by Geoff North
“Kernel go woof-woof!”
Hugh tried to stand but couldn’t quite manage it. He fell to his side, clutching at the desk for support. He called out to his son, sobbing.
Ben stuck his head around the corner and giggled playfully. He’d loved to play hide and seek. Hugh held his hand out and Ben took it. His fingers were soft and warm. He ran into his father’s arms and Hugh hugged him to his chest, smelling the fresh smell of his wispy blonde hair. “Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry…I’m so very sorry.”
“Gotta go, da.”
“Go? No, please stay with me! I need you…mommy needs you. We love you, Ben.”
The little boy ran back to stand in front of the desk with Mary. He wasn’t afraid. She took his hand and smiled down at him.
“Please don’t take him from me,” Hugh said. He’d gotten back to his feet, but he was too weak to do any more. He leaned down against the desk, his arms now the only thing holding him up.
Mary was looking at him. Her eyes were kind and gentle. “Don’t be sad. I’ll make sure he gets to where he’s supposed to go.”
“Kernel go woof-woof!” Ben repeated.
“Kernel what?” Hugh tried to understand what his son was saying, desperate to decipher what he knew would be his final words to him. A dog began to bark from down the hallway. No, he thought, swinging his head around. It was coming from outside the study window. It was a deep bark, a familiar, friendly old sound. It was coming from everywhere.
He turned back around and Mary McFarlane was gone.
And so was Ben.
The barking had stopped.
Hugh walked slowly throughout the house knowing full well he wouldn’t find a thing. He was all alone in a now empty home. Cathy was at his parents, and Ben was in a better place.
He ended up on the couch and closed his eyes. No more visitors.
“Colonel goes woof-woof,” he muttered before drifting off to sleep.
Chapter 25
And as he slept, Hugh dreamed. There was a field of wheat, its golden stalks waving softly in a cool summer breeze. Buffy white clouds drifted along against a sky of clear blue, each resembling the faces of people he’d once known that had left the world before their time, others who had lived their lives to the fullest.
He could hear the laughter of a little boy through the soft ruffling hiss of wheat. His boy. A dog barking. His dog. He could see its furry tail bobbing and wagging above the stalks, chasing after the head full of brilliant blonde hair. That’s all he could see of them. It was all he needed to see. The wheat swayed and grew before his eyes, blocking out the sky and turning color from golden yellow to a deep ripe brown. The laughing and the barking were smothered out by it, consumed in its heavy, rusted smell. The dream had ended, but Hugh was still awake, standing in that floorless, featureless world of depressing singular color.
“Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
The Voice in the Brown.
“You knew he would die again! You could’ve warned me! I could’ve stopped it.”
“I knew no such thing, and even I did, and I had warned you, what good what it have done? If it wasn’t a plastic red nail one night, it would have been a bottle of floor cleaner the next. And if you were ready for that, he would’ve wandered out onto the road next week and been hit by a car.”
“Bullshit.” But Hugh knew it wasn’t.
“Some people live and some people die, there isn’t anything you or I can do to change it.”
“I saved Billy’s life.”
“His life isn’t over yet…accidents happen.”
Hugh could feel the grip he had on ‘knowing everything that was going to happen’ begin to slip away. It was almost a relief. “What about the people who died that shouldn’t have? Thomas Nelson, Mrs. McDonald…Bob…Mandy Wood.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. What would’ve happened if you’d stabbed all those people with a knife instead?”
Hugh thought for a second. Was it a trick question? “I would’ve gone to jail?”
“Besides that.”
“They would’ve died.”
“Bingo. It’s easy to kill, that’s why the human race is so good at it. And it doesn’t always have to be murder…good intentions can kill just as easily…you had plenty of those, hey Hugh?”
The road to hell—
The voice continued before he could finish the thought. “Shit, Thomas Nelson never murdered Herbert McDonald; he really did fall from that bridge by accident.”
“But Nelson was cheating with his wife—everyone knew it! Why did he come after us, try and murder us?”
“McDonald knew Nelson was banging his wife, hell, they used to have threesomes all the time! I don’t blame him for coming after you. Probably knew nobody in town would believe his side of the story. Mrs. McDonald would never admit to such a scandal. Oh yeah, and Nelson was a crazy asshole…that might have had something to do with it.”
Four people dead because I believed the town gossip.
They were both silent for a while. Hugh began to wonder if the Voice had left him all alone in the brown. It was a terrible, claustrophobic feeling, like sinking in the middle of an ocean at night, holding your breath, seconds of air left. “Was Mary McFarlane the reason that house never burned down in 1979? Were we meant to move in there?”
“Now that is a very good question. Maybe you are beginning to think of others before yourself.”
“Can you answer it or not?”
The voice sighed. “Poor little Mary died twice in that house. First, at the hands of her father, and then when the house burnt down in ‘79. Her soul was bound to the place, you know? When the building went up in smoke, she went up with it. Hell of a way for a kid’s lost spirit to go…all alone and scared.”
“So what changed when I came back? I didn’t do anything that would’ve kept the place standing.”
