“What is it?” Ruby said, bending down to me.
I laughed, but it held no humour. “It’s a shoebox,” I replied. “A bloody shoebox.”
I lifted off the lid and tentatively reached in and lifted out a plastic bag, holding it for Ruby to see. She backed away as if she knew the contents. But that was impossible, because only Max and I knew what it was.
“It’s a dead rat,” I said.
And I knew then that Max was indeed insane.
* * * *
34
Mr Walton
They gave him a wristwatch and a tin of biscuits when he retired, which was appropriate, he thought, given his renowned punctuality and his love of a biscuit dipped in tea. He liked to think they put a lot of thought into the gifts, but he‘d contributed to just the same a couple of years previously when old Baker retired, and that cantankerous old pedant had been neither punctual nor partial to biscuits.
All the same, he loved the watch and wore it every day, the same watch that silently informed him he might as well pack in his gardening and fix himself something to eat, because it was getting dark and dropping cooler and his knees would suffer for it if he didn’t.
As he stowed away his gardening gloves and trowel he thought back to his days in the classroom, and though he didn’t miss them as much as he thought he would, he missed having something to pad out his days. There were times lately he woke up early in the morning – because he’d found it difficult to break the rising habits of a lifetime – and lay there on his back contemplating a row of tedious hours waiting to be occupied. They’d always planned to fill the hours together, Jean and he, had all sorts of schemes lined up for the time when work didn’t soak up their days and energies; they were going to join a ramblers’ club, take in the Yorkshire Dales or tramp over Derbyshire. The sad thing was the only time he really got out and did any real walking was to visit the shops or Jean’s grave.
He slipped his feet out of his old mud-caked shoes and banged the aged Hush Puppies against the wall to free them of dirt. Perhaps the action was more violent than it needed to be. But that was only a sign of his frustration.
Early retirement. Their suggestion, not his. Losing it, that’s what he’d overheard, that’s what they implied. Not good for the school. These were different days; you know, couldn’t go around hitting kids like in the old times, even if they deserved it. Time to call it a day. They understood what it must have been like, losing Jean, how it affects a person, having to let go of someone that close. You’ve done a good job at the school all these years so quit while you’re ahead, that’s what they were saying. Quit before you do something else stupid.
The affair with the Stone kid had finally done it, and he knew he’d been lucky not to have the police dragged into it. What a mess. It was in the local papers though, and what they wrote didn’t paint a very good picture of him. Bad reflection on the school, too, if the headmaster and the board of governors were to be believed. They knew what the Stone kid was like, and his mother, but that didn’t matter one bit, not when it came to the crunch, and he was well aware that there were some in the staff room who’d be glad to see the back of him. He wouldn’t mind betting they were quick off the blocks to offer their ten-penneth to the whole proceedings.
So they gave him his watch and a tin of Jacobs creams and breathed a unified sigh of relief. Another piece of dead wood hacked away.
The house was in darkness, and the sixty-watt bulbs did little to hold it back, but it did have the effect of making the butter on his bread look yellowier, more appetising. Two hours later he turned off all the lights and made his way up the stairs to bed, but not before throwing a couple of sleeping tablets down his throat in what had become a nightly ritual. Even the nights were getting longer, he thought, as if they were trying to compete with the days. Soon he’d not sleep at all, day and night joining and he’d have yet more hours to try and fill, his entire life eventually becoming one protracted and wearisome hour.
He sat in bed, the room in darkness, and he lit one cigarette after another till the effects of the tablets were felt and his eyelids began to grow heavy. He stubbed out the last cigarette half smoked on the ashtray at the side of his bed, and lay there looking up at the black expanse that was the ceiling, his thoughts melding till they were a pleasant but absurd stew of ideas and imaginings.
And in between the bubblings of a brain slipping into unconsciousness he heard the creak of the bedroom door, and he forced open an eyelid to search out the lighter oblong of the doorway and the shadow that flitted in and out of his vision. It became fused with the picture of Jean and he as they walked on top of Mam Tor in Derbyshire, as if it was the replaying of a vivid memory that couldn’t possibly be a memory, because they’d never been there, she smiling from beside the pile of rocks that marked the summit. She was waving, and he waved back, or at least he did in his mind, for his arms were lying motionless and useless on the sheets. He ran to her and held her around her slim waist, for she was twenty years old again, and so was he, and he kissed her on her cold lips. She pulled away, held out a packet of cigarettes for him and he took one out and put it in his mouth. She then produced a box of matches, from where he didn’t know, and she struck one.
His eyelids heaved open for a moment. The sound had not been in the dream but there beside him. Yet Jean was calling him and his eyes closed in spite of a sense of urgency rapping at his fogged mind, and he ran to join her again. There was the smell of the struck match strong and sharp in his nostrils, and for another instant he was awake yet again and staring at the shadow that hovered over him and the dancing sphere of light – a flame – that floated in the dark. But Jean called and this time he didn’t fight sleep and the dream of his wife; he wanted to wallow in its warmth.
