by A J Grayson
‘It’s the only way,’ I answer. I try to smile, to reassure him it’s okay. The tip of my knife rests at my skin, where it belongs.
‘No, Amber, it isn’t.’ He steps forward, into the water. I look down as it laps up over his shoes and reaches his ankles. ‘Despite everything that’s happened, Amber, this doesn’t have to be the way your story goes.’
The words are sweet, but not believable.
‘I’m sorry, David. You can’t wash away a life, however terrible it may have been. Sorrow is real, awful as it is. It has a right to exist. You can’t just get rid of it on a whim.’
His eyes are orbs, radiating sadness and regret.
‘Amber, I—’
‘But don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I know … I think, at least, that you were trying to help.’
I continue to stare at him. David really is the very sweetest of men. Sweet and a fool. Sweet and so very, very wrong. But his face is as beautiful as it’s ever been. God, I love that stubble around his chin.
Tears form in his eyes.
‘Thank God,’ he sobs, trying to keep his composure. ‘I needed to hear you say that. That you realize I never wanted to hurt you. I’ve tried to save you. Everything I’ve done … I love you, Amber Howell. I tried so hard to rescue you. To help you not repeat my sister’s story. Not to be … to become, Evelyn.’
The tears in his eyes tremble, and burst over their lids. I reach out the hand that isn’t clutching the knife and wipe them away from the sides of his face.
And I am confused, because David’s story is falling apart again. ‘Evelyn?’ I ask. The name is unfamiliar, and so is the context. ‘You don’t have a sister.’ And I almost pity him, now, though I don’t know why. A liar, who can’t stop.
‘I did,’ he answers. A sob. ‘When I was a child. Just a little boy. The most beautiful sister in the world.’
‘Please,’ I take my hand from his face and hold it up between us, ‘no more stories. No more inventions. Just let me deal with the reality of what I’ve done, David.’
‘Amber, you haven’t—’
‘I have to take responsibility,’ I insist. I want him to acknowledge that this is something I must do. ‘I can’t let you be dragged into what I’ve ended up doing.’
‘Amber, you didn’t.’
‘I did!’ The words fly out of my lips. ‘You told me I did!’
A pause, and then …
‘Just the woman, Amber.’ David’s face is strained. He is trying to sound reassuring. ‘Only her. Only Emma. Because she was the one who led you to them. Led you to your pain. You remembered, and you reacted.’
I really don’t want to think about these things any further. It’s too much as it is. But now the story is being tugged at again. The pages are changing, as they seem to do every time David opens his mouth. I struggle to make the pieces fit together.
‘No, David,’ I answer, ‘that’s not what happened. There were men. Silver hair. Fat. Older.’ I feel their flesh. Smell their horrible scent.
‘You didn’t—’
‘Stop it!’ I cry at him. ‘Don’t lie to me now. I can feel them on my breath, David. Their sweat on my skin. It’s real. These aren’t visions! You can’t hide me from what I did.’
‘But you didn’t,’ he persists. ‘You didn’t kill them, Amber. I did.’
David’s words have shut out the singing that nature had provided for the serenity of this final moment. It had come to grips with things. Accepted fate. Been ready to embrace the end that my beginnings demanded.
And then … this.
‘You?’ I can feel my eyes wide, round, radiating the surprise and disbelief that’s swelling up inside me. ‘That’s absurd, David. Damn it, don’t try to trick me! Let me at least acknowledge who and what I really am!
‘I killed them, Amber,’ he repeats. ‘This isn’t a lie. I’m not trying to deceive you. It was me.’
I shake my head. ‘That can’t be right, David. You can say what you want, but I remember it. Them. In my dreams, when I’m awake. Right now, in this moment. Their flesh. The struggles. The pain. My screaming voice.’
The tears flow over my eyes again. There are tears in David’s too.
‘You aren’t remembering killing them, Amber,’ he says. ‘You aren’t remembering anything you did to them at all. You are remembering what they did to you.’
