A Memory of Demons

by Ambrose, David

  ‘You’ve got to get them,’ she said. ‘Get them – quickly!’

  ‘No – you go. Shout – they’ll hear you. I’ll try to help Cassie.’

  ‘It’s dangerous. Be careful.’

  ‘Where’s the track you went up?’

  ‘Just along there. Not far. You’ll see it.’

  I set off at a run. The dense bushes tore at my flesh as they had Naomi’s. I could imagine the girls, when they were setting out on this adventure, only a half-hour or so earlier, picking their way fastidiously through all these branches and thorns. But minor discomforts didn’t matter now.

  Naomi was right: I had no trouble finding the track. It was, as she had said, steep, but an easy climb. About halfway up, I found Cassie’s video camera lying smashed on a rock. It must have flown from her hands when she fell, coming down on this side while she slipped down the other.

  I looked up and continued climbing, breathless now, perspiring, my hands and knees (I was wearing shorts) cut and bleeding. But I was anaesthetized against all pain, feeling nothing as I scrambled on up, but a blind panic that I wouldn’t get there in time.

  The girls had climbed surprisingly high. It was unlike them to be so physically adventurous, but I supposed they had been lured by the prospect of the spectacular view. When I got there, I saw it was indeed dramatic; and so was the rock face that slid away down the far side at a thirty-degree angle, ending in a jagged overhang above a deep crevasse, with the sound of torrential waters smashing against rocks below.

  ‘Cassie Cassie!’

  I called her name at the top of my lungs. At first there was no reply, then I heard her voice faintly over the rushing water.

  ‘Help me!’

  She must have been somewhere beyond that rim of rock I could see, on a ledge perhaps, maybe injured, unable to climb.

  ‘We’re coming!’ I shouted back.

  There was still no sign of Naomi with my parents and Charlie. Perhaps she hadn’t found them yet, but surely she must soon: they couldn’t have strayed that far from the camp. All the same, I was alone. I had to act.

  I could see that the sloping rock surface offered hand- and toe-holds for someone descending with great care and who didn’t weigh too much. An adult would most likely slip and fall. But somebody my size and weight, a ten-year-old boy and not big for my age, could maybe risk it. I took a deep breath, and started down.

  Like all kids, I knew how to climb; and, luckily, I wasn’t scared of heights. I felt my way with the toes of my trainers, looking down before each move, then up as I shifted my hands. I could hear Cassie still calling.

  ‘Help! Help me!’

  Inch by inch I reached the edge. It took less time than I thought it would – no more than two minutes. I managed to twist around, keeping my feet where they were but shifting my hands. That was when I saw her.

  She was hanging on to a lip of rock with her fingertips, about three feet below the edge that had been visible from above. Her feet must have been resting on something. ‘What are you standing on?’ I asked. I still had to shout to be heard above the water, its roar amplified now as it smashed and echoed off the rock walls.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t look down.’

  She was paralysed with fear – that was the only thing keeping her there. If she moved, she would certainly fall. When I managed to peer down over the edge I was now stretched out along, I saw that her toes were on a lip of rock even smaller than the one she was gripping with her fingers.

  I looked up again. Still no sign of help. Where were they? They must be here soon.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘don’t move. I’ll try to pull you up.’

  ‘No – don’t! You can’t! Where’s Daddy? Get Daddy!’

  ‘They’re coming. Naomi’s gone to find them.’

  I swivelled around further, so that I was able to lower my feet and plant them, one behind the other, on the lip of rock that she was clinging to.

  ‘No,’ she said again, ‘don’t touch me! You’re not strong enough. Leave me alone.’

  I looked up again. Still nobody.

  ‘Oh, yes I am,’ I said. ‘I’m quite strong enough.’

  I lifted my right foot with slow deliberation – and stamped on her fingers with all my force. She screamed, but didn’t let go. I stamped again. There was blood now, but still she clung on, staring up at me with a look of utter horror and incomprehension.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she wailed. ‘You’re mad! You’re going to kill me!’

