Beneath the Boards

by David Haynes

  He padded back downstairs and lifted the hatch. “Daddy’s here.”

  Some of the teeth were tangled up with hair again and he pushed two more inside the wound. He clutched the others in his fist. The pain took his breath away momentarily and a wave of nausea and vertigo almost dropped him into the hole head-first. He clamped his teeth together as hard as he could and felt the enamel grind away.

  He dropped into the hole and pulled the hatch over his head. He felt calm and relaxed now he was back down here.

  Scretch, scretch, scretch.

  The poor girl had lost all of her teeth but that didn’t make her appear any less beautiful. Perhaps it would make her feel a little better if he didn’t have any teeth either? He could show her that she was wonderful, just as she was, with or without teeth.

  He tugged on his front two teeth. They wouldn’t come out without a fight but maybe it was a battle he ought to take.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m here, Daddy,” a voice whispered in the darkness. Her voice, although faint, seemed to come from all around him.

  “I can’t see you.” He turned in a circle.

  “Just here.”

  He felt a cold hand take his own. It was so small and delicate that as he gripped it, he felt he might squeeze too hard and shatter her fragile little bones.

  “You look tired, Daddy. You should come and lie down.”

  He felt his feet start to move but he didn’t feel in control of them.

  “Just over here.”

  She led him into a dark corner and let go of his hand.

  “I’ll sleep just here and you can sleep just there if you like?”

  Stokes nodded and smiled. He could see nothing.

  “That way, if I get frightened I’ll know you’re right next to me and I won’t be scared anymore.”

  “Of course, I’ll always be here, Melody. There’s no need to be frightened anymore.”

  They both dropped down and lay back. The earth under his body didn’t feel damp or unyielding, quite the contrary, it felt as warm and comfortable as any bed he’d ever put his head on. As he started to drift off to sleep he felt Melody’s icy-cold body push against his own.

  “It’s nice down here, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  Stokes nodded, he was unable to speak.

  “Other people might like it too, don’t you think?”

  And she was right. An enormous sense of happiness washed over him. He didn’t want to share this feeling with anyone, not ever, it should always be just like this.

  “Lots of other people.” There was a strange tone to her voice, but he was too tired and too damned happy for a change to think about it.

  “Other people,” he murmured and fell asleep.

  12

  Edward Willis stood in his kitchen and looked out over the lake. One day soon a reckoning was coming and he was ready for it. He was ready to meet whoever was in charge of the next place and kick them in the balls. Life was shit and it was all their fault. Had it always been a stinking turd? Mostly yes, but it got worse after life threw him into that parish. Then life really started to reek. They’d wanted help from him when he could barely help himself. He slumped into the chair and put the TV on. Soap operas, bloody soap operas all night. He threw his empty coffee mug at the screen but it missed and shattered against the wall. Before they’d darkened his doorstep he was just another vicar waiting for his pension. Now look what they’d made him do. Christ, he was angry. He couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t angry, when he wasn’t tired and angry and he was getting to the end of his tether with it, with thinking about them. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the way things were but the scene played itself out the same each and every time.

  *

  “She’s our daughter, for Christ’s sake! Can you hear yourself? Do you know what you’re saying?”

  Willis nodded. The couple had come to him for help with their daughter. They had put faith in him and in God to help them and the girl. He was desperately out of his depth and not just because the girl was so obviously troubled, but because he wasn’t who they thought he was.

  “I can understand your reluctance but...”

  The man held up his hand. “No buts, this is just... medieval and I won’t have it.” He looked at his wife and stood up.

  This was the woman Willis had been sleeping with for the last six months. They’d come to him for help and he’d seduced her and then fucked her in their bed while hubby was at work.

  Now she looked to him for guidance when he was as troubled as the girl.

  “I can help her, you just have to trust me.” Trust him? Ha! That was a joke. He was about as trustworthy as Lucifer. Nevertheless, he was a good liar and when he spoke with conviction like he just had, people listened. God only knew why but they did.

  “We should trust him. I trust him.” The wife looked at them each in turn. She wasn’t exactly attractive and he’d had better in the last parish, but there was something about her wholesome village nature that appealed to him. She hadn’t exactly been unwilling, had she? No, she’d been active to the point of domination.

  The man stopped in stunned silence and looked at his wife. “Why? Why should we trust him? There are other doctors, there are other...”

  “No, there aren’t. Did you see what she did to the other children in the playground?”

  He stayed silent and looked at the floor.