But another familiar smell reached him. That of burning, and suddenly all around him the heather and grass was on fire, the flames licking around Jean’s ankles. She caught fire as easily as if she’d been a bundle of dry tinder. She stood there like a human torch. He coughed in his dream, choking on the rolling pall of smoke, and knew also that he coughed in real life, because the pain he was feeling was forcing his mind to the surface of consciousness. But the tablets held him there, just under, like a hand covered in a glove of soft kid leather, and the thought flickered through his mind that he would never wake again and so he lay on his back contemplating the endless hours that stretched out behind him and the thought that there wouldn’t be any more in front. It wasn’t a terrifying thought, as one might suppose, he mused. In a way he was glad there would be no more hours. He’d had enough of them.
* * * *
35
Monday
Last night I heard the door to my room click.
It woke me instantly, if indeed I was ever fully asleep to begin with. I stared at it, or in the general direction of it, for in truth there was nothing to see because the lights were out. But I pictured it in my mind as vividly as if I saw it for real. Every damn scratch across it, every tiny ripple in the painted metal, because I’d stared at it for so long now, with hope, with trepidation, with desperation. That door meant more to me than just a door.
The minutes dragged by. I heard faint sounds of shuffling, cotton rustling like dry leaves tumbling over each other in the distance, the thinnest of noises coming from the hinges as the door was eased open a little. The scrape of laboured breathing.
“Who is it?” I said, my voice weak, a rattle in my throat, a star in my own horror movie, with my own clichéd lines.
There was no reply.
Whoever it was merely stood and gazed at the blackness that was me with as much rapt attention as I did the blackness concealing the door. A cold panic started to well up, and a considerable part of me wanted to hide beneath the bedcovers. II even grasped them with that childish thought in mind. Hide from the bogeyman. Was this it? Finally? Was it all coming to an end?
“Is that you, Max?” I said. It was him. I could sense it. I could feel him across
the room as plainly as if I touched him. “I’m not afraid of you. I never was,” I said, though I was desperately afraid. “Are you going to get this over and done with or what?” I said, my voice sounding uncommonly loud in the quiet confines of my room. “Because if you don’t kill me, I’m going to kill you!” I screamed.
And with that scream my anger and fear melded into a dangerous cocktail of impetuosity and I threw away the bedcovers and ran for the door, but when I reached it the thing was closed. The door was locked. I refused to believe it had never been open.
“Bastard! Bastard!” I yelled, sending my fist crashing against the door heedless of the damage I was doing to me hand. “You took everything! Everything! I tell you, Max, if you don’t kill me, then God help me I’m going to kill you! Murderer! Murderer!”
I eventually slumped to the floor, my chest heaving and aching with a band of pain across the middle of it, tears hot in my eyes.
You took everything, I thought. Everything I ever had. You stole it from me. You took my life away a long time ago, little by little, piece by piece till I was sucked dry and empty and left here to rot.
I crawled to my bed and pulled the covers over my head. Hiding from the bogeyman.
Bernard wanted to tell me something, but I couldn’t be bothered with him and his stupid grinning head.
* * * *
I tossed the bag containing the rat across the room – my room – and sat on the edge of the bed – my bed – my head in my hands. “What the hell is going on?” I said. I could hear the sound of the sea being stirred by the wind; it appeared to be laughing. Hahhh hahhh hahhh hahhh. I felt the springs of the mattress give as Ruby sat next to me, and it caused us to lean so that we pressed against each other. She put an arm around me and we sat in silence.
Ruby said, “When I first saw you I was so, so glad, and then immediately I realised the danger you were in. Max never intended you would leave this island. I ought to have considered he might do something like this. It’s the next logical step.”
“This is so bizarre, Ruby. What is Max thinking of? What on earth is going through that mind of his?”
She let out a breath that brushed my hand. “Max believes he’s the real Philip Calder.”
I looked at her, then I laughed again without much humour in it, dry and brittle. She stared me out, her lips set. “That’s totally ridiculous!” I said. “Why would he want to be me? I’m a nobody, I’ve been nowhere and I’m going nowhere. Max was always the one who would go places. Max was always the one who people liked. Max is a success. I’m Philip Calder, the bloke from the backwoods, still a part of the backwoods, no money, no future, no nothing. And you’re telling me Max somehow thinks he’s me? That just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Sense doesn’t come into it, Philip. This is Max’s world and it’s turned upside down. Normal rules don’t apply. You have to see it as Max sees it. Look all around you. Look at this room. Is this normal? Max’s world is a twisted version of yours, because he’s always believed that you stole it from him. You are a changeling. You are his doppelganger that usurped his rightful place. At birth, whenever, Max is certain he was exchanged for you, and all that should have rightly been his was snatched away and he was forced to live this other life with a mother he never completely thought of as his own. Don’t ask how he came to believe it or why, but that’s the way it is. You are an impostor. He resents you, always has. He means to kill you for it.”
I rose quickly to my feet. “Rubbish!”
But of course I knew it wasn’t rubbish. It did make sense. My mind tracked back to various troubled memories from the past. They flashed on and off in my mind’s eye like a lurid slide show. Max in his garden telling me he didn’t want to be Max; atop The Mount and Max asking me if I knew what a changeling was; the time he stayed with us in our house and how he gradually took on my mannerisms; the night when I fell into the canal – I was there, in the water again, calling to Max as he stood immobile on the bank staring coldly down at me, and then striking out at me with the branch, intending that I never surfaced. Wanting me to drown! Wanting me dead!
