by Abby Wilder
I lay in the mud, listening to the sound of their retreat as it started to rain. I watched the droplets fall from the sky, splatter onto my face and wash away the blood.
I'm not sure how long I lay there before I mustered up the courage to walk home. Mum saw me approaching from the kitchen window and ran outside to wrap me in her arms.
"What did they do to you?" She never asked who they were.
"I'm fine, Mum." I peeled her arms from around my waist.
"Judah, this is not okay. We need to do something. I'm calling your father. He needs to be home, right now. He needs to see this."
I took Mum's hands in my own and squeezed them gently. "They'll forget about this eventually. It will all die down."
Tears welled in her eyes. "But this isn't okay." She shook her head. "You need to go to a doctor."
I let her hands drop and walked towards the house. "I'm fine, Mum. It's nothing. I just need to sleep it off."
"Sleep it off?" she cried. "Your nose looks like it's broken! You can't sleep off broken bones, Judah!"
"Just drop it, Mum, okay?" I snapped. Then as I turned and saw the hurt in her eyes, I took a deep breath. "I'll be fine, I promise. I just need to lie down for a while."
"Lying down isn't going to fix anything. I'm calling the doctor and he can come over and see you later." I started to object, but Mum held up her hand. "This isn't a negotiation, Judah."
I sighed and left her standing in the driveway as I walked up to my bedroom and flopped down on the bed, not caring that my clothes were muddied and wet, or that blood was still falling in the occasional drip from my nose.
I woke to Mum gently shaking me. "Judah, the doctor's here to see you."
My brain was filled with fog and my mouth couldn't form the words I wanted. Instead, I dragged myself off the bed and let Mum help me down the stairs, trying not to wince as the pain I hadn't felt before shot as needles through my body. It was almost a comfort. It made me forget about my life, about my brother, until I saw him sitting at the kitchen table next to the doctor. Mum obviously hadn't filled him in, as he paled when he looked up.
"What happened?" he said.
"Like you don't know," I mumbled, ignoring the splitting headache that had developed at the front of my head.
"What do you think?" Mum snapped. "Those friends of yours decided that the police were wrong and took matters into their own hands. You've got to stop this, Ruben."
"Stop it? What do you mean, stop it?" He looked at her frantically. It was the first time I had seen worry cross his face since that night.
Mum stopped fussing over me long enough to straighten herself and face Ruben. "Tell them to stop. Tell them he didn't do it."
Ruben's shoulders sunk with relief. He wasn't worried about me, he was only worried that the truth would come out. "I can't control them, you know that."
"Well, maybe we should go to the police, lay charges," Mum said angrily.
"No." I stilled Mum's hovering hand by covering it with my own. "It wouldn't change anything and I didn't even see who did it."
"Stop defending them, Judah," she scolded. "You don't deserve this."
Mum had never asked what happened that night, I think she was too scared to find out the truth. She desperately held to hope that neither of us were involved, and if she never asked, she never had to face the answer.
The doctor examined me and declared what I already knew. My nose was fractured, but the rest was just bruising around my kidneys and ribs, nothing time and rest couldn't heal. Ruben stayed quiet, staring at me with haunted eyes. He was pale, the skin under his eyes dark, and his lips chapped and dry. I briefly wondered if he was sleeping, but then I reminded myself that the reason my life was falling apart, the reason that Cara hated me was his fault, and I no longer cared. Ruben's vacant gaze moved to the window. I followed the line of his stare, wondering what he could be looking at in the darkness, but there was nothing other than the fountain lit up in an eerie green glow.
Chapter Thirty Eight
Lennon
I waved goodbye to Flynn and Mum and then packed a bag and headed to Grams'. I couldn't stand to stay in that house. Not with Cara, who flicked between hot and cold, not in Lana's room, not without Mum, not when there was no reason for me to be there.
Grams was in the middle of a card game when I walked in and dumped my bag on the ground.
