by Greg Chapman
Matthew blinked tears from his eyes and wished his father would drive the truck into a tree, or an oncoming car, until he remembered that life wasn’t fair, his father couldn’t help being a selfish jerk; after all, his daddy had raised him that way. Still, Matthew was telling the truth, and no amount of physical or verbal assault from his father was going to change that fact. He’d simply wait until his father realised that.
As Max raved on about the ass-whipping he’d give to Zac when he found him, Matt looked out the window at the darkened neighbourhood. The boy was amazed at how eager people were to remain ignorant of their fear. They were lucky; they could just switch on the television or stare at Facebook and ignore all the bad things going on in the world outside. But to Matthew, fear was like a bug burrowing under his skin or a splinter that just wouldn’t come free no matter how much you picked at it.
Until today, he’d never felt the fear so keenly. The Kemper House was to blame, and he knew it. The dead body was the start of something evil. If any good was to come from driving around with his father in the middle of the night, it would be because he was away from that house’s influence. Guilt began to assuage him. By getting away from the house, was he leaving Zac to his fate?
Matt guessed early on that Zac had gone over the fence to get a look at the house next door, and no amount of pleading would have gotten his brother to change his mind. He was more like Max than he realised. Now though, Matt was willingly abandoning him. Should he tell his father what Zac had done? Should he tell him in order to save him?
His arm seared with a jolt of pain. He turned to see his father, red-faced and recoiling his fist.
“Did that get your attention you little shit?”
Matt clutched his throbbing shoulder.
“Are you listening to me, boy?” Max said through gritted teeth. “I said this is your last chance to tell me where your brother is!”
The pain of his father’s blow radiated toward his elbow. The nerve-endings jerked in shock. “You can hit me all you want. It’s not going to change the fact that I don’t know where he is!”
Max punched Matt’s shoulder again, in the exact spot as before.
Matt swallowed down the pain.
The whoop of a police siren halted any further onslaught.
“What the hell?” Max pulled to the side of the road.
Matthew watched as two officers stepped out of their cruiser and approached his father’s truck. The one closest to the driver’s side shone a flashlight in his father’s face.
“Is everything all right here, sir?”
Max’s demeanour shifted to something more cheerful. “Hey officer, sure everything’s fine here.”
The other officer gave Matthew a look of concern. “We saw a commotion inside the vehicle.”
“Looked like you were striking the boy,” the officer with the flashlight added.
Max chuckled. “What? No, I was just giving my son’s ear a tweak, you know? The little scamp won’t tell me where his brother’s hiding. You know what boys are like.”
The officer next to Matthew leaned in. “Is that true, son?”
Matthew never heard the officer. His eyes were locked on a shadow standing on the sidewalk, just a few yards from where they were parked. The figure was watching them. Matthew could barely discern the figure’s features in the blue-black night, but he knew who it was. His brother Zac was a statue of darkness, standing vigil.
“Son?” The officer said again.
“Don’t mind him officer,” Max said. “I just put the wind up him, is all.”
“You do know there’s a heavy police presence in the neighbourhood, sir?” the torch-bearing officer said. “Given the recent incident up the street?”
Max chuckled once more. “Do I know about that? Hell, yes I do. The place where you guys found the body was right next door to me.”
Matthew wanted the police to disappear and for his father to take him back home. He felt a rivulet of sweat crawling down his back to his briefs. The silhouette of his brother Zac moved slowly, raising its finger to its lips.
It’ll be our little secret.
“Dad, can we just go home, please?” Matthew heard himself say.
“Son, is everything all right?”
Matthew recoiled and looked at the officer who’d spoken to him. When he turned back to the sidewalk, his brother’s shadow was gone. “Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. “Dad’s right, I was just being stubborn.” He looked to his father, who was squinting at him curiously.
“You should all get on home,” the officer with the flashlight said.
Max gripped the wheel. “Yeah, you’re right, and I’m sure Zac’s back at home now with his mother.”
