by Tim O'Rourke
“Are you okay?” Woody asked, looking at me like a caring father.
“I guess,” I said, looking down at my hands in my lap. I didn’t want him to see the tears standing in my eyes.
“Don’t you worry about a thing,” he soothed. “Your dad has got everything under control.”
“But those people...” I started, sniffing back the tears.
“Shhh,” Woody hushed. “Like your dad said, they should’ve never been in the road. It was just an accident. It could have happened to any one and anywhere.”
“They’re dead because of me,” I said, lifting my head to look at him. “It doesn’t matter what my father says or does – what any of you do – I know it was all my fault.”
“Now, you need to stop thinking and talking like that,” Woody said. “We all have to be singing from the same hymn sheet, or...”
“Or what?” I cut over him.
“Or we’re all in the shit,” he whispered as if someone might overhear us somehow. “Do you want your dad to get into trouble? He’s risking his career for you.”
“I never asked him to, Woody,” I said, reaching for the door handle. I didn’t know how much more guilt I could take.
Before I’d the chance to open the door fully, Woody had taken hold of my arm and pulled me back into my seat. “Listen, Sydney, why do you think your father did what he did today?”
I looked at him and said nothing.
“Because you’re his little girl and he loves you,” Woody said. “He just doesn’t want to see you get into trouble for the sake of a few...”
“People,” I cut in. “They were people who died today.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “But they’re not like us.”
“So that makes it okay then?” I snapped. “We just pretend it didn’t happen?”
“No one’s pretending it didn’t happen,” he said back, his voice starting to harden with me. “But they’re dead – nothing is going to bring them back. Their lives are over – you can’t change that – none of us can. What we can change is what happens from here, from this moment on. What happened was an accident. That’s all it was. You’re gonna feel guilty for years to come – isn’t that sentence enough?”
“But I don’t like lying,” I said, looking away again towards the cliffs and the sea.
“So what do you like, Sydney?” Woody asked. “Do you want to see your dad unhappy? Do you want him to feel the shame that any decent father would feel if their daughter were sent to prison? Your father is a proud man. What do you think you going to prison will do to him? Huh? It will kill him – that’s what it will do. Isn’t it bad enough that his wife has run off with someone half his age? Don’t you think that hurts him? I don’t know about you, but I see the humiliation in his eyes every time I look at him.”
“I see it, too,” I whispered.
“So how do you think he’s gonna feel if he loses you, too?” Woody said, his voice softening now, trying to reason with me. “Who do you care more about? Those drifters or your father? They can’t suffer anymore – but your father can. Telling the truth about what happened today isn’t going to change anything except break your father’s heart. Is that what you want?”
“No,” I breathed, knowing that I had broken my father’s heart enough – but nothing like this.
There was a pause, a short silence before Woody spoke again. “If I were you, I’d go inside, run myself a nice hot bath, relax, and then get some sleep. You’re upset – shook up – that’s understandable. Things will seem different tomorrow.”
I looked at him, a kind smile on his face. “I promise this time tomorrow, things won’t seem so bad. Just leave it to me and your dad to sort this thing out.”
Without saying anything more, I opened the car door and stepped out. It had gotten colder and I folded my arms across the front of my blood-stained shirt. I made my way towards my apartment. At the door I looked back, but Woody had gone, racing back towards the road and the accident. I took my front door key from the chain on my belt, opened the door, and stepped inside. With the door closed behind me, I sunk to the floor, pulling my knees up beneath my chin. There I sat until the last of the daylight, which cut through the windows, throwing my apartment into darkness. I knew in my heart I wasn’t doing the right thing – the honest thing by those people who had died on the road. That little boy deserved more. He deserved justice. But what about my father? If I owned up to what had truly happened, then I ran the risk of ruining him and his career, too. How would I ever live with that?
Those drifters can’t suffer anymore – but your father can, I heard Woody whisper, as if he were sitting on the floor next to me.
Hadn’t I caused my father enough shame and embarrassment while growing up? Hadn’t my mother caused him enough humiliation by running off with a guy half her age? Could I stick another thorn in his side?
When I felt as if I couldn’t cry anymore, and my head aching, I ripped off the blood-stained shirt. Standing, I went to the bathroom and turned on the light. Blood had soaked through the shirt and onto my bra. I took that off too, throwing both items to the tiled floor. I looked in the mirror above the sink. The cut to my brow wasn’t deep, but the skin around it had started to swell and turn an angry red. Taking Woody’s advice, I ran a bath, removing the rest of my uniform and leaving it where it had dropped. I couldn’t care if I never wore that uniform again. Did I deserve to? I wondered.
I lay back in the water, tendrils of stream wafting upwards, covering the mirror with condensation. I closed my eyes, desperate to unscramble my mind. I needed to try and make sense of everything that had happened; to come to terms with what I had done. There was a sudden sound – a knocking. I opened my eyes and gasped. The word Witch had been written in the watery condensation that now covered my bathroom mirror.