  Still there was no break on the skyline above, no movement, no silhouetted figures looking down as witnesses to what was happening.

  I stamped again, but my trainers were too soft, and she was hanging on with the preternatural strength of someone fighting for her life. And she was screaming. ‘No! Stop it! Stop! Help!’

  Her voice was still mostly drowned by the roaring water below, but I had to silence her. I looked around desperately. There was a piece of rock close by. I had to work it back and forth several times until I got it free. It was heavy, but small enough for me to hold in one hand while I clung on to safety with the other.

  She couldn’t stop screaming now. No words, no pleas for help or mercy any more – just raw shrieks torn from her throat as though from some invisible claw.

  One last glance back. Still no sign of anyone. This had to be my last chance.

  I smashed the rock down on her upturned face. She fell as gracefully as an acrobatic diver executing a back-flip from the high board of a swimming pool – except she didn’t complete the somersault she had so skilfully begun. She smashed, flat on her back, against a sharp-edged rock, bounced once, and slithered down into the churning water, disappearing from sight.

  ‘Brendan!’

  I whirled round with a gasp. My father was outlined against the sky above me, his hands cupped to his mouth to form a megaphone.

  ‘Be careful! Can you see her?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Stay where you are! Charlie’s coming with a rope.’

  I realized I still had the murder weapon, the lump of rock, in my hand. It was bloodstained now, but below my father’s line of vision. I opened my fingers and let it fall to the depths below. There were also traces of blood by my feet where Cassie had clung on so desperately; but I was bleeding myself, so they wouldn’t look suspicious.

  ‘Hang on, Brendan. Charlie’s here.’

  I looked up and saw Charlie with a coil of rope. He was tying some sort of loop in one end.

  ‘OK, Brendan,’ he called out, ‘slip this over your head and around your waist, then your father and I will pull you up.’

  He swung the rope around his head like a cowboy lassoing a steer, then sent it snaking expertly out so that it fell right alongside me. I slipped it on as he had said, and tightened it, then let them pull me up to safety. I made the climb look harder and more dangerous than it was, pretending to slip once or twice in order to exaggerate the bravery of my having crawled down there in the first place.

  But really, it was a breeze.

  46

  Frankly, I have no idea whether I would ever have actually killed my sister if the perfect opportunity had not presented itself. Would my life have been very different if I hadn’t killed her? Who knows? To ask the question is to concede that the die is cast.

  The fact is, my sister was born a bitch. I’m not saying she was born evil: she grew into that, though she sure as hell started life with a talent for it. I partly blame my parents. I mean, if you give a child a ridiculous name like Cassandra, you have to expect trouble. The very sound of it exudes a kind of preening narcissism. Of course, from birth she was known as Cassie, but there is a condescending quality even in the shortened version of the name, contriving as it does to remind you of how privileged you are to be on such casual terms with a familiar of the gods.

  And then of course they spoilt her, appallingly, for four years – until I was born. Not that they stopped spoiling her after my arrival; they went on
as they always had. The only difference was that she didn’t have it all to herself any more. She pretended outwardly to share their love with me, but in her own mind she retained the divine right to be an only child, a position of which I had robbed her, and for which she decided I would be made to pay.

  My father was a corporate lawyer, a partner in a large, important firm, and therefore relatively wealthy. For Cassie’s third birthday there were carousels and clowns and pony rides in the garden of our house in Chicago. I wasn’t there, of course – I wasn’t even conceived by then, at least not quite – but I saw the photographs and movies later. In fairness to my parents, they did the same for me when I was three; but my sister, who was by then seven, contrived to spoil the day by faking pains that kept her in the Emergency Room all afternoon, with my parents dancing terrified attendance and leaving me to get on with my party alone. Well, there was the housekeeper and her husband, of course, along with the entertainers and a handful of visiting parents. I had a good enough time, but it wasn’t the same as if my mom and dad had been there. And of course by the evening, when it was all over, Cassie was fine. Her indisposition was put down to food poisoning or some minor passing virus. She was brought home and put to bed with much fuss and ceremony, then brought cake and diet ice-cream on trays while she watched television. Her only acknowledgement of me was to stick out her tongue when I looked in her door to see how she was feeling. Her triumph was complete.

