Remains

  Glen was late. He should have been home half an hour ago. His feet pumped the pedals on his bike. Come on! Mom was going to freak out! She’d lose her shit for sure! Rod always said that and it always made him smile. How would she do that exactly? Where would she lose it? Of all the things she was going to lose—

  Glen saw the shapes and slammed his feet down on the path. His shoes skidded along the ground. He dug his heels in and jerked to a stop. Who was that? Who were the two figures standing in the window of that room?

  Lucy saw Glen stop. She watched him watching her. She knew now what she had to do. Wiping her tears, she turned back to face the awful room behind her.

  Glen watched Lucy leave the window. The second figure remained.

  5

  Lucy sat at the kitchen table with her back to the open door. In the hour that had passed since she stood in the window, the darkness in the house had swelled until it massed in every room.

  So many places to hide.

  Lucy hadn’t arranged for the power to be switched on. That could wait. She only cared about getting into the house. She only cared about getting to Alex.

  She’d found a box of candles in one of the kitchen drawers. Now their light formed a flickering last stand against the night.

  Lucy listened to the living room door knocking gently on its hinges. She listened, silent and focussed, to every sound the house made. Most of all she listened for any noise from Todd Lowe’s room. Above her, the ceiling was mottled, freckles of mould spreading across the white paint. More decay. An ornate ceiling rose circled a redundant light fitting. Its shadow jittered, stretching and shrinking in the candle light. Someone had removed the bulb from the socket. Lucy thought that was odd considering how much had been left behind when the Lowes had moved. Her eyes returned to her hands resting on the small suitcase in front of her.

  Twice in the last hour she’d moved her fingers to its catches, and twice she returned them to rest on top. The worn leather was warm, as if it had a heat of its own, a life radiating from within. It had been in her family for years. She’d taken it with her on every trip she’d made as a child. Each night before she’d left for camp, or one of her “expeditions”, as her father had called them, they’d packed the case together. When they were done, he’d attempt to lift the case. He’d puff and groan, feigning that he couldn’t lift the huge weight they’d crammed inside. He’d shake his head.

  “Too many biscuits!” he’d frown.

  “But we didn’t pack any biscuits!” Lucy would protest, laughing as he pretended to struggle and strain.

  Then, on her first night away, when she missed home the most, she’d open her case and there on top of her clothes would be two packets of her favorite biscuits. She never knew how her father managed to smuggle them into her packing. She was eight and it seemed like magic to her. That was a lifetime ago. Lucy knew what waited inside the case tonight. She’d packed it herself, the night she left Matt. She was glad her father had died long before any of this had happened.

  She reached again for the catches and, for the first time in seven months, flicked them open.

  Two months after Alex died, Matt had suggested they move some of his things into storage. Lucy had known what that meant. Once they’d begun to dismantle Alex’s room, they would never be able to put it back together again. Once his toys, his clothes, his memory, had been shifted into a dark storage container somewhere, they would never return. She couldn’t let that happen. Matt had tried to persuade her it would help them heal. That was the same day he found her cuttings. That night she packed Alex’s case and left.

  With trembling hands, Lucy touched the soft material of the red sweater. It had been Alex’s favorite. The warmest one, the softest one. He’d picked it out himself. It had been far too big for him when they’d bought it. By the end, it had just about fitted him. Lucy sighed. She lifted the sweater carefully from the case and breathed deeply the smell of him. His wonderful smell! For seven months she’d dreamed of breathing that scent once more. The smell of his hair, Sunday nights, when she’d bath him, and afterwards they’d sit in the high-backed chair in the lounge, watching cartoons until he fell asleep in her arms. For seven months she’d ached to open his case. But she’d always stopped herself, knowing that once she’d sprung the catches and lifted the lid, his smell would begin to fade. But now was the time, now she hoped the smell of his clothes, the toys and books that she had packed in the case, would call to him, draw him through the darkness to her once more. She closed her eyes. In her mind she saw him running, feet drumming across the varnished boards of their old house—a blur of red, laughing, racing away—and then he was gone. She tried to hold onto the memory, tried to fix it in her mind, but all she could see was the rough plaster smeared onto the wall in that terrible room.

