by Chris Ward
‘A kid. A baby.’
Ian’s mouth dropped open to speak, but at that moment Matt heard the sound of Red’s heavy footfalls on the first floor landing. Matt tried to read his father’s eyes as Ian looked away, but failed, his own vision lacking clarity.
As he heard Red descending the stairs, Matt said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to get outside for a bit. I need some air. Call me when you’re ready to go.’
‘You’re drunk again, aren’t you?’ His father sighed without looking back. ‘Red told me about this morning.’
‘Dad, I –’
‘Just control yourself a little while longer and then you can drink yourself to oblivion for all I care.’
Something about the disappointment in his father’s voice struck a chord with Matt. He started to say something, thinking again about Bethany, but changed his mind. Instead he simply shrugged and turned away.
He stumbled down into the kitchen and out on to the courtyard. He leaned against the side of his father’s truck, breathing in the leafy, sweet–tasting country air, feeling it fill his lungs with its chilled freshness. The cold numbed the skin of his face and he began to feel almost sober. He looked out across the courtyard to see the old couple just starting down the lane towards the village. His gaze drifted across the canopy of trees on the far side of the courtyard. He found himself frowning. It only took a second to realise why.
The black car had gone.
Owned by a couple of mourners? Perhaps. Yet it had been parked at the bottom of his father’s lane the night before. Matt had felt sure no one had been in the house with them, but in a house so big you could never tell.
The blinking light in the upstairs window.
It belonged to a cleaner. Must do, although the house didn’t look like a cleaner had been within a mile of these halls and corridors for some time. It couldn’t belong to a cleaner.
Uncle Red then. But Uncle Red was indoors with his father.
Matt had no choice but to believe what his mind told him not to.
Who are you?
He had not been alone in that room, either tonight or last night. Whomever he had seen, be it Bethany or one of the Meredith sisters, had been there for sure. In some form or other he had seen them.
Because they had just driven away.
It couldn’t be Bethany. Bethany was dead, drugged herself to death with sleeping pills, according to his father. And the Meredith sisters would surely be old by now, not young and lustrous as the woman he had seen had been.
So, what the fuck?
Matt’s head spun. Reality and imagery merged again, forming a blur of memories in his mind like a drenched chalk drawing on flagstones, even as from the doorway, he heard his father calling his name.
Matt stumbled back towards the house. His father leaned on the doorframe, and shook his head in apparent resignation as Matt approached.
‘We should go,’ Ian said.
Matt, dazed, let his father and Red lead him out across the back lawn. They headed for the thin, partially overgrown path at the back of the garden, a footpath leading down through the woods to a shallow stream where as a child he had fished and built dams. His father had laid the stepping stones you used to cross it, big rocks he had found further upstream and carried down to make the path. In truth, you could cross it easily enough if you were willing to get your feet wet.
From the river the path rose again, winding steeply up through the shady, less densely foliaged woods on the opposite side of the valley until it ended in a flat clearing near the crest of the hill, in which the ruined chapel stood. And where, fifteen years before, his mother had been buried.
‘Come on, keep up,’ Red called over his shoulder, as Matt stumbled along behind them, wet grass and brambles whipping at his jeans and making his footing unstable. Red and his father both wore strong hiking boots, but Matt had not changed out of his funeral wear.
The lush woodland dripped water on to his clothes even after the rain had stopped, and Matt cursed often as he slipped, in some areas the path little more than mud. The undergrowth hadn’t been cut back in a long time – obviously his father rarely came here anymore, and the occasional branch whipped back across his face after his father and Red had passed. Matt scowled, wishing he had bothered to bring a coat like his father or Red. Red wore a thick trench coat and Ian an old battered jacket with a satchel slung over his back. Something jostled around inside it, a prayer book perhaps, from which he might mutter a few last rites.
They waited long enough to help him over the stream, swollen from the autumn rains. His father’s stepping stones were slick with algae and spray, but somehow Matt managed to avoid falling in to the churning waters.