  Needless to say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize the familiar stresses and strains of sibling rivalry here. What made this case somewhat special was the lengths to which my sister was prepared to go. The lies she told, and the humiliations that she heaped on me, often with the collaboration of her giggling girlfriends, strike me now when I look back as almost unimaginable in their viciousness. Much of it, of course, was pretty trivial, though nonetheless unpleasant: toys broken, clothes hidden, minor crimes around the house committed in ways that framed baby brother as the guilty party. The harder I protested my innocence, the more I became regarded as a habitual liar – a view confirmed by my sister’s terrified screams one night when she found her bed infested by a mass of crawling worms and frogs. Who but a horrible boy of six, as I was by then, could have conceived of such a thing? When I dared to suggest that my sister herself might have staged the whole episode in order to incriminate me, I received for the first time a slap across the face from my normally tolerant father, who told me that he had had enough of my dishonesty, and if I went on like this I would be sent to military academy, where they knew how to deal with boys like me.

  The threat of military academy was enough to ensure that I suffered in silence from then on. Whenever, through my sister’s scheming, I was wrongly accused of some offence, I simply admitted my guilt. I became regarded as not so much a problem child as a stupid one: who but a fool, the reasoning went, could so consistently and trivially offend, screw up and goof off without being somewhat less bright than my poor parents had hoped their only son would be? My grades at school were indifferent, I was lacklustre at sports, and the few friends I had gradually fell away until I had none at all.

  What nobody realized was that I was living through a full-blown depression brought about by my sister’s increasingly sadistic behaviour towards me. It seems odd, looking back, that my parents had no sense of what was happening. They were sophisticated people: my father was a well-read man, and my mother an active patron of the arts. You might have expected them to be alert to such things. Perhaps today they would have been, but we forget how attitudes have changed in a single generation: a kid who is ‘disturbed’ now was just a pain in the ass back then.

  Cassie saw she had me on the ropes, and fully intended to pummel me into senselessness. I believe her ultimate ambition was to drive me to suicide, and she might well have succeeded but for the intervention of fate – in the shape of that ‘accident’ in Colorado.

  From the age of eight and until I was ten, my sister used the weapon of sex mercilessly against me. She was just beginning to develop a female body, and there was no denying she was an attractive girl. I saw the way boys looked at her with lust, and more than a few grown men too, including friends of my parents who thought nobody had noticed them stealing that extra little glance when she was bending over, or when the strap fell off her shoulder at the pool and the whole costume started to come ‘innocently’ adrift. My sister never did anything innocently.

  In my case, she hooked my natural curiosity about the female body by making sure I saw enough of hers while pretending she didn’t even know that I was there. Then, when she was ready, she would turn on me and accuse me of spying on her. Sometimes her tantrum would be kept just between the two of us; more often than not, it would be staged so that its angry ripples alerted the whole household to the fact that Cassie’s stainless modesty had been threatened by the dirty, underhanded, sneaky prurience of her sex-obsessed little brother. I felt myself increasingly regarded, as a result of these tactics, as the kind of thing that people, my parents included, scraped off their shoe while wrinkling their noses in distaste.

  The fact that all of this was happening during the early days of my own sexual awakening was particularly painful, though no doubt part of her plan. One morning I woke up with the most tremendous erection, which just refused to go away. I tried everything I could think of, to no avail. I had not expected my sister to come bursting into the bathroom, where she found me doubled over in a hasty attempt to conceal the problem in my pyjamas. To begin with she merely laughed cruelly at my embarrassment, then abruptly changed tack and ran out screaming that I had forced her to look at my ‘thing’, and even wanted her to ‘touch it’. It was, at that time, the worst lie she had ever told about me, and one that I knew I would never forgive. Our parents, too embarrassed to tackle the problem directly, said nothing that I remember in any detail, aside from suggesting that I might take the precaution of locking the door in future. But I recall the sidelong, wounded glances, the clearing of throats and quick changes of conversation when I entered a room, the inescapable feeling that I was something alien, unwanted and ugly.