Chapter Six
I snapped my eyes open with a start and looked at the mirror. It was covered in condensation – there was no writing. My heart was racing in my chest. I took a towel, which hung over the side of the bath, and got out. With the towel wrapped about me, I stood in front of the mirror and wiped away the moisture with the flat of my hand. Definitely no writing. I had fallen asleep in the bath and dreamt the whole thing up. But what about the knocking? I wondered, creeping into the small lounge and heading for the front door. There was a sudden bang and I span around. The noise had come from outside. I crossed to the window and peered into the darkness. The guy who lived upstairs from me was knocking on his own front door, trying to wake the rake-thin girl who lived up there with him.
With my heart beginning to slow, I closed the curtain and went to my bedroom. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I towelled my hair dry. In my head I could hear the old man out on the road – it was like I could feel his hot, sticky breath against my face.
Witch! he whispered.
Why had he called me that? Was it because I had killed him and his family, or was it a warning? A curse?
With my skin turning taut with gooseflesh, I dropped the towel onto the floor and crawled beneath the duvet. I pulled it over my head, hoping it would muffle the sound of the old guy’s voice. With my eyes closed, I tried to think of anything other than what had happened out on the road. It was hard, as all I could see in the darkness of my mind was that little boy and his pale white face framed by his red, blood-stained hair.
I didn’t want to, but I had to look at him – go to him. My feet crunched over gravel and the tyre marks on the road. When I was within touching distance, I crouched and reached for him. With the tips of my fingers, I gently brushed the hair from his brow. His fringe was knotted together in thick congealed lumps, which felt hot and tacky against my fingertips.
I’m so sorry, I whispered.
As if hearing my voice stirred him from a light and restful slumber, the little boy opened his eyes and looked at me. I stumbled backwards onto my arse. A crow squawked from one of the adjacent fields, the sound of its giant black wings beating as it soared away. I looked t
owards the sound and cried out – my voice seeming muffled and broken. It wasn’t the sound of the crow’s wings that I could hear flapping, but the clothes of that dead family as they pulled themselves to their feet. With my hands clamped to either side of my face, I watched the man with the wheel buried in his chest slide out from beneath it. The iron wheel began to turn slowly, pulling out the man’s intestines in white, greasy-looking lengths of rope.
Witch, I heard the old man say again.
I looked over my shoulder to see him standing, his emaciated face covered with skin which looked like the texture of a crinkled plastic bag.
Witch, he said again, then added something he hadn’t said before. Witch did it.
I scrambled backwards on my arse as he limped towards me, looking like something from a cheaply-made zombie movie. His arms twitched uncontrollably, giving him the appearance of someone suffering in the latter stages of Parkinson’s disease. There was another sound. I snapped my head to the right. The woman with her arm wrapped around her throat pushed herself up off the road with her free hand. Her face was so pale that it looked like a headlamp in the dark. It almost seemed to glow. I watched as her eyes rolled down in their sockets and stared at me.
Well? she whispered, her voice sounding hoarse.
Well, what? I screamed at her. It was an accident! I never meant to hurt you!
Something fell against my shoulder. Whatever it was, it was so cold that I could feel it through my police shirt, causing me to shiver. I glanced up to discover the little boy standing behind me, his hand gripping my shoulder. His skin was as white as a fish’s belly. I recoiled at his ice-cold touch and clambered away. Once on my feet, I lurched and staggered down the road. There was an opening on my right in the grey stone wall which surrounded the adjacent field. The ground was sodden through with rain, and pools of mud oozed from beneath my boots. It was cold, damp, and clammy, which made it hard to breathe as I ran across the field, just wanting to be away from those dead people – the people I had killed. I could hear the sound of crows squawking behind me. Glancing back over my shoulder, I could see four black shapes cutting their way across the field at speed towards me. Their jerking, twitchy movements did nothing to slow them down. I turned, drawing a deep lungful of cold air. There was a crop of trees ahead of me. I set off towards them, hoping I could hide amongst the twisted, black trunks.
With a stitch starting to gnaw away at my side, I reached the treeline and looked back across the field. The old man and the other three were just feet away from me now.
How had they gotten across the field so fast?
The wind snagged at their black clothing, making it ripple like black feathers around them. The squawking came again – high-pitched and ear-splitting.
Witch! The old man cackled as if gargling on a throat full of blood.
I turned and headed amongst the trees. The sound of my laboured breathing and pounding heart was almost deafening. Which way? Which way should I run? I screamed inside, feeling disorientated and lost. The trees seemed to crowd in all around me. The gaps between each gnarled trunk seeming to get ever smaller with each passing second.
The sound of squawking and the fluttering of wings – clothes – came from above me. I looked up, speckled grey daylight glinting through the canopy of leaves above me. The branches of the trees entwined like broken fingers twisting around each other, cutting out what little daylight there was, throwing me into darkness. I stumbled backwards on hearing the sound of those people coming closer as they made their way towards me in the dark. I was falling backwards into a hole. I threw my arms out, desperate to break my fall. My fingertips scratched against damp stone on either side of me. Into the darkness I fell, a dim circle of grey light growing smaller and smaller above me. I hit something hard, forcing the air from my lungs.
Gasping for breath, I lay at the bottom of a deep well. It stank of decay – meat that had turned bad. My hair hung over my eyes and across my face.