  “I was there picking up the pieces, literally. ‘They’ve got nasty words written on their faces, Mummy, and they’re all about me. I tried to rub them out but I couldn’t do it, not without the rock.’ And she smiled at me with the bloody rock in one hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world.”

  “But she’s just a little girl, she’s our little Melody.”

  He watched as the father fell back onto the sofa. He was a pathetic figure, the typical cuckold in many ways.

  The wife continued, “I know you’re frightened of her, I know you are. You can’t even look at her anymore, neither of us can. One day she’ll see something plastered all over our faces and it’ll be something she doesn’t like. What if she decides to rub it out with a knife or boiling water?”

  The man snivelled and held his hands up to his face.

  “We do this on our terms or the authorities will do it for us. She goes with Edward tonight to the lake. We tell them she’s run away from home and we carry on like we’ve lost her.”

  “And then what?” He was angry. “We just miraculously find her and everyone’s happy? It won’t work like that.”

  “We disappear. We all do.” Willis spoke quietly but assuredly. This was what God wanted from him, wasn’t it? To help people in their darkest hours, when all else had failed and they didn’t know where to turn next.

  Did he really believe that?

  Not so long ago there was a time when he felt those things, not just heard them, but felt them deep down in the pit of his stomach. Those feelings were so strong that they almost knocked the wind out of him. That was God’s call but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard it.

  The man turned to him now. “And aren’t you afraid she’ll try and do the same to you, Willis? She knows things about you too, she’s seen them. Your profession doesn’t give you immunity.”

  He touched the dog-collar around his neck. “She won’t be seeing anything or anyone for a while, not even me.”

  “Oh God!” The father threw his head back.

  Willis exchanged a look with the woman.

  “Yes, it is God who will help Melody,” he said. Was this a test? Was this the latest in a long line of examinations, all of which he seemed to be failing miserably? He couldn’t help thinking about the wife’s breasts; those big bouncing breasts with beautiful, pink nipples.

  He knelt beside the weeping man and put his hand on his wife’s naked knee. “You must trust me and you must trust God. We will never turn our back on you or Melody.”

  This was his chance of sa
lvation. This was his last chance to do something other than lie to people. He would save the girl and in doing so he would save himself.

  He showed them out and closed the door behind them. He slid down the door and sat on the floor. “Am I doing the right thing?” He thumped the back of his head against the door.

  “Answer me. Just this once, answer me.”

  Medically, the girl had been examined and she was as perfect as her parents wanted her to be. Psychosis, that was the diagnosis, but what did that really mean? Spiritually, that was where the troubles were and the only person who knew how to truly diagnose that had been dead for over two thousand years.

  She was haunted by hallucinations of a kind that were alarming and disturbing to others, yet to her they were perfectly natural. The parents had tried everything but the aberrations remained and were seemingly there to stay. The episode with the other children in the playground was startling but the incident in the church was a far more distressing event. She’d spoken to him at the foot of the pulpit and as he’d looked into her vivid blue eyes, he’d seen the words reflected onto his own – ‘faithless’ and ‘adulterer’. He’d wiped his head so that the congregation couldn’t see them, so they couldn’t see his own failings. She had missed one though, one that was worse than anything else he could imagine.

  ‘Suicide’.

  Every time he looked in the mirror, he saw it etched upon his own face.

  “Am I doing the right thing?” That was the question he’d asked as he swallowed the last tablet all those years ago.

  He’d take her up to the lake house. This was the cottage where he’d grown up, where his own mother and father had given him almost everything he’d desired. Almost but not quite.

  His father had tried to seduce almost every woman in the village at one time or another and his mother had been too drunk to notice. The constant arguments and the never-ending late night parties had kept him awake throughout most of his childhood, yet the gifts made up for it. A steady stream of the latest toys and gadgets had been a welcome diversion from the maelstrom around him.

  So why had he chosen the church? Or rather, why had the church chosen him?

  He’d not so much heard the word of God but felt it. Deep, deep down in his guts, amid the whirling cacophony that was a typical night in the Willis house, he’d felt it. As sure as can be, he’d felt it. It hit him so hard that he fell, panting and winded from his little bed. It didn’t feel odd or strange to him though, it felt right and it was a way out of the house. It was something to aim for.

  He pulled himself upright and walked into the front room. Her perfume still hung in the air and it aroused him. Her impatient fingers at his zip, her hot breath on his torso and...

  “Edward? Have they gone?”

  “Yes,” he called up the stairs.

  “Are you coming up to play then?”

  He smirked and touched the dog-collar.

  “Leave the collar on, please. I like it on.”

  He jogged up the stairs. It was probably a good idea to leave town for a while anyway. Sleeping with the daughter of another prominent member of the congregation was bound to get out sooner or later.

