Liam lifted the barrel of the gun from his shoulder and placed it under his chin.
Click.
Bang.
It was to be the longest second of Liam’s life.
The sixth holy white cross didn’t have instruction to act upon, but it did have a word that rang out like the end of prayer, it simply spelt:
-EAMON-
9:
“Curiosity shocked the cat.”
Eamon was down the stairs and standing on the step outside the open front door. His right hand was hidden behind his back when Jack reached the house. He had seen them from the upstairs window coming down the hill.
“Hey, Jack,” Eamon called out, “do you want to see something really cool?”
Jack turned around; he had just passed the gate and had not seen Eamon at the door.
“What did you say?” He had a bothered expression. It said, “Are you talking to me?”
“I asked if you want to see something really cool. You won’t be disappointed. I promise you that, Jack,” Eamon said with a glint of excitement.
Sally had just caught up and Jack grabbed her hand in his to keep her beside him. By the excitement of her, they were probably going to the shop for messages and sweets. They were still in their school uniforms. Sally had flowers in her hand, picked from gardens where plants hung over the walls.
Eamon turned his attention to Sally and bent down, putting one hand on his knee, the other still behind his back. “And what about you, Sally, do you want to see something really cool? It’s a surprise for you, too.”
“Piss off, you prick. Come on, Sally. I wouldn’t come to school tomorrow, if I were you, you complete weirdo,” Jack said.
Eamon ignored Jack and continued talking to Sally. “Could you keep a secret if I told you one?”
“I thought you said it was a surprise?” Sally said.
“It is a surprise. It’s a secret and a surprise all wrapped into one.”
Sally was excited. They were her two most favourite things in the whole wide world, secrets and surprises. Sally looked up at Jack with disappointed eyes and pulled on his hand to stop him as he tried to go wherever it was they were going. She wanted to know what this one was, a secret and a surprise, especially a cool one as Eamon had so eloquently put it.
“Please Jack, don’t you want to see?”
“You’re not afraid are you, Jack?” Eamon teased and then realised the seriousness of his accusation. He quickly continued, “Look, Sally wants to see it. You won’t ever forget it, Sally, I can promise you that.”
Jack looked up at Eamon, ready to pull him from the front door and do more than just head-butt him, and he would have, had Sally not been with him.
“What’s behind your back?” Sally asked.
“It’s all part of the surprise, it won’t take long to show you, come on in. You won’t be disappointed, I promise you that.” He averted his eyes away from Jack and motioned his head to direct them into the house.
“Come on, Jack, please, let’s have a look. Don’t you want to see what it is?” Sally asked again as she continued to tug on his arm and pull him toward the gate.
Jack gave in. “If this is some sort of a joke, I swear I’ll . . . .” and said something under his breath he didn’t want Sally to hear.
Jack went through the gate with Sally in tow and up the three steps to where Eamon was standing.
Eamon took a step backward, out of Jack’s arms’ reach. “It’s no joke, Jack, I promise you that.” Eamon smiled as if to say sorry for insult.
Jack recognised the gesture. “Stop calling me by my name, and stop saying, ‘I promise you that.’ It’s freaky. This better not be a wind-up, weirdo.”
Jack still looked like he could punch him at any moment, but also looked nervous. Sally was smiling and excited, pushing Jack forward, oblivious to the tension in her brother’s movements.
“Okay, follow me up the stairs,” Eamon said as he turned and brought his hand to the front, out of view of the other two, “and watch out for the ladder on the landing. The surprise is upstairs. Excited, Sally?” Eamon energetically turned his head and looked at Sally as he made his way up.
“Yep,” Sally said with a big smile on her face. She undid her grip from Jack’s hand and held onto the banister.
“Don’t forget to cover your eyes at the top or it will ruin the surprise.”
Sally partly covered her eyes, looking down at the stairs.
“Not yet, Sally, wait ’til we get to the top. This better be worth it, weirdo, or you are heading for a beating,” Jack said as he pulled Sally’s hand from her eyes. From the foot of the stairs, Jack noticed junk mail piled up behind the door. The wooden floor and thinly worn floor runner rug were in need of a good vacuum, even by Jack’s standards. He could see the dust built up around the edges of the skirting and in the corners that were visible. It looked like a dirty, un-kept house and there was a funny smell. Jack thought it smelt of cat piss, although, he didn’t think he had ever actually smelt cat piss before. The door leading off the hallway was closed but it was not hard to imagine a tip on the other side. He wasn’t comfortable about this house and wanted to leave. The closer he got to the landing, the stronger was the smell of something not nice. Indications of a mistake rubbed over his senses. He felt like gagging but only coughed and covered his nose and mouth with his hand.