The path rose up through steep woodland, towering stacks of sycamore and oak, thin boughs of ash and elm, all surrounded by an undergrowth of bramble, ivy and fern. Beautiful to look at, an untouched area of forest, but as they approached the top of the hill Matt could barely think about anything around him, only what lay ahead.
They emerged into the clearing and it rose before them, a tiny chapel, just a single stone room with the last of an often-replaced roof of wooden boards now collapsed inwards, and a small outhouse where as a child Matt had always believed the priest would keep his horse, or his donkey.
And there, in the centre of the clearing, some fifteen feet from the chapel’s boarded up doorway, his mother’s grave.
Matt froze, a terrible boiling sadness frothing up in his throat. He felt tears choking him, and he looked up at his father, horrifying memories flooding back as clear as the night they had happened. Unable to meet his father’s despairing gaze, he stared past at the empty clearing at the grave of his mother, the blank headstone, the grass and weeds now starting to grow up around it.
And wondered suddenly why the clearing stood so empty.
No gravediggers, no coffin, no grave.
Matthew’s throat seemed to constrict. He reached up a hand, thinking he would die of strangulation if he couldn’t force out a few small breaths.
‘Dad,’ he coughed. ‘Oh my god, where –’
Matt slumped to his knees, hands squelching into the soft earth. Mud spray flecked the front of his coat.
He felt himself pushed down from above, felt the ground reaching up for him. His eyes raced across the empty clearing, filling with tears. The earth bubbled and he thought it might swallow him.
The rain began again.
###
Bethany’s Diary, March 10th, 1985
We had a blizzard last night. Mummy never came, so the snow must have been too heavy for her. Today Daddy and Matty went out in the snow. Neither has come back yet, and now it’s getting dark. I haven’t seen Uncle Red today either.
I’m scared. I had the window open earlier. I heard shouting, far away. It sounded like Matty’s voice. Matty shouting. He didn’t sound too happy.
Interlude One
10th March 1985
‘Can’t stand this no more. Can’t stand this. Gotta get away. From here. Anywhere.’
Slumped in the corner of the bedroom, fingers raking against a torn poster of The Clash which now hung askew, the words of the seventeen–year–old Matt Cassidy float up through the air, striking the ceiling and shattering, breaking down into nothing before they can find their way up through the floorboards of the room above. Slumped, shoulder against the edge of Mick Jones’s guitar, fingers raking absently against Joe Strummer’s face, his words are heard by no one except himself and the bitter disagreeing silence of his bedroom.
‘I need . . . to . . . leave . . .’
Trickles of words, like the last flow of a stream before drought sets in, meaningless except to those desperate, despairing beasts yet to die, words as pointless as a killer’s gentle apology, as fresh air on the moon. A tap, dripping, fading to silence as the last drips slip off into the basin to vanish against the bleached white of the porcelain, to become meaningless, nothing.
He waits for an answer; none comes.
‘You kill
ed my mother.’
The silence remains.
‘You killed her. You took her.’
Cry, cry sweet baby, it won’t hurt you for long –
His fingers rake, and the poster rips from the last BlueTac, slipping to the floor.
Just another minute, he will soon be gone –
Tears fill his eyes, hot like vomit, stinging like acid.
‘Mother . . .’
He can see the blows raining down.
It is time to leave.
Matt climbs to his feet, unsteady, walks to the wardrobe, and pulls out a rucksack and starts to stuff it with clothes. He clears essential items off his dresser: razor, shaving foam, toothbrush, soap, deodorant. Takes his wallet, his keys (though will I ever need these again?) his watch, a couple of keepsakes – a signed Stranglers tape and a little stone in the shape of a heart that he found on the beach at Falmouth on a primary school trip. It all goes into the rucksack, shoved to the bottom to make way for a blanket he strips off his bed. Who knows where he might be sleeping tonight?