I looked at the dark patch that was the rat in a bag, and wondered whether symbolically this was Max or me. I would never know the full meaning behind this sad mummified creature with its stomach slit open and its innards piled up beside it. I could only guess at the possible answers. I shivered and folded my arms about me. But I found I could not blame him for who he was or what he thought. It was obvious there had been some damage done in childhood to his mind – possibly due to the beatings he’d had that Connie told me about. Poor, poor Connie. Was she ever aware of Max’s true condition, how he truly felt, what he believed? She would have been mortified. She doted on him like no other mother could. She gave him her all. Evidently, he felt a powerful bond for her, because he still felt they had to be together, her body enshrined like some ancient princess on a magical island, still close to him and never to be far from one another, even in death.
“Max and I met some years following our divorce,” Ruby said, shattering my thoughts. “My company was put in charge of marketing one of his many ventures, and when he found out by accident that I was employed as project manager there he insisted that I take charge in spite of me arguing otherwise. That’s his story, anyhow. I don’t believe it was an accident, not now, not knowing what I know. But I was flattered and pleased that we’d met up after all those years. We talked over past times, he talked about you, a lot, asked how you were, those kinds of things. One thing led to another. We saw more of each other, got closer, and eventually he asked me to marry him. I make it sound simple and short, but it was never that easy. I carried with me too much emotional baggage to make it a smooth transition. And we saw each other for quite a long time before either of us considered submitting to something like marriage.”
I turned away. This was hurting too much. “Go on,” I forced myself to say, because, in spite of this tearing away at my insides, I had to know.
“I guess why I was really attracted to him was the fact that I was trying to replace you, and Max made it easy to believe that this was exactly what I was getting. Another you. Another chance at being with you and making it work. But gradually it dawned on me that he was obsessed with you, first in little ways – constantly dropping you into the conversation, that kind of thing – to actually behaving and speaking like you. At times the likeness was uncanny. Scary even. Time went by and he eventually managed to convince me that I needn’t do the job I did, that I could somehow be more important to him and his writing, and like a fool I gave in, simply threw away all that I’d ever worked towards, and for what? Yeah, I know, dumb bitch. So I became more and more isolated and things start to get real weird.
“One night I found a photo album. Out of curiosity I flipped the pages. There was a black and white one of Max and Connie taken in the 60s; he was a kid, standing in some kind of park and holding up a white feather and an ice-cream. I moved on and came across photos of you and me, other kids we grew up with, that kind of thing. Then I saw one with you, Max, and your parents standing outside your back door…”
I remembered it well; it was during the fortnight or so Max stayed with us, taken by Connie when she and Bernard came back off holiday, to use up the few remaining frames of film in the camera. “Stand closer, darling!” she cooed at Max. “That’s it! Lovely!” Then she said, “It doesn’t work. Why won’t it work, Bernard?” He came over to her, his face ruddy with the effects of overexposure to strong sunshine. His massive hand took the camera and wound the film on. “Stupid, aren’t I?” she trilled. “I never did understand cameras, not like Collie here, am I? Not a photographer like you, eh?” And she clicked the shutter. My mother said she wanted a copy and Connie promised she’d get her one. A promise that, naturally, she never kept.
“The strange thing was,” Ruby continued, ploughing into my memories, “Max had written ‘Mum and Dad’ on the back.” She looked up at me. “And he’d scribbled you o
ut with a pen…”
I narrowed my eyes. “It’s starting to make sense now,” I stuttered. “I hate to admit it, but everything’s beginning to add up…” I went over to her, sat down on the bed again, taking her hand.
“That’s not all,” she said, drawing in a shaky breath. “When I came to this place a year and a half ago, Max confessed…”
“You’ve been here all that time?”
She nodded quickly. “Listen…”
It hit me what Ruby’s true situation had been all along. “And you’ve never been permitted to leave?” I was horrified. “You’ve been a virtual prisoner all that time?”
Her hand pressed against my lips, sealing them. “He confessed to me…”
I peeled away her cold fingers, holding them tight in my hand. I could tell by her expression she was deeply distressed. “Confessed what?”
“You see Max was convinced that other people knew he’d been replaced by you. In fact he believed there was a massive plot against him, that sooner or later one or the other of them would kill him so that you could take his place completely. Even his mother was in on it, but, he said, she’d grown so attached to him that she couldn’t ever do the dirty deed herself. Others had to be employed.”
“Others? Who?”
“Bernard,” she said.
He hated Bernard. That much was true. I could never understand why, though. “You mean he thought Bernard – Bernard – was going to bump him off?”
“So Max got in there first…”
I pulled away. “What are you saying, Ruby? That Bernard didn’t commit suicide?”
“Think about it. Who would have thought any different? Bernard was thoroughly depressed, drunk and potentially suicidal. All Max had to do was go in there and take a knife to his wrists. No more Bernard.”
“No…” I shook my head. I refused to believe.
Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller Page 32
