But the lighter was in her pocket. Paul’s lighter.
She pushed against the mannequin and it teetered, but wouldn’t fall.
She grabbed it around the steel base and yanked with all her strength, until the bastard thing fell with a heavy thump to the carpet.
For a moment she wondered what she’d do if the mannequin just wouldn’t die.
But she didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Couldn’t leave him any chance to come back, ever. It had to end now.
She could feel her blood still draining from her body. She slumped to the floor for a second and realised when she came too that she’d actually passed out.
‘No.’
Sam was still crying. Maybe it was Sam that had stopped her slipping into death. Sam, holding her on, while the rest of her dead family just watched and waited. But this wasn’t for them to finish. This was hers, and Sam’s.
‘Help me,’ she said to no one in particular. The bastard mannequin seemed to laugh at her. The word SAM carved into its chest. She could imagine it rocking back upright, indestructible, the word SAM taunting her.
The heart within still beat. She could hear it reverberating through the room. Thump thump. Thump thump. Deafening, almost, in its intensity and power.
She couldn’t burn the damn thing with just her lighter.
‘Help me,’ she said, and felt arms around her, pulling her up, holding her. She didn’t have to look to know it was Paul.
He laid his good hand over hers. His good leg helped her bad one. Together they could end it.
Standing on one leg, borrowing Paul’s strength. She tore the bedding from Paul’s father’s bed. Wrapped it around the mannequin, rolling it in the bedding, then Paul showed her what she needed. On the nightstand stood a bottle of aftershave.
Her smile was grim, and when she finally flicked the lighter at the mannequin, wrapped in old bedding, it took. It burned.
Then Paul lowered her to the floor next to Sam while the mannequin burned and vile smoke filled the air.
*
Black fluid seeped from the mannequin and she heard Franklin scream in rage and terror from below. He felt it break. She knew it.
Flames licked across the carpet and up the wooden bed, spreading fast. The smoke was filling the room, now, sickening and pungent.
Paul was right there, giving her strength, though part of her knew he was a long time dead and it just couldn’t be. But like a crutch to her, behind her, holding her sitting but so she couldn’t see how badly he’d been mutilated, he helped her, dragging her and Sam down the stairs. She gritted her teeth against the pain and strove on, pushing herself on her arse where she had to.
And she smiled as her blood poured, with baby Sam, because if she was going to die, she wanted him in her arms.
Upstairs, the flames roared.
Downstairs, Irene Jacobs, nee Harris, crawled through the open front door, underneath the smoke, to the fresh air.
She freed herself from her shirt and Sam latched on. With a smile on her face she waited to see if she would die
For a second, drifting, there on the front path, she thought she heard the thump thump thump of Franklin’s black heart within the mannequin.
But it was only broken fists on the burning hatch door.
*
Part Four
The Blue House (II)
On a hard cold Christmas Eve, Irene Jacobs sat on the shore out on the point, staring out to a black sea she could barely see in the lights coming from the Blue House behind her.
Tell it to the sea, she thought. That was easy though.
She heard footsteps, light, on the sand.
Tell it to your eleven year old son, though? That was hard. Explain to him why you were missing an ear. Why you limp badly, and heavily in the cold and wet. Explain to him where his father went, why no one ever comes out to visit the Blue House?
How do you explain all that to your eleven year old son?
Go through the borders of sanity, to the last moments of your life when you should have died, and the dead picked her up and took her and Sam out into the road away from the fire that raged through the old house, gutting it completely from the eaves right down to the basement. How no bones were ever found down there in the basement, no ruined corpse. Or where a car she’d stolen had just disappeared to. She never did know if it was found. She hoped so.
How? How do you tell all that to anyone, let alone your sole flesh and blood. Your sole family. Your reason for being alive and wishing to continue being alive for as long as it took.
Same as you told it to me, the sea seemed to say. She smiled and took strength from it.
‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Sit with me a while.’
At the beginning, she figured. That’s where you started.
‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Have I ever told you how I met your father?’
‘No,’ he said, and she was struck by just how like that voice she’d heard in the Black Room, guiding her, his voice was.
She smiled, and told it to her son, just like she’d told it to the sea, way back when, eleven years ago.
*
Christmas had always been a sad affair in the Jacobs household. For eleven years, it had been just the two of them. Sam and Irene. She’d made it as fun for him as she could.
It would have been a sad affair yet again, but things were different. She didn’t know why or what was different in the twelfth year, but she felt it, felt something building inside her, like a big wave washing in from out to sea, washing the shore clear.
Irene was determined, filled with new vigour. She felt that she needed to make Christmas whole for the first time ever. She invited Sam’s friends over on Christmas Eve for a party. She invited her employees from Beautiful Brides and their families. She invited Sam’s friend’s families.
The house was full for the first time in twelve years. She realised it felt good.
She smiled more than she had in public for twelve years. She took a few drinks, handed round even more drinks. She felt comfortable among these people, and she realised that even those she did not know well did not stare at her scars, or question her on the events of the past. The gossip hounds of the small Norfolk coastal village had grown tired of gossiping with no basis in fact. She knew there were stories about her, about Sam, but she’d never joined in the gossip.
What had happened in the past remained in the past. It was between her and Sam and the dead.
She was having a good time, relaxed, free, smiling. Loose with her words and unguarded.
Smiling as she watched her son growing in among his friends, changing now he moved from small school to big school, shot up suddenly, turning into a tall teenager instead of a self-conscious young, small boy.
Confident. Beautiful. More like her than Paul, but she could see Paul in him, too, and more so as he became older.