  Lucy looked up to the ceiling once more. As she did, one of the candles flared and burned out, its wick collapsing with a hiss, consumed into the hot wax it had created. The darkness that waited patiently in the doorway behind her edged a little closer. The remaining candles would last another hour at most.

  “Alex. Alex. I’m here now.”

  Lucy listened.

  “It’s okay. I’m here now.” She could no longer hear the lounge door knocking.

  “Alex, if you can talk to me, please say something.”

  She kept her eyes on the ceiling as she spoke, straining to hear even the slightest sound—a movement on the stairs, a board shifting under the weight of a foot in Todd Lowe’s room—anything to confirm she’d been heard.

  “Was it you I saw at the window? It was, wasn’t it?” Lucy spoke quietly, gently. “It’s okay. Mommy’s here now. Mommy’s here now.”

  6

  Early morning sun, amber through the dirty window, bled into the kitchen. The candles had long since died, melted to pools, wax stalactites spilling from the counter tops where they’d stood. The last candle had flared and sputtered out just over an hour after Lucy opened Alex’s case. She hadn’t flinched when the thick darkness had washed over her, consuming the room in an instant. She’d simply waited in front of the open case, whispering into the night and listening for any sound in return, hoping the grey-skinned figure she’d glimpsed in the window would try to find her in the black.

  But the darkness had brought with it only silence.

  Hour upon hour of it.

  Eventually, the sun had begun to rise and the darkness had retreated to the kitchen doorway once more. Lucy’s shadow stretched after it. She hadn’t finished with the night yet. Silent and still, Lucy waited at the kitchen table. She would wait for as long as it took to hear from Alex. When he was ready she would be here.

  Hers wasn’t the only shadow to reach across the kitchen tiles. All around Lucy, black fingers snaked from the doorway. The shadow of the chair, the table, the corrupted remains of the candles; and one more. One long black shape that hid among the others, inconspicuous at first. Until it began to move.

  A slow shift, and then fast, towards Lucy.

  Suddenly someone was knocking on the kitchen window.

  “Hello? Hello? Is someone there?” The figure leaned against the window trying to look inside.

  She recognized the voice straight away.

  “Hello?” Matt called again.

  Lucy got up quick, almost throwing her chair over. She backed up, away from the window, out through the kitchen door and into the hallway. Had he seen her? Matt’s shadow swept across the kitchen floor and disappeared.

  Lucy crossed the dim entrance hall, clinging to the shadows on the edge of the room. She thought about running upstairs, maybe running from the house. No, she couldn’t leave Alex now—

  Matt’s silhouette loomed up to the stained-glass panes surrounding the front door. The movement made Lucy jump. She ducked back against the wall.

  “Hello? Look, I’m sorry to bother you. It�
��s just… It’s my wife. She...she’s not very well. Her car’s been parked outside your house since last night. I’m worried something might have happened to her. Have you seen her? Please.”

  Lucy leaned against the cold wall. Matt’s concern made tears well in her eyes. For a moment she thought he might understand. She wanted him to understand.

  No. No, he wouldn’t.

  “I can’t help you.” Lucy’s voice was rough, the emotion barely hidden. She pressed against the wall, waiting for Matt to leave.

  “Lucy? Is that you?”

  He knows! What now?

  “Lucy! Open the door!” Matt leaned into the glass. “Lucy!”

  After a long moment Lucy opened the door. She held her foot against it so it couldn’t be opened any further than she wanted.

  “Lucy? What’s going on?” Matt looked at Lucy and his heart sank. She looked terrible, exhausted, her eyes were wild and distant. He’d seen her like this before, in the weeks leading up to her hospitalization. The Lucy he loved coming apart at the seams.

  “Are you okay? How did you get in there? Did you break in? Come on, we’ve got to get you out of here before someone sees.” He reached for her arm.

  “No. No!” Lucy pulled away.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t break in, Matt. You should go.”

  “What do you mean? What have you done, Lucy?”

