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Twenty-six
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2021-09-09 17:26:39Related chapters
House of Sighs Twenty-five
TWENTY-FIVEIt wasn’t Liz on top of him anymore.Lightning recollection struck and burned: Jack, the man who tried to kill him, the man who wielded scissors, a feral opportunist with short-cropped hair and hatred in his heart. Crests of dead trees grew out of his back like angel wings. That hateful face perched at its center, eyes weeping blood.Lips parted to spit a severed centipede at Michael’s face.“Ever wondered what it’s like to be cut?” asked The Beast inside his attacker. No, not inside. This was Jack. Its voice undulated, hummed, the brushing of fly wings over rotting road kill.
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-four
TWENTY-FOUR“Stop fighting me, Danny!”Aiden deflected punches until those punches ran out of steam. His partner deflated beneath his weight, folding in on himself. This sight saddened him more than anything, and Aiden found himself saying Danny’s name over and over again.Willing him back. Willing, willing.Aiden shuffled off and crouched on the floor near the overturned chair, tie over his shoulder, beads of sweat rolling under his shirt. He watched Danny crawl to his feet and swan down the hallway, listened to their bedroom door opening and then closing—not in a rush, not in anger, but with a spider’s precision.“Don’t make me come after you,” Aiden whispered. It wasn’t a threat. This was pleading. Begging. “Don’t make me come after you.”In that moment, after so much fighting, Aiden felt his heart crack in two. The hurt was equal to every bone in his body breaking, hurts of relief. You could only take so much bending, so much straining, before things snapped.Aiden picked up
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-three
TWENTY-THREEIntolerable burning in Michael’s shoulder.All he wanted to do was turn to one of the strangers around him and ask for help, for someone to please—please!—put him out of his misery. Someone swish a magic wand and take it all away; and whilst they’re at it, strip the planet of its populace to let him wander the streets alone. Only there were no magicians here, no quick fix hocus-pocus.Just the ticket in his hand and fire in his scars.He studied the veins in the back of his hands.Boom-boom. Boom-boom.Fingers strangled the air. Now there was the headache, too, as if those dry, dead branches were growing within his head now, twigs gouging at his grey matter, pinching nerves until there was no sense among his senses. The urge to vomit doused him again. Prickling flesh.Walk. Don’t run.He strode up the long white corridor, bored faces warped by fatigue gliding past him. He could see the toilet ahead and continued towards it as the walls inched in.Boom-boom. Boom-b
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs PART THREE Twenty-two
PART THREETWENTY-TWOJuly 21, 2018He made his way northbound along Australia’s M1 Pacific Motorway from Newcastle, skirting towns without stopping, not present enough to notice the winter rain coming and going. A passing truck flashed its blinders, a reminder to switch on the headlights. Sure, Michael did this, but everything remained peripheral.The road, its white lines sometimes solid and sometimes broken, yet always there to guide him. Not that he needed guiding, mind you. Michael had traveled this stretch many times over, though not for years.He’d picked up the rental Hyundai Elantra at seven p.m. after catching a taxi from the bus station, the bus which brought him into Newcastle. His flight had been to Sydney, one-hundred-and-fifty kilometres south. Michael’s destination, however, was deep in the Hunter Valley, about an hour’s drive from the Avis rental off
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE“What the actual fuck?”Aiden scuttled from the computer. His cheeks were hot, a weird contrast to the icy disbelief rippling down his neck. The hairs on his arms stood upright as a wave of goosebumps pebbled his flesh.“What are you doing?” he said to the screen. Without warning the tears were back. What he was reading couldn’t be correct. But he knew it was.Danny wasn’t home when he returned from work last night, and hadn’t been seen since. Six hours had passed. Aiden was almost at the point of calling the police.A word taunted him.Suicide.Even though every fiber of his being screamed to do otherwise, Aiden didn’t act. Not yet. One more hour, he told himself. One more to be sure. If he made a report and set those wheels in motion, and Danny wasn’t in danger but had gone on another bender, then there was every chance this straw may break the camel’s back. And then Aiden would lose everything.Assuming, of course, he hadn’t lost it already.His email chimed. The
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Twenty
TWENTYJuly 22, 2018Michael parked the car by the side of the road and walked the rest of the way. It hadn’t even gone six in the morning and the fog was thick and bright.He traced footsteps through the memory of a dream. Fingers curled around tufts of grass as he slid down the slope leading off the main road and onto Crown land. The scents of wet, earthy loam and animal shit. At the bottom of the decline he sat, rocking. This was where he once killed a man to save himself.The bush woke around him. Birds sang. Crickets droned. Wind churned the fog and made the trees hiss the truths they had witnessed and kept secret.Until today.Michael walked across the clearing. Soon the cuffs of his jeans were wet with dew. He passed through a net of trees, wearing a mask of cobwebs. The further he went, the darker it got, as though normal timelines didn’t exist anymore. Continued. Ducking under branches, turning sideways to shimmy between lightning struck trees that were collapsed togethe
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Nineteen
NINETEENThe lot where the Frost house once stood was on the outskirts of town, and it didn’t appear that the surrounding landscape had increased in population very much in the years since Michael’s last visit. This may have been for the best. It didn’t take a genius to realize the town had been bleached raw by tragedy, with this area suffering the worst. Some marks never went away.Scars.He passed over Flagman’s Bridge, wooden boards clattering under the tires. It was only a matter of time before the whole thing fell apart and tumbled into the Hunter River. Liz Frost had taken them across this exact same bridge in 1995—going the opposite way, of course. Towards her home. Her’s was a one-way ticket. She’d wanted to make a new family to call her own, one pieced together from them, her passengers.Hostages.Memories stirred as he drove into the dense hollow on the other side of the bridge, into the dark. He didn’t let them stop him. Flies crawled around the inside of the windows. T
Last Updated : 2021-09-09House of Sighs Eighteen
EIGHTEENAiden touched down in Sydney at four in the afternoon. Busting, he took a painful piss in the terminal toilets and then downed his meds with a cup of coffee from the Gloria Jean’s stand. He switched the sim card in his phone, a task that should have been simple but proved otherwise due to the trembling of his hands. He fiddled with the chip, noticing he’d bitten his nails down to the quick on the long, overpriced flight.“Get in there you—”Snap.The sim clicked into place. Waited for the reception bars to bloom. Pounded Danny’s Australian number. Aiden killed the call before it had a chance to connect and sat on one of the airport benches whilst waiting for his rental car to be brought around.Maybe I shouldn’t tell him I’m coming just yet.What if he runs?Per Google Earth’s not always accurate calculations, James Bridge was a two-hour drive north, assuming Sydney’s traffic proved merciful. If everything were to go to plan—if a plan this even was—Aiden should get to t
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
