69 INCHES OF STEEL (5 page)

Jonathon thought for a moment then replied, “I believe in the existence of a Higher Power, but not one that will smite thee down if we don’t.”

Serena smiled. “That sounds more like you’re against the Catholic Church than God.”

“The Catholic Church held my grandparents hostage for many years. Not physically of course, but spiritually. They were made to believe that the only way to Heaven was through believing in the Bible, a book written several hundred years after Jesus Christ and by a group of men whose word over the next sixteen hundred or so has become so carved in stone one will go to Hell if one doesn’t believe it. I have no time for their God. I decided at an early age to be my
own
God. So I freed myself from the constraints of the Church and set about creating worlds of my own. All it took was the time to decide what those worlds would be.”

Serena’s smile widened. “And the courage to build them.”

Jonathon smiled back at her. He knew all along he had the courage. He had been building new worlds all his life if only in his head and not yet on paper which was as safe a place as any to build them, for in one’s head is the one place they can’t be torn down or burnt like they can on paper. Even in one’s heart they aren’t safe, for hearts can be broken. Jonathon’s was broken at an early age when a girl he loved was taken away from him and he knew then for sure what he had already long believed, that one’s heart is much too fragile a place to be building anything at all let alone whole worlds full of people who believed in your ability as a creator to take them safely from one place to another. That of course was the attraction for some writers, the opportunity to take their frustrations and anger and hurt and pain out on make-believe worlds full of make-believe people where there were no consequences except the ones they created themselves and even then they affected no one but the make-believe people in make-believe worlds they dreamed about and wrote about.

Serena looked deep into his eyes. “What about the Devil, Jonathon? Do you believe in him?”

Jonathon looked around the room. Pictures of his mom and dad hung on each wall. There was a photo of Jonathon playing high school football hanging on the far wall. Above the mantle, some framed copies of his book covers that he had signed for his mom for her last birthday. They were worth a fair bit, each of them, but there they were when she could easily have sold them and spent the money on herself. Not that she was poor of course, after all Jonathon made sure she never had to work again, but she could have sold them anyway but didn’t. God bless her loving heart.

He looked at the photo of himself playing football and smiled knowingly at the hand fate had dealt him, that he was everything the high school coach had wanted in a player, but his heart just wasn’t in it. Neither was his leg. After breaking it he made the choice to let it go even as just a game and focus on his writing and now he was a best-seller worth millions of dollars who drove a BMW and lived the good life. He was happy with his choice. Who wouldn’t be? “I believe there is a dark side to every man, woman, and child who walks the face of the Earth that is capable of doing bad things and when those bad things are done they blame it on something that those who wrote the Bible thought up as a convenient way of scaring people into believing in their God, saying that they would burn in Hell if they didn’t. If God was as all-loving as the Christians would have us believe, He wouldn’t dare smite us down for anything, not even for not believing in Him, and He certainly wouldn’t create something as evil as the Devil. It’s funny, the Bible is as much a work of fiction as anything I or any other writer has written and people fell for it hook, line, and sinker. They thought it was real and the Catholic Church ought to be ashamed of itself for suggesting it is and the people ought to be just as ashamed of themselves for believing them. Unfortunately, as long as there are people who lack the courage to step forward under their own power, the Catholic Church will be there doing it for them, making it seem even
more
so to the poor souls that they can’t survive without the Church doing every damned thing for them.” He sipped the last of his tea and rested the cup on the table before looking up at Serena and saying, “Not only is there no God, but the
Catholic
Church
is the Devil, if there is one, and I could care less about any part of it.”

Serena’s face was firm and her look at Jonathon’s eyes was fixed on his heart and soul. “What
do
you care about?”

Jonathon thought about it for a moment. “I care about my Mom.
That’s
for sure. And my work of course. It means the world to me.” A tear welled in his eye.

Serena reached out her hand and touched his. “What is it, Jonathon?”

He looked out the kitchen window and into the night. He took a deep breath and sighed it out. With a teaspoon of courage he reached in deep and pulled out the truth.  “I miss my dad. He was a son-of-a-bitch who killed an innocent human being, and himself, but I
miss
him.” The tear that had welled in his eye escaped it and rolled down the side of his face. Serena stood up and came around the table to him. She sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She laid her head next to his and held him tight. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her forehead. The love he had always hoped would find him had not only found him, it had reached in and touched his heart. And it scared him to death.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
he next morning, Jonathon woke to the sound of rain falling against the roof of his mother’s house. He climbed out of bed and went to the window. He looked outside and watched the rain fall from the sky which was a dark, swirling shade of grey instead of the blue it had been the day before. Lightning flashed in the distance, streaking brilliant lines of white against the dark clouds. Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso were good, Jonathon thought, but Mother Nature and God were indeed the greatest artists of all time.

He went out to the kitchen and flicked the switch on the jug. The water inside the jug began to heat and soon it would boil. He reached for a mug and a tea bag and while waiting for the jug to boil thought back to the events of the night before. Never had a woman touched his heart or soul the way Serena had and maybe it was because he had never let them. He had always remained aloof, ignoring their love and taking only their bodies. It’s not that he was shallow, because he wasn’t. It’s just that he had seen too many broken hearts and he didn’t want his to be another one. Not once did he stop to think that not every heart could or
would
be broken.

