Beneath the Blood Moon

by Darren Wills

  Soon it will be time for her to return and shape the future. I hope she will recognize herself.

  We have gone through photographs and some documents. I think I know everybody now and plenty of stuff about each. My knowledge of her needs to be as great as hers is and she is beginning to accept that. I never thought I was clever or anything like that. I didn’t do well at school, although I always enjoyed reading and music lessons. But the thing I know most about is suffering, so I like causing some. The pain I have shown this creature has worked. It has given her a better understanding of me and, dare I say it, an acceptance, one that might comfort her in the gloom and danger of the place she is confined in.

  Don’t get me wrong, I knew plenty about her life and the people in her life before now, but I needed some specifics, a bit more flesh on the bones. In a typical life there must be ten million details, perhaps more, so I want to know as many of that ten million as possible.

  This bitch is adapting. She is beginning to smile more. She is going along with my plan. She has a dream of survival and seeing the sun again but will only ever have nightmares about death and darkness.

  August Is A Wicked Month

  What a month it had been. There had been twists and turns, dullness and silliness and I was travelling along the road of life with my tyres only half-inflated, or at least that was how it felt at times. I wanted to get through, wanted normality. I was determined to move forward. It felt like enough for me to succeed, but was it?

  I was just a man. Every day seemed to have at least one dark moment or sharp reminder waiting to pierce me and there were so many times when I asked myself whether actual happiness was ever going to be a possibility. That didn’t mean I was going into depression. Thanks to my long-held selfishness and sizeable ego, there was no chance of that. It was just that everything wasn’t as shiny and bright as life should be, continuing to be more dull and grey, with the odd glimmer of something better.

  On many of these days, I found myself waking up angry. Who did she think she was, this cow who had deserted me and our life together? Anger would take over for a while, then give way to confusion. I kept asking myself, why? After all, the idea persisted that this was not Laura, not her style at all. Maybe this disbelief was the thing that stopped me totally moving on and enjoying everything and everybody around me.

  I didn’t want to be destroyed by my personal crisis. I started spending more time in the garden, helping Jamie with his writing, and watching horror movies. These were probably all I had right now, giving my existence some semblance of structure. These and other distractions took care of the daytimes while I just worked on the computer at night, often with my old mate Jack Daniels as support.

  Curiosity sometimes got the better of me. I tried to access Laura’s email account, tried her passwords, but none worked. She had even gone to the trouble of changing to a password that I didn’t know. Why wouldn’t she? We didn’t have a joint bank account. We had talked it through and we had agreed that I would look after the mortgage and council tax while she would pay for the food and other bills from her account. This meant that there was no way I could check on the money going out of the account to see if that gave me any clues, but I anticipated a credit card bill coming through the letterbox one day and perhaps that would shed light on where Laura had gone. After all, she would have to spend money, wherever she was.

  Facebook also yielded a frustrating nothing. The last entry in her newsfeed was the morning of her disappearance, when she had posted some witty slogan about rules for a successful marriage that was meant to be comical, but which now seemed ironic and hypocritical. I did wonder why she wasn’t continuing her Facebook commentary, since leaving me the way she had did not have to mean an end to her online activity.

  I paid a visit to her place of work. Maxwell had nothing reassuring to tell me. “She hasn’t been in work all week. We’re worried about her. She was due to fly out to America tomorrow.”

  “Has she been in touch at all?

  “Only to say she’s ill and staying with a friend.”

  Ouch. Friend obviously meant lover. She was definitely with somebody else, then. “You spoke to her?”

  “It was an email.”

  “I didn’t want to give too away in case there every to be some kind of resolution to this situation. “Did she say when she would be back?”

  “No. She did say that she would still hopefully make the America trip. She asked me to email her the details in case she didn’t make it back in.”

  I tried to keep a faint smile on my face, although this was agony. She was going ahead with a life without me. She had left me and there was nothing I could do but cope with it. I wanted to give Maxwell my mobile number, but had to resist, as that would give the game away. If she was playing away, which now most definitely seemed to be the case, I had to deal with it.

  Most of these weekends, I didn’t remember much. I would buy two one-litre bottles of Jack Daniels on the Friday night and the ensuing two days became forgotten pieces of my history, forty-eight hours I would never get back. More lost weekends to add to the collection.

  The rest of the Summer, my feelings became much less changeable. I now believed fervently that she had left me for somebody else, that this wasn’t a disappearance. I searched the house to check that key documents were here. Her passport had gone, as had her birth certificate. Also, some photos, mainly the ones where she was with family or friends. None of the photos taken with me on our various holidays or trips had gone, which told the story. She didn’t want any reminders of me in her life.

  Malevolence

  I am preparing her for the big stage. It’s not easy, but I never expected it to be. I put her make up on so carefully, like I’m painting a picture. Not going to do much about the hair, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

  I want her to be dressed right too. Obviously, I have photos and ideas, things I have seen and know, yet everything has to work. This is the plan of a lifetime and it is going to work perfectly. So exciting. A smile in the mirror reassures and I carry on preparing in a way that I have never prepared before. If she looks right, then everything is on course for everything. Everything will be mine.