"Got away okay, did they?" she asked, and moved a pile of coins into the centre of the small table she and her friends were seated at, then said, "All in," with a wicked smile. Alma and Hazel groaned and threw their cards down as Grams cackled.
I sat down on the bed and sighed heavily. Grams gathered the coins into a neat pile and tipped them into a jar she used for her card games. "That's enough for today, girls," she said to her friends.
"Of course it is," Alma said in her high pitched voice. "You've got all our money."
"Plenty of time to get more before next week." Grams chuckled as they left the room. She looked over at my bag dumped on the ground. "Are you moving in?"
"Can I?"
Grams shuffled the cards expertly and tucked them back into their packet. "I suppose."
"You suppose?"
Grams shrugged. "What can I say? I like my own space."
"You could say, I'd be delighted to have you stay. I always look forward to our visits. You know, the ones when I sneak contraband into this little room you call home, even though security is tighter than a prison."
"I do enjoy our visits, because they are visits. I'm too stuck in my ways to have a teenage girl hanging around and interfering with my routines. What's the matter with your house?"
"You mean the Armisteads'?"
"No, I mean your house. It is your house now, is it not?"
"Cara."
Grams smiled. "That kid's got gumption." At my frown, she added, "Perhaps you know it better as spunk."
"I know what gumption is, Grams."
"You do?" Grams asked.
I narrowed my eyes. "What do you mean by that?"
"What I mean by that is you're running away from a girl because you don't like her. Rather than face her, rather than sort out your problems, you run away to the safety of your frail, old Grams."
"That's rich coming from you. And you're hardly frail."
"Speak plainly, Lennon. I've got no time for games," Grams replied sternly.
"You've been hiding from your life for years," I said quietly.
I thought she'd be angry, but she just frowned a little. "True. But there was more going on in my life than just someone I didn't get along with."
I got up from the bed and walked over to the window. Ruben stood outside, leaning against Elmo sitting forlornly in the carpark. "Did you ever think that perhaps I have more going on in my life, too?" I said bitterly.
"Such as?" Grams got up and walked over to look out the window, staring out at the miserable garden of shrubs and the gravelled carpark.
"Never mind, I'm just not feeling well." I shook my head, keeping my eyes locked on Ruben. "It's such a depressing view."
Grams followed my line of sight. "What are you looking at?" she asked.
"My car," I replied, turning away from the window. "There isn't anything else out there."
Grams squinted at the car and then sat down in the red chair, faded pink from exposure to the sunlight. "Headaches?" she asked.
I nodded.
"Do you feel drained?"
I nodded again.
"Are you seeing things?"
I looked over at her and she stared back openly, waiting for my answer. I thought about the incident in school yesterday, but I cleared it from my mind. "What do you mean, seeing things? Of course I see things, my eyesight isn't going."
"That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it, Lennon. Invite them inside."
"Who?"
"Whoever you are staring at."
Colour flamed my cheeks. "I don't know what you mean."
"Stop lying
to me, Lennon. Invite him inside, now," she said, lowering herself back to the seat at the table.
Confused, I motioned for Ruben to come inside. "What's happening?" he asked.
Grams tensed but didn't acknowledge him. "Introduce me," she ordered.
I cleared my throat as Ruben looked on, confused. "Ruben, meet Grams."
He stepped forward and held his hand out hesitantly. "This isn't going to work." His eyes kept moving to mine questioningly.
Grams looked through him. "His full name," she instructed. "Tell me his full name."
"Ruben Douglas Mitchell," I whispered.
Grams' eyes fell to focus on Ruben. "There you are," she hissed.
Ruben drew back. "She can see me?"
Grams looked at him, but not directly. Her eyes floated around his form, focussed for a moment or two, and then started searching again. "What did he say?" she snapped.
"He asked if you could see him," I said, too startled to comprehend the situation.
