by Lex Sinclair
The more they contemplated about their problems the more Carlton’s terrific idea sounded less and less terrific and more arduous.
‘How ‘bout if Carlton and I follow you in my Jeep back to your house so we can see if there’s a way out of this mess?’ Charles said. ‘We’re running out of time as we speak.’
‘Okay,’ Kate said straight away.
‘Are you sure you wanna do this?’ Tom asked her. ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to.’
‘No. This is important. We can’t waste any more time without acting, or it’ll be too late.’
‘Well, only if you’re sure, hon. Don’t let him persuade you like he did before, that’s all I’m saying.’
Charles didn’t protest against this remark in spite of being hurt by it. After all, it was his story that started this whole chaos. Tom was only making certain Kate wanted to do what she was about to do because it was her decision, and her decision alone, not Charles’s or anyone else’s trying to influence her.
10
Charles and Carlton trailed Tom’s Vauxhall through the incessant rain. The wipers sweeping back and forth rapidly. Tom was an excellent driver. He kept the Jeep in sight of his rear view mirror at all times.
Charles thought that Tom and Kate had been lying about allowing them into their home, and would speed up when at anytime just so they could lose them, so they wouldn’t have to see them ever again. Yet that wasn’t the case at all.
Charles wondered what it must be like to be Tom at this moment in time. The poor guy must have a thousand stabbing, chaotic thoughts running around in his head, all because of him - and still Tom listened to him, despite hating his guts.
Maybe if he’d had a wife and a family of his own, he would be able to recognise some of the confusing emotions Tom was going through at this moment in time.
Unlike him, Tom had a wife to take care of. Tom had lots of vital responsibilities he knew nothing about. Under the stressful circumstances, Tom seemed to be coping rather well with it all, Charles thought.
Prior to them finding the body in the forest, he and Tom enjoyed one another’s company and got along rather well. It was an awful shame the way things had turned out. Perhaps when this was all over they could resume their friendship? Charles didn’t like to admit it, but he doubted that.
***
The sheets of rain ceased by the time they arrived at Tom and Kate’s beautiful beige-brick home. Charles watched as Tom steered his vehicle up onto the driveway. He brought his Jeep alongside the kerb and killed the engine. Tom got out of his car and strode towards the Jeep before Charles with a purpose. He didn’t look the slightest bit exhausted from the long drive - just pissed off. He signalled for the old man to roll his driver’s door window down so he could talk.
Charles was about to get out when Tom said, ‘No, stay right there,’ so both Charles and Carlton could hear him. He didn’t know what Tom was going to do.
Maybe Tom was going to beat the crap out of him after all, he thought.
‘This is our home,’ Tom said. ‘I wanna tell you two something before I invite you in first: something that is very personal and must be kept confidential. Got it?’ Charles and Carlton both answered yes. ‘Late last year,’ Tom started, ‘my wife was informed by her doctor that she couldn’t have children of her own.
Clearly the poor woman has, and never will, recover from such devastating news, as you would expect...What I’m trying to say is - right now Kate’s head is all mixed up. She’s not like the vibrant, cheerful girl I asked to marry me. To cut a long story short, we were already going through a really tough time before all this crap happened. And I don’t think my wife knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s not insane; at least not yet. But she is mixed up. I’m asking you two men to consider what you do next; it may destroy her mentally, permanently. I personally don’t give a toss about what some shitty ancient book say’s or doesn’t say. Quite frankly you can shove the book corner first up your arse, for all I care. But Kate believes your story. She would’ve never believed before being told the awful news late last year, but she does now. You’ve already made my wife cry once today, all I’m asking is you think about how your actions can affect other people, who like my wife, take things to heart.’
Neither Carlton nor Charles said anything. Both men felt sincere pity and sorrow for Kate. ‘Do me and my wife a favour, Charles,’ Tom went on. ‘Put this dead body in your Jeep and do whatever you deem best. If you do that, in time I’ll find it in me to forgive you for what you’ve done to us.’
Charles met Tom’s steely gaze and said, ‘I am sorry to hear that. I really do like your wife and you, despite you not liking me. But I swear on my mother’s grave, I wasn’t lying to you about any of this. None of this was planned. I only did what I thought was in all our best interest. Honest to God.’
‘Just get the corpse and get outta here, ‘kay?’
With that said Tom walked back to his house and opened the garage door.
‘Bloody hell!’ Carlton blurted when Tom was out of earshot. ‘No wonder he’s pissed off. Who can blame him? He must feel like the whole world is against him.’
The young man’s comment was spot on. It made Charles feel sick to the stomach. What had happened couldn’t have been a worse time if it was deliberate.
Carlton saw Charles was hurt and depressed; he felt exactly the same.
‘Charles, let’s just get this body, get the hell outta here and leave this people in peace. You’ve got the book. You know what to do and what not to do. We can work the rest out for ourselves. Right?’
‘I’m too old to be running around doing this kinda shit at my age,’ Charles choked. ‘I’m ashamed. Ever since those two met me there life has gone from bad to worse.’