Eamon seemed oblivious to the smell; so too, did Sally. She was too preoccupied with the surprise that awaited her to pay attention to the warning signs. She was now at the top of the stairs and he wasn’t going to leave her. He hated that he was the one being a sissy but followed her to the top.
They were lined up on the landing outside the door. Jack’s head was bent slightly down to accommodate the sloping ladder above his head.
“Okay, you can both cover your eyes now,” Eamon said before opening the bedroom door.
“This better be something good or you’re dead,” Jack said, covering his eyes.
“Oh, it is. You’ll both like this.”
The three of them entered the bedroom.
Eamon closed the door.
The room was far from airy; it was dank and sickly to Jack’s mind. He was about to open his eyes, tired of playing this stupid game, when Eamon’s voice stopped him. “Okay, that’s fine, perfect.”
They were positioned just inside the door to the left hand corner of the bed. “You’ll get the best view from here. No peeking. Are you ready, Sally?”
“Get the fuck on with it,” Jack said, one hand still covering his eyes, the other pinching his nose. His voice was tense and he could taste something sour-sweet on the tip of his tongue.
“Jack, stop swearing,” Sally said and playfully kicked the side of his ankle.
“Hey,” Jack said and Sally smiled below her hand.
“Okay, you can open them now,” Eamon said with a proud-as-punch look on his face.
They both lowered their hands and opened their eyes, first looking at Eamon.
“I would like to introduce my parents. Ta-daaaa!” Eamon said, and swung his right arm outward as if introducing the opening act to a stage performance. Then he stepped back to watch the show unfold.
Jack and Sally both scanned the room simultaneously. It was better than Eamon could have imagined, Jack, in particular. All Sally did was to drop the flowers she had held in her hand.
A look of confusion and bemusement strained Jack’s face as his eyes focused, looking at the bed and then at the floor.
“What the fuck is—?” Jack snarled, then his eyes darted back to the bed as the chaos before him slowly unfolded.
The room was strewn with red spots and streaks as if someone had gone overboard with a paintbrush to create something abstract; the room a canvas. Globules of red, some with clu
mps of hair, were scattered among the clothes on the floor. Some of it was stuck to a pink furry slipper atop of some other clothes. On the bed was a white, ruffed-up grubby bed sheet that went a quarter way up to the knee, covering yellow pyjama bottoms with a pink daisy pattern. A white speckled vest was tucked in at the waist, and a distinctive bony shoulder curved to an arm with the hand resting on a folded dark blue trouser leg in the shape of a knee. The sole of the black, shined shoe pointed toward the ceiling. It was a foot or so in from the end of the bed. An ankle of blue sock and part of a calf muscle was visible, the skin white and hairy, squashed under the weight of the rest of the leg. The slumped-back torso sat over the sheet and the yellow pyjama bottoms. It was clothed in a characteristic police officer’s jacket. The front of the jacket was buttoned closed, the collar over the end of the bed. The neck extended from the collar, and the head, the hair its only clue, fell back toward the floor. The oval shape of a glistening red mess had once been a face. It was as if someone had taken a blunt shovel and dug the face off from underneath the chin. A pink shade of white illustrated the severed brain in all its cauliflower glory. One arm spread to the corner of the bed, the clean hand open as if clutching a tennis ball. It was so close to Jack that he could have wiggled the fingers. A shotgun rested on the bed, too, the barrels pointing right at him, harmless-looking, and blood was everywhere.
Eamon watched the shock take hold of them as the hard realisation of their situation began to materialise. It was impossible for them to fully comprehend what was going on.
Jack had forgotten about Sally. She was subjected to the same horrifying images as he was.
Sally’s mouth was open, her jaw suspended, eyes wide and her chest buffed out like a red robin. She looked straight ahead as if in a trance. Her body looked like it had been pumped full of lead, weighing her hands by her sides and welding her feet to the floor.
Half a head was propped on a pillow away from the entwined bodies on the other side of the bed. The crown looked like it had been placed and styled like part of a grotesque doll not found in any little girl’s room. The hair was off the fringe and fanned across the pillow. The corner of the pillow acted like a displaced tongue sticking out from under brown teeth where the thin lip was tucked in to expose the gum. Two cloudy, wide open eyes gawked back at them. Like the hand, the face was clean but for a few spots of dark red that looked more like moles from where Jack and Sally were standing.
The nose, the lips, the teeth were perfect, too, though, not to look at.
Eamon was in his element. He could not believe the look on their faces, priceless. One was shaking sick; the other perfectly still. They wouldn’t be hanging around for much longer and they still hadn’t seen the best bit, the final to this wonderful surprise.
