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Fourteen
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2021-09-09 17:26:38Related chapters
House of Sighs Thirteen
THIRTEENThe man named Jack stood in the doorway. Only it wasn’t Jack. Sure, it looked like him, had the same muscular arms and tell-tale cheekbones as him; but this figure was not the same person who had been with Michael and the other passengers on the bus. Couldn’t be. This man was covered in gore and held a pair of long-bladed sewing scissors. Though it would be easy to dismiss Michael’s conclusion as pain warping perception, he believed—perhaps more than he’d believed anything—that the person emerging from the house wasn’t even a ‘he’ anymore, rather a thing, a thing that had lost the most important parts of itself along the line, debris trying to piece itself back together again, only failing, always failing, and then becoming defined by that failure.Maybe—No. No maybe. Michael knew that he was seeing true.This thing was an ‘it’. A beast.The Beast.Michael pushed himself up off the ground, sluggish like someone coming out of hyper-sleep in the science fiction movies he
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twelve:
TWELVE:JackJack was the smallest kid in class. He hated being short, hated being so narrow shouldered. Everyone else was broad and tall. Some boys even had hair on their upper lips.Though the runt of the pack, he emerged popular but never the ringleader he wanted to be. Time resigned him to their jokes about his size, and on some level, he hated himself for letting them get away with it.Jack accepted that he wasn’t extraordinary, or noticeable. In class, he raised his hand even if he didn’t know the answer just so his teacher—whom he loved and often dreamed about–would look in his direction. She never did. He had no great aspirations and came from average blue-collar stock. Jack appeared destined to be forgotten, and worst of all, he knew it.One recess, he slipped into the boy’s restroom. In the farthest stall, he sat on the toilet seat and opened his backpack, dug through notebooks and lunch wrappers to fish out a pen. Nervous, he scribbled words against the back of the door
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Eleven
ELEVENThe uneven ground beneath Michael’s feet. Rocks jutted up through the earth with the sole purpose of tripping him over. He ran farther and farther into the trees. The sky was the color of a corpse—and Michael knew what a corpse looked like now. Heaven help him, he knew only too well.Tunnel vision. Tugging branches. Twigs raked his skin.The Beast pursued him.Michael pushed himself harder than he ever had before. Every yard he put between him and The Beast was a yard closer to safety. He heard the monster crashing through branches behind him. Michael ran blind, praying for a road, or maybe to discover some half-buried weapon in the ground.Lightning flashed. Trees in the strobe.
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Ten
TENJack sprinted through two places at once.One was the dense Australian bush with its brambles and knots. The second was the room in which he’d killed the driver’s father. He could see, clearer than the dwindling day itself, the ugly carpet lining the living room floor and the old man beneath him as he bent down to bite off his lips. They came off with such ease.A scream. Coppery blood in his mouth.Euphoric victory.It was surprising how long it took to kill him. The human body was programmed to fight; a self-defeating trait, considering that in the end it was destined to give up the ghost. Given this, Jack found enjoyment in assisting someone fulfill his destiny.The father had rolled around, grabbing where his lips should have been. Jack laughed. Damn funny! Power over another was a special kind of freedom.A ceramic lamp in the shape of two swans kissing on a table near the television set. He picked it up, sneered at its tackiness, yanked the cord from the wall. Jack sla
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Nine:
NINE:PunishmentJack on his parents’ bed from where he’d been thrown, face down, eyes closed. He waited for the unbuckling belt, a signal that his punishment was about to be enforced. And waited. Was his dad doing it slowly to prolong the torture? Or maybe he meant for it to be quiet—the element of surprise being the feature that distinguished this lashing from the others in the past.Nothing. In the distance, his cousin’s cries.Jack opened his eyes.The bulge of his father’s stomach through the apron he wore. In his hands, he held the blood-streaked scissors Jack used to slit open Charles’s hands and fingers.“What you doing, Dad?”“Don’t speak, boy.”“What?”“Don’t you say a bloody word, you hear?”Jack bit his tongue and pinched his lips together.“Now,” his father began, “you’re going to learn a lesson. And it’s a lesson I don’t much like teaching. But I’s got to do what I think’s fair.”Jack was frightened. He breathed hot air into the blanket. The fabric itched agai
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Eight
