by Rey S Morfin
‘You don’t need to fight it, Rey. Embrace it. Embrace those emotions. They are exactly why I showed you Laura. It’s exactly what you need to feel if you’re to become the being that you’re destined to become.’
‘What does that mean? What am I supposed to become? A monster?’
Elizabeth tutted, shook her head.
‘Rey, no! Not a monster. A god, maybe. It would be incredibly unimaginative to call someone who wields such power a “monster”.’
‘But I’ve seen you, I’ve seen who you really are. Is that what I’m going to become?’
‘Is that what you think of me, Rey? Truly? That I’m a monster? It makes a change from the typical accusations, I’ll admit. I know they call me a Witch, but…’
Elizabeth stopped to take a sip of tea, and took her time about doing so.
‘But having this power doesn’t make you a monster, Rey. It’s about what you do with it. Imagine the great things you could accomplish, both good and bad. You could save lives! You could reap vengeance, as you already have, I suppose. Think of what you could achieve!’
‘And killing people… killing young boys… that’s your idea of “great”, is it?’ I demanded.
‘If it keeps me alive then it’s all for the greater good, I would say.’ There wasn’t a hint of irony in her voice.
‘And is that what you’re trying to turn me into? Someone like you? A killer?’
‘I take it, Rey, you’re now referring to Robert Kamryn? How is he doing? Well, I hope?’ Elizabeth smirked.
‘You know exactly what happened there. I know you do. You orchestrated it.’
Elizabeth said nothing, simply sipping once again on her tea.
I continued, ‘I just don’t understand why. Why did you suggest that he did it? Why?’
The Witch continued to watch me as I became more and more indignant, voice rising as I grew furious.
‘Why did you make me do this? Why did you make me kill an innocent man?’
Elizabeth spat out her tea as she laughed.
‘“Innocent”! Oh, Rey. Rey. You just caught me by surprise. I hadn’t seen that you were going to say that! Innocent! My, my! Innocent! What a word!”
I opened my mouth to argue, but knew any interruption would fall flat.
‘Innocent? You know he wasn’t innocent. Anna knew it. The whole town knew it! Even Robert knew it, deep down.’
‘But he was innocent of this, wasn’t he? Of… of killing Laura?’
‘I never told you he killed his daughter. I only told you the truth: that he was the true monster here. It was your choice, in the end.’
‘But… but why me? Why did all of this happen to me?’ I could feel the rage releasing. Elizabeth was right, I’d chosen to kill Robert. It was my decision. I couldn’t blame anyone else.
I continued, the beginnings of tears rushing to my eyes, ‘Why did all of this have to happen to me? I didn’t want this life! Why was this done to me! I didn’t want this! I just wanted to be happy! I just wanted to be happy. With Laura. I just wanted to have a life with her. Was that too much to ask, really? I just wanted a life. An ordinary, beautiful, life.’
Elizabeth began to smile. ‘Well, maybe that can be arranged. Maybe we can both get our wishes fulfilled.’
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
Elizabeth didn’t reply, and simply shook her head. Her eyes began to glow softly, and suddenly I was walking back into town.
It had happened again. My body had been acting while my mind was absent. I took a moment to get my bearings. I had found myself exiting the woods once again, this time at the footpath by the church. Judging by the people I could see walking about town in front of me, it was late morning.
As I returned to civilisation, my vision faded to and from the red sight that I’d become used to. I was conscious that my eyes must have been glowing faintly, marking me a monster for all to see.
I crossed paths with only three people. The first person I saw was the overly-friendly local that had greeted me on my first day here. My first day… was that yesterday? Or the day before? I wasn’t sure any more. This welcoming man once again sprang to acknowledge me, but when he saw my face - my eyes - he turned his face down, eyes fixed only on the pavement in front of him. He continued his walk as if he hadn’t seen anything.
What did that mean? Did it mean he’d seen this before, and learned to steer clear? Or was it simply that he hadn’t seen anything like this before, and didn’t know how to react? I would once have assumed that it was the latter, however I was getting the feeling more and more that the residents of Redbury knew what lurked in the woods.
I stumbled back to the Kamryn household, stumbling with exhaustion, barely able to pick my feet off the ground. I quietly let myself in the front door, thanking the universe that nobody was around to accost me with questions about my search for Laura. I slinked up the stairs to the bedroom, and opened the door, which was old enough that the hinge creaked with an eerie groan.
The thick curtains were closed to keep the room dark, and the dim glow from my eyes dimly illuminated the room. The noise from the door partially awoke Anna, who was lying, fully clothed, in bed. Today, then, had been exhausting for her too.
Anna turned to stare numbly at me. I discarded my clothes, and bent down to get comfortable on the floor, in Anna’s previous sleeping spot. I felt a touch on my shoulder, and, turning, I found Anna beckoning me to join her on the bed.
I silently did as commanded, tucking myself under the bed sheets while Anna layed on top, ensuring that there remained a barrier between us.
In under a minute, I was asleep.
I dreamed of Laura.
Or rather, I dreamed her Shadow. Of course, with all that had happened over the past few days, this phrase had taken on a different meaning.
