Apart from the company of his younger brother, Donny felt very much alone laying there on his too-small bed as he whiled away the days. Max spent time with Donny whenever he could and managed to muddle his way through the first year of high school. Over half a year passed from the day of the attack as Donny recuperated slowly and he decided to celebrate his eighteenth birthday by officially dropping out of high school. The same day he intended to collect his leaving certificate, was the first day he felt strong enough to venture out of the house and exercise his thin legs with a walk to the high school to complete formalities. He felt strange as he stepped out onto the veranda, closing the front door behind him. He wondered why he felt so numb and why the sun’s rays held no warmth against his pale skin. As he walked, he felt as if he was in a dream; he could see everything clearly, but could feel no pressure on his shoed feet as he made his way down the street. He could see the trees moving gently with the warm breeze, but could not feel anything against his flesh. Donny figured his head injury must be responsible for his lack of sensory perception. Despite his attempts at logical thought, a gnawing tremor of an idea began to grind away at the back of his brain. Then he saw them.
There were only three of them this time, the main thugs who had bashed him so viciously. Pitz, Kerrit and Poggin, sauntering down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, spitting and cursing at everything in their uniform black muscle-shirts, exposing their scrawny arms and crude tattoos, lighting cigarette butts with cigarette butts. Donny stopped dead in his tracks and started shaking. They continued to walk, unaware of the pale figure staring at them from across the street. The bloody assault came flooding back to Donny and the emotion he had felt in the hospital resurfaced, leaving him reeling as he stood there twitching with rage as he watched the three thugs until they disappeared in the distance.
Donny, still trembling with rage, turned and walked back in the direction of his house. The sun dipped behind a mass of dark cloud and the day took on a dull saturated shade of grey. His vision began to swim as his thoughts tumbled through his brain like an avalanche. Donny held his breath as he looked down. He could not compute what he saw below where he now stood. He was no longer on the sidewalk but had strayed off course into the front of an unkempt yard. From his stomach protruded the rusty white lid of an old letterbox! He stood frozen to the spot, not feeling anything except the same perpetual numbness he’d experienced since waking. He lowered a shaking hand to the top of the letterbox and choked back a scream as his hand passed through the seemingly solid object. He stumbled backward, the letterbox appearing to extrude itself from his midriff, as he frantically felt for a wound and an explanation of what it was he had just experienced. Donny looked around to see if anyone else had seen what happened.
Everything else looked the same as it always had. The long wide street filled with potholes and lined with half-dead trees was deserted. Although he could not see any other people, outside of every second house there was a wreck of a car up on blocks and an enraged dog straining against a chain in the front yard. He felt panic grip him as he continued toward home; the sense that his existence had been compromised overwhelmed him temporarily.
Donny tried to think about something else as he continued to walk the final steps toward the house. He had been born here in the neighbourhood and had lived all his young life in the slim two-story house that he now stood before. The paint had long since peeled away from the cheap clapboard exterior and the timber window frames appeared to be the only thing keeping the walls from falling. The growing realization that things were still not quite right encompassed Donny’s mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened to him. The world had taken on a strange and surreal quality, time seemed irrelevant and the very laws of physics seemed to bend before his eyes.
He slowly mounted the old timber steps, expecting to hear the creak of his weight, but no sound was forthcoming as he reached the veranda and entered the house through the open front door. He looked into the small living room; nothing stirred, except the threadbare curtains lazily swelling with the warm afternoon breeze coming in through the open window. Donny retreated from the front door and made his way across the deck and down the stairs and then along the small path that ran up the side of the house. The sky had grown dark in a seemingly short space of time and now the air around him swelled with the night. He noted that he had no trouble finding his way in the dark – his vision was as clear as the day, although everything had a strange ethereal glow, much like the yellow aura that had accompanied his mother’s nightly visitations. He entered the back yard underneath the archway choked with climbing black roses and looked across the unkempt lawn.