EIGHTBack in that second reality, in the living room with the ugly carpet, Jack beheld the thin, white scars running the lengths of the two first fingers of his right hand. Surely all sons must hate their fathers for trying to make them stronger men. It was only natural to resent the teacher, the person who dealt cards no child wanted. But time passed and perspective drew things together. It made sense to him now. He didn’t hate his father as he assumed he did—he respected the bastard. These scars were his old man’s testament, and no doubt, they hadn’t been etched with ease.Those scars could never be undone. The carver and the carved had been united.Forever.The scissors from the kitchen weren’t cold anymore. If anything, they burned with their own inner warmth.He knelt beside another father—that of the driver who had brought him to this house—and wondered where to stick him. The stomach didn’t seem vital enough. The chest plate would be difficult to puncture. The heart? No, t
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Seven
SEVENThe bush. The rain. The orgasmic scream escaping Jack’s lungs.“I’m gonna cut off your cock and stuff it down ya throat after I fuck ya, Charles!”He didn’t add that he planned to watch his eventual decay, planned to stand witness to the flies as they laid their eggs in his stab wounds. So much to see.I won’t be erased, he thought. I’m not a blur on the back of a toilet door.He didn’t need the voice in his head anymore.Jack finally had his own.***Wiping rain and sap from his face, Michael burst through a blockade of trees and fell into a clearing. An uneven patch of ground with a fallen eucalyptus across its girth.Two options.Just keep on running and pray to God he shook The Beast off. It was getting darker by the minute and the bushlands were thick and knotted. True, this could be used to his advantage. But if he came across a road—what then? The chances of a car coming by at that exact moment were slim to none. So, alternatively, would he end up fleeing further
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Six
SIXMichael splashed through running water and followed a fast-flowing stream to a narrow cliff face on his right. He couldn’t tell how steep the drop was. Past the bluff, the valley writhed under the storm’s onslaught.His shoes slipped on mossy rocks. Behind him, The Beast jumped through the trees.“I’m going to get you for that, you shit! I swear to God—”Michael watched it twist its ankle on a loose boulder. The stumble gave Michael enough time to spirit into the thicket. Branches snagged his shirt, wrapped around his arms.The Beast walked towards the trees, limping. Drool strung from its chin, its face a mask of blood and shit-smelling mud. “Don’t you move, Charles,” it whispered. “Got a lesson to teach you. You ain’t going to like it.”The trees were its webs, and instead of fangs, the spider bore scissors. It crept closer and closer. It was as though The Beast wanted this to be drawn out, as if he was enjoying the thrill of the hunt.“You’re just too easy,” it told Micha
Last Updated : 2021-09-09
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House of Sighs Two & One
TWOEat the part that hurts, said the voice of the flies.Eat the part that hurts.ONEOutside, fog yielded to the winter wind and moonlight beamed through. That same rush of air swept over the James Bridge Motor Motel to rattle its eaves, blowing dirt against its windows. The night’s breath, so very much like a sigh, eased the door on the second floor shut. Ungreased hinges creaked, creaked, and trapped the new fathers within.Somewhere out there, time moved on. But not here. Not inside room eleven.
House of Sighs Three
THREEAiden came around to face his partner head on, Danny’s silhouette outlined in blue and pink. He could see every hair on his head, the fine peach fuzz along his arms, all of it highlighted in vibrant detail. Seeing him, Aiden thought, was to observe a painting, an oil on canvas titled ‘Man on Bed Holding Baby’.The itsy-bitsy-spider within Aiden’s throat bit down. Muscles tensed. Terror filled him and froze, painful cracks appearing in the ice as he brought his hands to his face. Things like this didn’t happen to people like him. This was something from a horror movie, or maybe, tomorrow’s headlines.I’m a good person, Aiden wanted to scream. I—we—don’t deserve this. It’s gone too far. Take it back.Take it back!Too late for that now. Aiden Bonner was in room eleven of the James Bridge Motor Motel, with the carpet beneath his feet and the stink of copper tainting the air. He was in room eleven with Danny as he brought the child to his face to plant a kiss on its cheek. Reali
House of Sighs Four
FOURThe woman who’d made the emergency call had collapsed at the entrance to another room on Kaaron Brennan’s right. Long, red hand streaks also palmed the door there. Blood lathered the handle, grew fat at the bottom of the knob, dropped to the puddle by the woman’s severed ear.Ploink.Ploink.Ploink.Brennan wanted to cry. She didn’t, and kept her pain inside.Stenciled across the ajar door were two words. It must have taken a caring, steady hand to inscribe that lavender printing so well, even going to the effort to put a little heart above the ‘I’. A mother’s touch, if there ever was one.“Timmy’s room,” Kaaron, who had two kids of her own, read aloud.Later, there would be time for weeping. That time was not now.