“You did something. Maybe you had a cold that fall and passed it on to the kid that was meant to torch the place. He could’ve been home that night, too sick to be out burning houses down. Maybe you just looked at someone funny that Halloween morning, and that someone got talking to someone else about it, and that someone else said something to so and so, and so and so mentioned it to what’s his name, and what’s his name may have gotten spooked because he’d heard certain kids were wise to his plan, so he decided to light up a few bales on the highway instead of an empty old house. Maybe you--”
“Okay, okay, I get it. A million things could’ve happened.”
“It doesn’t really matter how the house stayed standing after you went back, Hugh. I think maybe you should ask why. Mary may have stayed in that house for another thirty years if it wasn’t for Ben dying. Time really has no meaning when you’re stuck in those final few moments between life and death.”
“I –I don’t understand.”
The voice continued, softer now, more sympathetic. “Her dad choked her to death. Sure, he was drunk, didn’t mean to take it that far, but just try and imagine what that could do to a kid. Wouldn’t you be afraid to go skipping off into the afterlife if your dad had done that to you? She had no reason to go on. She was too devastated to get on with things.”
Hugh recalled what the little girl had said in his study. “But she said her dad was waiting for her, that he wasn’t angry anymore.”
“Took a long time for the good doctor to forgive himself. He ended his own life and that was another whole shit-load of baggage for him to sort through. So what you end up with is a lot of fear and feelings of betrayal on side, a lot of self-loathing and guilt on the other...Ben is what finally brought them together. By helping your son, they finally found each other again.”
Hugh began to tremble, it quietly turned into an uncontrollable full-body hitch. The kind of motions kids make before letting it all out. And out it came. He sobbed and cried and screamed. He struck out at the brown air with his arms.
The voice waited until Hugh played himself out and sun
k to his knees. “Feel better?”
Hugh wiped his eyes for all the good it did him. There was never anything to see here. “I don’t want a bunch of fucking ghosts looking after him. He’s my son! I want him back.”
“Ben is happy—you’ve seen that. Go back, Hugh. Go back and live your life. You’re at the halfway point now. This was the hardest part. Things can only get better now.”
“Better.” Hugh spat the word out.
“You’ve lived through some pretty rough times; you know these things take time.”
“Who are you?”
“No time for that now. You had better wake up.”
The brown began to fade around him, the color changing slowly to a dark, sickly grey. His eyes stung.
The television had been left on and Hugh could see a little girl with pigtails running down a field of golden grass and wild flowers, skipping and grinning. An old re-run of Little House on the Prairie was just ending. The picture was fuzzy, out of focus, and his eyes hurt like hell. At first he thought he was feeling the first effects of a massive hangover, but then he breathed in and coughed, violently. He wheezed for another breath but it only produced a second hacking fit. The living room was thick with swirling grey-black smoke. The television suddenly blinked off, a final image of little Mary Ingles jumping in the air with her arms held out burnt into his watering eyes. The power had cut out. Now he could hear the fire raging somewhere above his head.
He rolled onto the floor and crawled through the kitchen, heading stubbornly for his study.
Get out of the house, you fool! Get out!
He ignored the smart voice in his head and continued down the hallway, sucking in the last bit of clean air along the hardwood floor. Away from the front door, toward his latest manuscript, toward his diary. He had to save his diary.
An orange glow danced off the floor and walls all around him, muddied by the smoke pressing down, swirling inches above his face. The flames were working down the stairs, licking at the banister and consuming the carpet.
Not like the fire in the old farmhouse. I can’t beat this one out.
He made it to the study door, took in on last breath and rose to his knees for the metal knob. He slammed it shut behind him, thankful for not being too drunk (hours?) before to have left it open. Smoke had found its way in here too, he thought, gasping for breath. There were dozens of invisible cracks and broken seals in an old house like this, he had less than minutes left. There was a loud crash from above, the room shook and a white tile fell free and bounced off his shoulder. Hugh could imagine the bow in the ceiling above his head, could hear the mass of burning timber and plaster, the creaking of nails trying to hold it all up and failing. The attic had collapsed into the second floor. That dirty old fake-leather couch was on its way back down, a bitch to get up there in the first place, a yellow flaming bastard now, with a shortcut in mind. The whole place was coming down, and there was only one floor left to go.
It was dark, but he knew the layout of the room well enough to side step the chair Mary McFarlane had sat in. He reached for the desk, worked his hands along its surface, knocking a glass to the floor, a cup filled with pencils and pens, the cool plastic edge of his computer monitor. He flung out the narrow top drawer and found his diary. He tucked it into the front of his pants and went to feel for the manuscript.
The house groaned and shook, a series of loud snaps from out in the living room made him jump. Then he heard the distant wail of sirens. The Braedon Volunteer Fire Department was on its way. There was nothing left on the desk to feel for. Where was his manuscript? Why weren’t the sirens getting any louder? The roar of the fire was drowning out all other sounds, like a freight train coming straight down.
Not minutes--seconds left. Where was the goddamned manuscript?
