The Empty Heart: A Collection

by Derek Murphy

  Scrambling after the girl, he grabbed at her arm as she started to run along the ridge toward the trailhead. Her eyes were puzzled as he pushed her toward the reverse side of the ridge. She wasn’t familiar with the layout of the camp and didn’t know about the flume. Gavin’s yells were muted by the fog and rain and were soon silenced as they moved away from the cabin and the intervening ridge.

  By the time they reached the flume and the sluice-gate that controlled the flow of water down it, Kensey was shivering and they lost a precious few seconds while Alec unslung his rifle and ripped his coat off, shoving her arms into it. Zipping it up, he turned to the sluice-gate and kicked at the rusted steel panel until he had it open. The water rushed past his legs, threatening to take his anchoring foot from under him as he continued kicking at the panel. When he had it hanging from its bottom fastener, one last kick sent it spinning to the side and he knew there was no way that anyone could shut the gate. However, a determined man could collapse the trough that fed the stream’s waters to the flume and shut off the flow. He would have to stay while Kensey made her getaway down the flume.

  Suddenly, he heard Gavin’s voice again, closer than the cabin’s clearing this time. His brother must have found the hole in the cabin’s wall and deduced that they were making for the flume. Grasping Kensey at the waist, he swung her up to sit on the side of the wall with her feet swinging in the flood.

  "Keep your feet together and your arms wrapped around you! Keep your head up!"

  Climbing to the wall of the flume, he lifted her by the armpits and moved her so that her legs were torn from under her. Holding her against the force of the water, he quickly bent to kiss her on one side of her mouth.

  "I love you!"

  Her answering query of what he meant to do to escape was swallowed by the sound of the splash as he dropped her body into the water and watched her shoot down the flume. There was an anxious moment when he saw one of her feet catch momentarily on the side of the flume, but she straightened out and quickly receded into the distance until she was only a dark speck disappearing into the fog that clung to the side of the crag.

  A shot struck him low on the right side and he fell half in the water, his hands desperately grabbing at the wall to keep from being swept away. A quick push with his feet that sent agony shooting through him toppled him over the side. Falling to the ground, he clutched one hand to his side while the other hand went to the pistol in his waistband. The rifle was too far away from him and he knew he would be dead if he moved into the open to retrieve it.

  Another shot threw a gout of muddy dirt almost in his face and he spied Gavin crouching behind a large rock. The stone wasn’t large enough to cover all his brother’s body and removing his bloody hand from his side to steady his pistol, Alec sent two shots at his brother, striking him in the leg once while the other shot spanged off the stone. The sound of the ricochet was quickly lost in the muffling fog and he heard only his brother’s cursing.

  Letting the spent cartridges drop from his pistol as he reloaded, Alec squirmed further under the flume and moved slightly to one side to get a better view of Gavin’s position. He was surprised when his brother started to speak.

  "What kind of welcome is this, Alec? I came to visit you and everybody seemed to be mad at me! I wouldn’t have killed anybody if they had just been more friendly."

  Knowing the tricks of direction that fog could play with people’s voices, Alec turned his head away from Gavin as he spoke in an effort to make his brother think he was somewhere else.

  "The way I heard it, you came into town shooting, Gavin!"

  "Lies! All lies! Billy and his brothers always hated me and the folks in town weren’t any different! They just wanted to drive a wedge between us, Brother!"

  Suddenly angry, Alec yelled, "You did that a long time ago, Gavin! As for the people in town; you never gave anyone any reason to like you! I can think of several people who would have been glad to see you dead before you left!"

  A slug struck the wooden wall of the sluice, letting a stream of water pour out right in front of Alec’s face. He lifted his pistol and put two more shots into Gavin’s other leg and side, grinning with satisfaction as he heard his brother curse and moan. Waiting a few minutes, he was cautious about moving out into the open. He was certain that the last bullet had hit something vital.

