Dead Seth

by Tim O'Rourke

  “What did he want?” I asked her, feeling sick at the description she had given of this man.

  “We were behind with our rent and he wanted to know how I was going to make up the arrears,” Mother said.

  “Didn’t you have the money to pay him?”

  I asked, eyes wide.

  “No, but I knew how he expected me to repay him. I recognised that look he had about him. He pushed me against the wall and pressed himself into me.”

  Mother went on to explain how she had squirmed frantically beneath his colossal weight, as he tried to force his tongue into her mouth.

  Being only eleven years old, my imagination worked overtime as she continued with her story, and I began to fully understand the enormity of what she was telling me.

  “I pushed the landlord off me,” she said.

  “I think he was surprised by my strength and the flash of light in my eyes. It had surprised me. I had never felt such anger and disgust before.”

  She went on to explain that with a look of fear on his face, the landlord left at once, returning to his own flat on the ground floor. When my father returned home the following morning, my mother was still weeping and upset.

  “Your father was the biggest of Lycanthropes,” she said, “but I was soon to discover he had the strength of at least ten men when he let the curse take him. Through my sobs, I told Joshua what had taken place the previous night. His blue eyes had turned cold and grey, then bright, fiery yellow. Before I’d even finished telling my story, Joshua had stormed from our rooms and down the stairs to the landlord’s apartment.”

  With my heart racing in my chest, and my mouth wide open, I sat and listened to what she told me next.

  “I could hear the sound of crashing and smashing, as your father tore down his door. I can remember hearing an appalling sound as the overweight landlord began to shriek and whine.

  Then I could hear more sounds of crashing and banging, and the pitiful sounds of the landlord screaming in pain. I went to the door and looked in horror as your father dragged him back up the stairs to the communal bathroom. I watched in sheer panic as Joshua, now more wolf than man, repeatedly smashed the landlord’s face into the white porcelain toilet bowl until it was splattered scarlet with the man’s blood. Your father then rammed the squealing man’s head down the toilet and screamed at him, ‘ You fucking animal. You think you can try it on with my wife, you fat fuck! I’ve a good mind to kill you!’

  I looked at my mother, shocked not only because I’d never heard such words come from her before, but by what she was telling me about my father. She stared down into my wide, open eyes and stunned-looking face. Then leaning close into me, she whispered in my ear, “ Your father then ripped the landlord’s battered head from his shoulders and drank the blood that pumped from his open throat.”

  I lurched away from her, terrifying images of my dad killing a fat man and then drinking his blood. I shook my head from side to side, desperate to clear my mind of those pictures. The look of horror on my face didn’t stop my mother from continuing. It was like she was enjoying it somehow.

  “You father snarled at me,” she continued, “telling me to fetch some bedding.

  Shaking from head to foot, I pulled the blankets from our bed and returned to the bathroom and locked the door. In the short time it had taken me to grab the blankets, Joshua had dragged the landlord’s corpse into the bath. With his claws like a set of knives, he removed the landlord’s arms and legs. He worked feverishly, his eyes bright orange as he sliced the man into pieces. He ordered me to help him wrap the man’s limbs up in the blanket. Even though they had been cut up, the chunks felt heavy and wet with blood in my shaking hands. “I can’t do this,” I cried, but he didn’t listen to me, Jack. Your father made me help him dispose of that body in a piece of nearby wasteland. After, your father howled in some kind of sick delight, and led me back through the forests. Once clear of the human world, he stripped me naked on the shore of the great lake and its red waters. He then tore his clothes free and dragged me in. He washed the blood from me, as I stood crying and shaking in his arms. When he had washed that man’s blood from us, he led me out of the water. I went to put my clothes on again. I couldn’t speak and felt numb with shock.

  Your father snatched my clothes from me and forced me down onto the shore where he had sex with me. I turned my head away and cried until he was finished.”

  I could feel the hatred for him rising out of my eleven-year-old soul and eating away at my very core like poison. How I wanted to cover my ears and scream so fucking loud.

  “Why are you crying?” my mother asked, pulling me close.

  “I hate him,” I sobbed. “I hate him for hurting you. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “Your father isn’t dead,” she said, with a frown.

  “It’s that fat man – that landlord – who I hate, Mother,” I cried against her breast. “He hurt you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Kiera

  “I think it was your father she wanted you to hate,” I whispered.

  Jack got up and went to the window. “I know,” he said with his back turned to me. “And I had grown to hate him, but not for killing that fat man. The fat man deserved to die, don’t you think?”

  “For trying to get it on with your mum?” I said. “No, he didn’t. Not like that.”

  “Haven’t you killed for less?” he said, now looking back at me over his shoulder.

  “No,” I shot back.

  “What have I ever done to you, Kiera?”

  he said, looking back out of the window again.

  “Okay, I’m a killer, and not a very nice one, but have I ever hurt you?”

  “Apart from killing me in The Hollows, you mean?” I snapped, shuddering at what else he might have done to me.

