by Chris Ward
He heard footsteps somewhere below him, echoing through the empty hallways. His father had never been one for clutter. Even carpets and drapes were rare, but since Matt had left, from what he could see the barrenness of the place had begun to inch its way down from the top floors, as though his mother’s death had left behind a lingering sickness, slowly sucking the house dry of colour and life until one day soon nothing would be left but a skeleton, dead and empty.
Suddenly Matt doubted his choice. Up seemed worse than down – at least there was life downstairs; up brought only painful memories.
‘Mother,’ he whispered, moving quietly down the corridor.
A shroud of silence seemed to descend around him, as though he had walked through a curtain into the world of the dead. The air turned suddenly stale, empty, as though its goodness had all been breathed in, leaving nothing for Matt as the corridor’s dry miasma scratched at his throat.
He reached the door to the room his parents had once shared. A coating of dust covered the upper side of the handle, and his fingers lingered, unsure.
Go on.
He gripped and twisted, winced at the creak the door made, and was sure the shouts from downstairs adopted a sudden urgency. Not allowing himself to think, he slipped inside.
He hadn’t been in this room for twenty years or more. When she had still been alive he had not come here often, afraid, no – wary of her, of the elegant, beautiful woman from whom he had descended. As enigmatic as his mute sister but lacking the same sinister sheen, he had stayed away unless she came to him. Of course, in her last few years, after she became sick, those times had been few and far between.
Cancer, he assumed, looking back now. At least it gave a label to something no longer able to be labeled. Time had blurred the memories he still retained of her, to the extent where he remembered her as a persona rather than as a defined image; even in her last years he hadn’t been able to see her clearly, as though she had not wanted to be seen. He could remember only her grace, the way she moved, the soft lilt in her voice, and sometimes, that was enough. His mother had substance, she had aura, she existed as clearly as he needed, her beauty welcoming him to erase the darkness of her last years from his mind.
If truth were out, Matt might believe she would soon have died anyway. That didn’t excuse him, though. Nothing would ever excuse what he had done.
For years, like Bethany, his mother, Gabrielle Cassidy, had stayed hidden away in her room, seeing no one. His father and Red had cared for her, but the exact nature of events remained jumbled in Matthew’s memory. They had kept her away from him and Bethany, too ill for visitors, always too ill, they said, too ill even to see her own children. Throughout the six or seven months before her death he had built up a new persona for her, one he didn’t like, one he feared, and even when he heard her crying out at night, he had pulled the pillow over his face and cried himself to sleep.
Cancer was a safe bet, but some sort of dilapidating brain or nervous disorder seemed far more likely, looking back now. His father had never told him, but did it really matter? Matt liked the idea of cancer. A disease she could die gracefully from, standing tall against the pain and the fear, showing bravery in the face of impending death.
Matt could cope with that. Dying as graceful in death as she had been in life. What he couldn’t cope with were the memories of a bent, withered wreck, face aged fifteen years beyond her natural years, rolling eyes mad and clawing hands reaching out for him, desperate to touch her son one last time –
He slammed a fist hard into the wall, ignoring the pain that lanced up through his elbow to his shoulder.
This room brought it back.
This empty, soulless room brought it all back.
The memories, the terrible dreams.
Only a bed remained, and a cupboard in one corner. A dusty sheet had once hung over it, but a corner had dropped away, exposing the pine front. The bed was a single, metal-framed thing that looked fresh out of a prison or a mental asylum. It was covered by a moth–eaten, stained mattress.
Far worse were the scratches on the walls.
Thin nail marks, some reaching from near the ceiling to the floor, cutting through the white paint like a chisel through wood. Some had scored deep enough to reach through the undercoats to the stone beneath. And everywhere were copper–brown stains like dried slug trails, stains he turned away from as horror welled in his mind.
She had been kept locked in here, he knew, for the last months, before. Locked away like a rabid dog, shut up in a blank room like a cow waiting for slaughter.
He had been here before. Not in consciousness, he knew, but he had woken from many confusing dreams with a lingering image of this room, this blankness, and a shivering, chattering wreck hunched down in a corner.
Something in him broke. Some last thread of sanity tore from the cloth of his understanding, falling away into darkness and terrible dreams, like a child tumbling into the blackness of a mine shaft, hands clawing for a hold that wasn’t there, cries reaching out to no one, soon to be lost.
He slid rather than fell to the floor, like a droplet of water rolling down the side of a glass. His knees came up into his chest and his arms hugged them close, at once so thin and fragile, so weak and so incapable of protecting him, these same arms and hands with which he had possessed the immeasurable strength to batter his own father to within a few moments of his death.
Hot tears rolled down his cheeks. His eyes stayed wide open but his vision was blurred, and beyond the veil he cast over himself he could see her, slumped there, squatted like an old peddler by the window, or lying leprous across sheets his father could never keep clean. The skin of her face was cracked and broken, her eyes still bright but like little shiny stones at the bottom of a muddy pond. Desperate eyes, wanting, wanting more, wanting escape.