  Taking his time, he crawled toward the rock his brother hid behind and could see an outflung hand with a pistol some inches from the fingertips. Confident that Gavin was done for, he rose and walked, holding his hand to his side. The blood was still flowing and he was beginning to feel lightheaded, but needed to make sure of Gavin before he tried to escape in the flume.

  When he was near enough to see Gavin’s whole body, he saw that his brother had used his belt as a tourniquet on the first wounded leg, but there was still a great deal of blood staining the pant-leg. The wound in the second leg didn’t seem as severe, but the wound in Gavin’s side looked bad. The other hand was twisted back beneath his brother’s body. As he stood there, his brother’s eyes fluttered open. The voice was slow and low as he spoke.

  "Well. You finally won."

  Gritting his teeth against the pain in his own side, Alec asked, "What did I win, Gavin?"

  Gavin flashed a tired smile as he said, "The right to live, Brother."

  Even this close to death, his brother’s words mocked him.

  Alec said, "I always had that right, Gavin. It was you who wanted to take it away from me. Why didn’t you just stay away?"

  "The world ended, Little Brother. I couldn’t stand the thought of you still being in it if everybody else was going to die."

  Shaking his head, Alec said, "I never understood why it was that you hated me, Gavin."

  As though surprised at Alec’s failure to know the reason, Gavin said, "You took Mom and Dad away from me. I would have killed you when they brought you home from the hospital, but Mom was too careful with you. By the time she would leave you alone with me, you were too big for me to do it easily. Then it became a game for me; just how far I could push you before you tried to kill me. If you tried it, I could kill you and claim it was self-defense."

  "It didn’t have to be this way, Gavin."

  As Gavin said, "Sure it did.", his hand came from beneath his body with another pistol clenched in the fist. Two shots rang out in unison and as Alec reeled, knowing the shot had severed his spine, he saw that his own shot had taken Gavin squarely in the middle of the chest. Falling across his brother’s body, he heard the last dying sigh escape the other’s chest and closed his own eyes for the last time.

  Back to Table of Contents

  Repetitions

  He wasn’t anything like any kind of Hollywood hero that you see on the movie screen but he wasn’t bad looking, either. Rod Hayden was just an average kind of guy, interested in cars, guns, hunting and fishing. Oh, and writing. He loved to write. Anything. Everything. His efforts at poetry amounted to so much drivel and once he was finished with one, it went into a stack of other papers and promptly disappeared from his memory. Short stories were a different animal and he felt they contained more of a punch than his novels. Just at the moment, he sat in front of his computer screen, perplexed and disappointed. What some people called ‘the Muse’, had deserted him. He didn’t indulge in any kind of artsy-fartsy description of what inspired him; he just called it an urge to write.

  What currently bothered him was the feeling that no matter what he did, no matter how well he wrote, he would never enjoy any kind of success in the field. Success in anything had always eluded him while others managed to take his work, stolen actually, and turn handsome profits from it. No matter how many ways, or how many times he revealed that he was the author of one piece or another, all recognition and any measure of success continued to slip from his grasp. He supposed that he was as inept at defending his authorship as he was at marketing his work. Agents and publishers just weren’t interested in his work unless someone else �
�filed off the serial number’ and presented it as their own with an expertise garnered from ‘working the system’.

  Picking up the bottle of pills he had secretly collected for months from some of his friends who indulged in ‘pharmaceutical recreation’, he hoped they would be enough. He didn’t want to wake up in the hospital and have some doctor stand over him, telling him that the courts had ordered him held for psychiatric evaluation. That would be just the latest in a long line of disappointing failures.

  He upended the bottle into his mouth and followed it with a long pull at the bottle of whiskey he had been nursing for the past hour. Maybe one of his few friends would find him in a few days. Before the whiskey and pills began to tell on him, he set about writing the obligatory suicide note. By the time he was finished, he was sure that there were a couple of run-on sentences in it and drunkenly shook his head at what an editor would think.

