Though she was still young enough to have her life ahead of her, she knew she’d never fall for the wrong guy again. Once was enough. Some women, they went back to abusers, time and time again. Maybe it stemmed from having a terrible upbringing. Maybe they saw their dads hitting their mums. Maybe it was a habitual thing, something to do with having no self respect. Maybe Irene, too, would have gone down that route, but she hadn’t, and she was stronger than that.
Yet she realised, after checking the house obsessively over the course of the day, that she still clutched the knife. She’d almost forgotten she had it, like baby Sam, sleeping most of the day against her chest, upright in his sling. He was an easy baby, and sometimes she could almost forget she had him there, just like the knife.
But he reminded her why she was checking the house. She couldn’t forget the feeling when she’d opened the door to the nursery. Someone had been in the house. Someone dangerous.
She had no doubt they were dangerous. She’d fooled herself before. She didn’t do that anymore. Never again.
Should she have let Marc stay? Should she have relented, let the police come?
She thought about it long and hard, but no. Not the police.
Was she scared? Damn right, she thought. But she wouldn’t give in.
So she checked the observatory, the winding stairs leading up to the tower. She couldn’t see the mainland, because there was a light rain in the air again, though she could tell from the darker shape in the rain that it was there. The nursery, the bathroom, her bedroom, all were clear. There were two rooms on the second floor, one a small study she used for paperwork, mainly, with a computer on an old desk that had once been her father’s worktop. It still had saw marks on it from his woodwork, but she couldn’t bear to part with it. The other room was a guest bedroom. She’d never needed to do much to it, but dusting.
The first floor, with her living room, with an open fire. A second toilet and the bath. Her kitchen, refitted in a modern style, a utility room, the back door and the front door.
She roamed the house, over and over, thinking about all the points that someone could get in – she locked all the doors and windows on every level. The observatory’s windows didn’t open.
Feeling as safe as she could, she changed baby Sam and put him down in the nursery to rest.
He fell straight asleep and she put on the baby monitor, then sat in her living room, with the window open, listening to the sea.
*
She woke from a deep sleep to screaming. Something about the cadence of the screams told her it was a baby...Sam...God no, not Sam...
But something else, too. Jonathan’s voice joined Sam’s, and they weren’t crying in hunger or terror, even, because what does a baby know of terror? No. They were crying in pain.
Jonathan’s dead, honey, said Paul, in her head.
So’s Sam, said Franklin. For a second, she thought that voice, too, was in her head. But it wasn’t. It was on the monitor.
She ran up the stairs, because her baby was back.
And so was Franklin.
*
The door to the nursery was shut when she got there and she wouldn’t have shut it herself. She pushed down the handle, and ancient heavy brass thing. The handle wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t like it was locked because there was no lock on the door, more like someone on the other side, someone stronger than her, held the door shut.
Still she could hear two children crying, almost in unison, but when their breath hitched the screams overlapped. Their voices were similar, but even though he was a week dead, she could tell Jonathan’s from Sam’s.
‘I’m coming, honey, I’m coming!’
She screamed herself now, in rage and frustration, because no matter how hard she pushed the handle, trying to push it down, it wouldn’t shift, not even a centimetre.
‘Fuck!’
She turned and ran back a few feet and threw herself at the door, bounced off, hurting herself and not even making the door rattle. It was an old house, and the doors were good and solid.
She hit it again, and again, tears streaming down her face, not for a second questioning why Jonathan was screaming along with Sam.
‘Franklin! Franklin! You bastard! You let them go!’
She heard him laugh. She did. She heard it. She was sure. But then the door clicked open and there was baby Sam, screaming, but not distressed, just soiled. The smell of it was thick in the air.
Jonathan wasn’t there. The realisation hit her hard, because she was so sure, so sure she heard him. But he was dead. He was in an urn, in the living room, beside her husband.
She began sobbing and picked up Sam and sobbed with him on her shoulder, rocking him harder than she needed to.
*
Darkness fell and Irene stalked through the house, running things over in her mind. It was almost obsessive, the way she thought about it. Part of her imagined it was some kind of dream, brought on by the fear, the afternoon nap.
Some other part of her, the part that was a mother, not the part that hadn’t seen Franklin for what he was, thought that there had been some sense of reality about the episode. She hadn’t imagined it. Two babies had screamed. She was sure of it.
Was she just as sure she’d heard Franklin on the baby monitor?
She just didn’t know.
What she did know was that she was dog tired, and sore, and just wanted to go to sleep.
She took everything she needed for the night into her room, put a chair under the door. She curled up again with baby Sam, who just wanted to sleep and feed all the time, and fell asleep.
*
Baby Jonathan took her hand, only he wasn’t a baby.
She looked down at him, his toddler’s hand in hers. He smiled up at her, and even in the midst of the dream, knowing it was a dream, her heart broke because he was a beautiful boy.