I see their bodies, feel their flesh. The men reek of cigarette smoke and sweat. There is violence in the air, locked into a room that is too small to contain such horror.
‘Stop!’ I cry out, rage and pain in my voice. But it isn’t my voice. It’s the voice of a child. Of the girl I once had been.
‘Get the fuck off me!’
But the men don’t get off. One pins me down while another rips at my clothes. I feel them tearing away from my body. I can barely breathe, something having taken the wind from me.
‘Keep it down, you little brat!’ one of the men shouts. And he leans forward, and I feel his skin, and the sweat of his flesh, and …
And the little girl’s voice, my voice, weeping as the world breaks apart.
70
David
I don’t know if she’ll be able to accept what I’m saying, here in this moment. How can she take another implosion to her world, even if it’s the truth?
But I can’t let her think she’s done all this. She killed Emma, that’s the truth, and her coming to grips with that is going to be a project for the rest of her life. But it was explicable. Understandable. I think that even in a court, the circumstances would be compellingly mitigating. A horrible, painful, emotional reaction to abuse no human should ever have had to endure.
But Amber did not kill her abusers.
That was me, and it’s time I’m as honest with her about that as I’ve been forced to be about the rest.
Three days ago I’d begun fulfilling what fate had been demanding of me since I’d first met Amber in the ward. The plan I’d abandoned for the sake of mercy, really was the merciful one; and it was time to enact it.
It took several hours of driving, but Felton, California was where Emma, all those years ago, had said the first man lived. I remembered my conversation with her vividly – I still do. Felton, and a man called Gerald McEwan.
I knew where I had to go.
The town is about three quarters of the way between San Francisco and Monterey Bay, nestled between steep, forested hill rises. It’s hardly more than a little sprawl of residential neighbourhoods, without much else. The address I’d been able to locate for Gerald McEwan was 9160 Plateau Drive, which the satellite view in Google Maps told me was a slate-roofed house on the right hand of a bend in the street as I drove south. I scanned the house numbers, driving slowly so I could survey everything I saw.
I pulled alongside the kerb opposite the house, once I’d found it, and switched off the engine. Time to finalize just what exactly was coming next – there couldn’t be any delaying.
It was time to bring things to an end.
When I was finished, I opened the front door and crossed the street back to the car. The wooden door behind me was painted red, which seemed fitting.
I don’t remember precisely how the confrontation went. Only that I rang the bell and waited until the man opened the door, and then, a few minutes later, I was inside, standing at the base of a staircase. His body lay in a pool of blood that spread over the tiled landing, its silver hair still beautifully coiffed against his head.
He was motionless, lifeless, and my heart was filled with satisfaction. The ending had begun. Progress that couldn’t be undone.
Bringing it to completion meant there would need to be two more bodies. The two remaining men who had wrought such evil.
They still lived in the same neighbourhood as they had decades ago. Ross Michaels. Ralph Andrews. Such innocuous names for beasts. Emma’s voice rang in my ears as I recalled her giving me all the information she had on the abusers, striving to void herself of the guilt she had carried si
nce her childhood.
The fact that theirs was the same neighbourhood as when she’d known them was something I didn’t realize until I’d tracked them down on the computer, as I had with McEwan, and gone there myself. It was then I realized that the neighbourhood, and the house, matched the description Emma had given of where the abuse actually took place. As I’d driven through the residential streets of the Circle district in Santa Cruz, leading to the corner house my computer had revealed as Andrews’ address, the scenes all around me were strangely, terribly familiar. Emma’s words had been so vivid.
This is where it happened. Where so many lives had been destroyed.
I got out of the car before I reached the address itself and took to my feet. It wasn’t a predetermined plan. Part of me just wanted to empathize – to walk the streets those girls had walked while they were being led to …
Fuck.
