The Hounded

by Simon Butters

  I saw myself reflected in him. The genetic resemblance was astounding. Some siblings, even though they may be separated by years, look like twins, their DNA matching so closely that they look almost identical. Silas and me were like that. Looking at him was like looking at myself in a time machine, transported four years into the future.

  Drool dripped from his mouth and he screamed loudly, then smashed himself across his head with a clenched fist.

  Okay, so there were a few differences. I could see that Silas liked to hit that same spot repeatedly, because there was a large lump of scar tissue just visible under his hair, as though part of his brain had oozed out and solidified like lava gone cold. He stank of stale urine and faeces and I could see the top of his sanitary pad poking up from under his tracksuit pants.

  In front of him was some sort of game made out of a homemade wooden ramp. Silas held a tennis ball and raised it to the top of the ramp and let it fall. It rolled down to the bottom and he shrieked. There was no joy in his shriek, well none that I could hear. It wasn’t frustration either. It was the sound of acknowledgement. His shriek was matter-of-fact. Another roll had been performed. And another now waited. He rolled that ball again and again. This was his lot in life. He owed his existence to that ball and ramp.

  ‘He was born like this?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dad explained. ‘Your mother and I took care of him until he was four. By then, it came too much. We just didn’t have the skills. He’s better off here.’

  ‘He’s better off, or you’re better off?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t understand, Monty. He can’t help it, but he can be … violent. Not just to himself. But to anyone,’ said Dad.

  ‘When I was born? You put him away when I was born?’

  ‘I had to protect you,’ said Dad.

  His eyebrows furrowed together fiercely and I understood that there was more to it. Dad may have wanted to protect me, the new baby in the house, but my mother had not.

  ‘What about Mum? She didn’t want to put him here, did she?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you did it anyway? You brought him here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No wonder she hates me.’

  ‘She doesn’t hate you, Monty.’

  Silas shrieked and let the ball roll down the ramp. It fell to the floor this time and bounced away against the wall. I retrieved it and handed it back to him. He wouldn’t take it from me. He refused even to look at me. Only after I placed it back on the ramp did he take it and set it off on another futile journey.

  *

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about him?’ I asked my mother.

  She ignored me, as if I was nothing but a shadow. Perhaps I was. Perhaps she thought of me as a ghost, only there to haunt her pain.

  ‘You should have told me,’ I said.

  ‘And what good would that have done?’ she asked.

  We sat there for a time in the kitchen. She had the phone on the table, awaiting the call. She’d spend the night there, I knew. She wouldn’t sleep. She wouldn’t leave that phone. She’d fill up her ashtray and, come morning, would know one way or the other if her mother was still alive.

  ‘They gave her morphine. At least if it happens, she’ll go in peace,’ she muttered.

  ‘There is no peace,’ I told her. ‘There is only here, and the shadow.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. I don’t believe you,’ she stammered.

  ‘Dolly’s afraid,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t want to die.’

  ‘Monty, go away from me. I don’t want you near me right now. You hear?’

  Her eyes swelled puffy and red, ready to burst forth. Something in me enjoyed watching her suffer. I was toying with her, making her squirm for my own stupid benefit.

  I understood now that she lived with the guilt of giving up Silas, and every time she looked at me, she saw his face staring back at her. I was his reflection. No wonder she had turned away from me. Yet I wasn’t him. I was her other son. I had needed her once. And she had deserted me. Whatever schism fractured her mind after she gave up Silas wasn’t my fault. I knew it was wrong, but I despised her weakness. I hated her for it.

  *

  I stood on the cliff above the shipwreck. Despairing gulls circled, filling the air with their soft cries. The cliff held shattered nests; the chicks were all gone now, either grown up and far away, or long dead and turned to dust. Far below us, ice-cold waves rolled into shore after their thousand-kilometre journey from the Southern Ocean, finally coming to rest. The reef looked black and foreboding. White water crashed against rocky outcrops, sending up hisses of angry foam. I wondered how far down the drop would be. How long it would take to strike those rocks. One step, one breath, and I could take to the wing, grasp a momentary flight, and enact my fall from grace. The dog sat beside me on the cliff, looking out to sea.

  ‘Was that you in the room?’ I asked. ‘With Dolly?’

  ‘You’d take the word of a dying woman over mine?’ asked the dog.

  ‘I’d take anyone’s word over yours. Tell me, honestly, if you can.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘It wasn’t you, or it wasn’t some form of you?’ I asked.

  ‘It wasn’t me.’

  ‘Do you know the man in the black hat?’

  ‘Did you see any man?’ asked the dog.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Are you there?’ I asked.

  ‘You see me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I am here.’

  ‘Did you know about my brother?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said the dog.

  The creature fixed me with a cold stare. Its dark eyes bored into me, but I didn’t look away. I wasn’t going to be the pursued any longer. What would you do, dog, if I took you under the waves? I wondered. Would you put up a fight? Would you struggle for breath? Would you cling to life, fight to remain alive? Or would you succumb to me, and the dark?