The back fence was shaded with a layer of green moss that thrived on the damp shadows cast by the row of sycamore trees during the day. The yard looked the same now but different; it seemed older somehow in the dark. Donny noted another aspect that had changed imperceptibly: the lack of colour replaced by muted tones of grey was apparent everywhere, even under the cover of darkness. The grass was long, almost hip-height in some places, while the trees were fuller and taller. The rear of the house was as tired as the front, with paint peeling off the weatherboards like flaky sunburn.
Donny saw something move in the shadows beneath the trees along the fence. He heard his name clearly – “Donald.”
“Donald, come to me . . .” said the unmistakeable voice of his Mother.
Donny’s heart smashed under his ribs, as the pale figure of a woman emerged from behind the trunk of one of the old trees.
“Come closer Donald. Come see where I live now.”
The figure before Donny was dressed in a night robe very similar to the one his mother used to wear around the house. Apart from in his nightmares, the last time he had seen it was when his father had burnt a pile of things in the backyard a while back. Clothes, carpet, furniture, books, mattress . . .
When he asked him why he was burning Mother’s belongings, his father had looked down at his son and smiled.
“There’s no sense hanging onto the past boy. Your mother’s gone whoring with some man her sister knows and she’s never coming back. I guess you could say that by burning her stuff, I’m insuring she is never coming back.”
Donny’s father pushed his cap back from his furrowed brow and poked at the fire with the rake handle, stirring a rash of embers up into the night sky, a curious sneer on his lips as he stared into the flames.
And now, here was someone who claimed to be his mother, dressed in the same robe he had seen his father burn so many nights ago, motioning for him to follow her into the darkness behind the trees. Donny hesitated before allowing himself to be led by her. She looked just like his mother as she had appeared to him in his nightmares. She had the same white flesh and dark wounds that covered her lithe form and seemed to float as she moved. Her long black hair hung over her face, two black coals burned deep in the dark recesses of her skeletal face. Donny felt strangely at peace; emotionless, and accepting of what and who he saw before him.
He followed her as she turned silently and disappeared behind the trunk of the large sycamore tree. Donny rubbed his eyes as the shadows seemed to darken and swirl behind her form before she appeared to sink beneath the leafy ground in front of him. His vision cleared rapidly as the shadows seemed to lighten around him. Donny stood there, considering what he had just witnessed, before dropping to his knees and sweeping leaves aside with his cold hands. He realized he was crouched in a depression in the earth, roughly about the same length and width as himself.
Donny lent to one side and puked against the fence, wave after wave of nausea causing him to dry heave until he managed to stand, exhausted and disgusted with what he had just realized. At the opposite end of the depression was a deeper hole and in it Donny could see the interior bones of a ribcage. He thought of the pictures he’d seen in his biology textbooks at school and he knew he was looking past the lower ribs into the cavity of the chest beyond. He stepped back
from the lip of the shallow grave and nearly lost his footing as the ground dipped down once again. This time the depression in the earth was the size of a basketball. Donny crouched again and fitfully swept at the cold soil until the facial features of the skeletal cranium were unearthed. He saw the gap between his mother’s front teeth and the shattered partial steel plate embedded in her lower jaw. She had lost those teeth before Donny could remember but he could still clearly envisage her pulling crazy faces at him and trying to scare him with her false teeth out.
He stepped back from the edge of his mother’s grave and lent against the ragged bark of the tree trunk. Trying not to look at his mother’s rotten corpse, Donny stared at the house now shrouded in the cold light of a full moon. A small glow of yellow candlelight flickered on the curtains in Max’s upstairs room. Thoughts raced through Donny’s splintered mind as he shivered with cold and made his way toward the house, through the fog that drifted like smoke across the back yard. As he entered the kitchen door at the rear of the house, he decided that he did indeed now believe in the possible existence of spirits.