Carlton reached out and squeezed the old man’s bony shoulder. ‘Oh, come on man. You never meant any harm. I know that, and so do Tom and Kate. But they just don’t want any more to do with this whole corpse thing, which is understandable, after all they’ve been through. I think deep down, Tom does like you and knows you never meant any of this to happen; that’s why he said what he did about forgiving you when all this blows over. If he really hated your guts, truly, then he would have punched your lights out by now and would’ve never mentioned anything about forgiveness. Right?’
For someone who just by looking at him appeared to be an ordinary young man, Carlton had wisdom way beyond his years in abundance. And unlike Charles, he always tried to take positives from a negative situation, as opposed to be pessimistic.
Charles unbuckled his seat belt and got out.
Due to the battleship-grey clouds that threatened thunder, daylight had swiftly faded into night.
All four of them headed to the garage. Tom hit the light switch and closed the garage door so no passers by or neighbours could see what they were up to.
Carlton and Charles followed Kate’s gaze, passed he fluorescent strips, at the loft overhead. ‘It’s up there,’ she said, stating the obvious.
There was a space next to Kate’s car on the concreted surface. Tom pointed to it and announced, ‘We’ll bring it down and put it on the floor, here. It’s too early and too risky to haul a corpse into the Jeep yet, without being seen.’ He then turned and faced Kate, who stood with her back to her parked car and said, ‘Why don’t you go inside and put the kettle on, hon?’
For a moment Kate didn’t seem as though she had heard him. She stared at him, blinked, and then finally said, ‘Oh, okay. I’ll be in the kitchen. Do you boys want anything to eat? You must be starving?’
‘Yeah, that’d be great,’ Tom said, before Charles and Carlton had chance to answer for themselves. ‘Make us all some sandwiches or something...’
Charles knew why Tom had suggested the drinks and food. He didn’t want his wife to see the rotting corpse. It would only damage
her psyche to a greater extent in its fragile state. They waited until she stepped out of the garage through the pantry door and into the kitchen in advance to ascending the timber stairs to the loft. Tom carried a torch as the loft was still rather gloomy even with the light on below. He pointed the beam to cardboard boxes and crossed the creaking floorboards to where the body was hidden.
As he got nearer, Tom halted suddenly. He crouched over so he didn’t whack his head on the crossing rafter, staring at the two cardboard boxes which had been pushed out from the niche into the centre of the loft. The boxes weren’t like that when he’d put the corpse up here a month ago. You didn’t forget something as serious as hiding a corpse in your garage; it wasn’t an ordinary errand or a household appliance. He specifically recalled stashing the body away, wrapped in the woolly blanket and concealing it by pushing some cardboard boxes in front of it so it wouldn’t be in plain view.
‘What’s the matter?’ Charles asked.
Tom ignored him and crept closer to the spot, shone the torch light in the corner, eyes protruding, face slack. ‘Oh, dear God! No!’ Tom’s throat worked convulsively.
Charles glimpsed Carlton. Both men were alarmed.
Tom stood up and inadvertently whacked his head on the rafter, forgetting all about it in his astonishment. Charles could feel the hairs on the nape of his neck rise. You didn’t have to be Albert Einstein to work out that something was terribly awry.
‘It’s gone...’ Tom said, wincing.
11
The three men sat on cardboard boxes in the gloomy loft in silence, panic setting in. They had just searched the entire loft for the corpse and found it was no longer there.
Tom caressed his sore head, which was already starting to swell. By tomorrow morning he would have a massive multi-coloured bruise. ‘I can’t tell Kate,’ he said, breaking the stillness. ‘It’ll crush her. She’d never recover from something like this, after all she’s been through.’
Charles was in two minds to say what he was about to. He took a chance and spitted out what he’d been deliberating: ‘You might have to, Tom. Maybe Kate moved the body. After all, she did melt the ice. Maybe she was afraid you would get rid of it when she wasn’t here, so she hid it from you?’
Charles thought having said what he had would enrage Tom but instead Tom looked at him, and said, ‘That might be precisely what she’s done. But if she did then why didn’t she say so earlier?’
‘You’ll just have to take a chance and ask her,’ Carlton said and shrugged.
‘She must’ve moved it,’ Tom mused aloud. ‘How else could it have disappeared?’
Charles lowered his head. Tom saw this and knew Charles couldn’t look at him straight in the eye, just like earlier in the café. ‘What’re you thinking, Charles?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ the old man said.
Tom huffed. ‘You think that there’s a strong possibility that the corpse moved by itself, don’t you?’
‘I’m not saying anything no more,’ Charles said, still staring at the floor.
‘TELL ME!’ Tom roared.
Charles’s heart lurched. ‘Why don’t you just ask Kate first and see what she say’s?’
Roughly translated that meant, yes he does think it’s feasible that the body moved by itself, but doesn’t want to admit it, Tom thought. ‘How the hell can a dead body move, for God’s sake?’ Tom shouted.
‘Calm down,’ Carlton said. ‘We’re probably getting ourselves worried over nothing.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, Carlton. It’s not you house, or your wife in danger!’
Carlton got to his feet and yelled back, ‘Look, man, you’re not the only one with your neck in a noose! We’re just as neck-deep in this shit as you!’