I recognized sights Emma had described. The distinctive, circular curvature of the roads in that part of town, the little wrought-iron gate that led through a brickwork fence to the front yard of one of its houses. I ran my fingers along the brick and moss of its surface and thought of the innocent children who had done this before, and what had become of them.
I recognized the house itself, too. I had the address in my pocket, but it wasn’t required. I remembered its description. Its little patch of green out front, and a tree with drooping branches covering almost the whole of the corner patch of yard.
The tree’s trunk was damaged. Scars ran across the bark and wood, remnants of the head-on collision of Emma’s car several years ago. The collision that brought her into the system, that brought her to me, and has ultimately brought me here.
God bless that tree.
Beyond it, the house. Unassuming, like so many others on the street. The greenery in the garden was tended moderately well, nothing bordering on obsessive or fancy, and a mini satellite dish hung out one of the second-storey windows.
The front door was a mirror copy of those all down the street, but I knew there was also a side door, just round the corner, and that this was the real entrance to the house. The one that was actually used.
In the moment, I simply walked up to that little door and knocked. As if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Knocked, right at the gate of hell.
The man who answered looked like I expected. The way a man like that ought to look: the portrait all of humanity carries of a beast. He was fat, with a beer belly protruding over trousers he’d belted up far too tightly around his midriff. The comb-over atop his head was appalling.
‘Are you Andrews?’ I asked without any introduction. The man’s brow lifted. His forehead didn’t require the motion to be wrinkled, his age giving him permanent creases along its surface.
‘I’m Ralph Andrews,’ he answered hesitantly. ‘Who the hell are you?’
I didn’t reply. Rage made it impossible to speak. Instead I simply pushed past him. The door led into the kitchen, and I walked around Ralph Andrews into its bright light.
Another man was sat at the table. Scrawny. Like a wire doll decked out in the thinnest layer of flesh. His skin was pallid, too yellow and too grey at the same time. Bags drooped under both eyes and his face bore the recesses and hollows of chronic illness.
‘Who are you?’ I asked boldly. My demeanour seemed to have them both in shock, but the seated man, clearly uncomfortable, answered.
‘Ross. Ross Michaels.’
And I think I felt pleasure, if that’s the right word. Pleasure that I had both of them in front of me at once. The two remaining links in that horrible chain of suffering, still connected to each other after all this time.
All at once my pleasure was accusation and rage.
‘So the two of you are still fucking friends in arms. Partners in evil, after all these years.’
‘Evil?’ Andrews asked. ‘Listen here, mate, I don’t know who you are or what the holy fuck you think you’re doing here, but this is my house. I could call the cops, you know. I didn’t invite you in.’
‘No, you don’t know who I am.’ I telegraphed all my anger and bitterness at the fat man. ‘But you’ve known someone I love for a long, long time.’
He passed an uncomprehending glance at Michaels, who shrugged his spindly shoulders.
‘You knew my wife.’
More stares.
‘Her name is Amber,’ I continued, ‘and you … brought her here.’
The words had a radical effect on both men. Michaels sat abruptly forward. Andrews took a step back, away from me, and both men’s faces paled, turned towards each other.
‘Ah, so you do remember the past,’ I sneered at them, holding my position. ‘You haven’t completely forgotten.’
‘Please, I’d like it if you would leave my home.’ Ralph Andrews was a ghost, but he motioned me towards the door.
‘I’ll bet you fucking would,’ I answered. ‘Just disappear, like all your little houseguests have done over the years. After you’d finished with them. When your fun was over and you’d beaten and threatened them into silence.’
Neither man answered. I’d thrown their world off balance.
‘Tell me, do you still have your den downstairs? The one with the extra lock on the door? The one you forced them into, when you had them brought here?’
I could smell these men’s fear, like acid wafting in the air, poking at my nostrils. They couldn’t pretend with me. I knew what they’d done.
‘We … we don’t do that any more.’
