by Tim O'Rourke
I shook my head.
“Well, you are going to have to help me and your sisters.” She looked straight at me with her blazing stare and spoke again. “You’re going to have to tell Father Paul that your father beat you, too.”
I couldn’t believe what she was asking of me.
“It is the only way if we’re going to be believed,” she insisted.
I began to cry and shook my head. I didn’t want to be in the room with her.
“Jack, you don’t want your sisters to have to go back to him, do you? Can you imagine what he would do to them?” she whispered.
“But, Mother, it’s wrong, it’s lying!” I pleaded with her.
My mother’s voice turned ever more hostile towards me.
“Don’t you dare tell me what’s right and wrong! I know what would be wrong, if you didn’t stand up for your sisters, that would be wrong!”
I remember just wanting to vanish, to disappear. I slumped forward. She had asked the impossible. But I hated the thought of letting my sisters down, so I agreed.
My mother eased up beside me and placed her arm around my shoulders. She kissed the side of my face. She explained I was correct, it was wrong to tell lies, but there was always an exception to the rule. Saving my sisters was one of those exceptions, and the Elders would forgive me.
“Look, just tell Father Paul your father beat you a few times, that he scared you, was cruel, too.” She whispered in my ear, so it was just our secret.
I felt hot bile claw its way up my throat and into my mouth, where it burned like acid. I tried to think of something that would get her to change her mind.
“I can’t do this,” I howled, wanting this burden to be taken from me. I couldn’t remember my father hurting me – I couldn’t remember him hurting anyone.
I looked at the floor and wished I were someplace else.
“Say your father beat you,” she whispered again.
“What will happen then?” I asked.
“Father Paul will write down what you have said and pass it to his brother, who is tracking your father. It will be put forward as another piece of evidence against him. Then when he is finally caught, he will be imprisoned by the Vampyrus, or worse.” She made it sound so easy, so simple.
“And that’s it? That’s all I have to say?”
“That’s all. I know it’s a terrible thing to ask you to do, but just think of your sisters,” she said, staring back at me.
It was a few nights later, when Father Paul got me on my own with my mother, he looked very serious, his pale face looking long and drawn.
“Your mum says you have something you want to tell me?”
I looked across at my mother and she nodded. “Go on, Jack, it’s okay. Tell him what you told me,” she said.
Father Paul moved his chair next to mine, believing, I suspect, that he was offering me support. With a pen in his hand and a blank piece of paper before him, I opened my mouth and told the lie she had created a few nights before. I felt awful as I told this untruth. I was lying about my real father and lying to my new father. With each word I spoke, I felt I was somehow getting smaller, I was disappearing, and I hated myself.
The only consolation I took from this, the way I justified it, was to tell myself I was saving my mother and two sisters.
As I came to the end of my lie, Father Paul put his arm around me and said, “Thank you, Jack, I know that must have taken a lot of courage. But could you just give me some more detail for my notes?”
“Detail?” I whispered, glancing across at my mother for guidance. She hurriedly obliged.
“You know, Jack. Where did he hit you, and how hard?”
I didn’t want to say where my father had hit me and how hard because he never had. I didn’t want to lie to Father Paul anymore. I hated it and I hated myself.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said, knocking his arm from around my shoulder and standing up. I saw my mother lower her head and look away. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I left the room. Father Paul never mentioned that conversation to me again. No one did. But as I lay in bed that night, my mother came and spoke to me from the doorway of my bedroom.
“I won’t ever ask you for your help again.
You’re useless,” she said, switching off the light and throwing the room into darkness.
Chapter Fifteen
Kiera
“Did you feel you had let your mother down?” I asked, shocked by what he had just told me. Again, I tried to battle with the conflict that I was gradually feeling inside for him. Part of me didn’t want to know his story. I wanted to picture him in my head as the monster who, as an adult, had committed so many crimes; who had ripped the heart from my friend, Murphy. That’s what was keeping me focused on saving my own father and Potter. However, there was another part of me that couldn’t help but feel for him in some way – to see another side of him.
“I felt I had not only let her down and Father Paul, but most of all, my own father,” he said. “But what was I meant to have done? I didn’t want to be responsible for my sisters and my mother to have to return to my father to be beaten and attacked.”
With my arms, shoulders, and chest beginning to stiffen and tighten, I was beginning to find it difficult to breathe. It felt as if someone was standing on my chest. I took several short breaths.
Jack saw this, and said, “Do you want something to eat?”
I knew he wasn’t talking about a sandwich or anything like that. He was talking about the red stuff – my father’s flesh. I slowly shook my head.
“Are you sure?” he said, and he looked at me with some concern on his face.
This time I nodded and drew more breath.
“It’s your choice,” he said, heading back across the room to my father.