  Then came the incident with Naomi. Naomi Chase, as well as being my sister’s best friend, was also a remarkable lookalike. They were invariably taken for sisters, and sometimes even twins, though not identical. In their mean, nasty and hateful natures, however, they were absolutely identical. Just how much so, I found out one day when Naomi suggested that she and I get together alone, without my sister. She said it casually: why didn’t I come over the next afternoon? Not to her parents’ house, but to a boat house they had by the lake. She wanted to show me something, but wouldn’t say what it was. If I would go there, all would be revealed tomorrow.

  From the way she said it there was no doubt what she was talking about. I was nine, she was just thirteen. It was an offer neither I nor any normal red-blooded boy could have refused and retained a shred of self-respect.

  It was a warm afternoon. High summer. I found Naomi waiting for me alone. She kissed me first, then asked me if I’d ever seen a naked girl. I’d seen my sister, of course – half-naked, never totally. Sisters don’t count, she said. You couldn’t do the things with sisters that you could with other girls. Then she told me to remove my clothes. We were going to do things, she promised, that we would both enjoy.

  Like a fool, I believed her. I was out of my clothes in seconds flat, waiting for her to do the same. That was when I heard the first muffled giggles from somewhere overhead. I looked up. The boat house had a high vaulted roof, an inverted V-shape. There was an area, a kind of mezzanine, that was used for storage – sails, oars, and various bits of sailing equipment. My sister and two more of her friends were there. It was a set-up, though I didn’t realize how bad a one till I saw Naomi sprinting out of the door with my clothes under her arm and my shoes in her hand. The others clattered down some wooden steps and joined her in the bright sunlight outside, shrieking with laughter, their voices fading into the distance
.

  I got home wrapped in a piece of ripped tarpaulin I found in a corner. When my parents asked me what had happened, I told them I had gone swimming with some boys who had played a trick on me. My sister was hovering at the top of the stairs, trying to overhear what was being said. I knew she would brand me a liar if I told the truth, and she would be backed up by her friends. They would claim I had ‘interfered’ with Naomi in some way, and they had all come running to my rescue. I knew how their minds worked. I decided I would rather be punished for swimming without adult supervision than for the offence they would accuse me of.

  They were strangers to the truth, all of them. There was no bridge between us.

  Later, I came to realize there are no bridges between anyone. Just illusion, and sometimes disillusion.

  But the truth as something to be shared and held in common?

  Don’t make me laugh.

  47

  Naomi’s murder, almost two years after my sister’s death, was never solved. She had been babysitting as a favour to one of her cousins. She was alone in the house from seven fifteen onwards – alone, that is, except for a three-year-old who remained fast asleep upstairs throughout.

  The killer had apparently entered by breaking a conservatory window, then forcing a door into the house itself. Naomi had been taken by surprise and, after a brief struggle, strangled. Fibres found on her throat suggested that some item of silk had been used, possibly a scarf. It was never found. Nor was the fine gold chain she had been wearing. Murderers, the police said, especially serial sex murderers which was what they suspected they were dealing with in this case, frequently kept some personal object belonging to their victim as a memento of their crime – a habit which sometimes led to their discovery and arrest.

  But not in this case, because the chain in question was at the bottom of the river where I had thrown it on leaving the house.

  My knowledge of the behaviour of serial sex and other murderers was gleaned from a couple of paperbacks I had picked up in a local bookshop. These books had enabled me to simulate perfectly the scene of a typical sex crime. The victim had been stripped naked after death and sexually abused, though the perpetrator had left behind no trace of saliva, semen, blood or any other substance that might have been helpful in identifying him.