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Eighty-Seven:
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House of Sighs Eighty-Six
EIGHTY-SIXWhat once was Steve but was now merely meat, arced backward. He hit the ground hard. A splinter of skull landed near Michael’s hand.Liz watched the corpse dance. Soon the spasms died, but the blood continued to gush.This is what I would have looked like if I’d shot myself this morning. Or all those other times, she thought. Doing a little tap dance to music nobody else can hear. Going to pulp. Making a darn mess over the carpet that Mum would hate to clean.“L-l-look wh-what you all d-did,” she sputtered. A line of spittle between her upper and lower lips shook with every word, threatening to snap.The sounds of her passengers were tortures she could no longer stand, so when she screamed at them to “Stop it,” the words drained her person. Liz could have collapsed, a skeleton without substance. But no, she held true. To Liz’s surprise, the passengers went silent. Still. This power over them kept her flame burning, a glimmer in the skull’s eye socket, flickering movemen
House of Sighs PART THREE - Eighty-Five
“PART THREE:On the Road“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”—Robert Louis Stevenson”EIGHTY-FIVEPeter prayed on the floor, notebook in hand. I’ll never fight with Mum again if I get out of this alive. This had changed him, made him see the value in her spite. All he wanted to do was write, but he would give it up to see her face again. He smiled, knowing that when the police found the dead girl rescue wouldn’t be far away.What Peter didn’t know was that Suzie Marten’s body wouldn’t be found by police for almost two hours. A haystack-toting pickup will stumble upon mother and daughter on the road. It will take another hour and a half for the police to arrive, the farmer constructing a makeshift barricade around the body from his cargo. He would spend his time comforting the woman, throwing rocks to keep the crows away, and at one point chasing a guinea fowl with a torn-off fing
House of Sighs Eighty-Four
EIGHTY-FOURThe empty Frost family kitchen.Water dripped from a faucet. The refrigerator hummed. Danish figurines lined the top of the kitchen door architrave, collecting dust. A pair of long-bladed scissors hung from a hook by the sink.Wes was upstairs in the bathroom. The Kinks and Waterloo Sunset lilted down the hallway from the record player. His wife loitered in the living room watching television, a magazine across her lap. Daytime soap operas mingled with the music.There was a filing cabinet in the study full of tax reports, and Liz’s and Jed’s old school papers—Reggie held on to it all. Every drawing, every Easter card, all kept and forgotten in that tiny room.Outside, last year’s Christmas cutouts flanked the house. Dead fairy lights in the trees swung low over Santa and his reindeer, a shepherd leading his donkey. It embarrassed Reggie that they were still up, though she couldn’t find the energy to take them down now.The shed: thirty feet from the front door on the
House of Sighs Eighty-Three
EIGHTY-THREEJulia awoke with a start, relieved to be in her own bed. Her face tattooed with pillowcase creases. The room bathed in blue light. Her lips were chaffed and bleeding.A nightmare.In it, she’d been hovering on the ceiling of her room, looking down at her sleeping form on the bed. She enjoyed the sensation of weightlessness as she hung in the air. But when she tried to move, her arms remained in place. She floated crucified, damned to scrutinize her own body forever. She started to panic, tried to talk.Nothing.The bedroom door opened. A sliver of light across her sleeping face. A man with long, gray hair tiptoed into the room like a Punch and Judy doll on jerking strings. She wanted to scream a warning at her other self. No luck. The man had come for her. He stopped at the head of the bed and bent over. She heard him sniffing, the sound of his pebbled tongue running over her skin. Then, with a robotic slowness reserved for nightmares, the intruder lifted his head to
House of Sighs Eighty-Two:
EIGHTY-TWO:ScissorsTen year old Jack stood in the backyard. His parents were gone. The smell of evening barbecue: oily and rich. Next to him was the apple tree. Beetles flew in its shadows.Sunset. An orange sky raked with purples, and high above, an airplane. It left a long silk thread in the ozone, like a spider web when it catches the light. Jack could just make out the Boeing’s drone.Another sound. Closer.Screaming.
House of Sighs Eighty-One:
EIGHTY-ONE:NoiseThe memory rose from somewhere deep inside, a bubble from the bottom of a lake. Pop. It made Jack dizzy. Sweat dripped into his eyes. Crunching thirst.A fly buzzed by his head, its whine like the roar of chainsaws at dawn. He tried to ignore it and focus on the scene in front of him, on the shape and texture of that one word, on the word.Scissors.If someone wanted or had scissors, it meant that someone was willing to fight, willing to bring those twin blades down in a shimmering arc—over and over—into the driver’s face until she was dead and someone else took control of the bus. That person would be him. Jack always knew he was hero material. It silently thrilled him.He stared through the Perspex hub at the back of the driver’s head—little life there. She reminded him of a toy whose batteries were winding down.If only the emergency escape window was closer, he thought, then I could just make a run at it. Or if we all decided to take her down together, the
House of Sighs Eighty
EIGHTYJulia dipped low in her seat again, drawing a ragged breath. The driver hadn’t moved after all. It struck her as almost impossible that the woman could be both there and not there at the same time. Though then again, possibly not. Because when Julia closed her eyes, she could see the posters in her bedroom far away, could hear music crooning from the cassette player on her dresser.Pulling something close to her chest, assuming it was one of her teddy bears. Only it wasn’t. The baby in her arms was a viscera-coated, half-dead creature clambering for breath.She clenched her fists as hard as she could, refusing to resign to the worlds of hurt on either side of her blink. Two places at once, and neither of them safe.“Look,” Jack started again, his voice like a shake in the dark. Julia didn’t know why she feared him so, yet fear him she did. She watched the way he held up his large strong hands, both as big as trashcan lids, and shivered. “I’ve got these. I can—” he mimed a ki
House of Sighs Seventy-Nine
SEVENTY-NINEJulia’s head pressed against the seat. Skin clung to the leather. Its grip drew her face into a deformed jester’s smile.“See!” Jack pointed at her.She closed her eyes again. Something dark and primal pounded in her, a second heartbeat that couldn’t be ignored. “Who knows when there will be police?” she said. “You’re right, Di. This is James Bridge, and there’s never any cops at the station. If they come, they’ll come from half an hour away in any given direction. God only knows where we are. Any idea?”“Trees and more trees,” Jack said. “I can’t see a thing.”At the front of the bus, Michael tried to imagine what the others were talking about. He longed to be with them—safety in numbers, as they say—and not here at the mouth of the lion’s den. Or lioness. Either way, if the driver moved, he and the prayer-happy teenager would be the first to know. The first to die. Michael’s urge to join the others grew and pulsed.If you join them, you will be seen, he told himsel
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