  * * *

  The deck slanted at such an angle that he was sure he wouldn’t be able to keep his feet and held onto the rail with a desperate grip. The lifeboat he had watched Mary step into was just settling into the water, only half-full of women and children. The crewmen shoved with their oars against the side of the huge ship, pushing away from it and in a few minutes, pulled strongly, moving toward the small group of boats that had left the stricken ship earlier. He knew he wouldn’t live to see their child, boy or girl, grow up, but he hoped his family would take care of Mary and the child. She had only just told him she was pregnant the day before and the iceberg that smashed in the side of the great liner had smashed his life as well.

  That wasn’t quite true, though, was it? The cause of their cutting their trip to Europe short in the first place was the problem with ownership of his company. His cousin, Frederick and his cronies had stolen it from him while he was away. He retained a seat on the Board, but would receive only a meager, annual stipend instead of reaping the rewards for building the company in the first place. The great mansion he planned to build on the five hundred acres he bought at Water Mill would have to be built by someone else.

  Turning from the rail, unable to watch his wife and unborn child being borne away from him any longer, his feet threatened to slide from under him and he bumped into someone behind him. Instinctively catching hold of the person, he was embarrassed to realize that he had just grabbed a woman’s breast, smothered in heavy woolen clothes though it was. Muttering his apologies, he let his hand slip down to the woman’s arm until he found her cold hand and pulled her toward the railing. When she was able to grasp it for herself, he looked up into her face and felt the words of encouragement he was about to utter die in his throat.

  The woman wasn’t beautiful, but her face was one that had haunted him in his sleep for most of his life. She was very short. Not as short as a midget, but she just barely missed being so. He estimated her height, even on the slanting deck, at possibly four feet and eleven inches, no more. Despite the bulky, woolen clothing she wore, it was apparent that she was slim and well-proportioned for her height. A heart-shaped face with pointed chin, a regular, though somewhat long nose, held eyes dark as the surrounding sea and full lips that were half-parted at the moment. A desire to kiss her roared through his mind and he had to restrain himself from the urge. Her face, though pale, was olive-skinned and he knew that if he could see her arm, he would see that her complexion was the same all over. Chestnut hair was pulled back in a severe bun and topped with a ridiculous, little maid’s cap.

  Her eyes widened as he looked into them and he saw a puzzled recognition in them. He wondered if she also dreamt of him. She shook herself, or maybe it was the cold that made her shiver, and she grasped his arm with one hand while steadying herself with the other at the rail.

  She babbled, "Mr. Pettigrew told me to wait in the cabin. I waited and waited, but no one came to take me to a lifeboat. I heard others running down the corridor and dressed in my warmest clothes and came up on deck. I saw Mr. Pettigrew hiding in the boat with his family! The crewmen said only women and children were being loaded, but Mr. Pettigrew had a shawl over his head and pretended to be a woman! I’m sure he took the place in the lifeboat that should have been mine!"

  Outraged that any man would shirk his responsibility and show such cowardice, he grasped her hand and began pulling her up the inclined deck to where another lifeboat was being loaded. There were fewer women and children clustered around it and a fistfight broke out among several of the men until a ship’s officer fired a pistol into the air. The shot quieted most of the tumult, but it was still difficult to hear anything. He could hear the officer shouting but could only make out a few of the words.

  "…omen and children! You lot stand back! I’ll…you don’t!"

  The crowd of men was too great for him to force a way through them for the girl and in desperation, he clutched at a life-jacket that slid down the deck almost at his feet. Pushing the girl against the rail, he wrapped a leg around an upright and braced her against his body as he helped her into the life-jacket. Once he had the cords tied, he cast about for something, anything that would float. His eyes fell on a life-preserver that hung on the rail and he handed it to the girl. Clutching it to her, she looked up at him with that same expression of near recognition that he had noted earlier and he heard her thanks clearly.

  "Bless you, sir. I don’t know what I can ever do to repay your kindness. I’ll pray for you, sir."