On the floor, in front of the desk! Where you pushed it off…
He heard the door suck up into its frame. The fire was that close, searching for more oxygen to feed on. A supporting beam in one of the study’s inner walls snapped free, as loud as shotgun blast. Hugh grabbed the heavy monitor and hurled it through the window. Cold air rushed in and he half-climbed, half-fell through the jagged opening and onto the grass below.
The house came down the rest of the way, crushing his computer, his printer, his favorite writing chair, his desk…his unfinished manuscript.
Fuck it…wasn’t that good anyway.
Two men dressed in bulky yellow suits scooped him up and dragged him back to the safety of the street. Scott Harder and Willy Jelfs, he thought dimly, good stand-up type of guys. Their orange faces were coated with sweat and streaked with soot. They’d been here awhile, probably started fighting the blaze while he was still sleeping on the couch. It was a small town and everybody knew they’d been staying out at his parents since the accident. The volunteer firemen must have assumed he was with his grieving wife. That or maybe they considered the place was too far gone to attempt any kind of rescue.
More fire trucks were arriving on the scene. Their sirens hurt his ears, and a man with a bullhorn ordered the growing crowd to make way. There were dozens of neighbors out on the street. They were in their pajamas and bathrobes and fuzzy slippers. More people were running up the road and down the back lanes to watch the old McFarlane house burn down, their eyes open wide and glistening. Mouths agape like cavemen presented for the first time with the gift of flame. Nothing brought a tiny community together better than a big bonfire.
Hands were groping all over him, feeling his forehead, shaking his shoulders.
“Are you alright? “
“How’s your breathing?”
“Were you burnt anywhere?”
“I’m okay.” He felt down for the diary. It was still there. “I’m alright.”
The poking and prodding continued. Hugh looked around at the gathering of concerned onlookers. A few were whispering back and forth. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could imagine the questions being asked.
“Why isn’t he with his wife?”
“It’s a shame about their little boy…now this?”
“What was he doing here all alone?”
Wonderful, Hugh thought.
They probably think I started the fire.
Chapter 26
October 24 1992
Most people didn’t believe I started the fire, and those that may have didn’t really care. I guess they figured we’d suffered enough already. Cathy had become a well-respected young business woman in town, and well, I was that crazy young writer. Leave them alone. Pretty sure the insurance company didn’t believe me, but they couldn’t prove anything. We were offered forty thousand--payable only if we rebuilt on the exact same location. It would’ve cost that much just to clear up the mess that was still there. Cathy was devastated. I told the insurance rep to shove the offer up his ass, along with our policy.
No one could ever say exactly where and how the fire began. I knew though. It was in that in that little attic crawl space where Mary McFarlane used to hide when her daddy came home drunk or high. She had finished with it, burned the goddamned place down like it was meant to have burned down in 1979.
December 17 1992
Guess what? We’re still living with my parents. Cathy is still messed up and I guess she always will be. At least until we start having more kids. She says no, but I know she’ll change her mind. I told her about the dream of Ben and Colonel running through the wheat field last night. A part of me was afraid to tell her. Scared it might freak her out, scared she might think I was going crazy talking about ghosts again. It made her feel a lot better. Wish I’d told her sooner.
I helped mom put up the Christmas tree this morning. In the same old spot it’s always gone, northeast corner of the living room. I was lucky to have had so many Christmases here.
This will be the last one with dad. A week short actually. I haven’t been dreading this coming night, and I’m not even really that sad. I’ve stayed close with him through the years a
nd there are some things you just can’t change. Accepting what’s to come is a hard thing, but once you do it can be such a relief.
Cathy returned to bed with an extra comforter. Hugh tried to steal most of it away before she’d settled in beside him. “Give that back,” she said, yanking it back to her side. “It’s too cold to share.”
“I used that thing when I was a kid, barely covered me up back then.”
“I guess your mom likes to save things.”
Not that again.
Cathy was still sore that he’d managed to salvage his little journal from the fire, but hadn’t even considered saving the photo album in the desk drawer beneath it. At least she hadn’t asked to see inside its pages to see what made the little diary more special than Ben’s baby pictures. Hugh’s mom had plenty of those, but still, she couldn’t resist dropping one-liners now and again.
He worked an arm beneath her and hugged up for warmth. “Can you see us staying in Braedon forever?” Big question, great subject changer.
“It’s been hard…but I can’t see us running out now. Maybe if we get another place in the spring, a new place just out of town, maybe that will get me back to work.”
It was good to hear her talk like that, looking ahead. “This place is just out of town.”
“Your parents live here, Hugh. I’ve heard of twenty-eight year old guys still living with their mom and dad--but with their wife too?”
“They’ve been good to us.”
“Oh, they’ve been wonderful to us; I love your parents… a hell of a lot more than I loved my own.”
“But?”
“But even though they would never say it, I think they’d like it if we got back out on our own.”
Not tomorrow morning. Mom will need us then.
She watched him study the ceiling and rubbed the tear away with her thumb as it trickled down his cheek. “It must be hard coming back knowing that you’ll have to say goodbye again so soon.”