa. Looked at the beige carpeted stairs. No sign of her. No sign.
He moved a bit further to the right. She’d be in there somewhere. Maybe she was hiding under the radiator. Or maybe she was standing by the door that led down to her stairs. She had to be here. She had to be, or all this was for nothing.
“Susan, are you…”
Ashley’s voice trailed off. He couldn’t make sense of what it was he was seeing at first, but it was there. Right by the door.
There was a hexagonal shape on Susan’s floor. Except these weren’t etchings or drawings—these were chunks of something. Chunks of meat, freshly cut judging by the stained red blood seeping into the carpet.
Ashley’s mind raced. This meat, he could see it clearly now.
It wasn’t just meat. There were legs. Arms. Feet. Hands.
And in the middle of the hexagonal pattern, Ashley realised he’d found Susan. She was there after all.
Except he didn’t feel relief. Not for long, and only a misunderstood sense of relief.
Susan was there, right in the middle of the hexagon of body parts.
Unfortunately for her, she was missing her body parts.
Ashley couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand why Susan was lying limbless in the middle of her floor. He couldn’t understand why she was surrounded by body parts.
He tasted metal. He tasted vomit. He wanted to throw up. He needed to throw up. He needed to get away.
He fumbled his way back down the hard, rough surface of the roof.
Get back to Steve. Get in the car. Drive away.
The body parts. Susan’s dismembered body. The blood staining her carpet.
No. Just stay calm. Stay—
Ashley felt the roof beneath him give way once again, just like he had when he’d been climbing up. Only this time, his mind was so fixated on Susan’s body, not understanding, not comprehending, that he didn’t manage to get a grip on the hard surface of the roof.
He felt himself flying in slow motion. Flying towards the ground, staring up at the birds as they too flew in the grey clouds above. This must’ve been what the sinkers felt, he thought. This must’ve been what they felt when they were falling, staring up at the sky, the cold rain tumbling down on them.
He closed his eyes. He could feel it coming now. Feel it coming for him. He’d tried. He’d tried so hard, but at least it would be over now. At least he’d be at peace. At least it would be—
He heard a sharp crack.
It took him a few seconds to realise that it must’ve been his skull hitting the concrete.
After that, there was nothing but blackness.
THIRTY-TWO
The first thing Ashley noticed was the dull pain at the bottom of his back.
He opened his eyes. Or at least, he tried to open his eyes, but doing so stung, as there was a bright white light ahead of him somewhere. He snapped them shut again. Tried to take in a deep breath, but doing that just made his chest and his back sear with pain. He could taste blood in his mouth. Thick, slimy blood. Where was he? What had happened?
And then it came back to him. Not just the immediate history, but all of it. Grace’s return. The hexagons. The scales. Eromus Reptilia, Saturn, and the stillbirths.
<
br /> His stomach knotted the more the images flashed through his mind.
Climbing up to Susan’s flat window.
Seeing Susan’s dismembered torso surrounded by her limbs.
The pain in his back got more intense.
He opened his eyes again as a dribble of vomit trickled out of the side of his mouth. He tried to move to his side as the rancid, rotting taste tumbled out of his mouth and to whatever was at his side. He thought he could hear crackling. Mumbling. But it was cold. Awfully cold on his skin. Was he at the hospital? He must be at the hospital. He’d fallen from Grace’s roof. He’d—
His eyes started to adjust to the light. As they did, Ashley soon realised that it wasn’t the bright light of a hospital bed, or even the light of day at all. No, the sky above was dark. Dark, except for a peppering of stars. But up ahead, that’s where the light was coming from.
There was heat coming from there too. Cutting through the cold every now and then.
And this heat was flickering an amber glow.
He blinked a few times. Panted as he got a strong whiff of the crackling firewood in front of him. He could see somebody over there. A woman. She was tossing things into this bonfire, which was taller than them. She was tossing things in, mumbling things as the fire crackled at the added fuel.
“Ashley…Ashley…”
The whisper to his left made Ashley spin around. His wrists and back stung like fuck in the process, and it was then that Ashley realised that he was attached to something. His hands were bound. He couldn’t move his legs. He was tied down.
And to his left, somebody else was tied down too, their hands and arms outstretched on a big, solid rock, their legs tied to the ground beneath.
Blood was running down from their greasy black hair.
Steve.
For a moment, Ashley wondered just what the fuck was going on. Whether this was some kind of dream. Whether he was in a coma, or in hell, or somewhere like that.
And then he heard the fire crackling even louder. He spun around to look at it, his entire back and chest aching and searing in the process. He realised that every breath was making him wheeze. He should be in hospital. He’d taken quite a fall. He should’ve been in hospital and being taken care of.
Instead, he was here. He looked back around at the woman with the long blonde hair, who threw the final item from her hand into the roaring fire. He knew what those items were now. They matched the size of the limbs he’d seen hexagonally spread around Susan’s lounge area.
They matched the size of the arms he’d brushed his fingers down. The legs he’d pressed his lips up against just over a year ago. And at the time, he hadn’t felt guilty, not in the slightest. But he’d made up for it in guilt. He and Susan both had. He’d had his punishment. If this was her punishment, then it was very unbalanced.
“Ashley…” Steve gasped.
Ashley moved his neck gently back in Steve’s direction. Doing so sent pain right through his body, but it was better this way than a sudden jolt. He wanted to ask Steve what had happened. How it was nighttime now, and how they’d all ended up here.
But as he heard more mumbling from around the bonfire, more crackling, a whiff of burning meat drifting towards him, he realised those answers didn’t even matter anymore.
All that was relevant was that he was trapped, right here, and the psychopath inside Grace’s body was having the last say.