“Laura’s Shadow” might before have meant that beams of light had travelled millions of miles across the solar system towards the planet Earth, only to be blocked, at the end of its path, by a young woman, casting a silhouette across the ground.
Now, however, this meant I was dreaming of something very different - a being composed of writhing columns of smoke, taking on the vague form of my fiancee, who I knew - although I could not yet properly process it - was no longer with us.
She beckoned me to follow her through the woods. We shared no words. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to hear her if we did - what with dreams having that bizarre ability of being able to warp the senses.
We passed Elizabeth’s house, pausing only momentarily to watch it burn to the ground. Laura - Laura’s Shadow - bowed its head before continuing onwards, taking us down the winding path out of the trees.
When we past the perimeter of the treeline, the city stretched before us, in all its wonder.
It too began to burn. It was slow at first, with small fires blossoming here and there amongst the cityscape. Then, they grew, and as they grew, they snowballed into larger and larger flames, merging with their neighbours, and blazing with a ferocious intensity.
We walked among the burning buildings, the fire feeling like silk to our touch.
In the distance, Anna stared at me. She stood over a lump on the ground. She turned to look at it, prodding it first with her foot, and then bending down to turn it over. This side of the mass was recognisable as a person, skin warping and eyes burned out. The fire engulfed them, and they are disappeared from sight.
Laura again bowed her head, acting as a moment of silence, of respect, from a seemingly silent being.
The fire spread further, filling now the gaps amongst the buildings, obscuring my vision, making me unable to see anything further than a few feet away. Within the raging inferno there was only Laura - an impossible being in an impossible place. A man stepped out of the flames.
14
Guilt & Rage
Hello, Reader. Apologies for my absence over the past few chapters - the stakes in these being what they were, it did not feel right to comment on them
, only to let them stand for themselves. I’m still here, and will be with you until the end of the book.
It took Anna a while to deal with Laura’s disappearance. In reality, by the time Laura had been missing for days, and then weeks, Anna still wasn’t ready to admit that she was gone. I spent a lot of time with her in the months that followed, and during that time she seemed to continue on as normal. Eventually, I did catch her with her guard down, and forcing her to talk about it meant that she finally had to come to accept that she wouldn’t see her friend again.
I think, had I not forced the matter, she would have continued on indefinitely, convincing herself that nothing had changed, and burying it all deep down inside of her. I don’t know what sort of explosive reaction that would have eventually led to - if any at all - but I think it was best for everyone involved that we didn’t find out.
Even after coming to accept that she wasn’t going to see Laura again, I failed to persuade Anna to talk to a trained professional about the situation. I explained to Anna how much doing so had helped me, but still she refused. ‘Everyone deals with these things differently,’ she told me, and I stopped pushing the idea. It’s no wonder, then, that Anna would go on to not understand why I was publishing this work - that doing so was helping me cope. She wouldn’t understand because she herself had no coping mechanisms, and the thought that it would be helping me had not crossed her mind.
In reality, during the events of the chapter to follow, Anna was still going through the motions with her investigation, even though she knew - on some level - that Laura was gone. During this time, while Joyce and I began to face the very crushing reality of the situation, Anna was in denial.
When I awoke, it was mid-afternoon, and Rey was still sleeping. He had been restless in the night, jostling me awake multiple times. I knew when he awoke, I would need to tell him the truth about the campsite, about how it belonged to Laura and Sam. It was, at this stage, our best possible chance of finding the person that hurt Laura (and, in my mind, pointed only at one suspect).
I started the third day by checking on Joyce, conscious that both Rey and I had been mostly absent since we arrived in town. Until we understood exactly what had happened, I wasn’t going to tell Joyce the truth. I wanted the full picture first. I told myself this over and over, to convince myself that it was rational, that it was logical, and that it was the truth. Deep down, however, I knew that my actions weren’t rooted in logic, but in fear. I was scared to tell Joyce everything we knew about the fate of her daughter. Not only that, but I was scared to do it myself. I was terrified to cause someone that much pain.
Joyce, more and more, shared the quiet despair of Rebecca, the mother of the Burning Boy. When I thought about how she would feel when she found out the truth, my stomach dropped, contorting painfully. I resolved to find out the full truth behind the mystery that had taken their beloveds from them, to save them from the ongoing the pain of not knowing. The pieces were slowly slotting into place.
When Rey awoke, his eyes were still filled with madness.
‘Are you ready to continue?’ he asked.
‘Continue?’
‘Finding the person that did this. You weren’t going to stop, were you?’
‘No, Rey, of course not,’ I replied, ‘I thought we might need to take a moment, is all.’
Rey firmly shook his head. ‘No… I’m not stopping. I only slept because I had to - if I had the strength to carry on without sleeping, I would’ve done.’
He spoke firmly, more definitively, than I had ever known him to.
‘Fine, Rey, we can continue.’
I allowed Joyce the courtesy of waiting until Rey and I were away from the house before I told him the truth about the campsite (I could see visions of Rey exploding again, and I wasn’t going to cause Joyce any more stress than she already had). As we approached the end of the road, and Rey began to look left and right and if deciding where to go next, I braced myself.
‘Rey…,’ I began.