Matt pulls a coat around his shoulders, stuffs gloves into the pockets – the spring is late, snow still blankets the world outside and the air has a sharp bite like hungry piranhas – pulls a woolen hat over his head. He slips shoes over his feet.
And goes.
There is no sign of Bethany; he hopes she is stowed away in her room, doing . . . whatever. He can’t fight off a surge of guilt for leaving her, but even now he can barely see his sister as anything other than the pearl-white wraith which haunts the corridors and his dreams. In an act of defiance, he faces upwards along the corridor that leads towards her room, and spits. For a second he watches the spit spread out across the carpet like the body juices of a crushed bug, then he turns away and heads down the stairs.
There is no sign of his father in the lounge or dining room, and Matt goes out the back door into the garden. He heads for the break in the hedgerow where the path begins, leaving footprints in the snow behind him. He knows his passage is as obvious as a freight truck dripping black paint on a white highway, but he has no choice. He wants to see his mother’s grave one last time, but wants to get away soon. He hasn’t time to cover his tracks, but the snow is still falling; within an hour it might cover them for him.
He reaches the edge of the lawn, the maw of the path gaping in front of him, white-tipped branches and grasses pointing the way downhill towards the river. He stops, his feet halting without request, and turns back, to look on the house one last time and remember its external beauty with its cloak of snowfall, perhaps to mask the pain that throbs from inside.
He sees Bethany standing at the top of the lawn.
She still wears her bedclothes, and her face is as white as the snow, tilted to one side as though she watches him like a curiosity, an anomaly, something unexplainable and incomprehensible within the mind that ticks behind her unreadable expression. A lock of hair beside her ear dances like a sprite in the breeze.
He watches her in return, feeling his blood run cold, wondering what she will do. Will she run after him, will she turn and walk away, will she simply disappear into nothing, become part of the snowflakes that fall around her?
She lifts a tiny hand, the sleeve of her sweatshirt slipping away to reveal milky white skin. She smiles.
And she waves. Two movements of her hand, once left, once right. The hand drops. She smiles again. It seems to split her face from side to side and is so bright it is as though the sun is trapped inside her head and is trying to squeeze out through her mouth.
‘Bethany –’ Matt starts to call to her, but she turns and walks stiffly back into the house, her feet marching like those of a clockwork soldier. He looks down at the point where she stood, but already her footsteps have covered over, as though she was never there. Feeling some kind of complex emotion that resides in the eternal void between euphoria and despair, Matt turns and starts down the path.
He only gets a few yards before he stops, and turns back to see if she is there, behind him. Of course, the path behind him is empty.
It takes longer than normal to negotiate his way down the steep path to the river. Under the trees, much of the path is free from snow, but wherever a break in the foliage occurs the path becomes blanketed, hiding roots and outreaching stones and rabbit holes, any of which might send him sprawling. He picks his way, kicking aside the snow, and soon the river appears before him, its thin width frozen solid.
Climbing the other side seems far easier but as he makes his way up through foliage made thicker by the snow, his nerves begin to rattle and Matt feels his heartbeat start to race. As though something terrible is set to happen some time soon.
It is a feeling he finds irrational, but one he cannot shake. He has no reason to fear his mother’s grave, no reason for trepidation to grow inside him almost to bursting, as though he is a human pressure cooker. No reason at all.
But when he reaches the clearing, he understands.
His father stands a short distance away, leaning over the grave of Matthew’s mother. His head is down, his eyes on the blank stone that rises up from the snow like a tiny rectangular pedestal. As Matt watches, his father reaches down and begins to scrape the snow away.
Matt feels the pressure building inside him. He wonders why he is afraid, then suddenly realises how he has been mistaken, that his fear has evaporated with his steamy breath, and taking its place is something that terrifies him as much as it seems to energise, to galvanise him towards action.
‘Why are you here?’ Matt’s voice echoes from one end of the clearing to the other.
His father stands up and turns towards him. The seconds seem to stretch like elastic as Ian Cassidy’s eyes look across the clearing at his son. For a moment they hover on the rucksack slung on Matthew’s back, then he looks away, back down towards the partially uncovered gravestone.