Paul’s blood, as he would have been.
Could he talk, in the dream? Could she? She’d never spoken in a dream before. Her dreams were in pictures only, sometimes, strangely, in smells, but there never was any sound or conversation.
She tried her voice and found it worked just fine.
‘Honey, are you Jonathan?’
He nodded, but she saw that around his throat there was a black mark, like a rope burn, running right through the space his windpipe was.
Like he’d been strangled, and in her dream she realised that he was still dead, always would be, but it was enough that his spirit, his ghost, was here now. She didn’t question why or how he could be here in her sleep, but he was and that was good enough.
She followed where he led her, down the stairs, through the lobby, and out of her back door.
The sky was dark, like it was the middle of the night. There was a light mist sitting just above the water. The mist wasn’t high enough to obscure the lights from the mainland.
Jonathan led her down to the shore. She held back – she knew she shouldn’t leave Sam behind – but somehow Jonathan seemed to know this, to read her mind. Of course he could, she reasoned, because this version of her stillborn son was in her mind. He didn’t exist. He hadn’t been a toddler, never would be.
Jonathan understood, but pulled her down to the sea, then into the sea, but she found she could walk. She stepped onto the mist, not the water, and walked toward the mainland.
It seemed as though the mile to the mainland passed in an instant. There were no boats in the bay, though there should have been hundreds, all moored and bobbing in the high tide, the rusty and forgotten and the new and the proud. Yet the bay was empty but for her and Jonathan walking on that strange mist.
With a thought she was before her shop. She didn’t mean to be there, but Jonathan took her where she needed to go.
Her son put his finger to his lips. Quiet, he said without words.
Together they passed the front door to Beautiful Brides, and headed down the rear alley, where the waste was stored until the bin men came to take it away.
<
br /> Shh, he said again with the same gesture. She heard his sounds in his head though his mouth didn’t move.
He crouched in the dark, and she crouched beside him, watching.
Something was coming through the dark, and it thumped, bumped. Like a heartbeat. The thing that came through the dark was dead. She understood that, too. It was why Jonathan could see it, and she could see it, too, because Jonathan alone could show her such sights.
The beating became louder as the thing approached, and she saw that it was a man surrounded by black mist, like smoke, but something ethereal and not quite there.
The man was dead. That much was obvious. His skin had slewed from his face, showing the muscle underneath. A rotten man, and she could smell him as he came closer. He was a man, but something else, too. She felt Jonathan trembling beside her, understood that this man must not see them. Darkness and evil came from him, just as strong as the smell of death and rot.
The man, the corpse, looked around, like he was checking for observers. He looked right past them in the darkness, hiding. She shivered as his gaze past over her, and for some reason she thought she should recognise him, though he didn’t look familiar and she didn’t understand the need to know who he was. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was how dangerous this moment hiding in the dark was.
But his gaze didn’t stop with them. It turned back to the bins in the back of the shop and then he opened the bin and she saw it. The mannequin. It began to beat. She could see the wood pulsing as the man drew it from the bin. Pulsing exactly like a heart beating, though it wasn’t in a chest. It was just a dress maker’s mannequin, and yet it was more.
The man hefted the mannequin in his arms and walked straight past them toward the light at the front of the shop.
Jonathan tugged her hand and pulled her after him. Even in the depths of the dream she was terrified of the man. She shook her head, but Jonathan was in charge of this dream, this powerful toddler, this spirit of her flesh.
He tugged and she couldn’t resist. She followed him and he led her to the front door of the shop, where the corpse was picking the lock.
She was even more afraid, because now she knew that the locks on her house were inadequate. She understood perfectly that this thing had been in her house. Locks were no bar to it.
It opened the door and walked in. She heard the lock snick closed again.
Jonathan looked at her sadly. He pulled her down and touched the side of her head.
Remember, he was saying. Remember.
*
Irene’s mobile rang her awake again in the morning. She panicked, remembering the word SAM carved...the threat...
The man in the dream. A dead man in a dream that could pick locks.
But it had only been a dream...just a dream. Nothing had changed. She’d slept like a log and woke to the phone, not in the middle of the night with a psycho, a phantom, leaning over her.
Baby Sam nestled in the crook of her arm again, a replay of the day before. She took a moment to look at him. A beautiful baby, already putting on weight after losing it during the first week. His face had lost that kind of squished look that newborn’s have, and in sleep his face was smooth and beautiful.
She checked caller ID on her mobile and groaned.
‘Mum,’ she said.
‘Morning, honey.’
Irene checked the time. Five AM. Her mother had no concept of time, and that other people had lives.
‘Mum, it’s five in the morning here...’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘What is it?’ said Irene, not wanting to get into a slanging match with her mother first thing in the morning.