  It was apparent that she was of that class of women who took positions with wealthy people, caring for their children, working as maids, doing all the drudge-work of the household. For her loyalty, her employer had left her to drown in the cabin rather than give up a place in the lifeboat. His own wife’s maid sat in the same lifeboat he had fought to get them onto. Perhaps he had been stupid, but at least he knew he could meet his maker with a clear conscience. At least he could if he could find a way off the sinking liner for this girl.

  He looked over the rail, estimating the height in case he had to force her to jump and knew that would be a death sentence for her. The water was filled with struggling bodies and flotsam of all sorts. Looking down toward the bow of the ship, he saw the water boiling upward and knew that they would both be inundated in a few minutes. Just then, a small group of men brought a raft with collapsible canvas sides around a corner from somewhere and made their way to the rail.

  Scrambling up the incline with the girl in tow, he reached the men just as they were about to toss the raft over the side. Crying out in frustration, he braced a foot against a stanchion and grasped the girl around the waist with both hands. Swinging her bodily through the air, he tossed her into the raft just as it left the men’s hands and watched both disappear over the side. He was knocked off his feet in the general scramble as many of the people near the rail rushed over the side after the raft. When he regained his feet, he clawed his way back to the rail and looked over it in search of the girl. For a wonder, the raft rode upright on the water and people were clambering into it. The girl sat in the middle of the raft, the white oval of her face upturned toward him as her hands lifted upward as though to catch him. It wasn’t so very far to the water now and he felt that he might be able to dive over the side and miss the struggling mass of bodies if he was careful.

  As he prepared to climb the rail, the great ship lurched downward, jarring his grip loose and sending him in a heap toward the superstructure. Crying out, he scrambled back to the rail but found the water rushing up toward his knees as he reached it and the ship settled quickly into the water. He was lost among the debris and struggling bodies and was pulled down by the terrible suction caused by the sinking ship. The water was so cold it took away what breath he had left and long before his clawing hands reached the surface, he felt his mind and body shutting down from the cold and the lack of air.

  * * *

  It was so cold in the house that he dressed as warmly as he would have for the outdoors. There was no money for coal and while he had chopped down the few trees in the y
ard for firewood, he had been forced to sell most of it for food. Martinson had succeeded in forcing the Board of Regents to dismiss him from the University the year before and he had run out of anything to sell to support himself. A teaching job had been offered the previous spring, but as soon as Martinson learned of it, he had written the school board of the small town and persuaded them not to hire him.

  Now, the last of the food was gone. As well as Patricia. She had left him during the summer and he had seen her on Martinson’s arm one day on the street in front of Martinson’s bank. She had filed for a bill of divorcement and while it had been granted, she was causing a scandal by taking up with Martinson before a decent amount of time had elapsed. He shook his head as he thought of how she had become lost to decency because of Martinson’s money. But no, it wasn’t enough for him to have lost his position at the university, as well as his wife. Martinson also wanted to force him to sell his home to him.

  Rowbridge House had been here since before the Revolution and a member of his family had lived here since its construction. Though he had been unable to perform much in the way of maintenance for the past year, it was still an imposing and elegant home. He was sure that Martinson had embezzled money from his family’s account but couldn’t prove it. As the balance in the account had dwindled, he had sold off all his property in town and even been forced to sell some of the furnishings. No one would hire him and while he never despaired, he had been forced to cut back on his charitable works. One thing he had never stopped doing was giving what little money he was left with to the local school for their less fortunate students. That had been the last straw for Patricia. She had slammed out of the house with curses on her pretty lips and he had never seen her again except in divorce court.

  He had been painted as a profligate and the judge, an old family friend, had stopped short of awarding her Rowbridge House. That had been the only bright spot in the whole business and he had despaired of ever regaining what he had lost. Many times, he had thought of chucking it all and hanging himself from the rafters of the attic, but had held out one last hope. He was sure that God would reward him for having done the best he could in helping those less fortunate than himself. But this last blow had been the worst.