  I look into her eyes. I see a contrast, but that does not matter. What must happen will now happen and nothing can stand in the way. Eyes don’t need to show life or familiarity if they can show something else, something that gives something to somebody. These eyes will give.

  At last she understands now what is happening. She has co-operated, but she had no choice. Now she has to accept what is coming, although I still see the terror in her eyes at times. She understands who I am now, who we are. I still enjoy the wide open mouth and the staring eyes. I have even filmed and photographed her like some model for a horror film. She now meekly accepts the future. She will never forget what she has gone through in this chamber of experience and longs for relief, that better time that will never come.

  I am excited. My heart is beating like it has never done before and I know that this is how it was meant to be. It is not going to be long now. Whatever I have had to do to bring this about, I know it has been worth it.

  Wickedness

  The following Saturday, I went out with Jamie. He was so positive and I guess it was infectious.

  “Why do you still mention her every time we go out, Dom?”

  “I don’t know Maybe it’s not as easy as I thought it would be.”

  “No, I don’t suppose it is. Anyway, I’ve got a beautiful distraction for you, something wonderful. Got three chapters written for the book.”

  “Oh. Yes. The book.”

  “More of that stuff I sent you on your birthday. The best of my dating adventures; going to dress them up a little, make it a book for men about sex and the online stuff. Think it will be a laugh.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “We can do some res
earch, you and me.”

  As if on cue, at that moment I noticed a woman glance at me and then look away. She was pretty, with long curly blonde hair, but I shrugged it off. Day One was still less than two months ago. “What do you mean?”

  “Fuck off, Dom. You know what I mean. Let’s get you back in the saddle.”

  “I don’t really know if I’m ready for that yet. We’ve not been that long separated.”

  “Come on, Dom. We’re blokes. We get over heartbreak like machines. Some of these women I’ve met have been split up from somebody for two years and not had a shag. They go on a dating site after two years celibate. Unbelievable.”

  “I can believe it…” I paused. The sexy blonde had glanced at me again, this time with a faint smile on her lips. “I think we should get another drink here, mate. It’s a nice place.”

  “Another double JD. That will be your eighth.”

  “Oh, bollocks. Who’s counting?”

  Abruptly, I was woken up, not by the glowing sunlight, but by noisy bedsprings, which were accompanied by grunts and piercing sighs from the next bedroom. Looking around, I realized that I was under a blue duvet in Jamie’s spare bedroom with a mess of blonde hair on the pillow at the side of me. I couldn’t remember much, but some of the details were obvious. I studied the details. The woman at the side had her face away from, me, still with her make-up on judging by the smudge on the side of her cheek, with a black handbag on the bedside cabinet. I did a three-sixty and noticed her black dress and tights strewn on the floor at the side of Jamie’s spare bed with my stuff on a chair next to the door. Had I actually performed? Judging by how little I actually remembered, it was clear that I couldn’t have been much more than barely conscious at the end of last night. At any rate, I felt severely poisoned this morning. Well I guess physically it wasn’t impossible that I managed to do something, since I hadn’t had any sex for a few weeks, and Shakespeare once remarked how the body was capable of anything when the need is great, or something like that. I couldn’t remember anything.

  I didn’t feel good. Sharing a bed with someone didn’t feel right. While she slept, I sneaked out from under the duvet and put on my clothes, hearing some kind of big finish happening in Jamie’s room. I wanted to get home. I wanted a bath. I was sure that I smelled of her perfume, Calvin Klein Euphoria, the same one I had bought Laura the previous Christmas.

  This was too soon to be back in the saddle. At home, every morning as I awoke, I thought of Laura, and today was no exception. This woman, whoever she was, was gently snoring as I closed the door behind me. I didn’t know whether she was attractive or not, and was back home before there was even the chance of me caring.

  JD Clover

  For the rest of a month that passed so slowly, I didn’t do much other than work, drink, watch the occasional television programme and listen to music. On some nights, Jamie would send me some of his writing and I would help him with it. To be fair, it wasn’t very good, but it was funny. He had plenty of stories to tell about his online dating and it actually distracted me from my miserable state of being, so much so that I actually looked forward to getting an email from him with some depraved, woman-baiting chapter attached. I wasn’t comfortable with the sexism, but really enjoyed the humour of it. Certainly, editing and laughing at his writing was better than being a miserable bastard, and it prevented me drinking heavily.

  This went on for weeks. I had had an unwelcome liaison and did not want another. I guess I had suffered a setback in my quest to become a happy single man again, and was finding it wasn’t that easy to move on from the love of your life. Deep down, whatever I told myself, I still wanted what I had had, although I would have preferred to see everything differently. Life had to be about now and the future, not the past.