She called her mother Mum, but always thought of her as her mother. Somehow, the distinction between the words in her mouth and head kept her mother distant. She’d been hurt by her too many times over the years to let her any closer.
‘I heard what happened to Franklin,’ she said.
Irene could imagine her mother, almost gleeful, wanting to impart her piece of gossip, to be involved in some kind of drama.
Irene didn’t need it at any time of the day, least of all five in the morning.
But it wasn’t worth it. Maybe she could put the phone down...go make a cup of tea...come back and say ‘uh-huh’ a few times. She wasn’t really needed for a conversation with her mother.
‘Go ahead,’ she said, nestling the phone between her ear and her shoulder. She extricated herself from Sam, sound asleep, and piled pillows around him so he couldn’t fall out of bed.
The floors were cold on her bare feet, but they woke her up all the way.
‘He killed himself,’ said her mother with triumph in her voice.
‘Good,’ said Irene. She didn’t know what she felt, but it was good. Definitely good.
Her mother was still talking, but Irene suddenly found her legs wouldn’t hold her and she sank back to the bed. Shock? Relief? She didn’t know. Dizzy, for sure.
‘They never found his heart,’ her mother said, and the world rushed back in with a thump. Thump. Thump...and she remembered her dream, totally, fully, from holding her young son’s hand, to the corpse behind the shop...to the mannequin.
*
‘Mum, what? What did you say?’
‘They never found his heart...’
‘No. All of it,’ said Irene, her voice shaking now the reality of the news hit her.
‘Well,’ said her mother, with barely disguised glee, ‘He made a, what do call it?’
Irene suppressed her impatience. Her mother would get to it in her own time.
‘I don’t know what ‘it’ is.’
‘A deal, kind of thing, but about dying, you know?’
‘A pact?’
‘That’s it.’
Get to the point, she thought, her heart cold. She’d wished the bastard dead so long, and now she found herself panicking...still early...a Saturday...Marc wouldn’t be going to the shop just yet...
It was still early, and this time she would call the police.
But she had to know.
‘Well, it’s pretty sick.’
Did she really need to hear? Did she have time?
She decided she did. She felt this was important.
‘His cell mate cut him up.’
‘Stabbed him?’
‘No. Cut him up. Like, in pieces. Cut out his organs and ate them.’
*
Paul Jacobs knew there was something wrong with his old brother from as early as 10 years old. Maybe before, but he didn’t really remember. Kind of like some abused children forget, willingly, or because their minds can’t take it at that age. People have different ways of coping. Some talk. Some forget.
Paul forgot for a time.
*
He’d found Franklin with the cat back when he was too young to understand, but with the second cat after that kind of cusp of childhood that comes around 10 or 11 years old, just when children are thinking about beginning a new school. Maybe a child hits some kind of peak, some brain spurt, around those years.
But when he found Franklin with the second cat he remembered the first, and the first had been the worst, because back then Franklin didn’t know what he was doing. The second time around, he didn’t make nearly as much mess.
*
Franklin was hunched over something at the back end of the garden, where their dad put the garden rubbish, the cut grass, the trimmings.
Franklin was sixteen and Paul was eleven years old. He looked up to his older brother. He loved him unconditionally, and when he went out into the garden he was merely interested to see what was so fascinating down there in the shadow of the white birches, three of them, that grew low down. Between two of the birches there was a pole which they used like a monkey bar, shimming across from one tree to the other. At least they used to, until Frank seemed to lose interest in playing with his little brother.
Paul found porn in his brother’s bedroom one day. He flicked through the pic
tures, kind of confused. He didn’t really get it, but he knew it was something secret. He put them back, just as he found them, because even then he knew some secrets were for the keeping.
But there was something about the set of Franklin’s shoulders that said he was concentrating hard, and maybe this was the kind of secret they could share, and Paul was ever curious.
‘What you doing, Frank?’ he said, walking toward him, where the three trees hid them from the house and the neighbours.
‘Come and see, dippy,’ said Frank.
Paul didn’t mind being called dippy, because he’d always loved his brother.
‘Is that...is that...’
‘Is that...is that... Yes, dippy. It is.’
‘What are you doing?’
Paul hadn’t seen the spike through the cat’s stomach at that point, but when he got closer he saw what Franklin had done.
‘Shit, Frank! Shit! Mr. George is going to kill you! Shit, what have you done to Bess? Shit. Frank. Frank...’
Paul remembered later. Not all of it.
He remembered Frank. Remembered the fevered look on his brother’s face. A look like he got when he came out of his room in the afternoons, when their father was out at work sometimes and he was supposed to be watching Paul. But Paul thought those magazines might have something to do with that feverish look in his face.
Frightened, Paul turned to go, to tell their dad, back in the house.
A Home by the Sea (A Supernatural Suspense Novel) Page 6
