Poison in the Well

by Chris Tetreault-Blay

  ‘I couldn’t always be where I needed to be,’ he said flatly, coldly. ‘Besides there was nothing I could have done for him.’

  The words hurt. If I could have located him at that moment, without hesitation I would have swung at him. ‘You put him there!’ I yelled, the power in my voice surprising even myself, amplified by the thickened silence.

  ‘I did not,’ came the reply, again without feeling. ‘Everything your father did after I met him was by his own doing. I warned him, but his quest for the truth was too great for him to listen.’

  I let out a half-sigh, half-laugh of my own. I felt the corner of my mouth curl up into a brief but angry smile, against my will. To make matters worse, I had no retort. The man’s stillness made it even harder for me to locate him then, and I felt so disoriented that I couldn’t tell how close I was to the light switch anymore. My head started pounding, telling me that only the darkness would keep my impending migraine at bay.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked, my voice close to breaking.

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘How did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping my eye on you too, my boy. Just like I promised your father I would.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘Whatever you promised him means nothing anymore. I don’t need you.’

  I moved to walk past him, but was knocked stumbling back as my shoulder collided with his. My weakened state left me no match for his frame. Thankfully, my father’s trusty armchair was there to catch me, breaking my fall. I felt the Caretaker’s cool, sweatless palm grip my arm momentarily.

  ‘Take it easy,’ he said. ‘You need rest. And a decent meal.’

  ‘And I suppose you can offer me both, huh?’ I sneered, wincing as I gripped my side. My old wound pulled at the stitches, but I felt no fresh blood. A few deep breaths later, the pain started to subside. ‘Relax, I’m fine,’ I assured him.

  ‘Sit there,’ he told me firmly, ‘I will get you some water.’

  I listened to his footsteps as he left the room, heard them click lightly on the stone floor of the kitchen. He returned a few moments later, placing a cool glass in my hand. It felt good, great even. I downed the chilled water in one, spluttering as I struggled for breath afterwards. The wound in my side throbbed some more. The Caretaker walked back to the kitchen and returned with another glass, this one with a more-than-generous helping of whiskey.

  ‘Any chance of a light?’ I asked.

  ‘Smoking is bad for you,’ he said simply.

  I had to smile to myself; what I knew of this man from before would never have led me to believe he had any concept of humour. Owing to his emotionless voice, the delivery of his quip reminded of my favourite comedians, those who made the jokes all the funnier by telling them with a wry dryness and no smile. Genius, I used to think it was. I had, of course, been referring to him finding the elusive light switch.

  ‘Funny,’ I replied. ‘Do they hire you out on Saturday nights at all? I know some people that could use a laugh that I imagine only you could give them.’

  There was no reply.

  ‘Tell me, do you always remain in darkness? Or does it just follow you around like a bad smell?’

  ‘We need it to survive,’ he said as he leant forward to peer out of the window. The feint moonlight illuminated his face at last. He hadn’t changed at all from the last time I had seen him. Maybe more hairs at the corner of his beard had greyed over the years, but it suited him. Against the backdrop of his dark skin, the ageing of his facial hair and at his temples shone more like silver. His face turned to me as he spoke again. ‘Your father knew that only too well,’ he said.

  The mention of him again made my chest burn, ache. Now able to look directly at his face, I ensured I held his unwavering stare as I replied, ‘And that’s exactly what killed him.’

  INTERLUDE

  O Father, Where Art Thou?

  As I have already mentioned, I have been blessed – or cursed – with an abnormally acute memory system. I can remember my first hours in this skin, and I could write possibly recall at least one event from ninety-nine percent of my days so far. But memories of my father actually being like a normal dad are less common.

  For my fourth birthday, he bought me my first bike. It was red, with a cartoon monster faceplate sitting on the front between the handlebars. We celebrated the day, just the two of us, tucked away in the cabin that served as our home at the time. Surrounded by a vast and silent forest, I should have been in heaven. After our meal of baked bean chilli – one of his few culinary masterpieces – he brought out the cake. He had tried to decorate it himself and it showed. One half of Thomas the Tank Engine’s face had started to slide south, giving the impression that he had been inflicted with Bell’s palsy. The cake itself was dense and dry, but I loved it because he had tried. He was trying to be the dad that he so desperately wanted, and that he constantly told me that I deserved.

  I never hated him for being absent, because physically he wasn’t. Until I turned eleven, I was never away from him. But his job kept us from being the family that we should have been.

  But it was more than a job. It consumed him. It was near impossible for me to ever explain to any of the scattered people that I ever met what my father did for work. For so many years I simply didn’t know. The only thing I knew was that I had to absorb any day – any moment – when we were stationery, with any hint of settling somewhere, because before I knew it we would be running again.

  It was the same old story. In the dead of night, my father would wake me and carry my sleeping body to the car. He would be frighteningly calm. Our bags would already be packed, stored away in the corner of his room or in his wardrobe if our current abode afforded it. He always knew that wherever we ended up, it wouldn’t be permanent.