  “That was an act of suicide on your part,”

  he said.

  There was no reasoning with him, so I said nothing back.

  “Why the silence?” he said, peering up at the snow which still fell outside. “You know what I say is true, but you killed me in The Hollows.

  You gave me up, sold me out to the Elders. Is that not right?”

  He turned to look at me again, his eyes now bright, like two headlamps shining out of his face. “So why did you do that?”

  “Because you hurt my friends,” I breathed.

  “And that man hurt my mother,” he smiled weakly. “So my father only did what you did to protect the person he loved.”

  “I never cut you into tiny pieces…” I started.

  “My pain was just as great, if not more!” he suddenly screeched at me. My father suddenly groaned in the chair behind him as if being woken from a deep sleep.

  “At least the fat man’s pain was brief – mine has spanned two hundred-fucking-years thanks to you!” Jack screamed, leaping back across the room at me on his stick-like legs. “My father didn’t make that man suffer. He didn’t feel the pain that you have put me through!” he hissed into my face. Spit sprayed from his lips, and it felt hot against my stone-cold skin and I knew it wasn’t long before I totally became unmovable like a statue. I had an hour at the most to save my father and Potter.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my lips feeling cracked and broken. I felt dust fall onto my chin.

  Was I sorry? I wasn’t sure anymore. Jack’s story – his life as a boy had been a troubled one – and although I could never condone or understand the despicable crimes he had committed, he had been a child once, just like I had. Were people born evil – or were they gradually made – molded into what he was now? If that were true, then I knew who it was who had molded him.

  So looking at him, and slowly turning my wrists behind me, I said, “Why do you think your mother told you such horrific and graphic stories about your father?”

  The question seemed to strike Jack like a slap across his face, and he took a step back from me. I needed to get him talking, take his mind off what was going on in the room. S
o I said, “Did she want you to hate your father?”

  “Yes,” he said, the anger now seeping out of his voice again. He paced to and fro across the wooden floorboards. He seemed on edge and his mood unpredictable. However sad his story was, I had to remember I had been imprisoned by a killer.

  “Why?” I whispered, trying to keep my voice even, soft, so as not to anger him again.

  While he was deep in thought, he seemed to have forgotten about my father on the other side of the room. That was good, that’s what I wanted.

  “I believed she was trying to scare me.

  She didn’t want me giving into the curse,” he said, his pacing back and forth growing quicker. “If she told me about my father – made me scared of him – then I wouldn’t want to become him. Just like the pictures you see of diseased lungs on the backs of cigarette packets. You’re being scared into quitting.”

  “So she was surprised then when you said it was the landlord’s actions that you hated and not your father’s?” I asked him softly, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of my sessions with Doctor Keats after returning from the Ragged Cove.

  Would Jack see what I was up to, just like Doctor Keats tried to see through me?

  “She was surprised, and I think angry at me,” he said, his gangly legs opening and closing like a pair of scissors as he continued to stride back and forth across the room.

  “Angry?” I asked. “How?”

  “It was like she wasn’t getting through to me somehow – that I wasn’t hating my father quickly enough,” he said.

  “Why do you think you found it so hard to hate him, despite everything she had told you about him?” I asked, glancing down at the little pile of dust which was growing bigger. “Was it because you could sympathize with him in some way, could understand what he had done? Just like how you understood his motives for killing the landlord?”

  “No!” Jack suddenly spat, shaking his head from side to side as if confused. He rubbed at his narrow temples with his fingers and looked at me. “I just couldn’t ever remember my father being like that. My memories of him were different to the pictures she was painting inside my head of him. So one day, I went to my mother and said…

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jack

  “How did my father get away with behaving like he did?”

  “Your father had two sides to him. He acted normal in front of others, but in our cave, when the shutter was down, his true self would come out and he would hurt me and your sisters.

  Then there were those darker times when he would disappear for days beyond the fountain and the forests into the human world. I did try telling my mother once, but even she didn’t believe me.”

  “How come?” I asked her.

  “Well, your father was so plausible.

  Whenever my mother came to the cave, she would see how nice it was, the tidy yard, and all of the toys he had given you. Joshua would be on his best behaviour and be very polite and courteous.

  She fell for it.”

  I accepted her explanation and used it in the future to try and reconcile the conflict I had when remembering him alongside the terrifying stories my mother continued to tell me about him. I believe she told me these stories to instill in me what a monster my father could be. I racked my memory but could not recall any incidents of my father acting in an aggressive way. I remembered him as a soft and quiet man. See, one of my clearest memories showed my father in a completely different light, and I just couldn’t get it from my head, however much my mother tried to hide it with her tales.

  We weren’t the richest of Lycanthropes, but we weren’t poor, either. My father was a carpenter. I remember my father had just been paid, and we had congregated by the shutter to our cave. We were going to the marketplace to buy meat and vegetables to keep us fed for the week.