  ‘I am the dark,’ said the dog.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘You mother never loved you,’ it said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She is broken,’ said the dog. ‘She could not bring herself to love you, for this would require her to acknowledge him, and her rejection. She despises you because she despises herself. You never stood a chance. These are the wrongs she has done you, Monty.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘And yet you have a choice. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What would you do, Monty, if I took you under the waves?’ asked the dog.

  I remained silent as Earth drifted through space. The sun bestowed its warmth. The gulls sang their songs of doom.

  ‘Not today dog,’ I said.

  I stared the creature down. I knew the moment I turned away, it would be gone. I held it within my grasp, within my sphere. It was mine, while I had it in sight.

  It almost grinned, mocking my empty assertion.

  ‘You have no control over me,’ grinned the dog. ‘Don’t think that you do. I’ll pass on my condolences to your mother.’

  I blinked and it was gone.

  I turned and ran. My mother was in danger.

  *

  The street was empty and so was the house. No car in the front yard. No lights on inside. I bolted in through the front door and called out for her. Nothing.

  ‘Dog!’ I screamed.

  ‘Dog!’ I hollered. ‘What have you done with her? Where is she? Dog!’

  The world was silent, only the slight creaking of the house broke the stillness. There was nothing left but a cold ashtray and an upturned chair. I cried for her then, my mother, the woman who’d spent her life regretting my existence. I didn’t hate her, far from it. Even though she was incapable of any form of honest connection, it was her I dreamed for. Her touch. Her understanding was all it would take. Only then could I exorcise the shadow. And the dog.

&n
bsp; I sat alone for two hours. Eventually, the phone rang. It was Dad. He told me a cab was coming around to pick me up. My head reeled. My dad had never paid for a cab in his life. It had to be bad.

  The mental hospital was strange. It was nothing like what you’d read about in books. Asylums were meant to look like eighteenth-century prisons: all stone turrets and bars on the windows and even surrounded by a moat. This was classy. It looked like some kind of designer hotel behind a grand hedge. A gravel driveway circled up to reception. Those little stones muttered a wonderful crunching sound as the cab tyres rolled over them, as if they secretly enjoyed the pain of being crushed.

  The woman at reception beamed a soothing smile. She was young and pretty and dressed in a neat blue cardigan. I was expecting some strict matron in a white lab coat maybe, but not her.

  ‘Your father’s waiting for you up the hall. Outside room twelve,’ she said.

  I stood before her, my mouth agape like some kind of comatose patient. I thought she might throw me in there with the rest of the nut cases so I quickly shut my trap. My teeth clanked together loudly. She smiled uneasily as if I’d just tried to bite her.

  ‘Mint?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘Okay. Thanks.’

  I sucked on the mint and found my father sitting in the hall on a floral chair, underneath a matching floral print on the wall. The whole place look as if it had been styled to ease tension, to give as little offence to the senses as possible. Nothing was out of the ordinary. And that’s exactly what made it so grating on the nerves. It was too ordinary.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s asleep. But not hurt, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He shook his head and gazed solemnly at the floor. He’d better not be thinking of car parts, I thought. I’d take his skull and scream into it. Feel something! I’d holler. Anything! Just don’t sit there and think of car parts!

  ‘Some things don’t make sense,’ he said. ‘She’s been under a lot of pressure.’

  ‘I need to speak to her,’ I told him.

  ‘You can’t. She’s out to it. The doctors gave her sedatives.’

  ‘But she’s okay? You said she wasn’t hurt?’

  ‘I only stepped out for a minute. To get milk. Some bread. When I came back, she was talking to someone. Asking them to take her away.’

  ‘What did she see, Dad?’ I asked. ‘A dog?’

  He looked up at me, suddenly aghast. Fear gripped him. She’d seen it then. She had made the transition. She could now view both sides of the stream.

  Watching my father cry was debilitating. It crushed me. The man who I thought was so strong and bereft of all emotion dropped his head and cried like a baby. He howled, long and hard and gripped my leg with his bear-like fist. I cried with him and patted his back. It was a strange feeling, to console your own father. He began to look weak. I saw his bewilderment at the world around him. My father was confused and lost, just like the rest of us.

  He gathered himself and we drove home without a word.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I watched Eliza’s house. I watched as she left for school. I watched as she arrived home. At night, I saw the light come on in her room. I watched everything from our front porch. I had set up an old chair for my observations. Eventually, the scars on my bum hurt from sitting too much so I took to wandering up and down like a caged animal in a zoo. When Dad went to work in the morning I was there and, when he came home at night, I was still there. He’d given me some time to sort things out, after quitting school and everything, but that wasn’t going to last much longer.

  ‘Ms Finch called this morning. She asked about you,’ he said.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said we’ve been going through a rough patch.’

  ‘So that’s what this is?’ I asked sarcastically. ‘A rough patch?’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, Monty,’ he chided.

  I caught his disappointment. Dad wasn’t going to take my belligerence like my mother. He never once raised a hand to me, but I knew Dad grew up in a time when it was okay to smack your kid across the ear for less. The man was a gentle giant and rarely lost his temper. Still, I didn’t want to press him. He could snap me like a twig if he wanted to.

  ‘Sorry,’ I offered.