  “What have I done? Don’t look at me like that! I did what had to be done. What? Was I going to wait for you to do something? You left him here! You left him here alone for six months while I was rotting in that hospital!”

  “Left him here? Lucy, Alex isn’t here.”

  “That’s what I thought too! But I’ve seen him. Oh, Matt, I’ve seen him!”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “You’re wrong. I’ve seen him and I’m going to find him. I’m going to find him and I’m going to make sure he’s okay.”

  “He’s dead, Lucy! He’s dead,” Matt snapped, his pain and frustration boiling over. “He isn’t anywhere any more. For God’s sake, listen to yourself! You can’t bring him back from the dead!”

  Lucy gripped the door with white knuckles. She was crying, but it was anger that had brought her to tears. She was furious, close to slamming the door in Matt’s face. “I knew you wouldn’t understand! You wanted to burn this place down. Don’t try and deny it! You told me! You wanted to burn this house to the ground, with him in it!”

  Matt felt sick. In the months after Alex’s murder, he’d watched, helpless, as Lucy slowly went out of her mind. It had been terrible, but in all that time, through those grinding, bleak months she’d never spoken like this, she’d never lost track of reality. He understood her hoarding of cuttings, her need for answers, her obsessive poring over every detail of Alex’s murder. But every one of her obsessions had ended at the same point, at the same crushing conclusion: that every beautiful thing their boy had been, or would ever be, had ended on that awful April night. Listening to her now, he felt a new, somehow even more dreadful, sadness wrap around his heart.

  “Lucy, there’s nothing for you here. Please let me help you.”

  Lucy fell silent. Somewhere, deep inside, a part of her knew she might be out of control, that she should listen to Matt, get help, get out of the house before it was too late. But that part didn’t stand a chance while the deafening whisper of 1428 Montgomery promised her that she might see her son again.

  “I don’t need anyone’s help. I just need Alex.”

  Lucy closed the door on Matt. She locked it and stepped away. She walked to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. Up to where the shadows swirled, safe, away from the prying eyes of the early morning sun.

  “Alex, please.”

  Lucy stood before the darkness, willing Alex to appear, to give her a sign, anything to end the months of torture.

  Nothing.

  Lucy was utterly alone.

  7

  And she remained alone, living in that hopeless place, the ghost of 1428 Montgomery. At night, if you pressed your ear to the freezing front door, you might hear her sobbing in the upstairs room where Alex died.

  8

  Plates piled in the kitchen sink, the remains of the little Lucy did eat unwashed and discarded. Takeaway cartons, abandoned for the flies, littered the bench tops. After Matt left, she’d moved from room to room redrawing any of the curtains she’d disturbed. She knew now that if Alex were to appear to her, it would be in the darkness, so she set about blocking out any light that might scare him away.

  A single candle burned low, frail against the night. Alex’s case had gone from the kitchen table. It had been replaced with an overflowing ashtray and a collection of thumbed books on the occult. The Dead Are Around Us—its spine broken so its pages would lay open where Lucy had been reading. She’d scribbled angry notes in the margins of another text, Speaking With The Dead, and a copy of They Are Not Gone lay open at an illustration of a Victorian woman sat at a table performing a séance with a Ouija board. In the image, pale faces pulled from the sketched shadows that whirled around her. One smiled, another screamed, a third was horribly contorted, as if possessed by a terrible madness: the faces of the dead, waiting in the dark for the living to bring them forth

  Lucy’s chair was empty, twisted away from the table as if she’d gotten up in a hurry. It had come to rest facing the open door to the hallway, looking into the deep black that lay beyond. Suddenly a scream, the sound of metal grinding on metal, roared through the kitchen. The waste disposal spun up with a metallic howl. At the same time lights began to blink on: in the study, the lounge, upstairs in Ted and Ann Lowe’s bedroom... The power had been switched back on.

  No lights blinked on in the hall. In fact, the darkness seemed to press forward, deeper into the kitchen doorway as if it had been waiting for the thundering noise to cover its approach. Just beyond the door something shifted in the black.