The tone in my voice must have been a giveaway, as Rey spun around to look at me, eyes wide.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘There’s something I didn’t tell you yesterday, when we were sorting everything out. Now, I want you to understand that I didn’t tell you because we had other problems to deal with, and not because I was trying to keep anything from you, ok?’
‘Ok, Anna.’
‘And I’m going to want you to stay calm.’
Rey paused. ‘…ok.’
‘The campsite that you spoke about, the one in the woods…’
‘Yes?’
‘That was a campsite that Laura shared with one of her ex-boyfriends. It-’
‘Sam?’ Rey asked, nostrils flaring.
‘Yes.’
Rey took a deep breath, turned, and stormed onwards towards the centre of town. Fucking hell, Rey, this isn’t exactly calm, is it? No points for guessing where he was headed. I chased after him, but didn’t get in his way. Seeing what I had seen, I didn’t think I was ever going to get in Rey’s way ever again.
When we reached the Post Office, Rey slammed the door open with such force that it hit the shelves by the entrance, causing crisps and snacks to topple onto the floor. This was enough to alarm the middle-aged woman who was working behind the counter in an otherwise-empty store.
‘Gosh! You’ve got to be careful with that door, it can do that!’ the woman told Rey. ‘Did the wind catch it?’ The cashier stepped around the counter to begin picking up the fallen goods. With Rey simply standing quiet, staring around the store, I instead was the one to help fix the mess he had caused.
Satisfied that Sam wasn’t in the store, Rey turned to the woman.
‘Where’s Sam?’
She peered up over her shoulder at him. ‘Sam? I don’t think he’s working today, sweetheart. Maybe I can help you with something?’
The stern expression on Rey’s face didn’t change. ‘I just need to find Sam’, he insisted.
‘Well, he’ll be working tomorrow, maybe you can see him then?’
Rey’s mouth twisted to a snarl, and, not wanting to find out what he was about to say and/or do, I interrupted.
‘Maybe you could point us in the direction of his house? We’re friends. Just visiting.’
The woman nodded in understanding, but looked cautiously at Rey out of the corner of her eye.
‘Of course, dear, of course. He’s just around the corner… go out the store, turn right, take another right and you’ll be on Buckle Street. He’s number 3. Say hello from me!’
Rey immediately left the store, not needing anything more from its attendee. I smiled an apology, thanked the woman, and, once again, found myself chasing after him.
So Sam had finally moved out of his parents’ home… but not made it further than a five minute walk down the road. It was, at least, an improvement, I guessed. The house itself was small, but (with property prices in the area rising as people looked for holiday homes in the English countryside) I couldn’t imagine that Sam had bought it himself, not on the store’s salary. Surely the bank of mum and dad had lent a hand.
I was relieved when the fuming Rey didn’t immediately kick the door down. Instead, he knocked, firmly and aggressively. The door had frosted glass, through which we could see that there was a commotion inside the house, suggesting that its inhabitants had not been expecting company. However, when a shape calmly approached the door to open it, it also suggested that the inhabitants were not fearful of company either. On this count, they were wrong.
As the door opened, Rey pounced, grabbing the occupant by the neck and forcing them against the wall. If the person opening the door had not turned out to be Sam, I would have been more inclined to pull Rey back, and to calm him down. Only because it was Sam that Rey had assaulted did I rest easy, feeling that on some level this had always been coming to him.
‘Convince me that you didn’t do it,’ Rey commanded an almost-tearful Sam.
�
�What… what?’ Sam stuttered.
Rey repeated himself, this time pausing between words, letting each of them ring in the air. ‘Convince… me… that… you… didn’t… do… it.’
‘Didn’t do what?!’
The commotion in the doorway drew out another figure from the kitchen at the back of the house. Peering over Rey’s raised arms, I spotted a woman about my age, with long blonde hair not dissimilar to Laura’s, wearing only underwear and an oversized men’s shirt. This woman looked terrified, and, upon opening her mouth to speak, made no noise.
‘I know you saw her,’ Rey insisted.
Sam looked to me for help, and I simply shook my head. ‘I think you better answer him, Sam. Who knows what he might do?’
Rey released Sam’s neck, and gestured for him to move down to the kitchen. Sam was in no mood to argue, and quickly did as he was told. The other woman scuttled out of the way, and watched us, eyes wide, from the corner of the room.
I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table, and Rey nodded for Sam to sit in it. Again, he did as he was told. I sat down on the opposite chair, and Rey stood over Sam menacingly, waiting for him to talk.
‘I… I… I did see her, I did see her, yes,’ Sam spluttered.
‘And did you kill her?’ Rey demanded.
At this point, the other woman found her voice.
‘Sam, what are they talking about?’ the woman offered, gently. ‘Who are they talking about?’
Sam turned to the woman, putting on a brave face. ‘It’s nothing, C, it’s nothing, I promise. I’m just going to sort this all out.’
Rey punched Sam in the jaw. He yelped, and his hand rushed to cradle his face.
‘What the fuck?’
‘Did you kill her?’
‘No!’ Sam insisted, ‘No I didn’t fucking kill her! Yes, I’ll admit, I saw her.’