Ashley looked at Steve. Started to say something to try and calm him down.
But Steve wasn’t looking at him. Not anymore. Instead, he was looking straight towards the bonfire, the glow of the orange light reflecting in the wide whites of his eyes.
“Grace,” he muttered. “Grace, I…It’s Steve. Please.”
Ashley’s stomach sank right through his body when he heard the light footsteps stepping through the dry grass. He didn’t want to turn around, as the footsteps got closer, but he knew he had to. He had to see. He had to look Grace in the eye. He’d snapped her out of her trances before. He had to do it again. Do it again before she did anything she regretted.
No. Anything else she regretted. She’d already crossed the line of regret when she’d done whatever she’d done to Susan.
Ashley turned his aching neck back around slowly, facing the direction of the bonfire, which continued to crackle and send gusts of heat in their direction, making the cold air just about bearable.
But Grace was walking in their direction too. She was walking in their direction with her body completely upright, her arms stuck to her side, her head pointing towards the sky.
Ashley felt his heart pounding in his chest, which only made his wheezing and aching worse. He wanted to talk, but he could see the deadness of Grace’s eyes. That glassy look she’d given him when she’d first been caught etching those hexagons on her parents’ kitchen floor. That look she’d given him when he’d caught her in her parents’ bedroom, and when she’d had her meltdown in the police interview room.
She had that look. That look that lacked so much vibrancy. That sent goose-pimples across his arms.
“Grace, please,” Steve said, as she walked right towards them both.
Then, just a few feet away, she stopped.
Ashley looked back at her. He had a good look at her now. She was wearing her white cotton cardigan which, by the looks of things, was over nothing. Her legs were bare, except for the small marks and scratches on them. Her hands were covered with blood right up to her elbows, like she’d dipped them in a bath of red paint and left the paint to dry. She stood there and stared. Stared at Ashley. Stared at Steve. Stared at nothing.
Ashley stared back at her. He didn’t know what to say or what to do. As the fire crackled behind her, he wasn’t sure what he could say. Just that he had to try something.
“Grace, you have to—”
“You will understand now,” Grace said. She didn’t really look at Ashley when she said this. She just smiled. Smiled and stared into space as the smell of burning flesh continued to drift towards Ashley, as Steve continued to cough and splutter.
Ashley gulped back some more sharp, bitter vomit. “I want to understand, Grace. I—I want to. But to do that you—you have to let us go. You have to let us free. Then we can—we can go home. We can talk. We can—”
“My glory needs his sacrifices,” she said. “My glory above needs his sacrifices to maintain order. To maintain his great legion. To maintain his honour and his strength.”
Ashley’s body felt like it had completely deflated. Because with these words, he realised that there was no Grace in this woman in front of him. There was no Grace in the blonde hair, the pointy nose, the usually beaming blue eyes. This thing in front of him was just a shell of Grace. He wanted Grace back so badly—he’d tried so hard.
“This is a great privilege,” she said. She crouched down to her knees, still keeping her upper body and head staring ahead.
“Let us go, Grace,” Steve said. “Snap out of this, sis. Just snap the fuck out of—”
“I hope my next lamb is ready.”
When she rose to her feet, she had something in her bloody hands that she hadn’t been holding before.
Ashley’s jaw clenched together. His stomach knotted. His heart raced and everything else seemed to freeze around him.
Grace was holding a bloody machete.
And she was walking right towards him and Steve, with those glassy, vacant eyes.
THIRTY-THREE
“Please, Grace. Don’t—don’t do this, sis. Please.”
Grace walked towards Ashley and Steve. She held on to her blood-covered machete with her blood-drenched hands. Steve was the one doing all the protesting as Grace walked a path directly in the middle of them, her feet crunching against the dry grass, the bonfire continuing to crackle behind them.
“Sis, just—just think about the past,” Steve whimpered. “Think—think about when we were kids. Think ab
out the beach. And—and the swings. Think about—about Disneyland. The time we had there.”
Grace took another step, still unrevealing in her actual direction.
Ashley held his breath. Stared up at Grace and held his breath.
Then, he saw Grace turn.
In Steve’s direction.
Steve’s eyes widened. He tried to shake from side to side, his body denying him as he was strapped down to that rock, arms and legs outstretched. He started to protest. Started to shout and squeal. “Please, sis, please. Don’t do anything. I’m your fucking brother. Don’t do anything—”
“My only brother is the brother in the sky,” Grace said. She stopped and looked down at her brother, who shook himself from side to side, desperately trying to break himself free.
“It is a great honour what is about to occur,” Grace said, her voice alien, distant, so…so not Grace.
She moved close to her brother. Moved close to him, and no matter how hard Steve tried to push himself away from her, he couldn’t; she just got closer and closer to his wrists with that machete, closer and closer to him.
And then she slipped the machete between the ties on one of his wrists and snapped it loose.
Steve stopped struggling. He stared up at Grace with wide, confused eyes.
“Grace, what…Yes. That’s right. That’s right, sis. It’s me. It’s your brother.”
She still had those glassy eyes, but she snapped Steve free of his other wrist tie. She followed with his left leg, and then his right leg. Then, she stepped away, still holding the machete, and held out her other hand with a smile on her face.
As the pain of the tight ties, which were some kind of sharp wire, dug into Ashley’s wrists, he looked on in disbelief as Steve rose slowly to his feet.
“Come, my little lamb,” Grace said, eyes still glassy, voice so distant. “Walk with me to our salvation. Walk with me to a beginning of a new beginning.”
Steve stared on, transfixed. Blood dripped from his wrists. He looked over at Ashley, then back at his sister.