“I’m sure he is,” the officer said. “Drive safe now.”
The officers went back to their cruiser and drove past them out of Blake Street. Max put the truck in drive and did a U-turn to head back home. He never spoke a word to his son, but his last words to the policeman gouged into Matthew’s mind, and he prayed that his father wasn’t right.
Chapter Seven
Amy found solitude in her bedroom. She locked herself away, a butterfly inside a chrysalis of sorrow. Her mother and brother had become thorns in the skin of her psyche and she had to be free of them, if only for a short while.
She lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Remembrances of her session with Dr. Ruskin circled in her mind like vultures. She didn’t tell her mother what had happened, and had retreated to the safety of her own four walls. Still, Amy knew that in time, her mother would figure out something was amiss and come knocking with her prying questions.
Everyone wanted a piece of her; everyone wanted her to be normal, but Amy didn’t believe she ever would be. Being an introvert and disconnected was part of her, like the colour of her eyes and the shape of her lips. She would always be frail and afraid, until the day she died. She caressed the thin scars at her neck, raised nodes of damaged flesh. Friction burns from the day she’d almost become nothing. If only her mother hadn’t come home early. If only she’d locked her bedroom. If only. Thoughts of suicide, although no longer so intense, still lingered like the taste of blood on her tongue. She needed to be free, and she no longer wanted to fail at setting herself free. If she was to attempt suicide again, it had to be perfect.
Cool air coming through the window touched her cheeks and she was surprised to find she’d been crying. She reached up, touched the wetness there, and gazed at it glistening on her fingertips. Before she knew it, she was sobbing. Not from sadness, but rather self-pity.
Amy’s phone twittered the tone of an incoming message. She sat up on the bed and reached for her bag, eyes narrowed in confusion. She thought her phone was no longer working. She groped around inside the bag and retrieved the only creature comfort she’d ever really revelled in. When Amy pressed the home button the screen surprisingly came on.
You have 1 new message.
Amy clicked the envelope icon and a photo appeared. The image showed the interior of a house, a living room. She recognised an old tattered leather chair, a frayed rug, a dusty mantelpiece and fireplace, but she had no clue whose house it was. Everything in the room was thick with shadow.
Her phone announced another new message and she almost dropped it.
A second image slid in beneath the first, a fresh playing card from a strange deck. It was another room, full of darkness. Amy tapped it with a finger and the image bloomed to fill the screen. She felt her pulse throbbing as she wondered who could be sending her strange photos and how they had her number.
As she squinted to see the details, she felt like someone in a movie theatre, searching for the aisle. The image had been lit by the faintest of sources. She saw the edge of a bed, the frame of a painting on the wall above it. Scratches, or smears, dark and thick, were scattered about the wall. And as she tried to make sense of the image, her phone trilled for a third time.
You have 1 new message.
It was the same photo,
but higher, looking up towards the ceiling. The tips of two black shoes were suspended in the air.
You have 1 new message.
The fourth photo came through seconds later: legs and the hem of a skirt. The skirt looked familiar.
You have 1 new message.
The fifth photo made her scream.
The shoes and skirt were hers. The photos were a patchwork of Amy’s body, hardened with rigour, the rope around her neck, a python, curling up to an ornate light fixture on the ceiling of a bedroom she’d never visited. And she was dead, or about to be.
She screamed over and over. The phone left her hand and smacked against the wall. But she never heard its thud. She never heard her mother pounding on the door, or crying to be let in. All Amy knew was the sound of her own voice, denying a death she’d always dreamed of, but never wanted to see.
And yet, someone was determined that she bear witness.
~
Richard Markham awoke in a sweat, his flannel pyjamas stuck to him like congealed blood. He sat up, drawing in breaths of cold air in a bid to steady his racing heart. It wasn’t until his eyes adjusted and revealed he was lying in bed, that he realised he’d been dreaming again. It was the fourth nightmare in as many weeks.