In his mind he saw that night again.
The crippled, hunched wreck that had once been his mother coming for him in the darkness, her clawed hands reaching for him, wanting him, and her eyes, long vanished of the love he had once treasured, full now only with hunger, with need. The woman he could only see as elegance, as grace made flesh, as divine beauty made human, replaced by this twisted, nightmarish creature, shuffling towards him, croaking his name. And then his father appeared from nowhere, Ian’s own eyes filled with the tragic, concerted authority of a man who would do without wanting a part in the doing, who would fight against his friends to save his lover, who would strike his own deranged and crippled wife dead with the blow of a hammer in order to save his son.
In that moment Matt knew it had nothing to do with cancer. Her sickness had spread deeper than her skin and bones, her organs and her flesh, into her mind, her soul, into the irreparable parts that no medicine could reach.
As he saw her lingering memory shuffling forward towards him, he closed his eyes, trying to remember her as she had once been, and failed. He could see only the shivering, withered beast who would have drank his soul if not for his father’s swinging hammer.
6
Ian and Red, searching the house for Matthew, passed by the door, themselves unable to enter. They heard nothing, and chose to believe the last place he would hide was there, in his mother’s cage, the room his parents had once shared, before his mother went bad, and the only way to protect her and others was to keep her locked away.
They had not been in there for years. Ian had closed that door after Gabrielle’s death and sworn never to open it. He wanted never again to look upon what their love had made him do to her.
He had kept her caged like an animal because he loved her, and because she loved him. All because she wouldn’t leave.
Red glanced across at Ian as they moved past the door, heading for the last stairwell, the one that led up to the attic, and his expression said everything. I know why you couldn’t tell him. How could you ever make your son understand something like that?
But the unspoken answer that drifted from one to the other through th
e stale air of the upper corridors was that they both knew there was so much more. So much that even they couldn’t face.
Hammered by the day’s events, the fight gone from them both, they leaned against each other as they urged their weary bodies through the rooms and corridors, looking for Matt’s hiding place. Matt held the key to a question they had not known existed before today, but as they closed one door after another they began to realise that the door that led to the answer they wanted might not be locked after all.
They might have the answer for themselves.
And it sickened them.
All it took was a little rational thinking.
Not dead.
The answer had just taken time to come.
Red’s baby was not dead.
And they dreaded what that meant.
7
Elaina sat in a leather–bound armchair, close to the large open fire that was set into the far wall of their living room. She was trying to read a book as the shadows flickered across its pages but was not doing very well, her mind on other things. Just as she was thinking about tossing the junk thing into the fire she heard the sound of feet crunching on the gravel outside.
Her ears pricked up: her sister was back.
With a scowl she rose from the creaking old chair and was at the door even before her sister’s knock came.
Liana, identical to her sister besides her eyes, as bright as the sun compared to Elaina’s, which were as dark as a moonless night, gratefully came in from the cold and the silvery rain which had begun to sheet down across the moors.
Elaina shook her head and sighed, but seeing the wriggling bundle under her sister’s coat, it was a sigh of relief.
‘Don’t bother to lie to me. I know where you’ve been. And I’ve told you, stop going back there.’
Liana just shrugged and shook rain from her coat.
She won’t be there, and you know you can’t see her alone.’
‘I thought, if I took the child –’
‘You’re a stupid, impetuous fool, Liana. Your heart isn’t good, it’s soft! By going back there you risk them finding him!’ Elaina growled at her sister. ‘Don’t you understand what that means? They think he’s dead! Heaven knows what they might do if they find out.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘Give him back to me!’
Elaina snatched the bundle out of her sister’s arms, a bundle which immediately began to cry.
‘Hush, hush,’ Liana cooed. She reached forward to touch the baby, but her sister snatched him away.
‘You’re a fool, Liana.’
Liana said nothing. She pushed past her sister, pulled off her coat and shook rain on to the tiled floor of the lobby. The carpet began where a wall had once separated the hallway from the lounge, removed to give them more space some years before. She made sure she kept the water away from there; she liked that carpet, even though her sister hated the faded crimson. But then her sister hated most things, unless they dealt in mischief.
Elaina and Liana were twin sisters, identical yet so utterly different. Two separate people, yet still one.
Two halves of the same soul, one good, one bad. They were like Siamese twins whose physical selves had been separated at birth but whose souls remained forever linked, so completely that if one died, the other would die, too.
One soul pure, the other rotten. Opposites, yet equal. Different, yet the same.
‘I went to look for her again. Since Bethany died we’ve –’
‘I know! I’m not stupid, am I? Not like you.’
‘– not seen her.’
Elaina just scowled.
‘You don’t think . . . you don’t think Bethany –’
Elaina shook her head. ‘No. Bethany was too old. Her innocence was gone.’
‘But she couldn’t speak –’
‘Oh just shut up, will you? I wish you couldn’t speak. You’ve caused me enough headaches for today.’
Liana sighed and went through into the kitchen. She rolled up her sleeves and immediately began to pick through the dishes piled up in the sink. Her sister never did anything around the house.