He was exhausted as he climbed the stairs to bed, so much so he thought it quite possible that he could sleep forever. As he lay on his small bed on the top blanket, he looked at the shadows on the ceiling. The cold light of the full moon sent elongated shapes dancing across the room as Donny raised an arm in front of him as if a beacon. His stomach flushed with nausea again as he struggled to understand the opacity of his limb, standing erect, held skyward above his prone form.
Donny woke to find Max sitting squarely in the middle of his solar plexus, his small head held in his hands and sobs shaking his thin body. Donny lay still, aware that his brother seemed submerged inside him. Donny raised his head and reached out to touch Max but hesitated as he heard him repeating Donny’s name. Everything Donny had experienced in the past months now merged in the realization that his brother had no idea that he was in the room with him, let alone sitting on him. Max stood up slowly and walked across to the nightstand beside his own bed, he picked up the small photo frame that held a picture of Donny, himself and their mother, and continued to cry. Donny felt compelled to rise and approached his brother intending to give him a comforting hug. He wrapped his arms gently around his brother’s slight shoulders, not surprised when his limbs passed effortlessly through his sibling. Max shuddered visibly and exhaled a deep sigh along with a cloud of icy breath. He turned and looked around the room as if searching for something.
“Donny? Is that you?” he said, his big brown eyes wide with expectation.
Donny yelled at the top of his voice . . .
“It’s me Max – it’s me. I’m right here beside you!”
Max paused briefly before shaking his head and wiping the last tears from his face. He tucked in his school uniform, shouldered Donny’s old school bag, and left the bedroom leaving Donny alone with his thoughts and a new understanding of who and what he was.
Donny tried to remember how long he had been this way. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten or drank anything. He looked down at the grey school uniform and saw the dark stains that covered his torn shirt and shorts. He bent and looked closely at his skinny bare legs and at the dark bruises and cuts that patterned his opaque flesh. He listened carefully and heard the muffled call of a bird outside, followed by the distant bark of a dog. Donny knew that the stillness and quiet of his surroundings was foreign to his old life. The neighbourhood was usually a cacophony of noise; cars racing down the street, dogs barking from the neighbouring houses, music blaring from stereos, sirens and constant road noise from the adjoining freeway that linked the surrounding suburbs. It was too quiet.
He hungered for emotion – anything that would make him feel alive. The only thing he felt was a deep sense of anger in the back of his brain, slowly smouldering like an ember waiting to be ignited. He knew that he was no longer “alive” in the normal sense of the word, but that he was not quite dead as his thoughts and reality attested.
He walked aimlessly around the quiet house, his father nowhere to be seen, thinking constantly about his predicament. He remembered coming home from the hospital after the vicious beating at the hands of the thugs. Or had he? He couldn’t quite remember how he returned home or having ever been ‘released’ from the hospital.
Donny stood in the doorway of his parent’s bedroom and looked at the sparse décor, wondering if his mother had even existed. Beer cans litter the floor around and under his father’s unmade bed, the sheets were brown with filth and he could see small bugs hopping and crawling over the stained linen. He felt nothing, just a hopeless despair as he turned to the window and looked down upon the grey back yard. His father’s legs extended from behind the large trunk of the sycamore and an empty vodka bottle sparkled with the refraction of the mid-morning sunlight, amongst the leaves and hubris beneath the tree. Donny looked down at his father passed out on his mother’s grave and sighed deeply, waiting for the rage or tears to come, but instead feeling no emotion other than a pervading sense of melancholy.
He decided he needed to take a walk, far away from the house that held so few good memories. He felt the need to retrace his steps in order to understand how he’d ended up so very alone. He looked up at the house once more before heading down the dreary street toward his old high school. Before he arrived he heard the school bell rang. Moments later hordes of students exited the grounds in droves, some walking past him – excitedly talking amongst themselves, others looking like zombies with their vacant expressions. Donny instinctively moved to one side, avoiding the students who walked his way but none seemed to notice or acknowledge his presence. As the noise of the departing students dissipated he continued walking, noting the classrooms he used to spend so much time in as he drifted through his old high school. The grounds were barren except for a few kids who were kicking a football around, oblivious to Donny as he made his way across the field.
