Charlie
Smith walked up the steps to the Brook house; hat in hand, the stump of a
cigarette hung limply from the corner of his mouth. When he reached the top of
the steps he craned his head back a little to get a better look at the old
place where his mother had died.
It wasn’t much of a house, he
decided, it was more of a mausoleum – a sprawling, Victorian mausoleum that
seemed to have developed out of the ground from nothing at all. It was a dark
wood build with dusty windows you simply could never get to brighten, and the
same lifeless old garden; a dark patch of earth where nothing bright grew.
He coughed into a balled hand,
donned his hat, and hung his finger over the tarnished brass door bell. He pushed
it. He heard it chime somewhere in the distance. The sound reverberated a while
and died just as abruptly as it had begun. There was a slight sound after that;
of shuffling feet on carpet.
After a few minutes, the door swung
open. “Yes, can I help?” The owner of the house asked in a no nonsense tone of
voice. She was perhaps sixty, slightly stooped, slightly bitter looking. She
fitted the house perfectly. She waved a slightly arthritic hand in front of his
face and sighed heavily. “Well ... can I help you?”
“You don’t know me,” he said, “but I
was hoping you’d permit me a moment to look around the old house one last time.
I used to live here – a long time ago. I was passing by and ... well ... I
suppose you could say I have become a little sentimental over the last couple
of years.”
The old woman squinted. “It’s not a
museum,” she said. “People don’t just walk in off the street.”
“I only want a couple of minutes.
Five, maybe six, at the most and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“You’re not going to steal anything,
are you?”
Charlie grinned and shook his head.
He felt the first tickle of laughter rise into the back of his throat. He
didn’t let it go, fortunately, but he was sure he came close for a while.
“No,” he assured softly. “But if it
makes you feel better I’m open to compromise.”
She squinted, her milky eyes caught
in the sunlight at his back for a moment.
“Compromise?”
“I have a car – not a very expensive
one, I’ll admit – and I’d be more than willing to give you the keys to hold on
to while I look around. Then, when I’m done, if you’re confident nothing is
missing I get my keys back.”
She thought about this for a while
as Charlie looked into the dimly lit hallway beyond her. He had not stepped so
much as a single foot into the house but he could already smell the acrid aroma
of damp, dust, and rot. Similar smells, he would concede, to when he lived here
as a child.
“And it would only be for five
minutes? No more?”
“Of course.”
She nodded sharply, pushed out her
hand, and watched as Charlie dropped a small set of keys into her slightly
bunched hand. The car key gleamed in her palm. She looked at it briefly, then
to the red Ford parked beside the garden gate. It seemed a fair trade.
“Then be quick,” she said.
It was much as he remembered it. The
outside may have changed only slightly, but nothing on the inside had.
The rooms contained much the same furniture he remembered his
mother possessing. High backed chairs, floor to ceiling bookcases, some of
which were now empty, and the overbearing dining room table. Even the hallways,
while now adorned differently, seemed to have similar dusty pictures hung on
them.
“It’s quite remarkable,” he said simply. “Nothing seems to
have changed one bit.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “My husband – my late husband – did a lot of restoration
work around the place when we bought it. It cost a small fortune too, I don’t
mind telling you.”
Charlie walked slowly, methodically staring up at the high
ceilings with its cracked plaster.
She didn’t stray far from where Charlie walked, but that was
just fine. What did it matter? It was her house.
“And your husband’s dead?”
“Yes, two years last week. He died of cancer.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
The old woman sighed and walked a little way from him.
Charlie smiled.
“Have you seen all you wanted yet?” She asked.
“There is one place,” he said. “I’d very much like to see one
of the bedrooms. It was my sisters. It had the best view in the house. It
overlooked a small pond in the back garden, is that still there?”
“Bedroom?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind. It used to be my sisters. She was
... she was raped in there when she was eleven years old. She died six months
later – she committed suicide. My mother said she lost her mind because of it.”
He paused. “She was beaten on the back of her head by what sounded very much
like a cosh. But, of course, nobody was completely sure.” Another pause, longer.
“I guess you could say it’s a kind of pilgrimage.”
She pointed her finger towards the sweeping stairwell,
disinterested. “Up there,” she said. “You can lead the way. I’ll follow you.”
Charlie pushed a hand into his pocket, tipped his hat with
the other, and his smile widened.
He goosed, endlessly, of how he and his sister used to hide
in the cupboards behind the wood panelled walls (now gone) from their parents
whenever they’d done something they shouldn’t have. He also told her, oddly,
how his mother had lost her own fight with cancer in one of the three master
bedrooms. The latter part of the conversation, though well meant, did not sit
well with her.
And so to the bedroom. The room didn’t smell like the rest of
the house, though he had imagined it would have. Here, the windows had been
cracked and dust cleaned.
It was a girl’s room now. There were signs of previous occupation
hung all around: high school photographs of wide eyed, cheery friends huddled
together, ceramic dolls in white lace dressed, their faces cracked and mottled,
and cloths set out on the bed as he imagined they would have been for the
moment their owner stepped out of the shower to dress. There was also a vanity
table to the left of the window. A photograph had been pinned to the mirror
showing a girl of perhaps no more than twelve or thirteen with blonde curly
hair smiling broadly into the photographer’s lens.
“This ... this was my daughter’s room,” she said without any
prompting. “She died when she was seventeen years old at the hands of some
drunk lunatic who decided to take a midnight drive on the pavement. She died on
the eve of her eighteenth birthday. I’ve just never had the heart to empty the
room.”
“I’m sorry.”
She was going to cry, Charlie knew. Her eyes were scorching.
“Sit down,” he said. “I never meant to upset you. Had I know
then –”
“It’s all right. It’s fine.”
He waited until she’d turned away to dry the first show of
tears before removing his hand, and the cosh it was curled around, from his
pocket.
He leered at her, his face a deadpan expression. His hand
wrapped tightly around the cosh until his knuckles cracked and whitened. He
drew two steadying breaths (one for need and one for luck), raised his arm, then
brought it down against the back of the old woman’s skull.
The smile on Charlie Smiths face broadened hideously,
revealing a row of modestly crooked, slightly stained, tombstone teeth. He
dropped the cosh, took off his coat, and set about unbuttoning his pants with
all the carefree grace of a man with nothing to lose.
Charlie set out his clothes on the bed, folded and ordered,
and turned back towards the old woman. And again ... the smile. He dropped to
his knees, hoisted the old woman’s waist into the air, and waited for the blood
to flow south again.
The irony was not lost upon him.
It’ll be quite a
performance, he
whispered into her deaf ears. Hell, you
may even be surprised what an old guffer like me can do for a dry old lady like
you. And do you know what the best part is? You don’t even have to be conscious
to be a willing participant of it.
A moment later, assurances over with, Charlie Smith dug in.
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