‘You know the son has come back, don’t you? Matthew.’
Elaina’s voice was sharp. ‘Matthew? Are you sure?’
‘He came back for the funeral. I saw him today. Twice.’
‘Did he see you?’
Liana wished, not for the first time in her long, long life, that she could convincingly lie. Unfortunately Elaina knew her as well as she knew herself and would detect any fallacies before they had even fallen from her lips. At times she resented their bond. She accepted it in the way a cat might look at the sky and wish it could fly; it was an interesting pipe dream but one that could never be realised. Having her sister anticipate and usually criticize her every move was a frustration, but that was just the way it was.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The first time, I’m not sure. I think so. It was from a distance. The second, yes. He stumbled in on me. In Bethany’s room.’
Elaina groaned. The noise was rich, like thick treacle chocolate, stirring in a vat. Liana’s voice had a shrill, mousy quality. At times she sounded like a frightened child.
‘But don’t worry, I don’t think he recognised me.’
Elaina glared at her. ‘What did you do? I felt the pull of your magic.’
Liana gave her a bashful smile. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think properly, I just did the first thing I could think of.’
‘Liana . . .’
Liana sighed. ‘He thought I was Bethany. I just let him think he was right.’
Elaina planted hands on hips. ‘Oh, you stupid fool. Now you’ll have him running around chasing his dead sister. That’s just bloody great.’
‘I’m sorry! He was drunk, so he’ll probably think he dreamt it.’
‘Well you’d better hope so,’ Elaina scowled. She pointed at the baby. ‘From now on, Liana, I’ll look after him. Keep him away from your moronic meddling.’
The baby. The child of Bethany and Red. The baby Ian and Red thought was dead, but which had instead been taken away at birth by these two soul–sharing women. Liana still cried silently at night when she remembered the illusion they had created to take the baby away. Even Elaina felt a twinge of regret.
They had made a beautiful, healthy boy look dead to their eyes. Ian had rushed from the room, unable to stand it, tears glistening in his eyes. Red, sobbing, had stroked the baby’s tiny face, his big hands the size of the child’s body. He had wept, looked across at Bethany’s sleeping form, and looked back at the baby. A dead baby. His stillborn son.
Liana knew they had done more than steal his child. They had taken part of his soul away too.
That day she had promised herself never to do something that cruel again, whether it might end up saving them all or not. Red and Ian had no idea just how important little baby Jack was. To them, to the sisters, to Gabrielle, and now to Bethany.
‘He won’t remember,’ Liana said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Even his obscured memory might be enough, you stupid fool. Who knows what he might cause if he starts shooting his mouth off? You’re an idiot!’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘Oh shut up! I’m sick of hearing it.’
Liana bit her lower lip and continued to wash the dishes. She hated her sister sometimes, for her total lack of compassion, but knew she might as well hate herself. And she knew her sister was right, but even so, it just didn’t make believing her words any easier.
At least she would still get the baby. Elaina would soon tire of him, leaving Liana to step back in and take over. Elaina could never hold any sort of compassion for long.
‘Matthew’s sick, you know,’ Liana said.
A moment passed, then Elaina’s voice floated back from the living room. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘He’s got too much of his mother in him, I think. He hurts. The seeds planted the night he tried to kill his fath
er have grown. Until recently they’ve been dormant, but in the last few weeks they’ve begun to bloom.’
Elaina shifted in her chair. ‘Speak English, for God’s sake. What on earth are you blabbing about?’
‘Violence and corruption. It’s like a force he struggles to control. I could feel it inside him, emanating out. It was hot, it almost burnt me.’ She pulled the plug from the sink, watched the water and the bubbles drain away. ‘He drinks heavily as a means to escape it, to try and control it, but it just makes him worse.’
‘So what makes him any different to the rest of the human race?’
Liana went through into the living room and sat down on the couch opposite her sister. She swung her legs up under her and rubbed her hands. She hated the cold.
‘He doesn’t want to be the way he is, but he has so much anger inside him. He blames his father for everything that happened.’
‘And why not? It was because of Ian that all this started in the first place. He should have left Gabrielle alone. It was all his fault.’
‘You know as well as I do that Gabrielle found him. It had nothing to do with Ian.’ Liana’s eyes drifted, and she smiled, a long, wistful smile. ‘If you had been Ian could you have left a beautiful woman alone in the forest? Could you? They found love, Elaina. Don’t you understand?’
‘Pah! You and your love of romance. It’s all a waste of time if you ask me.’
‘Well, you would say that.’
‘And you would say that.’
They stared at each other for a while, having reached some sort of stalemate. As always, Liana could never understand the heartlessness of her sister, any more than Elaina could understand the unbreakable compassion that Liana felt for everything. They could only understand that each, as opposites, felt compelled to feel those things, and that their painstakingly achieved agreements would eventually bring them to a definitive and usually correct answer.
‘Just go tell him to try some Feng Shui or something,’ Elaina said at last, with a bitter smirk.