  “For God’s sake!” Lucy shouted. She burst into the kitchen, heading for the sink. She slammed her hand on the switch, shutting off the waste disposal. The grinding wound down and stopped.

  Lucy leaned against the bench, the metal scream still ringing in her ears. The noise had startled her, yes, but for a moment, she’d thought something was finally happening. The vacuum that replaced the screeching was a crushing blow, the same hopeless silence that had filled the house since she’d arrived. She was pale, exhausted; she’d started drinking early today.

  In the hallway, Alex laughed.

  Lucy pushed herself off from the bench. She was walking in thick mud, booze and exhaustion catching at her heels as she stepped sluggishly for the hall. Alex laughed again.

  Lucy loved that laugh, it had brought her such joy when Alex had been alive. Now all it brought her was pain. The power coming on must have triggered her answering machine.

  “Shut up! Just shut up!”

  Clumsily, she hammered for the machine’s off switch. She stopped the playback but didn’t notice she’d hit the record button at the same time. A red light blinked on indicating the machine was listening.

  Lucy pulled herself back up the stairs. As she neared the top, the hulking shape of the wardrobe came into view. Was its door open wider than when she’d passed it before? She slapped her hand down on the landing light switch and plunged the upstairs hallway back into darkness. She headed along the corridor flicking off each light she came to. Room by room, the night reclaimed the house.

  The candle in Todd Lowe’s room cast a dim glow over the bare boards and up onto the bare wall behind it. Less than a year before, Todd’s room had buzzed with the endless energy of a smart six-year-old boy. It’d been a safe haven. A place where the rough edges of the world were dulled to soft pillows and warm pyjamas. Dinosaurs warred aliens nightly on the windowsill. Todd had chosen his own wallpaper: space,
specked with stars, where cartoon galaxies swirled across the walls and rocket ships sped towards the most dangerous and mysterious unexplored planets, the ones closest to the ceiling, in the corner where Todd Lowe’s bed had stood. After the murder, when the CTS Decon team had cleared the room, they’d had to strip that wallpaper too. Now, all that remained of Tod Lowe’s dreams were a few scraps of torn paper in the high corners of the room. As the dim circle of light trembled on the bare boards and the bare wall, it was hard to imagine anyone had ever found comfort in this stripped and sanitized room.

  A small figure stood on the edge of the candlelight, its face masked in the shadows. Lucy had unpacked a few of Alex’s toys and books, she’d placed them in a rough circle around his case. The Wizard of Earthsea, a Spiderman comic, his homework book, Optimus Prime, and his favorite, the toy she hoped he’d be drawn to the most, an Action Jack figure, closest to the case and closest to her.

  Lucy leaned against the wall to steady herself as she crossed the room. She sat heavily down on the floor in front of Alex’s case. Her movement set the candle’s flame swaying, and for a moment, Action Jack was swallowed into the shadows altogether. Darkness had followed Lucy into the circle.

  After Matt’s visit she’d decided to move into Todd Lowe’s room, deeper into the house, away from prying eyes and interference. That was where she’d seen him, the shape in the window, and that would be where she would see Alex again. She was sure of that.

  She’d bought a Ouija board the morning after she’d seen the figure in the window. Before that day she’d had no idea how easy it was to buy one. There was a whole shelf of them, in the board games section, propped up between Monopoly and Scrabble.

  Lawry, not Larry, had returned her call when she’d been coming out of the store. The ringing of her cell phone had startled her, not because she wasn’t expecting him, but because, when she looked around, looked down at the shopping bag in her hands, she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten to the mall. She didn’t remember leaving her apartment, or the drive. She had no idea where she’d parked her car. She felt like she’d been sleepwalking and Lawry’s call had woken her. It wasn’t the first time she’d lost minutes, even hours. She’d blacked out whole days with booze and pills. She had to, it was the only way to survive. But she hadn’t been drinking that morning. She put a hand to her other ear, to block out the noise around her, to try to focus on Lawry’s words. Even then, the sound of the whispering was so loud she could barely hear her own thoughts.