The old man threw the heavy blankets off and put his feet on solid ground. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip. The saltiness tasted harsh on his tongue. He looked over his shoulder at his wife and found her undisturbed. How he wished he could be like her, blissfully unaware of the night. Shivering, he reached for his robe and slippers and got out of bed. His bladder was suddenly awake as well.
Richard shuffled towards the door and reached out to steady himself against the doorframe. The world seemed to tilt as his tired heart tried to cope with being awake at such an ungodly hour. Something pricked the skin of his palm and instinctively, his fingers poked at the doorframe. The paint on the frame crumbled between his fingertips. The entire length of the doorframe was cracked and peeling.
In his half-awake state, he groped at the door and found that it, too, was peeling and dry. A bizarre thought crossed his mind, that the door to his bedroom had been turned inside out, and had been exposed to the midday sun for a hundred years.
Yet it was worse than that.
He stepped through the doorway and into the hall. He felt for the light switch and found only more cracked paint on the walls. Every surface was broken and oozing like sap from a tree wound. Panic set Richard’s heart into a fresh, staccato rhythm. He wanted to cry out to his wife, but his voice failed him. His eyes, however, were as keen as they had been when he was half his age. Despite the dark, he could easily make out that he was no longer inside his own home.
Fuelled by adrenalin and a morbid curiosity, Richard walked along the hall to examine the house that had infected his own. The ragged hallway opened into an expansive living area, with a filth-covered fireplace, a matching lounge suite and a moth-eaten rug. Dust motes, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight through the window in the front door, swarmed like flies so thick, they made the old man want to gag.
His slippers scuffed along the ancient timber floor, as he fought the urge to run for the front door and escape. Would he leave Margaret in danger if he did? He turned on his heels, realising he’d left her back in the bedroom. Yet how could it be, when he wasn’t inside his own house? He slapped a gnarled hand across his face. He had to wake up.
Decision made, he started to walk back up the hall, which was now overrun with darkness. He ran his hand along the walls in a bid to find the door, any opening in fact, but all he sensed was a patchwork of peeling paint with razor-sharp edges. He cried out in the dark. “Margie?”
In response, he heard the sound of a chair being scraped along the floor. Richard flinched and about-faced, his body drawn to the vibration. Unable to stop himself, or his thundering heart, the old man walked back into the living room.
There, he found a girl standing on top of a chair, stretching to tie a noose around the chandelier dangling from the ceiling. He knew this girl. It was Amy Cowley, the youngest daughter of Alice Cowley, who lived at Number 65. Amy was so determined in her task, she never noticed the old man until he spoke.
“Amy?” Richard said.
The girl dropped her hands and shrieked at him in sheer bloody fright. The chandelier rattled from the force of it. Richard tried to speak, but the girl’s unnatural scream abolished all other sound. The old man dropped to his knees and covered his ears, silently begging for the screaming to stop.
When he opened his eyes Amy was gone, the noose was gone; the other living room was gone. He was back inside his own home, looking like a fool. Relief washed over him. He was thankful to be awake, and safe. He pulled himself to his feet and tried to fathom this latest nightmare. It had been so vivid, so purposeful, almost prophetic.
Released from the terror that had gripped him, Richard’s body filled with lethargy, and for the first time, he craved sleep more than reason. He turned to walk the hall to his bedroom, to slip in beside his wife. The smell of pine and sweat invaded his senses. There was another scent as well, one he hadn’t smelled for more than sixty years: gun smoke. The hallway evaporated before Richard’s eyes and he beheld the jungles of Borneo. He heard a soldier’s boots on the jungle floor. His heart almost stopped.
“Kofuku!”
The Japanese soldier’s voice was thick with aggression. The old man’s knees began to shake, as they’d done in 1943, and yet this time Richard was old and defenceless. His bladder emptied down his leg in a steady torrent of fear.
“Kofuku!”