  “On my way.”

  *

  Willis bit his lip hard enough to draw blood. He’d kept that little girl locked up for so long she’d become something else, she’d become a demon and it was all their fault. They’d made him do it.

  They wanted everything to be perfect. They wanted their world to be filled with sugar plum fairies and little girls in gingham dresses, and if something didn’t fit into that scheme, well it was just discarded like waste.

  Yet he had been complicit, there was no denying that. The duplicity of his own wretched soul was a disgrace. With one hand he would offer help, pleading for the opportunity to aid those who suffered, and yet with the other he would search out an opening to suit his own ends, to aid with his own redemption. He had sought this above all else. He had conspired with his own madness until lunacy prevailed and led him down a path which was awash with the blood of a little girl. And for what? For forgiveness? From whom?

  From a God who had never even tried to converse with him, not even when he was on the brink. He licked at the blood on his lips. Physically, he was intact but beneath his worn and leathery skin lived a soul which was forever damaged. A soul which deserved to be torn into a thousand pieces, put back together and torn asunder again and again and again for all eternity.

  Was there a chance for redemption?

  He didn’t want it. He had forfeited that shot when he allowed his own pride to stop what he knew was wrong. What had they been thinking? What had any of them been thinking? Were they all so damaged that their vision was blinded by blackened and disease-ridden cataracts? Yet even through the fogged vision they should have seen her for what she was – a sweet and frightened little girl who did not deserve to see out her days in a pit.

  Willis groaned and raised his hands to his face. If he had the strength he would do what he had tried to do before, twice.

  He threw back his head and shouted with as much force as he was able. “Forgive me Melody, forgive me!”

  He slumped forward and allowed a child-like whimper to escape him. There may be no chance of redemption, there should be none, but he could no longer stand the abject sound of his own thoughts. He must do something, not for himself but for the girl. It must be for the girl and only for her.

  He gathered himself together and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. Judging by what he’d seen a few nights ago, the man Stokes was deranged, and capable of almost anything. He pulled open the drawer containing his underwear and socks and slid his hand toward the back. His fingers touched the cold metal of the key to the cottage as they had done a hundred times. He pulled it out and examined the indentations on the metal. It was as unremarkable as it was poignant. This would be the last time he held the key between his fingers, he was sure of that.

  He looked out of the window and watched as the familiar pattern of lights from the houses across Stormark were fanned by the bowing trees. It was early evening but night, true night, was still so far away. Stokes was clearly a night-owl, but surely even he slept some nights. The man had seemed so normal when they’d met. He didn’t listen to the idle tattle of the villagers very often but he’d heard them whispering about the ex-copper coming to live in the cottage. It had been a shock and, at first, a source of anxiety and worry, but as he had come to this final resolution it no longer mattered. Perhaps he too was haunted by the ghosts of badly made decisions and they stopped him from sleeping. Perhaps everyone shared those demons which came hurtling into your head at three in the morning.

  He wiped the blood from his lips. Not everyone possessed the dark and guilty soul of a habitual insomniac. Not everyone claimed to be a man of God and had murdered a little girl.

  He sat on the bed and stared at the key. “Am I doing the right thing?”

  The wind screamed down the chimney and blew the kitchen door shut. It rattled against its hinges and fell silent.

  Willis laughed. “Is that a yes?”

  13

  She was a monster, she knew that now. If it had been her own parents, which she thought it probably was, they had screamed when they saw her. And if she was a monster then it was their fault, not all their fault because the Vicar was to blame too but mostly their fault.

  Had she been a monster before they locked her away though? She ran her hands over her head. It was completely bald now and it felt creepy. She could even feel where parts of her skull were knitted together. She shivered and chuckled to herself. The Vicar had brought them here, to look at her, but why? They hadn’t spoken and the light from the sun was too bright to see if they had any words written across their faces. She wouldn’t have liked to see their faces though, not really. The words wouldn’t have been nice ones, they would’ve probably been like those girls at school – mean and nasty.

  The Vicar didn’t seem nasty, at least not like
a proper nasty man. He brought her food and came to speak to her sometimes but she couldn’t work him out, not without seeing his face. She might like to see that, at least for a little while.

  Footsteps overhead. That usually meant he was on his way down to see her. She smiled and scuttled off into the darkest corner she knew. It was where she went to the toilet and not even the rats went there.

  A shaft of light shot down in a perfect square and lit up the floor. It looked like the light looked inside a church, when the sun shone through one of the big windows. If he just turned around once she might see him and understand him a little better.