House of Sighs Five
FIVESneakers wisped over carpet. Aiden was tempted to reach into the dark, but he held off for the time being, letting his eyes adjust instead. The room sketched into form one shade of blue and pink at a time.Aiden found his partner sitting on the bed with his back to him, lit in neon glow.The quiet hotel room. Quiet, except for a curious suckling sound.“Danny?” Aiden said and took another step. His chest seized when he saw a shape on the far wall near the kitchenette, where the drawers had been opened.Just his shadow.You bloody fool, he could almost hear his mother say, leaning over to scold him as she did when he was a kid, bringing with her a wave of scented lady sweat and bush smoke. Pull your shit together.Aiden longed to have her here with him now, even if only to condemn him. That, at least, would be something. He felt so disconnected from his people, from his land. He couldn’t wait, one way or another, for this Hell to be over. Besides, he did need to pull his shi
House of Sighs Six
SIXNull relented and nodded, stepping up to his partner’s side as they inched to that doorway. Brennan smelled blood in there, in the pit of nothingness.They forced themselves through the arch, the quaking beam of Null’s flashlight revealing an upended phone on the floor, and farther ahead, the soles of two pale bare feet.Brennan didn’t want to see. Yet it was her job to see.It wasn’t that the woman’s clothes had been torn away. The comfy looking Sunday garments had bloomed off the slippery corpse, shed like the scrim of a cocoon. There was no beautiful butterfly here, not here in this dark house on Queen Street. Only cuts on top of cuts.For all Brennan knew, she stared at eighty stab wounds. Or more.“Good God in Heaven,” whispered Null. These were the quivering tones of that boy in the third grade, the one who feared his teacher’s yells because he hadn’t done his homework again.If only there was a way to wind back the clock and erase this sight from her mind, to go back
House of Sighs Seven
SEVENBlue and pink neon light illuminated Aiden’s way.He listened to the buzz of electricity from the MOTEL sign at the carpark’s entrance; it sounded like a hive, bee stingers rasping together. Another gust of wind blew through town to rustle his fringe, to stir the foggy cauldron obscuring the sky, stretching it thin in places to reveal the quarter moon beneath. He sweated. And he was scared.Aiden stopped.He thought of his flight from Brisbane to Bangkok and the black-and-white movie he’d watched on the way. It’s A Wonderful Life, it had been called, and while it featured numerous set-pieces, one particular scene returned to him now. In it, Jimmy Stewart’s character said he would lasso the moon and gift it to his gal to win her affection.And earn her love.The fog rolled in. Everything turned blue and pink once more.To think that he—or any man—had ever set their sights on the moon and thought it a three-dimensional thing worth dragging to Earth for the sake of someone sp
House of Sighs Eight
EIGHTAn ambulance pulled up as Kaaron Brennan entered the house. Never once in her six years on the force had she ever drawn her gun with the intent to shoot; she was more terrified now than she’d ever been. Null was by her side, covering blind corners. Every door she kicked open revealed empty rooms, rooms of unfinished business. The paperback on the bedside table with the bookmark tucked within, the mobile phone blinking messages received, a scented candle that had never been lit.Death in the details.Blood caked thick where the hallway branched into a T intersection, kitchen on her left and living room on her right. There was no mistaking which way the action had progressed; gore led to weeping MasterChef contestants.The door hung off its hinges on the other side of the room. Darkness beyond. Null shone his flashlight to reveal handprints on the architraves, swipes of blood resembling red, drooling smiles.Footsteps and flashing beams outside the window, past the television.
House of Sighs Nine
NINEAiden thought he’d dreamed the coming and going of sirens. He lifted his head from the pillow, muscles giving a kick. The musty motel air made his eyes itch.The television was on, evening soap operas playing out their inevitable dramas.Those sirens sounded so real.He fumbled for the remote and switched the old unit off. Beautiful faces shrunk down to a dot, bleeping into oblivion.Aiden propped himself up with one arm and looked to the window across from him, brow furrowed with concerned tension lines. He strained his ears, blinked his quiet shock away, and registered the fading screech of police cars. Or maybe an ambulance.Legs swung around to touch the carpet.He licked his lips. Dry.Aiden was at the point of crawling off the mattress and taking himself over to the kitchenette to drink water straight from the tap like he used to when he was a kid, but he stopped in his tracks. And he stopped because of a fresh sound, one that couldn’t be confused with another.The
House of Sighs Ten
TENIt took sixteen minutes for the police to arrive, and considering how long it took for the authorities to respond the day of the James Bridge massacre, this wasn’t too bad a turnaround. Some things had improved in this part of the world after all.Units dispatched from Maitland, further up the valley, their journey quickened by the expressway killing the town, skidding off the exit, kicking dust, their red and blue blinders like fireworks in the fog. They sped down the main drag and took a sharp turn, not bothering to stop at the traffic lights. Cockatoos feasting in the tree above the bus bench were startled into flight, feathers twirling and the branches tumbling into the gutter as they took to the air, screeching as though they were the chased ones.Units mounted the curb out the front of 15 Queen Street. One by one, lights bloomed within the surrounding houses. Rubberneckers took to their windows, clutching nightgowns, cupping faces to the glass.Officer Kaaron Brennan hit