  I changed nothing in the house. I don’t know if this was out of laziness or because I wanted to preserve everything. Perhaps subconsciously, I still wanted to wake up and find it all a dream, although deep inside, I knew the reality. Laura was out there somewhere. She would have come back from America by now. I wondered if the next contact I would receive from her would be an official letter from a solicitor, wanting to arrange a financial settlement and make the separation legally permanent. How would I deal with that?

  Every time I thought of that kind of contact being made, I winced. The prospect was so far from what I had planned, what I thought we had planned. I spent much of this time in a haze of confusion and uncertainty about the future, with spells of defiance and asserted independence, when I would go drinking with Jamie.

  It was a Friday night. I was returning from a game of squash with Jamie. He was all excited about his writing and bought the drinks that evening to thank me for helping him. We had worked together on creating what was becoming a manuscript and had laughed out loud so many times. Obviously, I assured him that what we had written was a fantastic piece of work (it wasn’t) and that it had actually helped me cope so much (it had).

  “Shall we include a chapter about you and your stuff, just as a sub-plot?’

  For some reason, I found him irritating and refreshing at the same time. Maybe it was the basic way he expressed her disappearance, his failure to grasp perhaps what it meant to me. He was my best mate, yet he was a world apart. “Don’t you even think about mentioning me or my shit. You’ve got loads more interesting things to write about.”

  “And I’m still doing the research, mate. I need to meet a psycho now.”

  “What, worse than the one who got you into trouble at work.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, as long as she doesn’t kill me…Are you drinking much?

  “A bit.”

  “Well, keep on top of it.” He pointed a finger like a stern parent. “Otherwise it will be on top of you.”

  “Of course.”

  Boomerang

  Why does so much of humanity like a warm sunny day? In this fading summer, the sun was smiling down on me like it knew something I didn’t as I stepped out of the car.

  On this day, my seven hours at the school had been a game of two halves, with three easy pleasant lessons in the morning, but tougher classes with surly and lazy pupils in the afternoon. Work was often like this. Nobody, teenager nor adult, cut it quite so well after lunch and the controlled chaos of football, sex, make-up and mobile phone usage were strong in the minds of the awkward teenagers. In all fairness, the same things might also have occupied the minds of their teachers. Of course, the job couldn’t afford us the honesty to ever admit that. I guess the hypocrisy of being a teacher was half the fun.

  Anyway, dreams can’t trump reality on most occasions, especially in the classroom, so conflict was as inevitable as the passing of time. In every classroom I had ever entered, the teacher had to show himself as a confident defender of education, whatever that was worth these days, and we had to promote working hard in lessons like it was the greatest pre-requisite in life. One day they would make kids who could do a full day without their batteries of concentration and effort wearing out halfway through. Such were my thoughts as I made my way home. I concluded, as I turned into our cul-de-sac, that I probably needed some alcohol and to do some more work on that dirty writing of Jamie’s to stop me being the ultimate bore.

  At least it was a Friday, with a weekend ahead of doing whatever I wanted. Consolation was divine, but it was a long time coming. The Friday feeling meant waiting for the golden dawn, herald of the weekend’s glories, that three o’clock brought with it and the promise of abandoning the body clock for a couple of days to spend time with JD or some of his lesser alcoholic cousins.

  As I left my car top walk up the path, I waved to Joan and Arthur, an elderly couple who had moved in when we had, at number six. They were just leaving their house.

  I put the key into the lock.

  I stopped.

  There was a noise.

  It was the sound of a chair being scraped a
cross the kitchen floor.

  There was somebody in my house.

  A burglar?

  I continued to listen.

  There were no further sounds.

  Forcefully, I turned the key then pushed open the door. Any burglar was going to regret picking my house, and if it was the same burglar as last time, he would get a little extra for his trouble. My fists were clenched and I was ready to fight. At that moment, I didn’t care if he killed me. The shit I had been through over the past few months, he was going to feel the full force.

  As I approached the kitchen, her back was facing me.

  Her back.

  It was a back full of meaning, but the meaning it had lacked clarity.

  She turned to face me. “Hello, Dom.”

  I felt the express trains of conflicting emotions crash inside my mind. I was standing there and I just stared. It was all I could do. Intensity brought with it a paralysis. Anger was at odds with relief, whilst surprise and shock twinned themselves and met up with anxiety. This was real theatre for an onlooker.

  But there were no onlookers. There was only me. Only her and me.

  This should have been deep unprecedented joy. Back in July, that would have been the case. There was no way I could feel delight, however. Not now. I couldn’t allow that. There was too much that was inexplicable. Plenty that was unforgivable.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I stood there. What the fuck did that mean? I was still staring. Sorry for what? Sorry that she had come back or sorry that she had left. Maybe she was sorry that I had been through so many shades of hell. For some seconds it was as if I was hallucinating, that she was some kind of created image, or a hologram, manipulating my mind. I couldn’t speak.

  “I’ve been through the mill a bit.”.