With Jack’s back turned to me, I slowly leant forward in my seat and looked at the floor beneath me. The stone that I had been grinding away from my wrists now formed a pile of dust about the size of a tennis ball. I knew that Jack might see this at any time and he would figure out what I was up to. With the chains not so tight where I had been slowly grinding my wrists against them, I found that I had a little more room to move. Careful to keep one eye on Jack, I leant forward as much as my hardening body would allow, and tried to flatten the pile of dust with my boot. My legs felt like dead weights as I slowly tried to brush away the dust.
“What are you doing?” I head Jack suddenly ask.
I lifted my head to find him watching me, as I sat bent double in the chair.
“I’m in pain,” I breathed. “Stomach cramps.”
“You don’t have to be in pain,” he said with a smile, and to see it pushed those images of him as a boy from my head. He had become the monster again.
Good, I thought. I can focus.
“All you have to do is chose, and all of this can be over with. Just like that!” he said, snapping his thumb and forefinger together. Then turning to face my father again, he sunk his fingers into the open wound he had made in my father’s stomach.
He screamed in sudden agony, sitting bolt upright as if receiving an electric shock.
“Stop it!” I screamed, but it came out sounding more like a dry rasp.
My father slumped forward again, moaning and crying out in pain. Jack then licked the black clots of blood from his fingers as if he were sucking on an ice-lolly, his eyes twinkling yellow in the semi-darkness. “Want some?” he asked, smacking his thin, twisted lips together.
If I hadn’t have realised how screwed-up this man was before, I was now truly getting a sense of his utter madness. It was as if reliving the painful memories of his past was making him become more unstable than I originally believed him to be. His moods were changing from ones of sadness, to sudden outbursts of brutality. I needed to get him away from my father and nearer to me.
I needed him to be close for when I was a statue.
“What was it like having no one to turn to, Jack?” I whispere
d, my throat burning now.
He drew his fingers slowly from his mouth, making a popping sound. I could see a clot of blood hanging from his bottom lip, and he armed it away as he considered my question.
“It must have been hard carrying a secret around like that,” I pushed, trying to draw him back towards me and his chair. “Why do you think your mother burdened you with such a lie at such a young age? How old were you? Eleven?
Twelve?”
“Twelve,” he said, standing fixed to the spot next to my father. “She was desperate for my father to be punished for his crimes, I guessed.”
“You’ve said that you had started to view this Blackcoat - Father Paul as some kind of adoptive father,” I breathed. “Didn’t you ever want to tell him?”
“Of course,” he said, slowly coming towards me, as if the mention of the Blackcoat had calmed him again, sent him back into his past.
“I had the chance…later…much later…”
he said thoughtfully, the light in his narrow face fading again. “But by then, things had changed so much…things had grown so dark for all of us… me and him…that I couldn’t tell my new father the truth when the chance came.”
“What happened?” I croaked, knowing that I was cracking up – and fast.
Jack rolled his head back on his scrawny neck and untied the red bandana which was knotted there. Holding it between his long fingers, he twisted it like someone wringing water from a towel. Then, peering at me through the gloom, he said, “Life at home began to resemble something close to normal for me over the next year or so. I wasn’t very bright at school. My only true love was art. I kept myself very much apart from the other kids. My brother Rik – Nik as he was now known, made friends easier than I did. He had been younger than me when we had fled our home to live with the humans, so he probably remembered very little about the caves beyond the fountain. Why would I want to mix with the other kids? I wasn’t one of them.
“I’d spend every moment I had drawing.
It didn’t matter if I couldn’t find a pencil or paper.
I would draw on the schoolyard walls, and the pavement outside our house with pieces of chalk.
It would wash off, right? Not according to my mother…
Chapter Sixteen
Jack
One morning I was in the backyard. The earth had tiny bits of white coloured chalk mixed in with it. I plucked a piece out and began to draw stickmen on the wall with it. My mother had seen me through the window and had come racing out.
“What do you think you are doing?” she shouted.
“I was just…”
“Don’t even bother! I’m not interested in your excuses. How many times have I told you – every time you misbehave, you’re risking your chance of the Elders lifting your curse.”
“I’m sorry…” I started.
“I don’t want to hear it. You’re a sinner and you must repent!” She held out her open hand and waved it at me.
“C’mon, give
me your clothes,” she said.
“What do you mean ‘my clothes’?” I asked her, perplexed.
“You can sit out here naked and pray to the Elders for forgiveness.”
“But Mum, its cold. I’ll freeze!” I begged her.
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you started sinning!” She waved her hand in my direction again. “C’mon, I haven’t got all day to be standing here arguing with you, give me your clothes.”
I couldn’t believe she was telling me to do this. It wasn’t the cold that concerned me. It was taking my clothes off that upset me. I might have been a Lycanthrope on the inside, but on the outside I was like any other adolescent. My body was starting to change. I didn’t want my mother or anyone else to see me naked. I looked up into her face and her eyes had that look – the angry, bright-eyed look, and I knew I would never get her to change her mind. Reluctantly, I removed my clothes and handed them to her.