He stooped as he entered the hole in the fence, his back brushing through the rough-sawn timber as he did so. Donny realized that this structure was no more tangible to him than he was to it and was probably true of all material things now. An inkling of the new power he inhabited creased the dimple in his cheek, as a slight smile involuntarily escaped from his stony features. He stood and looked through the trees toward the dirt track that ran parallel to the tumbling river. As he picked his way through the brambles and the debris of the grove, staccato images started to flash in his brain. He continued to walk toward the track as the smell of blood wafted in his nostrils and settled in the back of his mouth.
He began to hear the laughter of young men and the sound of something being repeatedly beaten. Dull thuds echoed in his brain and the laughter grew louder with every move he made, until he was standing where he had fallen, in the dust and the dirt so long ago. His senses reeling, Donny’s mind verged on implosion as the violent scene played out before him in slow motion detail. His attackers lurched, their limbs pin-wheeling, faces contorted with rage and a manic glee, as they rained kicks and punches down onto the crumpled bleeding body on the ground. The sound was like the roar of a train bearing down on him. Donny’s body hung limp mid-air, weightless, static, as he watched unflinchingly as the three boys proceeded to kick and stomp on his body until his head was a bloody pulp.
He watched them laugh and take turns spitting on his body as they encouraged the other three younger bystanders “to have a go.” Two of the younger boys vomited the remains of their school lunches into the grass beside the track, before they joined their other cohort and ran into the scrub in the direction of the school.
“You better not fucking squeal little pigs,” yelled Poggin, as he lobbed stones into the trees after the younger boys.
“Yeah,” chimed the other two, “you better keep quiet about this or you’ll get a kicking as well.”
Pitz and Kerrit wiped the blood from their school shoes on the long grass as Poggin dragged Donny’s body up the track before
dropping him in a puff of dust. “Come on, you fuckers. Give me a hand with this spastic – he weighs a ton.”
Donny stood watching, a burning rage boiling in his brain. He could feel the crackle of energy spark around him as his primary emotion enveloped his being. He continued to watch every last grim moment of his death as the three dragged his mutilated corpse further off the tracks into the woods.
He followed their trail of blood as they dragged his broken body by the ankles, the remains of his head bouncing along the rough terrain, grey matter and viscous fluids leaking from the shattered skull. He watched them select an area and then obey Poggin’s commands to dig a hole in the dirt. Pitz and Kerrit laboured in the waning light, scratching a large hole with sticks in the dirt as Poggin continued to desecrate Donny’s immobile corpse. They unceremoniously shoved and kicked the body into the shallow grave and covered him with dirt and leaves, finally laying a large felled tree trunk across the top of where he lay buried. The three huffed and puffed, exerted with their efforts to hide their crime and with a final group “high-five” they turned, without looking back, and exited the grove of trees before heading home.
The deathly silence gripped Donny once more, as he stood alone in the woods above the very spot where his body lay buried. The final piece of his memory puzzle had been revealed and now he knew what had happened to him. There was no hospital, no return home, and no eighteenth birthday – he was dead. Dead and buried. Donny felt no desire to return to the house that evening; instead, he lay down on a bed of leaves next to his grave and closed his eyes.
Donny woke to the sound of children at play. He listened carefully as he raised himself up in the woods, hearing the noise of students making their way to school. He felt different somehow, more powerful, almost with a rage to live as he smashed his way through the trees, heading toward the school. He spent the morning searching the school grounds for any sign of Poggin and his crew. He failed to find any of them at the school but he did see Max in his old classroom, sitting at the back in the same desk that he had once sat in.
Four Ghosts Page 8