  ‘You need to go to school, Monty. What are you going to do? Sit here all your life?’

  ‘What difference does it make?’ I asked.

  ‘I told you, don’t get smart.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m really asking. What does it matter?’

  Dad regarded me with sadness. He looked lost, as though I was a riddle he could never solve. Helpless, he ignored me and went to work.

  The house missed her. Something felt wrong with it, as if the walls had become addicted to their daily nicotine fix and were shuddering from withdrawal. The whole place creaked and groaned in her absence. The pipes made their grievance known with loud rattles and thumps whenever you turned on a tap, and the floorboards uttered painful sobs whenever you stepped on them. It was as if the house was moaning in protest, desperate for her to return.

  I came out to begin my day of watching and found Dad setting down a trailer-load of paint cans on the front porch. He stood there with a knowing grin, man-sweat already beading on that thick, meaty brow of his.

  ‘What’s all this?’ I asked.

  ‘Paint.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that. Why?’

  ‘The house,’ he said.

  Dad was nothing if not matter-of-fact. I had to fill the gaps in his explanation.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be at the hospital?’ I asked.

  He wrinkled his brow together so his eyebrows came close to touching. I’d always thought of them like two furry caterpillars, forever kept apart by one centimetre of bare skin. No matter how hard they’d tried over the years, they’d never made it to touching, despite their obvious yearnings for one another. Some things just aren’t meant to be together, I guess.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do there, Monty. She’s in good hands,’ he said.

  *

  The stupid thing about Mum’s episode, as Dad called it, was that it had all been for nothing. Dolly wasn’t in mortal danger at all. She eventually made a miraculous recovery and the whole thing was put down to a bad ham sandwich; the retirement village had inadvertently given her food poisoning. There was a newsletter all about it, along with a sincere apology. Apparently, the kitchen had strict protocols on food service and everything in the fridge was marked with a use-by date. On this one occasion, however, somebody mistook the number three for the number eight, meaning Dolly got to eat a rotten ham sandwich. Her hallucinations were all because of a fever and she woke up the next day, perfectly fit and healthy. That greyhound had made a mistake. Or perhaps it wasn’t Dolly it was scratching for? I wondered. Either way, my mother ended up in a mental institution out of sheer bad luck. That and some bad ham.

  Dad tossed me some overalls. Now, some tribes teach their sons how to hunt, or initiate them into manhood by cutting open their chests and rubbing hot ashes into them to see if they cry. My dad was going to teach me to paint. Following Dad’s orders was pretty easy. He communicated his instructions with three types of grunt. The first kind of grunt was friendly and meant I should put something down where he was indicating. The second was more urgent and meant I should hurry up or I’d ruin everything. The third kind of grunt was seriously harsh. I only heard that one when I dropped a ladder and almost knocked him on the head. No surprises there.

  We worked most of the day and at lunchtime Dad drove me down to the shops and bought me a meat pie and an iced coffee. This was the usual kind of meal Dad and his mates at the auto shop bought. The iced coffee was rich and milky, but had enough caffeine in it to give you a rush. Mixed with a sloppy meat pie it made me feel a little queasy but, after all the hard work, it actually worked. My body was keen for maximum energy, and this was a meal meant for working
men.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘You look like you needed it. Hardly see you eat anything,’ he muttered.

  He chomped into his pie and ate half of it in one bite. Dad could seriously win a pie-eating competition, I thought. The man was built to eat meat pies. What a life he could have lived. He could’ve taken home trophies, been on the news, even won an oversized novelty cheque, if only he’d taken up eating pies competitively. We could have been famous. I would have been known as the son of the pie man. Maybe I would have lived another life too? Maybe I would have been different, growing up in his humungous shadow. But maybe, no matter what choices my dad made in life, I would have turned out exactly the same.

  Painting turned out to be a nightmare. With an old house like ours, you had to spend hours sanding back all the old paint first. It was seriously hard work and my arms ached like crazy. Still, by the end of the first day, we’d taken the house pretty much back to bare timber. It looked like something out of an old cowboy movie. Raw. I kind of liked it like that but Dad popped the first tin of paint. By the fading light, we slapped on the first coat of gleaming white.

  I went to bed tired and with aching arms, wondering how the house looked. It was too dark to take in our efforts. As evening drew in, Dad quietly took off to the hospital and left me on my lonesome.

  I waited for the dog. It didn’t come. I was too tired. My body screamed for sleep, but I resisted. I wanted to confront the dog. It had sent my mother away. It didn’t come. I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. My eyes finally fell as a warm, bear-like hand smoothed my hair.

  ‘She’s going to be okay, Monty. Just give her a little time,’ said my dad.

  I drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep. Until then, I didn’t know what it felt like to be safe.

  The morning sun dazzled as Dad flung back the curtains in my room.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he muttered and walked out.

  ‘Yeah. Good morning to you too,’ I said and fell out of bed.

  I stretched, still sore from the previous day’s work. But my muscles felt good, stronger somehow. Dad had bacon and eggs and strong coffee on the table. The food was good. As I finished my bacon, Dad slapped down another pile of it out the pan.