The soldier demanded that Richard surrender. Sixty years later. In his living room.
“Kofuku!”
Richard felt the jab of a bayonet in his back, and he jerked in response. He turned to face the soldier. The assailant’s uniform was dark with blood and sweat, his narrow eyes burning with hatred. Richard raised his hands in surrender, but the gesture was lost in translation. He felt the cold length of steel enter his gullet, an ache that quickly became a blaze of icy pain. He dropped to his knees and clutched his abdomen, desperate to put the bloody coils of his large intestine back where they belonged.
“Margie!” he cried.
He closed his eyes and reopened them, begging for the nightmare to end.
“Margie!”
When he reopened them, the soldier had been replaced by a little boy, young Zachary Campbell.
“Mar… gie!”
The boy pressed a bloody finger to his own smiling lips to shush him.
Reality flickered for a moment. Richard’s house was now the Kemper House. His innards were now back in their rightful place, and he realised the nightmare was a message, a sign that he and the boy—and all of Willow Street—were players on its stage.
With the nightmare ended, the old man awoke in the real world, screaming for his wife to kill him.
Chapter Eight
The sound of the newspaper striking the front door woke Carol with a start. She’d fallen asleep in the recliner, after hours of staring at the front door, praying for her son to walk through it.
“Zac?” She wiped away the crust from the corner of her eyes. “Zac!”
When the door didn’t swing wide, tears began to flow. She went to the door, her legs defying her body’s weariness. She pulled the door open and looked out into the front yard, but all she saw was a sleeping street and a plastic-wrapped newspaper on the porch. An ache settled in her heart, a familiar fear she hadn’t felt since her eldest son was a baby.
The memory of it pushed its way through the cobwebs of her exhausted mind. Zac had been six months old. She’d been at home alone, eight months pregnant with Matthew and Max, as usual, was on the job. She’d just finished feeding Zac when he’d begun to cough. No amount of back rubbing could temper the boy’s coughing and within seconds, he’d started to turn blue. She’d never forgotten how his little face had swelled up; his rosebud lips had gaped wide open in search of air. She had panicke
d and cried out for help, for somebody to save her boy. When he fell limp in her arms she’d run for the phone and dialled 9-1-1. And yet, as she’d screamed her home address to the dispatcher, something had happened. Before her eyes Zac’s colour had returned, and the boy had puked all over her. He breathed again. To this day, she believed her son’s return to life was a miracle.
Now, standing alone at the front door, she prayed for another such miracle to occur. She picked up the newspaper and wrung it in her hands, surprised by her own strength. She was high on adrenalin and fear. If only she’d paid more attention to Zac, shown him more love, rather than disappointment. He was too much like Max, brimming with vigour and wild abandon, and she wished he’d stayed the sweet little boy she adored in his earlier years, before Max had got his hands on him and filled his mind with engine grease and disrespect.
Max was truly a hopeless man and an even worse father. Distant and then too close, too quick to scold and never caress. His own no-good father had been the same. She never wanted Zac and Matthew to turn out that way, but she guessed it was in their blood, at least in Zac’s case.
Matthew was an enigma, timid and wary, like an animal trapped inside a cage. He was afraid of everything and everyone, especially his father. He’d been terrified of the dark ever since birth, and had always wanted to be by his mother’s side. In frustration, she’d pushed him away and now the guilt cut deep, for in the back of her mind she’d wanted Matthew to be the son who’d disappeared and not the other. Why couldn’t Max and Matthew have found Zac? How hard could it be?
“Still no sign of the little shit?”
Max was standing behind her and immediately she felt the desire to slap him. “No.” She tried to stay calm.
Max nudged past her onto the porch and looked up and down the street. “Where the hell is he?”
“I think it’s time to call the police.”
He turned, his face contorted with that ridiculous condescending look. “We don’t need to get the cops involved. They’ve got enough on their plate as it is. You know, with our neighbour being murdered and all.”