  My father always kept his money rolled tightly together with a piece of string. He would free several paper notes and hand them to my mother to pay the market traders for the food. The rest of the money he would deposit with the bankers on the other side of the market. He would go ahead, deposit the money, and then meet us in the market in time to help my mother carry home the sacks of vegetables. So as usual, he set off minutes before us and disappeared between the maze of narrow passages. As we left our cave, mother spied something on the ground on the other side of the shutter, and picked it up. As she straightened, I saw the money, rolled together by that piece of string, in my mother’s hand. Lorre spoke up, stating that our father must have dropped it.

  Mother turned and pulled us close, and whispered, “Don’t you dare tell your father that I have this money! I need it more than he does. It’s mine now.”

  She didn’t say another word and led us down through the caves to the market, where other Lycanthrope hustled the market traders, seeking the best of the food which was displayed there. It wasn’t long before my father joined us.

  He looked pale and panic-stricken. He approached my mother.

  “Oh, Kathy, I can’t find the money. I’ve lost my wages!”

  Hearing the worry in my father’s voice, my stomach somersaulted and I glanced at my sisters. My brother lay asleep in the sling across my mother’s back, blissfully unaware.

  My mother spoke sharply to my father, “What do you mean you’ve lost your wages!”

  “I got all the way to the banker’s, but when I got there, it was gone!” he said, rummaging through his trouser pockets. “I must have dropped it somewhere!”

  Mother grew angry and spoke to him as if he were a disobedient schoolboy. “I just don’t believe you, Joshua! How are we going to buy food without any money?”

  My father continued to rummage through his pockets, hoping he would find the roll of paper bank notes hidden in some recess of clothing his fingers hadn’t yet explored. He spoke again, “I’m sorry, Kathy. I just don’t know what could have happened to it... I just don’t...”

  Wheeling around, she turned her back on my father and walked away. As she went, she spoke loud enough for him to hear. “Useless!

  Absolutely useless!” She glanced back at my sisters, her eyes bright and fiery, and growled, “Come on!”

  We mooched away from our father and joined our retreating mother. I remember I felt awful for him, so fucking awful. I looked back to see my dad just standing there, looking pathetic.

  Remembering him like that was at odds with the picture my mother was painting of him inside my head. The contrast became even starker with the stories she continued to tell.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jack

  My mother’s bedroom was decorated with statues of the Elders. They were fucking creepy looking. They had been made in porcelain and were cracked all over. Their faces were covered with hoods and I would often wonder what they looked like. I think my mother had become obsessed with the Elders, and I often discovered her bent forward on her knees, rocking back and forth before the statues, deep in prayer.

  Whenever she caught me goofing around or if I did anything she now considered wrong, she would tell me that the curse would get me – that it wouldn’t be lifted and I would never be free of it.

  Although my mother told me that even telling the smallest of lies would cause the Lycanthrope curse to take hold of me, it didn’t stop her getting me to create an untruth for her.

  One day, towards the end of that year, my mother beckoned me into her bedroom and closed the door. As I sat at the foot of her bed, she said, “Your father is denying the charges made against him.”

  Hearing this, my heart leapt into my throat, and I gasped, “The Vampyrus have caught him then?” How long had she known and why hadn’t she told me? Did my elder sisters know? I had so many questions I wanted to ask her. I could see that my mother was so angry, I didn’t dare ask her the questions I now had screaming around in my head.

  “He has the nerve to say that I am a liar!”

  she barked at me.

  She went on to explain that Father Paul, my newfou
nd dad, had sat with my sisters and made written accounts of the alleged abuse they had suffered at the hands of my father. He was going to fight to prove that he was innocent, claiming that it was my mother, not him, who was dammed by the curse.

  “Have the Vampyrus hunted him down then?” I dared to ask. “Do they have him?”

  “No,” she hissed, shaking her head. “They nearly had him again. Your father is a cunning creature and managed to elude the Vampyrus hunters. He left them a letter, just like he left you that present. He wrote in it that he was innocent and was going to prove it!”

  With her eyes blazing, she told me again how my father, like all those Lycanthrope who had given in to the curse, had attacked her and my sisters. Again, she stressed the importance of not letting them know I knew this. Then, pulling me close, she stared at me and said, “Jack, did your father ever hurt you?”

  “No,” I said. “He never did anything to hurt me.”

  “Are you sure?” she persisted.

  I felt uncomfortable. I shifted on her bed so I could avoid having to look into her face.

  Again I told the truth, my father had never hurt me. I could sense she was becoming frustrated with me and I just wanted to leave her bedroom.

  “Listen, Jack, if we’re not believed, then your father…you know what that’ll mean, don’t you?” she barked at me.

  I began to feel tears sting at the corner of my eyes and my bottom lip began to tremble.

  “You will have to go back and live with your father,” she continued. “Do you want that to happen? After everything I have told you about him. How do you think your sisters will feel?”

  I felt like screaming at her that it wasn’t my fault.

  “Do you want to go back and live with him?” she asked.