"I can," she said. "Not well, but I know you're there. He's murky, smudged, as they all are. The thing about the dead," she said, turning to me, "is that they think they can't be hurt. Since they can't be seen or felt, they think that no one can hurt them. Normal people wielding a weapon would just pass through them like thin air. Oh, it would hurt for a moment, but like everything else around them, it would be fleeting." She pressed her hand against the table, lifted herself, and walked across to Ruben. "But that's not the case with people like you and me." She was close to him now, her face inches away from his. "If someone like you or me were to attack him, he would feel it."
"Grams stop. You're scaring me."
She took a step closer to Ruben but turned her eyes to me. "We are different, Lennon. We can see them, hear them, and feel them. It would make sense that we could hurt them too, would it not?"
Before I could register what she was doing, Grams reached out and scraped her nails down Ruben's cheek, leaving a trail of blood.
Ruben stumbled back, covering the side of his face. His hand was stained red when he pulled it away, and he lunged at Grams, knocking her to the ground.
"Ruben!" I exclaimed and ran over to Grams to help her up.
"I'm fine," she snapped. Her hands hung in the air like claws. Her eyes were wide and darted around the room, trying to focus on him again. "Has he gone?"
I looked around the empty space. "Yes."
Grams sat down again. "You need to kill him, Lennon. He's already taken too much from you."
"Are you alright?" I asked as Gram rubbed her elbow.
"I told you, I'm fine," she growled. "You must kill him, Lennon. You must."
"Kill him? Grams, stop it," I said. "You're scaring me. What are you talking about? How can you see him?"
Grams took a deep breath and sat back in her chair. "I'm going to tell you a story, Lennon. I will only tell it once, so make sure you listen well." Grams spoke slowly. At first, I thought she spoke peacefully, as though remembering a time in her life she wished to return to, but as I listened to her words more carefully, I realised it wasn't peace that formed her tone, it was surrender, resignation to something she had no choice in admitting. Peace and surrender are not always the same thing.
"I was a lot older than you when I met Gilbert." She smiled softly and repeated the name. "Gilbert. It's a dreadful name when you think about it, isn't it? But it wasn't for me, not back then. Back then it meant everything, but it also made me forget everything else I held dear. Shelley and Debbie were just little girls with ribbons in their hair, your Grandfather worked a lot, and I was lonely and naïve of the world that existed beyond ours. I met a man who made me feel like I was the most important person in the world. I didn't know what he was at first. That came much later.
"I was with him for two years. The first of which, I am most ashamed. I would leave the girls at home alone just to spend time with him, and when I was at home, he was all I could think about. He was a lot older than your Ruben, both physically, and in the number of years he had been dead, so it happened a lot slower for me. He wasn't as hungry." Grams' eyes clouded over and I lost her for a moment, but then she came back and continued with her story. "The night he told me was the night your Grandfather drove me to Hollow's Rest, the hospital, home, prison, whatever you want to call it, and that is where I met Alma and Hazel. You see, they could see dead people too, but since that's simply not possible in the eyes of the world, we were all branded mentally unstable and in need of constant supervision. There were also a lot of patients who were just plain crazy. It was often hard to tell the difference. But Gilbert stayed with me and I became sicker and sicker. Not just mentally, but physically as well. It was happening to Alma and Hazel too. One night we were talking about our families and we noticed we had something in common. Our mothers and our grandmothers all died young, but no one knew from what. Their illness was explained by the doctors as withering. Every part of their bodies started to shut down bit by bit, the mind included. It is a curse passed down from generation to generation. I thought I had broken it, but it must have merely skipped a generation."
I shook my head, denying her words. "Ruben's not like that, he would never hurt me."
"I don't believe your Ruben is aware of what he is doing, just like you are unaware. But I've been through it, Lennon, I witnessed it in my own mother before living through it myself. Go ask Hazel or Alma and they will tell you the same."