“Hey, Jack,” Eamon called. “Jack,” he said once more, louder, trying to break the trance. “Look at me, Jack. Look at this.”
Jack snapped a look from the bed to Eamon. He knew Jack wasn’t going to do anything. His face was pure petrified white. Jack, so pitiful, was no longer Big Man on Campus. He had taken over that mantle now and Jack knew it. He wasn’t the one with baby tears. He wasn’t the one shaking and making sissy girly noises like Jack.
Pale-faced Sally didn’t move. No tears in those eyes, not yet. Sally was out of the game altogether.
Eamon moved his clenched fist to just below his chin. Blood seeped from the cracks of his fingers and stained between the knuckles. He uncoiled his fingers to reveal two lumps of bloody flesh in the palm of a bloody hand. He pointed a finger close to one of the pieces.
“Mother,” he said. The finger moved in a small arc to the other piece, “Father,” he concluded. He bent his head slightly forward, eyes patiently holding Jack’s gaze as he fingered the pieces into his mouth like sushi and began to chew.
Jack pissed the floor.
Eamon licked the palm of his bloody hand as though it were gravy off a plate, then sucked every finger. “Look, all gone,” he said and moved his tongue from side to show his empty mouth.
Jack screamed at the nightmare, wanting to wake up. His eyes closed tight and he began to slap himself repeatedly in the side of the face with both hands. “This is not happening to me.”
“You see, Jack, you see how big and strong I am. You won’t forget to tell the others, will you, Jack? You won’t forget to tell how big and strong I am and how I made you cry like your little sister? Look, Sally’s fallen down. Don’t forget her on your way out, will you, Jack?”
Jack looked down at Sally, curled by his feet, crying and now shivering hysterically. Instinct picked her up by the arm and in seconds the bedroom door was open and the two of them stumbled down the stairs and outside into the rain.
Jack and Sally headed in the direction of home without their sweets.
10:
“Say hello to my new best friend.”
Eamon stayed where he was, listening for the front door to open, and when it did he began to bounce on the spot.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Ha-haaaa!”
He felt electric again, like he had when he’d bitten Mother. Now he had some of Father in him, too. He could feel his heart beating so fast in his chest. It felt amazing.
“Ooh,” he said, as if he had almost forgotten something, and moved quickly over to the window, careful not to step on the red stuff. “Phew, made it, lightnin’-fast and in super-quick time. I’m like the Flash.”
He folded his arms on the window ledge and rested his chin to look curiously outside. His back foot was kicking the carpet at a hundred taps per minute.
Jack and Sally had just exited the gate and were heading homeward. Jack turned to make sure Sally was with him and his eyes veered to the upstairs window. Eamon lifted his chin and waved his fingers at Jack without breaking the cross of his arms. He knew Jack saw him because Jack suddenly bent over, placed his hands on his knees and begin to vomit all over the footpath. He could faintly hear Jack gagging through the window pane. Sally was sucking on her thumb and swaying from side to side. She looked like she was about to topple over again. Jack had barely stopped heaving. Long strands of bile hung from his mouth when he straightened up. He glanced at Sally and mouthed something before wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his jumper. Jack approached her, paused for a moment, and then lifted her into his arms. He looked to struggle as they made their way home. Sally’s thumb never left her mouth.
Eamon was laughing when he turned away from the window. He spread his arms out, careful not to hit the curtain, and began to spin in a tight circle while looking at his reflection each time his head turned to face the distressed dressing table mirror. He was relishing in his own mischief and taking pleasure in his newfound strength. He didn’t want the feelings to end.
He stopped spinning, feeling a bit dizzy, when he heard a clapping noise behind him. It wasn’t a sound that frightened him, though it was unexpected. It sounded like the clapping of appreciation. He turned around and faced his reflection in the mirror. It stared back at him with a grin, clapping its hands and showing its teeth. The teeth were stained red just as his Mother’s had been when he had ruptured her nose and the blood seeped into her mouth. There was blood around the mouth, too. He put his hands down by his sides and watched the image in the mirror continue to clap.
“Thank you,” Eamon said, smiling back at his appreciation.
The image behind the voice looked like Eamon but the voice was different, more grown up, as if broken. It was firm and in control. The way Eamon wanted to be. This was a welcome sight.
“No, not at all. I quite like it,” Eamon said.
Eamon had heard the whispering in his head, but it was more like little busy bees buzzing around. He could never decipher any meaning, and sometimes he wanted them to stop, to shake them right out of his head. Maybe that was the learning process, like learning a foreign language, just like Mother’s slur had once sounded. There was no doubting he’d felt an uncontrollable force just seconds before he’d bit down on Mother’s arm.
The Ice Scream Man Page 6