She sat in a corner in her living room for a minute, feeling tired and not a little drunk, smiling and nodding as people came to check if she was OK.
The truth was, even though she was happy, she knew something was coming this night. She could almost feel it in the way the old pains woke in her wounds. Like she was awake again tonight, for the first time since Paul had died. Something was coming.
A wave to wash against the shore.
She sat, and drank, and waited until a knock came at the door. She excused herself and walked down the hall, limping heavily, into the lobby and opened the door.
Paul was there, and her mother. David and Marc. Jonathan, her sweet baby Jonathan.
It’s time, they seemed to say.
She nodded and went back into the hallway and opened a credenza beside the back door. She took their remains that she had put there in the morning. Took them out, four urns only, held in a shopping bag.
Irene left the party behind her, and walked down to the sea in the dark.
*
Light from the house at her back lit her way down to the shore. Her family, her dead ones, followed her d
own.
She never did have Marc’s ashes, but she knew why they’d come. This wasn’t about the ashes. It was about letting go. Moving on. She’d been holding onto their love for her for the last twelve years. Holding onto their pain, cherishing the memories of their lives, yes, but taking that pain and bearing it like it was hers to own.
But it was not. It never was. It was not her fault that Franklin had killed all but Jonathan, and Jonathan was not her fault, either. It had been an accident.
Looking at her beautiful son now, she knew that, utterly, completely. She loved him. She did not want to let him go. He knew, as did the others, but it was time. Time for them to go.
She could not punish herself any longer. It was time to be reborn afresh. She bore wounds enough. She did not need to bear theirs, too.
Her mother kissed her on her cheek. She could swear that she could feel that kiss, though her mother was nothing more than vapours in the cold winter’s night.
‘It’s OK, honey,’ said her mother. And for the first time in her life, Irene understood her mother. She hadn’t been selfish, or immature. Just stunted...like Irene herself had become?
She didn’t wonder if this revelation was true. She knew it to be so, just as she knew that her mother didn’t want her to become the same as she had on her husband’s death.
She kissed her mother in turn, and then emptied the ashes into the sea.
Her mother’s vaporous ghost seemed to sigh, and then it drifted away on the wind.
David came to her next.
‘I always loved you for what you were,’ he said. The unspoken suggestion was that he loved her still, but not who she’d become.
He kissed her, too, and she nodded. Held his hand, solid enough for a ghost. She turned up the urn and watched one of her best friend’s ashes taken away in the wind and the tide.
Marc came to her, said nothing. He smiled and stroked her hair. Tears came then, running down her face, and she could not help but remember the last time she’d seen his face, broken and battered with Franklin’s insane eyes looking out at her.
But she understood his gift to her. His face now, looking down at her with a satisfied smile. Taking away that memory was his gift to her.
Jonathan came to her and snuggled into her hip. She sat on the sand so that she could take him into her lap and hold him one last time, this solid boy who would have looked very similar to his brother, had he been given the chance to live.
But she had to let his soul loose, too. It wasn’t held in the urn beside her in a shopping bag, but in her heart, and for her heart to be free she had to say goodbye to them all, these memories that had such weight.
She kissed his head, smelling his toddler’s hair. He couldn’t speak but to say no. He said it one last time, looking at her tears.
‘No,’ he said, and with his small hands wiped her tears away.
Irene sniffed and nodded, in turn, to her dead son. Then she emptied his ashes, too, into the sea and let them wash away.
At each passing, she felt unbearable lightness coming over her, like she too would float away as she let the weight fall from her shoulders.
All that was left was Paul. Silent, he sat beside her.
They sat that way for an hour. They spoke, comfortable, like twelve years hadn’t passed since she’d seen him.
She stared out at the sea for a moment, feeling him there beside her, his shoulder touching hers. Then she turned to talk to him and he was gone.
*
That night Irene lay facing up, looking at the ceiling, the Blue House holding her tight.
The sea was in the house, a part of it, holding all her stories and whispering them through the open window in her bedroom.
Sam slept down the hall from her. Irene Jacobs lay alone, but for the Blue House and the memory of the dead.
But those memories were light, and comforted by them at last, she slept.
End
24th June 2011 – 16th August 2011
About the Author
Craig Saunders is the author of over thirty novels and novellas, including 'Masters of Blood and Bone', 'RAIN' and 'Deadlift'. He lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and children, likes nice people and good coffee. Find out more on Amazon, or visit:
www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com
www.facebook.com/craigrsaundersauthor
@Grumblesprout
Also by Craig Saunders
Novels
The Dead Boy
Left to Darkness
Masters of Blood and Bone
Damned to Cold Fire (previously published as 'The Estate')
A Home by the Sea
RAIN
Vigil
The Noose and Gibbet
A Stranger's Grave
The Love of the Dead
Spiggot
Spiggot, Too
BLOOD DRUGS TEA (previously published as 'The Gold Ring')
The Devil Lies
Novellas
UNIT 731
Death by a Mother's Hand
Days of Christmas
Flesh and Coin
Bloodeye
Deadlift
A Scarecrow to Watch over Her
The Walls of Madness
Insulation
Short Story Collections
Dead in the Trunk (Vol. I)
Angels in Black and White (Vol. II)
Dark Words (Vol. III)
The Cold Inside (Vol. IV)
Writing as Craig R. Saunders:
The Outlaw King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book One)
The Thief King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Two)
The Queen of Thieves (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Three)
Rythe Awakes (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book One)
The Tides of Rythe (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Two)
Rythe Falls (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Three)
Beneath Rythe (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Four)
A Home by the Sea (A Supernatural Suspense Novel) Page 13