  On a few occasions, we were followed. I remember peering out of the back window of his speeding saloon car once – I can’t recall which model it was exactly, as he often ditched whatever vehicle we had shortly before we found our new residence – hearing the mad roar of the black car’s engine as it sped towards us, its headlights dazzling me. My father was a deft navigator, however, and knew where pretty much every overgrown lane would take us, always managing to throw our assailants off course.

  But it wouldn’t last forever.

  That’s why my fourth birthday always stuck with me; it was the first time I realised that the life we had was far from the one that my father wanted for us. He was simply doing what he had to do. But as the years wore on, the less I felt I knew him. It wasn’t that I felt more distant from him; as I say, he wasn’t exactly an absent father. I just became more aware of the fact that I didn’t actually know who he was.

  I was never enrolled in school. I hardly ever made friends. Even those I did get even remotely close to would quickly disappear from the scene. I never saw them or heard from them again. We often moved miles away shortly after, with no explanation to me why or where we were headed.

  I guess as a kid, I never needed to know too much. I just accepted that that was my life, and thought I was no different to anyone else. It was as if my father did everything to protect me from what was considered normal. He shunned society, for a reason that was unbeknownst to me for my entire childhood. The way he reacted when other people were around, when anyone from what he considered to be the ‘outside world’ stumbled into our – his – little bubble, was just plain scary to a child.

  In the end I found a way to block it all out. I began to wonder whether we were two of only a handful of people in the world. Of course, some familiar faces did come and go sporadically, one of them being the man known as The Caretaker, the dark stranger that was waiting for me that night upon my return to Spinwood. I hardly ever saw my father talk to these people, for when they arrived they would disappear into his office. No matter how small the homes that we occupied over the years, my father always ensured he had a space of his own, dedicated to his work. I was never allowed
in there. Whenever I asked questions about his office, or his work, he would simply tell me that I didn’t need to know. Or that he would tell me one day, when I was old enough to understand.

  He never did.

  When I was eleven-years-old, I started to see my father less and less. He travelled abroad more and, unlike the early years when he would take me everywhere – to places that to a wide-eyed impressionable child looked like something out of a fairy tale or comic book – he left me behind. I would be sent to a stately home somewhere in the heart of the country – I never really knew where it was, despite my efforts in my later teenage years – for my schooling, mainly. The place resembled a boarding school, except for the fact that I was the only student. The same teacher took me through each of my lessons; a crone-like old lady called Mrs Stepson. Her grey hair pulled tight into a bun, pulling at her temples so that the corners of her eyes narrowed, making her look suspicious of my every move. A thin pair of spectacles rested on the edge of a hooked nose. Her blouse was buttoned up to her chin, making it look as though she had no neck. And she was ever-so-tall.

  She scared me. But I knew that my education was massively important to my father. Otherwise, why would he have gone through the trouble and obvious expense to send me to that place? Whatever reasoning or plan behind it, it worked. I left there a few months after my sixteenth birthday. I may not have had official certificates to display my intelligence, as I could not sit the academically-recognised exams, but they told me how well I had done and I believed them.

  I could feel the difference having received their kind of education too. When I saw my father again, my mind was ablaze with questions. Not just aimed at him and what he had been doing, but about everything I had learnt. I wanted to know more about the world – the world that he had tried to hide from me.

  The only problem was, each time I saw him after that – sometimes months at a time in between – he would tell me less and less. He still didn’t talk about his work, where he had been, what he had seen. He didn’t even say he loved me. And that was when it really hit me; I had never heard him say that. I couldn’t even remember him giving me a cuddle when I cried or felt scared. Any affection or assurance he ever offered me was from a distance.

  I had no idea what the touch of another human being felt like. The only ones who had ever shown me anything like that – even just a quick shake of my hand – were those who left my life just as suddenly as they had arrived.

  I should have hated him, but I couldn’t. How could I when I wasn’t even sure if I had been given the chance to truly love him?

  But this was the hand that fate had dealt me, clearly. I had so very little of what could be considered a normal life for me to be able to feel bitter about what I didn’t have. But now, as I think about it, I realise that I have even less.

  My father died almost a month ago, on September 10th 2030. I have no idea how, or even where. We said goodbye for the last time in very much the same manner as we always had whenever he left for another job; in awkward silence. I remember sitting in the same front room that I now sat in darkness with The Caretaker. My father was sat in his armchair, his feet elevated on the dusty antique stool, its tight leather coat unblemished as it held his weight effortlessly. We both sat with an emptying glass in our hands, both knowing we had probably had one too many, neither feeling as though it were enough.

  I like to think that maybe, somewhere deep down inside, we both knew it was to be the last time. Neither of us wanted to spoil the air with careless or trivial words. I watched him take the last swig of whiskey from his glass, and then gently placing it on the occasional table next to him. He stood, looked at me and waited. I stood, wanting this to finally be the moment that he would embrace me, even just taking a hold of my hand.

  I stood. I waited. It never came.