“Help me!” I called upwards, my voice echoing back off the circular walls.
There was a face peering down into the well at me. It was white, like a full moon set against a dead black night.
“Help me!” I cried, reaching up at the face. “Please, help me!”
“Sydney!” the face called down into the well. “Sydney!”
It was my father’s voice.
“Daddy!” I screamed, feeling relieved to hear his voice. He had come to save me. He had come to lift me out of the hole I now found myself in.
“Sydney!” he called, his voice sounding as if it were coming from miles away. “Sydney, open the door!”
“Door? What door?” I sobbed. “There isn’t a door...”
“Open up, Sydney!” his voice came again, but this time louder. Closer.
“Daddy...” I started to sob, just wanting him to lift me from the hole. I could feel hot tears on my cheeks.
There was a banging sound, and I turned around and sat up...in my bed. My hair was plastered in damp streaks to my forehead and cheeks. My mouth felt dry, throat raw.
“Sydney!” I could hear my father’s voice. “Sydney – are you in there?”
I looked about my bedroom, my head aching, heart racing. The sound of banging came again.
“Sydney!” my father called again from the other side of my front door.
With my tongue feeling like a thick length of carpet, I croaked, “Okay, I’m coming!”
I doubted he heard me, because no sooner had the words left my mouth, he was banging on the front door again. Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I got up, took a T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms from my wardrobe, and quickly threw them on. A thin splinter of daylight cut through a gap in the curtains. I glanced down at my wristwatch and could see that it had gone half past eight in the morning.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Okay, okay! I’m coming,” I said, leaving my bedroom and heading for the front door.
I opened it to find my father standing on the other side.
“Christ, you look like shit,” my father snapped, brushing past me and into the lounge.
“Thanks, dad,” I said, closing the door behind him.
Chapter Seven
I caught my father eyeing the room. I was glad it was relatively tidy. There were a couple of Elle magazines scattered on the floor, so I discretely pushed them under the nearest armchair with my foot. With a grunt, my father turned to face me. He was wearing his uniform, and as always, he looked immaculate in it. He took a beige coloured file from under his arm and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s your statement about what happened yesterday,” he said, crossing the room to the window and pulling back the curtain.
“I haven’t written my statement,” I said, opening the file to find several typed sheets of paper.
“I wrote it for you,” he said, turning to face me.
“I think it’s best if I were to write my own...” I started.
“We all need to be saying the same thing,” he said, taking a pen from his shirt pocket and offering it to me. “Besides, I’ve spoken to Inspector Skrimshire in Penzance this morning. I’ve briefed him on our version of what happened yesterday, and he seems quite satisfied. He does, however, want to see copies of all our statements ASAP. So just sign the statement and I can get one of the team to run him over a copy.”
“But...” I started, quickly skimming over the statement. It read just how my father had described the incident yesterday as we stood in the road together. I had been driving down the Old Buckmore Road, lights and sirens flashing. The driver of the cart had either refused to steer his horse off the road to let me pass or he hadn’t seen the vehicle because of the state of his poor eyesight, in which case he was himself at fault and caused his own death and that of his family. I had given a negative breath test and received minor scrapes and bruises.
“Sign it,” my father said, waving the pen before me.
Slowly, I
took the pen from him and signed the bottom of each page. I closed the file and handed it back to him with the pen.
“What about those people?” I asked him, my heart beginning to race again.
“The drifters?” he said, cocking one of his thick, black eyebrows at me.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“In the morgue,” he said flatly, tucking the file back beneath his arm, and the pen into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Don’t worry, the post-mortem has been carried out on the old guy and the pathologist noted the state of his eyesight. The old fella was practically blind.” Then, placing a hand on my shoulder as if to reassure me, he added, “See? It wasn’t your fault. The old boy shouldn’t have been on the road with that horse and cart. The pathologist reckons he wouldn’t have been able to see more than a few feet in front of him. The truth of the matter is, the old sod probably steered that horse and cart into you and not the other way around. You’re lucky to still be alive.”
“I guess,” I said thoughtfully. Perhaps my dad was right. Okay, so I had had a couple of whiskeys, but I wasn’t drunk. I could hold my liquor – most of my teenage years had been spent in a drunken blur. I knew when I was drunk, and I hadn’t been yesterday.
“I’ll get the paperwork over to Inspector Skrimshire today so he can contact the coroner,” my father explained.
“Coroner?” I gasped. “Will there be an investigation?”
“Calm down,” he hushed. “I’m doing the investigation. I’ll hand everything over to Skrimshire and he’ll pass it onto the coroner’s office. There’s always an inquest into these things. The coroner will simply want to decide how and when those people came to die, so it can be marked on their death certificates. It’s just so they can be buried and their estate can be settled.”
“Do they have any family?” I asked him.
“Mac is looking into it, but it will be like searching for a needle in a haystack,” he grunted again. “Like I said, these people don’t hold down roots like us. They flutter through life like litter on the wind, moving from one place to the next. Christ, we can’t even be sure of their names, let alone anything else. No one is going to miss them. No one cares what happened to them.”