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House of Sighs Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN—hard against the bus floor. Incredible pressure in her bladder.Screams all about her. The old woman, whose name she couldn’t remember, had her hands over her eyes and was kneeling in the aisle, rocking. She looked so sad, and Diana was scared for her, though not for herself.The man with the big veins in his arms, the one with a goatee, ran past her in dreamy slow motion, and jumped into the stagnant air.***Jack landed hard on his feet. The faggot ran wildly around the back of the bus, thumping against the seats and windows. The faggot was everything wrong in the world. Sure, his eyes might look sympathetic and everything, but Jack saw him for what he really was: the conspirator in all things weak and lost. The faggot was the enemy, more than anything else. The faggot was the driver; the faggot was the dead kid, splattered on the road; the faggot was the driver’s brother; the faggot was everyone but Jack, the only sane person left in this wasteland. The faggot was
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-Six
TWENTY-SIXJack drove his fist into Michael’s face, watched the kid crumble to the floor and then jumped on him, arms thumping away. Michael kicked out in defense, one foot connecting with the base of his attacker’s jaw. That he connected at all was luck alone.The sound of a hundred busting soda cans under the heels of a hundred drunken men, followed by the tinkle of glass, exploded through Jack’s head. He faltered, clutching at the already forming welt, and watched the faggot wriggling out from under his knees.***Jed stood on the hood of his destroyed pickup. In his hands, he held the hammer, ribbons of hair clotted on its head. He pulled himself up onto the roof of the bus, which was white and reflected what little light remained in the day. The clouds were at the point of breaking, weeping. Wind shook the trees through the valley. As Jed slid across the surface of the bus, he left a snail trail of gore in his wake. Dirt blew against his face, although it was no longer a face,
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-Five:
TWENTY-FIVE:HomeJed, who had run ahead of the rest, burst through the door, trembling and out of breath. The smell within hit him hard, offending and displacing his senses. Butcher shop stink. Blood. Raw meat. Shit. It wasn’t just the room that smelled, but he, also.Violent afternoon cartoons played too loud from the television. It was getting dark quick and the first hailstones were pelting the corrugated roofing, filling the house with hollow pot-and-pan rumblings.Curtains billowed, signaling the arrival of rain.Reggie cradled Liz between her legs by the kitchen door, hugged her from behind, an awkward bundle of limbs rocking to and fro.She was conscious of the flesh in her hands, the sensation of her skin pressing against her daughter’s dead weight, but her mind was mostly empty.Once, she’d entertained the thought of being a teacher, only like most of her aspirations, it never eventuated. Instead, Reggie bounced between office work and retail, never quite happy. As a c
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOURSarah tripped over the threshold and fell into the living room. Her glasses were back in the bus, and the heavy crucifix slapped against the side of her face. Though her vision blurred, the mother and daughter could be clearly viewed in their embrace across the room. It was like something from the Francis Bacon paintings her children had studied at school, the ones that upset her so much she’d written to the principal requesting the artist be removed from the curriculum. What she saw now was a grotesque knit-work of meats, impassioned and ungodly.It made her sick.As Sarah crawled across the musty carpet, Michael entered behind her, hands still on his head. Like Jed, the first thing he noticed was the smell. As a child, he’d talked his mother into buying him two pet mice for his birthday. This room smelled like the cage his pets called home—musty newspapers and urine and captivity and blood. Because unknown to his poor mother, one of the mice was cannibal, and it ate th
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-Three
TWENTY-THREEUpstairs, Jed threw the bathroom door open and the handle smashed the wall. Almost slipped on the tiles. Panting hard, fast. Locked himself in. Scolding vomit threatened to rise in his throat again, so he grabbed the porcelain washbasin to steady himself. What he saw in the mirror made him recoil.The reflected man couldn’t be him.This man’s skin was covered in matted bits and pieces of other people.A murderer.Jed laughed. No, he wasn’t a murderer. He was a youngish, fucked up, average guy. If anything, his worst crime was being a cliché, not a killer. He’d seen enough movies to know that murderers lurked in the dark, sharpening their knives; they danced in the moonlight wearing their mother’s clothes and made lampshades from the skins of their victims.He was just Jed.History wouldn’t remember him—he wasn’t some future horror icon.I’m as common as the cold.The man in the mirror was someone special.“So you can’t be me.”Jed pulled his shirt over his head,
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-Two
TWENTY-TWOSarah nuzzled Michael’s neck.He smells like Bill. Perhaps the two men even shared the same taste in cologne. Was it Old Spice, she wondered, or maybe Imperial Leather?Something with a ship on the bottle, sails unfurled and billowing in a breeze. It didn’t matter either way in the end; this wasn’t an attractive evocation. If anything, the familiarity startled her—and then it dawned why. These matching colognes were artificialities masking the natural, a musk to hide almost dead things, to hide fear.Bill.Thirty-nine years of marriage. While the majority of that time had been well spent, the skeleton of their relationship weathered dislocations more than once. In 1960, Bill, for some reason, thought it was okay to indulge in his newfound penchant for younger women. Caught in the act, he said that regardless of the error, his heart was hers forever, but owning it came with a caveat: he demanded she acquiesce and accept his flaws. Only human. Humans made mistakes. Bill com
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONEReggie caressed the air where her daughter’s cheeks should have been, were she to still possess a face. “Don’t look, baby,” she said, her voice syrupy with phlegm. “Daddy’s got his gun. Who’re these friends you’ve brought home? You should have told me so I could’ve had dinner cooked for them.”Wes stood over the remaining passengers as they dropped to their knees. He felt dissociated from what was happening, the gun a strange weight in his double grip—it teemed with energy he didn’t think could be controlled. Comprehending what he had done proved a struggle, let alone what he knew he was about to do. That awareness sparked from a simple question, one he kept circling back around to: Who were these strangers, these people with their grotesque pantomimes and prayers? A shudder ripped through him, and Wes’s mind re-entered his body. The answer didn’t matter anymore. And he wanted it to stay that way.He gripped the gun, sneered. It was he who couldn’t be controlled, not it.
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty
TWENTYJed heard everything happening downstairs from the bathroom. Cringing, he stepped into his jeans. They slipped over his jagged hipbones with ease. He didn’t bother with underwear or a shirt; they were in a wet, red pile in the corner. Water still ran from the showerhead. A single scarlet thread dribbled down the side of the tub.Fingers formed a net in front of his face, a lattice between him and the mirror. His heartbeat raced as though he’d gotten “wet”, but he was sure the drug was no longer in his system.Pain and bleeding cuts and images of people flying apart in slow motion. His sister running at him with open arms.He recalled how Liz came to him earlier that morning to say goodbye, as if she’d known these were her last hours. He’d seen a similar frightened and confused look on her face when they had gotten high together that one time in the shed, the day he’d lost control. He’d slammed her in the face with the heel of his foot. She didn’t bleed until after she hit th
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