  He nodded silently at me as if to say ‘see you soon’, but possibly not believing he would mean it, and so didn’t. I nodded back, my heart racing, aching. My mind ablaze with so many things I wanted – needed – to say to him, to ask of him, before he left. But the words never came. I watched him leave and then within moments I felt suffocated within that house, my eyes throbbing with the din of silence.

  But I couldn’t leave. Not that night. I surrounded myself with every small memory I dredged from the walls of the cottage at Spinwood, and sank a few more glasses of whiskey until the bottle was empty, deciding that it was what my father would have wanted or expected of me.

  I bravely took a seat in his beloved chair, letting the dizziness from the alcohol take hold. My eyes grew heavy, tiredness suddenly wrapping its warm arms around me. I gave in to it. The dreams I had that night still haunt me now. It was the first time that I dreamt of the dying red world, the scorched earth beneath my feet, the swirling shadowy figures floating together to become one.

  And then the phantom. The huge, grotesque silhouette that made fear ring in my ears, grinding at my bones beneath my crackling skin. I watched as he came towards me. I was powerless, just as I have been every night since that he has found his way into my sleepy mind.

  Something threw me violently from my slumber in the early hours of the morning. I woke up struggling for breath, realising I was still clutching the whiskey glass. The sun had started to creep above a band of thick white cloud, blinding one of my eyes as I drew the net curtain back across the window beside me.

  I could feel he was there at that moment but didn’t see him at first. And then he spoke. The Caretaker was there with me, just as he was now. He told me my father was dead. But after that I didn’t hear a word. All I could hear was the rumbling all around me as my entire world fell to the ground.

  My father’s name was Dean Morden. You may have heard part of his story. Now you will listen to mine.

  Chapter Five

  ‘You never even told me how he died. Or where,’ I said, finally breaking the silence. The glass in my hand felt weightless, a sign that I needed more. The way my head pounded told me I didn’t.

  The painful silence had lasted for hours, or so it felt. In reality it was probably only ten minutes, but long enough for everything to surge to the surface once more.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ The Caretaker replied. I scoffed, the boozy haze making his words sound all the more incredulous.

  ‘I didn’t think I had to!’ I raged. ‘You owed me that much. You took him from me and you gave me nothing back in return.’

  ‘It wasn’t my place to. Maybe the real reason you never asked is that you never wanted to know.’

  His words were like a knife scraping against one of my bones, deep beneath my flesh. They hurt. But I had neither the strength nor the desire to argue right then. I simply wanted another drink, something to blot out the memories once more. Something my dad was good at was teaching me how to run away from things.

  ‘I want to know now,’ I said through clenched teeth, with my dazed, wide-eyed stare fixed on the floor.

  ‘That’s why I am here,’ The Caretaker said, exhaling loudly as he stood up. He leant towards the window between us and peered through the curtain for what must have been the hundredth time already that night. ‘You father knew that this day would come, even if he didn’t know when.’ Satisfied that whatever he was searching for outside wasn’t there, he stood to full height in front of me again. The dark man reached inside his trench-coat and brought out a small padded envelope, its edges and corners creased and darkened. ‘He wanted me to give you this when he was no longer with you.’

  He handed me the envelope, and I could only stare at it dumbly as I took it from him with a trembling hands. My vision blurred and my eyes stung as they filled with tears, when I looked at the writing on the outside. It was a script I knew only too well, in every birthday and Christmas card.

  There it was. In my father’s elegant handwriting was my name, the moniker he gave me and which – until that moment – I could never recognise as my own.

  Zero.

  ‘I still have much to tell yo
u,’ The Caretaker announced, ‘but so does he. You need time to digest what is inside this, but unfortunately that is a luxury which we are both running out of.’

  I looked up at him, confused. I had no idea what he meant, but suddenly I felt a cold weight in my gut. Dread. Fear, once more.

  ‘They’ve tasked me with something that I cannot fail for them, for it will be my last. But it is something that I will refuse to do, therefore I have already accepted my fate. But by God, I will ensure that you reach yours.’

  Although his words sounded threatening, they strangely comforted me. I knew he was here to protect me from something, and maybe at his own expense. But I was too confused with everything that had taken place in the last minute, let alone still trying to piece together the days – weeks - I had already lost. I couldn’t possibly cope with whatever the Caretaker was trying to warn me of now.

  ‘Stay here. Read through this,’ he said, pointing at the envelope, ‘and do as he tells you. You are safe here for another forty-eight hours, but no more. I will return in thirty-six.’

  He was at the rear door, through the kitchen, before I was able to look up. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he looked back at me quickly, before he too was gone.

  And I was alone again. But this time, as I looked down at the package in my hand, I felt my father there with me again. Heeding The Caretaker’s advice, I wasted no more time and tore at the top of the envelope. Inside was a letter and, tucked so tightly in the very bottom corner that I almost missed it, a ring holding two simple unmarked keys.

  I made a quick trip to the kitchen, poured myself another large measure of whiskey but decided this time to water it down. My head was pounding already. I then settled into my father’s chair once more, unfolded the letter and started to read.

  Seeing his handwriting again, within the first few lines I found I could hardly breathe.