Charles could see that their hot tempers were getting the better of them, and if they weren’t careful they would end up fighting amongst themselves. ‘Guys!
Guys! GUYS! Get a grip would ya! This isn’t solving anything. Beating the living daylights out of one another isn’t gonna do us any good.
‘Tom, why don’t you ask Kate if she’s moved the body. If she hasn’t we’ll search the entire house for it. Then, and only then shall we start worrying about how to proceed. Everyone agree?’
Tom and Carlton concurred with his plan of action.
***
Twenty minutes later, Tom had brought Kate up-to-date with their predicament.
Understandably, Kate had started to fret when she heard about the men not being able to find the corpse in the loft where it had been hidden. Evidently she’d not hidden the corpse to another safe location on the property. They had searched the house from top to bottom, inside out, and come up with nothing.
Now it was time to start worrying. Not only had they carted a dead body home with them instead of informing the authorities - like any respectable person would have done immediately - but now there was a corpse walking around, either on their street or somewhere else.
‘What do we do now?’ Tom asked no one in particular.
They were seated at the dinette table in the kitchen with plates of ham sandwiches on china plates in front of them, which no one had touched. No one answered. They couldn’t.
‘Bring that book of yours in for us to look at,’ Tom heard himself say. ‘It may give some inclination to what this might mean, apart from the obvious.’
Charles struggled to his fatigued legs. Carlton gripped him around his left forearm and righted him. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, seeing the old man was pallid and weary.
‘Yeah. I just got up a little too fast. I’m fine, really. Thanks.’
He shuffled out of the kitchen, into the living room to the outside where the Jeep was parked, snatched the tome off the passenger seat and brought it back inside, hurrying through the hammering rain. The old man came back into the kitchen sat back down, opened the tome up and removed his spectacles from his breast pocket. The he started scanning the text in the appropriate chapters with his index finger.
‘Find anything?’ Tom asked.
‘The story I told you of in café; about the guy finding a corpse perched on a gravestone in the cemetery, suggests that once the frozen men are exposed to heat, they are able then to move like a living person. Whereas our corpse has moved from where you originally put it last month, the corpse in the tale had dug itself out of a grave, unless someone else had done the digging and placed the corpse on top of the gravestone. There are so many possibilities... but there are no definitive answers, I’m afraid.’
Tom went to the refrigerator and got himself a cold beer. ‘Anyone want one?’ he said, holding the door open and letting the cool air blow gently on his hot cheeks.
‘Yes, please,’ Carlton said.
Charles could do with a cold beer right about now. However, that was a very bad idea. It was no secret to anyone who had got to know him fairly well that he had a serious drinking problem. Furthermore he had a long drive home when their discussion was finally over, and he needed to have a clear head if he was going to be able to drive safely. ‘No, thanks,’ he said.
Tom handed Carlton a beer, opened his can and gulped the fizzy contents down his cotton-dry oesophagus.
A segment which Charles read caught his interest.
Carlton and Tom noticed this.
‘Listen to this,’ the old man said, getting everyone’s attention. ‘This talks about colours in the skies...’
Carlton frowned. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
Charles put his finger on the first word of the paragraph and followed the small print across the page. “‘The Frozen Man had been declared dead by the murderers. It didn’t take long till the townsfolk discovered this gruesome, yet delightful information. People: men, women, even the children celebrated at dusk. The Frozen Man was dead!
“‘The townsfolk were full of joy hearing the news, not me, though. I for one had grown fond of the fine gentleman. He was a true gentleman in every sense of the word. He helped me cope with my wife’s sudden passing, during the time he appeared from nowhere, to the time he was killed. He made us believe in miracles and in good people. Then the horrid rumours started floating around town that this strange man from parts unknown was in fact a child molester.
“‘I, unlike the rest of the townsfolk, can use my intuition and make up my mind for myself. I don’t need others telling me what to believe, who to like and who to loath. I am a grown man who can stand on his own two feet unaided.
And my firm belief was this: John never harmed a living soul. It didn’t fit his charming, sincere personality. He loved children, yes. Yet there’s loving children and then there’s ‘loving them’ - if you know what I mean?’”
Charles glanced up at the two men and Kate, and said, ‘This narrative sounds a bit more recent than the other ones.’ Tom agreed, although he kept perfectly silent and let Charles continue reading from the text.
“‘Jonathan was his name - at least that’s what he told me at when we were acquainted. He stayed with me for a few nights the day after my wife’s funeral.
I had no clue who he was or what he was doing standing on my doorstep, staring deeply into my eyes, like he could see my soul and read my thoughts. It turned out that in actual fact he could do all those things, and many, many more.
“‘He introduced himself to me and asked kindly if he could come in. Without any hesitation whatsoever, I did as he asked, as though I had no control over my body.
‘From that day forth, Jonathan aided me to grieve for my wife, because up until then I had bottled all of my inner feelings for Claire (my deceased wife). I wanted to be strong for her relatives and friends who attended the funeral. Also, I wasn’t the type of man who let my emotions get the better of me, regardless of whether I had company or not.
