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Ninety-One
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House of Sighs Ninety
NINETYPerspiration welled in the folds of Steve’s gut. The bus was fitted with large, inoperable side windows; above each were sliding glass panels a child might get a head through if they were dumb enough. They were all open however, and whatever air could get in the vehicle was in already.Steve imagined sitting at the Maitland Golf Club bar, a schooner in hand, talking to mates over the whirr of Formula One cars. “I can feel a XXXX comin’ on,” was the catchphrase from the advertisements—and the old line had never been more inviting.The fantasy dissipated as his gaze passed over the emergency escape window near the kid from the stop. Next to the window was a small box where a BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY hammer should have be tied. Yet was not.Tears in the seating, scuffs on the handlebars. Alert wires sagged in long, thin smiles. Graffiti scratched into the glass on Steve’s right. Peeling warning stickers covered the walls, a faded cardboard advertisement for Wrigley’s Extra Su
House of Sighs Eighty-Nine
EIGHTY-NINEThe outside world shrunk to a pinpoint and Liz pushed the bus towards it. Nothing else existed, just a vanishing point that she longed to vanish into. She chased the dot, pushing her foot against the accelerator. If she lost sight of it, then it all would have been for nothing.Sounds grew louder and louder. The hum and inner workings of the bus. Her dot of light brightened.Wheels spun faster, kicking dirt.***A mother pushing a baby carriage with two additional children at her side threw her hands into the air, cursing, as the bus roared past her stop at the entrance to Combi-Chance Road.Three days later, Bobby Deakins will leave a copy of the Bridge Bugle in the mother’s mailbox. She will read about what happened, about who died and on what bus it all occurred. The woman will cry for four continuous hours.In the cloudless sky, five black crows circled.***Jack Barker tracked the angry people on the roadside until their yells bled away, forms lost in a cloud
House of Sighs Eighty-Eight:
EIGHTY-EIGHT:ShadowLiz on the ground of her parents’ shed. An exposed light bulb swung back and forth in a lethargic arc.Shadow. Light. Shadow. Light.A leather belt tied around her left bicep, the skin bruised. On the floor next to her was the syringe. From a hole in her arm a single line of blood oozed free.The Beast hid in the dark. She opened her eyes. Teeth chattered. A shadow that remained even when the bulb swung the world into illumination. A person so tall and far away. In the middle of this shadow, she noted the winking red eye of a cigarette.She felt so good and she wanted more.“Please—”The shadow fell over her.“Please don’t leave me.”The shadow withdrew. Where Liz’s face had been, there was now a spluttering pulp. Blood erupted from her nose and flooded the wells of her eye sockets. Limp hands swiped numbly at the red. Screaming, followed by silence.The shadow was fearful of what it had done. Its wet cigarette fell to the floor where the night continued
House of Sighs Eighty-Seven:
EIGHTY-SEVEN:ImpactThe twinkling of the Saint Christopher medallion blinded Liz. She couldn’t tell how long she’d stared at it, hypnotized.Where am I again?Tingles ignited in her fingers, forcing them to squeeze around the steering wheel. It was hard and real, a realness that made her fog dissipate, focus blooming outwards to encompass the dashboard, and beyond, the windscreen of the bus she was employed to charter, though the world on the other side of the glass remained too glary to discern. Just yet.Oh, Christ.Liz swerved the vehicle—eighteen tons of paid responsibility—away from the curb, and as she did so, caught a suggestion of the world past her medallion. A land of blur, which now Liz was back in her body, she forced into focus. Somethingfloated towards her at an unimaginable speed.A cherub swathed in pink light.***Ten-year-old Suzie Marten spun in her leotard to the music from her Walkman, knowing only the happiness of the moment. Behind closed eyes, her futu
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
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