The abrupt confession came from Michaels’ scrawny form in the chair. He was balding, retirement age like his associate, and nervous sweat balled up on his splotchy scalp.
‘Shut the fuck up, Ross!’ the other man snapped at him. It sounded odd to hear such an old man, who looked like he ought to speak in grandfatherly platitudes, utter profanities like a teenager. ‘Don’t say another goddamned word.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to hide anything from me, Mr Michaels,’ I said. ‘It’s not as if I don’t know perfectly well what went on down there.’
‘You don’t know shit.’
‘I met Emma,’ I said, and he froze. ‘That’s right, I met your bait. I know exactly what you fucking did to my wife.’
‘It’s over!’ Ross Michaels blurted out. ‘We finished all that, years ago.’
‘I said shut up!’ Andrews repeated.
There was something satisfying in seeing them grate at each other this way. I wondered, for a fraction of an instant, what their lives had been like since Amber was last here. I didn’t believe for a second that they’d given up their abuse. Monsters stay monsters. But they’d also grown older. Had they tried for normalcy? Retirement parties and lecture cruises with their wives? Cups of coffee in the kitchen that was the gateway to all their evil, like none of it had never taken place at all?
Then I appear, and they’re biting at each other, all that charade vanished, and all at once.
I might have been smiling.
I turned to face Michaels in the chair. ‘I don’t give a fuck what you’ve stopped. A killer might stop killing, but that doesn’t give him a pass for what he’s done.’
‘We never killed anyone!’ Andrews answered for his collaborator, seemingly appalled by the accusation. ‘We were never even violent.’
‘Never violent?’ My smile vanished. Rage took its place. ‘That’s all you were! You beat those kids before you fucked them!’
‘We only did what we had to do to keep them quiet. Our aim was never to hurt them. Not really.’
I couldn’t believe I was hearing the words. The self-justifying, reality-denying nonsense of a monster trying to downplay his monstrosities. My vision started to wobble, and my peripheral sight was fading.
‘What you did … it was worse than violence!’
‘We never—’
‘It was worse than killing! Do you know what those girls became? The lives you condemned them to, of emptiness, shells of themselves? Do you know th
e agony you drove into their souls?’
The tears in my eyes were hot.
‘Look man, I don’t know who you are but—’
‘My name is David.’ I spat at the two men. ‘My wife was Amber Jackson, when you knew her. And she was the most beautiful creature I have ever known.’ I had no intention of letting them know I’d worked to rescue her. Let them feel guilt and shame and nothing else.
There was nothing more to say. Michaels was faint, weak in his seat. Andrews breathed heavily. The knuckles of my clenched fists were pure white.
‘I’m, I’m sorry …’ The words fell out of Andrews’ mouth, and they were the final straw.
Sorry would never be good enough.
I was no longer filled with the explosive fire of rage. It disappeared instantaneously, as he offered that final, unjustifiable, unearthly statement. It was replaced by a stolid, sturdy sense of inevitability. Of course men like this are as sinister in their old age as they were in their middling years. Of course evil doesn’t fade. It just takes on a new face and pretends the past is a slate that can be wiped clean and forgotten.
There was only one way to deal with it.
My eyes didn’t have to scan the room long before I saw what I needed. They’d made it easy for me, really, having a collection of matching kitchen knives hanging from metal strips on the wall above the counter. They were barely more than a foot or two from my position. Like this had always been meant to be.
It seemed, at that moment, as if Andrews was speaking again; like there were words coming from his direction. Probably more denials. More self-justifying crap. But I didn’t really hear it. Instead, I turned towards the door, a knife in each hand, and lunged towards the monsters as the whole earth sang out for redemption.
71
Amber
Reality is slipping away, here with my ankles in the water. David’s words are meant to comfort me, I think, but I am beyond comfort. And yet, though they’re void of comfort, somehow I sense these words are true. Perhaps the first true words he’s ever said to me.