"But—"
"There are no buts," Grams said sharply. "This is not up for debate, Lennon. I had hoped never to need to tell you this and I'm not doing it to scare you or upset you. I'm telling you this to save your life." Grams reached out and clutched my hands in her wrinkled ones, digging her fingers into my flesh. "You must listen to me." She sat back and looked out the window, content with my silence. "Hazel, Alma and I all helped one another. We talked to every person in the home. We gathered all the information we could, and what we found out led to one conclusion. If we wanted the haunting to stop, if we wanted to live, we had to kill our—" She choked and her voice reduced to a whisper. "We had to kill them." Grams cleared her throat and shook her head a little, before pulling a cigarette out of a packet and lighting it. She inhaled deeply and blew a stream of smoke in the direction of the closed window.
"Gilbert died when his wife held a pillow over his face. She wasn't a nice woman." Grams flicked the tip of her cigarette and the ash fell to the floor. She inhaled again and spoke, holding her breath in. "But then again, I'm not sure if he was a very nice man in his previous life." She let her breath out slowly. "So on the night of the anniversary of his death, I did the same." Her eyes moved over to me quickly, as if daring me to show horror at her actions. "He vanished from my sight and I haven't seen him since. I thought I broke the curse and when your mother and Debbie grew up without a hint of any signs of withering, I thought I had broken it for good. But it seems it merely skipped a generation." Even though her cigarette was far from finished, she stubbed it out in the ashtray and leaned in close. "You must do it, Lennon. You must kill your ghost in the same manner as he died the first time."
I shook my head. "Couldn't I just move away? He can't leave the area, he's tried."
Grams smiled. "He couldn't leave the area, but that was before. He will be drawing strength and life from you. He would have formed a strong enough bond to break some of the things that have held him captive and separate from this world." She exhaled again and spoke words through the smoke. "The only way to keep your life is to take his."
Chapter Thirty Nine
Lennon
Grams checked all the windows and the door before she finally climbed into bed. I lay on the couch, covered in the only spare blanket she owned, and looked at the moon shining through the gap in the curtains.
I didn't know what to think. It wasn't that I didn't believe Grams, it was that I didn't want to believe her. But there was no denying the fact that Ruben's presence in my life was having an adverse effect. Ruben hadn't come ba
ck since Grams attacked him. Even if it were all true, even if Ruben was, as Grams said, sucking the life from me, he wasn't aware. It wasn't his fault.
I must have fallen asleep at some stage, as rain started to fall from the ceiling. At least, I hoped I was asleep. It fell in silver balls into my eyes and left them blurred, my world tinted grey. Ruben swam through the water and the grey turned blue. He reached out, beckoning me to follow him down into the depths. Fear clung to my skin and I began to swim to the surface. I could see it. The sun glinted through the waves as a quivering ball of light. I swam and I swam but I never reached the surface. Ruben stopped my struggling by holding me close. He bent his head and covered my lips with his own, breathing life back into my lungs. But just as the relief flowed through me, he tore away and placed his hands on my shoulders, pushing me down. I shook my head. My hair swirled in the water and covered my eyes, but through the strands I could still see his face. So beautiful, so peaceful, yet he held me down as I struggled. I pleaded with him, forcing my eyes to remain open. His fingers gripped into my flesh as he pushed me further and further. As soon as I stopped struggling and sucked the water into my lungs, the world returned and I was back on the couch in Grams' room, staring at the silver moon. It was silent. I felt light, as though I was no longer chained to my body. I couldn't feel my heart beating and my chest wasn't rising with my breath. I was trapped somewhere between my world and his. Only, he wasn't there. I looked over to find the door still locked, and as I reached up to move the curtains, Grams' deep breathing sounded in my ears.
Throwing the cover off, I got to my feet, shoved a jacket over my shoulders and grabbed my keys from my bag lying discarded on the floor.
Elmo started on the first try, and I drove along the deserted streets glowing pale in the light of the moon, until I pulled up beside a broken down car left by the tow-truck. There were no lights on and the door was locked, so I used my key and crept down the long hallway. I stopped in front of the carved words of 'piss off' and knocked gently.