More visions of young girls being murdered entered his mind’s eye, of blood and horror and of a Countess whose wealth afforded her the right to do as she pleased. She dragged a young girl whose body was naked outside and pushed her into a hole in the frosty ground. She ordered her staff to fill the hole with snow from around it. They did as they were told even as the young girl pleaded with them for her life. Soon she was buried up to her neck and left for dead by a black hearted woman and group of people who did as they were told, not because they were evil but because they were as scared to death of the Countess as the young girls she was killing and whose bodies she discarded with gay abandon and whose blood she bathed in because she believed it would keep her looking young. Jonathon poured the boiled water into his cup and wondered if the time had come to become something more than he had ever really been. Indeed, more than he ever
thought
he would be. ‘Every fourteen years, Jonathon, we enter a new chapter of our lives,’ his father had said a year or so before his death. ‘The first fourteen we are a product of God. The next fourteen we are a product of our parents. The next fourteen we are a product of ourselves.’ Jonathon stirred some milk into the cup and took a sip from it. He was entering that third fourteen year cycle and without even realising it had been set on a path that would lead him away from everything his father had been, and had wanted his son to be, to becoming everything he was
meant
to be. The boy would soon become a man and the man, as men were want to do, would fall in love. The trick for most men of course, and women, was staying there.

His mother came into the kitchen dressed in her night gown and stood next to him. “It’s not yet six a.m. Jonathon. Why didn’t you sleep in a bit?”

Jonathon sipped another mouthful of tea then said, “The rain woke me. Besides, I like the rain and would rather be up in it than sleep through it. It helps cleanse the mind.”

His mother, as mothers always do, sensed something was not quite right. “You want to tell me about it, Jonathon?”

Jonathon looked down at his cup of tea. “He visited me again last night while I was at the cemetery.”

His mother ran her hand through her son’s hair. “He loved you, you know.”

Jonathon turned to her and smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile. Then again, how could it be? After all, it was hard to smile when you knew your life was about to change and you had no idea if you would get through it in one piece.

His mother let him be and returned to her room and closed the door behind her. Jonathon sipped some more of his tea and looked out at the rain. It was falling much heavier now and he could barely see the silver BMW parked near the front gate. He knew in his heart that soon enough it would be worth a lot less than it was then and it began to sink in his chest. But he knew right from the start that nothing was meant to last forever. Not even a one hundred thousand dollar BMW. And that’s what happens when the man you look up to more than any other goes and gets himself killed. You find out that nothing lasts forever. Unfortunately for a seventeen year old boy who was not yet a man himself, he was made to find that out the hard way and the hard way comes when two tonnes of metal crash head-on in the middle of the night.

CHAPTER NINE

I
t
was seven a.m. now and nine a.m. in New York and Jonathon listened to the churlish voice on the other end of the phone. It was his publisher explaining that it would be impossible to shift the release date for his new book back any further than they already had. They were cutting it fine as they were and they needed him in New York by the end of the week at the latest.

“I’ll do my best to be there,” Jonathon replied. He had baulked in the past at the need to be somewhere he didn’t want to be but this was different. He
wanted
to be in New York. He was primed and ready for this one, for this was one of his best and the one that meant the most to him. But this time it was a need to be somewhere else that made him baulk at being in New York. This time it wasn’t about him. It was about his father and everything he was and everything he wanted his son to be. He hung up the phone, grabbed his keys, and ran out to the BMW. He climbed into it and starting the engine which purred like a great big cat. Yeah baby. He shifted it into gear and gunned the engine, taking off down the road at a good speed. His mother looked over the road from her bedroom at Serena who was standing at the front door of her parents’ house. She had watched Jonathon climb into his car and drive away. She turned to Jonathon’s mother and looked at her with sad eyes. They knew the time had come because Jonathon said it had, and they could do nothing about it but hope the man they loved, one as a son and the other as the best thing that had ever happened to her, would be safe. They could only hope too that he would still love them as much as he did when he left.

Serena turned and went inside. Her own father was waiting for her in the lounge. He was holding a book written many years ago by a then unknown writer that became like a bible to a group of people who worshipped both it and the man who wrote it. The author had since moved onto other things to write about but had never let go of the darkness from which his bible had come. It was a part of him and had affected those around him, either directly or indirectly, for many years. It didn’t matter which though because such was its reach and impact that one could hide in the deepest, darkest corners of Hell itself and it would still have touched them, and once they were touched they were touched forever, unless of course they had the courage and strength to pry its evil fingers from around their throats. Most of them didn’t. Some of them did. And for some, all it took was the love of someone strong enough to do it for them. “You need to go after him, Serena,” her father said. He held out the book to her. “Take this and show it to him before it’s too late, before his father turns on him as sure as he turned on the girl who died with him in the accident.”

Serena looked at her father. His face was as straight as an arrow and gave no signs at all of anything but the truth. She took the book she had read as a teenager at her father’s request in the hope she might join him on his journey. She refused and was grateful his journey was a short one. They had her mother to thank for that and they were forever grateful for her strength and love and courage. She flicked through the book and thought about what it meant and what it represented - a past so black it was impossible to see the light and she feared it now as she did when she first read it. The darkness was too much and she closed it quickly. Something caught her eye. She took a closer look at the cover, the small print under the title, the author’s name which was familiar to her. Tears welled in her eyes as the connection between the author and the man she had come to love was made. She knew she had to show it to Jonathon. She grabbed her keys and a coat and ran outside to her car. She started the engine and headed for the cemetery.