“Now get on your knees and pray to the Elders,” she said, turning away from me and locking the backyard door behind her. I knelt on the doorstep, bent forward with my arms cradled around me, hiding my body. If my mother had looked out of the window, she would have presumed I was bent forward in prayer, praying for forgiveness. In fact, I knelt there rocking back and forth in the cold, cursing her. I was there for hours, naked and humiliated, until she decided I had repented enough.
These random acts of cruelty my mother showed towards me lessoned after that – for a while, at least. I don’t know why. Father Paul had taken on, albeit a secret, the role of our dad, and I hardly gave much thought to my real father. I was so accustomed to seeing my mother sitting at home with her arm draped around his shoulder, with Nik and me sitting nearby, listening to him as he read, I had mostly forgotten about my real dad.
The only time I did think about him was when my mother took me aside and told me her terrifying tales about him.
My mother always seemed happy and content during these occasions, and I finally realised why the number of times my mother was cruel to me had become less frequent. It was only when Father Paul wasn’t at our home she would be cruel, or what I had started to call ‘strange.’
As he was spending more and more time with us, my mother’s ‘strange’ behaviour towards me became less. I, therefore, had another reason to want him close by. Just when I thought that perhaps my mother’s erratic moods had passed, something happened which sent her into a blind panic.
That Christmas, we had a delivery at our home. It seemed that, despite all the steps my mother had undertaken to hide us from our father, they had failed. It was evening time and we were all at home. We heard a sound at the door and our mother went into the hall. She returned almost instantly holding a sealed envelope. She opened it and read the Christmas card inside and started to tremble.
“He’s found us! Your father has found us!” she cried.
I focused in on my mother as Lorre got up and peered at the Christmas card over her shoulder. They both looked at each other as fear crawled across their faces. I instantly began to feel those fingers grab hold of my stomach again.
Mother crept into the hallway and we all followed.
She went to the front door and placed the side of her head against it. She listened intently for any sound outside. After what seemed like forever, she leant away from the door, and inch by inch, she opened it. We strained to see past her, but there was no one there, only a pile of brightly-wrapped Christmas presents.
Mother edged her way past the presents and gingerly looked up and down the street. On seeing our father wasn’t there, she hurried back to the front door and told us to take the parcels into the house. I helped my brother and sisters carry the packages into the hallway. A wicker basket had also been left on the step. Mother opened it and I could see meat inside. I didn’t understand why, but she left the basket and refused to take it into our home. I remember seeing that basket of food the following day, still sitting on the front step, with blood from the meat running down the garden path.
Once the presents were inside, I noticed that there were tags hanging from the presents.
One of the tags had “Jack” written on it, the other, “Rik.” I was so excited I thought I was going to explode. I could hear the sound of ripping paper and wheeled around to see my mother tearing the wrapping paper from the presents in large strips.
She was in a frenzy, going from one present to the other, removing just enough of the paper to reveal what was inside. I stood with my brother and sisters and watched her. As Mother came to the last few presents, she started to speak, not to us, but to herself.
“You can forget any ideas about keeping these. You’re not having them, they’re from him! ”
she barked.
I looked at all the wonderful items laid bare before us. There was a necklace and brooch each for my sisters. I remembered what had happened with the present my father had sent to me on my ninth birthday, and knew in my heart I would nev
er get any joy from playing with these.
The initial excitement I had felt seeped from me and left me feeling deflated.
A few days before Christmas, I saw Father Paul handing out those presents to the less wealthy Vampyrus children who gathered at his church. We were poor, weren’t we? I wondered.
Besides, they were meant for me, not for them. I watched their happy faces from afar as they took the presents my father had left for me and my brother and sisters, and I hated them. As I stood alone in the snow at the edge of the graveyard which wrapped itself around the church, watching my presents being carried away, I thought of my father. Those parcels he had left hadn’t just been presents, they had been a warning to my mother.
He was letting her know he was close. In a strange way, it scared me and filled me with excitement. I glanced over my shoulder. Was he watching me now? I wondered. He had outwitted the Vampyrus which had tracked him over the last four years. What had he been doing in that time?
Was he really trying to find some way of proving his innocence like my mother had suggested? I had so many questions going around in my head that it hurt. There was one thing I just couldn’t figure out: Why had my father left a basket filled with lumps of raw, bloody meat for my mother?
That just had to be a warning of some kind.
I think she knew that, too. My mother was on edge for weeks after that night. I didn’t believe she could run away again, although I suspected she may have considered the idea. So she returned to what she knew best, feeding our heads, mine in particular, with hideous stories of my father, in the hope I would never want to see him again. Perhaps even lie for her again.
A few weeks later, she invited Kara and me into her bedroom. As I have said, my mother rarely discussed our father at great length when we were all together, and I had always believed she had kept her frightening stories just for me.
On this occasion, I shared with my sister, Kara, the most horrific story I had ever heard. Mother explained, in her usual emotionless tone, that just after Lorre had been born, our father had returned from the human world with a baby. I wanted to ask where he had found the baby, but my mother soon filled in the blanks.