‘And you?’ Ian asks.
‘I’m leaving. I came to say goodbye.’ As if to clarify, he points at the grave. ‘To Mother.’ He takes a few steps forward towards his father. ‘Get out of my way.’
His father does not move. Ian can see the anger pulsing in his son’s eyes. So much anger, and all because Matthew does not – cannot – understand.
‘Where exactly do you plan to go?’
‘Wherever I choose. Away from here.’
‘And you would have left saying nothing to me?’
Matt scowls. ‘I have nothing to say to you. Why don’t you understand?’ He shakes his head, disbelief in his eyes. ‘I hate you. You killed my mother.’
Ian Cassidy’s eyes flood with pain as though a sluice gate in his mind has opened. He wants to tell his son the truth, make him understand. Matthew only remembers his mother as she was in the good days, before the corruption and sickness turned Gabrielle bad. Turned her evil, depraved.
But Ian knows Matt will never understand. Nor, he suspects, will Bethany, should she ever choose to listen. Bethany, he worries for. Her mother had already begun to change by the time Bethany was born, and Ian knows Gabrielle exists strongly in their daughter. Matt, though, was born pure. His only corruption is from the hatred breeding in his own mind.
Ian shakes his head, wondering who to blame. Matt doesn’t lie. Gabrielle died at Ian’s own hands; but to save her, and to save them. And now Ian suffers. Like Lady Macbeth before him, he will never cleanse his hands of his lover’s blood. Good blood, or bad, blood is blood.
He saved her from her own damnation, even if it meant losing her himself. But, had she not refused to go back to where she came from, to leave Ian forever, choosing instead to stay with him and live her life in Tamerton, she would never have turned bad, corrupted by the baseness of the mortal world that the purity of her mind could not control.
They had never known it would affect her so, but they had known the risk.
You couldn’t combine two worlds and expect there to be no consequences, but they had been willing to try.
For love.
&nbs
p; So in love, Gabrielle and Ian had not let life nor death nor anything else separate them.
She could have left, Ian tries to tell himself. At any time. Even when the sickness began, and later when she had to . . . had to . . . His eyes squeeze shut against the terrible memories. ‘Even then she could have gone. It was her choice to stay. I did what I had to. To save her.’
He opens his eyes and looks up, surprised to realise he has been speaking aloud. He turns around to look for his son, only vaguely aware that somewhere someone is screaming, and a whooshing sound is racing through the air towards him, a sound like a brush through shallow water.
Something heavy strikes him, and Ian Cassidy feels his knees buckle, his balance go, and he drops forward, the snow cushioning him, but only from hitting the ground, not from the great blunt thing which strikes him from behind, over and over again.
It is Matt who is screaming. Ian struggles in the snow, trying to roll on to his front, to fight off the blows. A couple more blows land on his back and shoulders before he achieves it, only to have one strike him across the side of the face, knocking the fight out of him. One arm rises weakly to deflect a blow from the branch Matt holds, but Ian’s last strength fails him and he starts to drift away as the screams get louder and the blows continue to rain down.
In his mind he sees the face of his son, Matthew, his eyes blazing like a forest fire, one that will obliterate everything in its path. Ian can see nothing behind those eyes, behind the stark anger and hostility which so terrifies him, and he starts to wonder how much of Gabrielle’s corrupted soul had manifested itself before his son was born.
Matt batters and batters his father and then suddenly, with a splintering of wood the branch breaks. He feels incensed enough to fall upon his father and finish it with his bare hands, but something holds him back. Breathing hard, sweat forming on his brow despite the snow and the cold, he takes a step back, stunned. The branch, where it has fallen, leaves red stains on the snow.
He looks down on the bloodied mess which had been his father. Ian’s face is almost unrecognisable, his nose crushed, his lips swollen and his eyes closed. One hand lies upon his chest, where it fell after its last effort to fend off the blows.