Albatross (22 page)

Truth

             
It was a cold night, true, but atop the rooftop of Keepers Cottage, on sea view side, the air had a harsh, biting chill to it that seemed to set the precedent of the evening quite accurately.

              Dragging her quilt up and out of the window with them, Jen and Deacon settled upon the rooftop, tucking the blanket around each other and cocooning themselves together in a nest of safety and warmth.

              At first they did not speak.

              Jen leant back against Deacon’s chest, feeling his heat and his strong heartbeat protecting her from the suffocating cold all around. He draped his arms over her front and she clung to his hands as if she were afraid to ever let him go.

              Sat like this, after the madness of the evening, it wasn’t long before tears rolled openly down Jen’s face, warming her cheeks in wet streaks as they went.

              Hushing her gently, Deacon managed to quiet her swelling sadness, but he didn’t want to push her too much, for he knew there was still much more to come.

              Behind the house trees rustled and swayed in the blackness as the wind picked up slightly and whipped about their cocoon. Jen sunk deeper into Deacon and he pulled her ever closer, enveloping her securely, as he always did.

              “I’ve got a problem…” Jen suddenly confessed, her voice slicing through the night like a sharpened blade.

              “Can I help?” Deacon asked after a moment.

              “You’re the only one who’s made any difference at all.” Jen told him, but her words only confused Deacon further.

              “I don’t understand.” He admittedly honestly. “I haven’t done anything.”

              But Jen shook her head.

“You have.” She replied adamantly. “You’re the only one who has.”

“What about your mother and your sister?” Deacon asked then.

Even as he spoke he felt Jen’s body tense slightly, but he pressed on.

“I’ve known you barely a month…” He continued. “If this has been going on a while, whatever it is, haven’t they been able to help?”

“They can’t.” Jen replied immediately, but Deacon refused to accept that as gospel.

“They must be able to do something? If not Dyra, then what about Clare?” He suggested. “I can see how much you love her, even just in the pictures downstairs. I know how close you two are…”

But Jen cut him off.

“Were…”

“What?” Deacon asked, confused again.

“How close we were…” Jen finished, sighing deeply and regretfully.

Now Deacon thought he was beginning to understand.

“So, this problem…” He started. “It’s with Clare…”

Jen didn’t reply, and so Deacon took that silence as a profound yes.

“Right…” He continued, pretty much just thinking aloud. “So, what happened that pushed you so far apart?”

“It wasn’t her fault…” Jen whispered, her voice lost almost entirely to the wind.

“Did you do something?” Deacon asked her.

His question was not accusing; he just needed to know.

“I couldn’t…” Jen croaked, tears welling up again. “I wanted to…”

“Wanted to what?” Deacon pressed gently.

“I wanted to help!” Jen exclaimed, shuddering and shaking suddenly as grief overwhelmed her. “I couldn’t!” She cried. “I should have…I could have…”

Deacon pulled her close and quieted her, resting his palm against her cheek tenderly.

“I’m sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…” Jen apologised, repeating it over and over and over again, whiling her breath away as she spoke.

Deacon couldn’t tell if she was apologising to him, or whether it was for something else entirely, and he got the impression, actually, that it was a little of both.

“Shh…” He calmed her. “It’s okay…” He did his best to reassure her.

“I should have told you…” Jen confessed, looking up at him through the dim light.

He leaned forward to kiss her, wiping the streaming tears from her cheeks and pressing his warm lips to hers.

“It’s okay…” He assured her again. “Whatever it is, it’ll be okay. I still love you…”

Jen looked on at Deacon, overwhelmed by his kindness, and he looked back expectantly, though clearly, and understandably so, nervously.

Opening her mouth to speak again, Jen croaked a little and struggled to talk, partly because of the state she was in, and partly because she just couldn’t find the right words.

It was as if the very thing she needed to tell him, she was still trying to convince herself was true.

She didn’t want to believe it either.

Deacon sighed.

Sometimes his perception was just as much a curse as it was a gift, especially when something eluded him.

He rested his hand gently on Jen’s cheek again, and looked into her eyes with his all-seeing gaze.

His trust in her was obvious, and it seemed to give Jen courage.

Once again, it was now or never.

She took another breath, still drawn entirely by his gaze, and took the leap.

“Deacon…” Jen whispered into the night, for a second time shattering the silence of the darkness all around them with her words.

“I’m here…” He breathed back at her through the blackness, and Jen nodded slowly, holding back a scream that she had kept hidden within for a very long time.

“Clare’s dead.”

Revelations

             
Unsurprisingly, that night, Jen’s dreams were not peaceful. They were wild and treacherous and yet again plagued by a haunted past. The dark of the night once more took her on a long, sinister trip down Memoria Lane, stirring the darkest thoughts and emotions from deep within her.

              The blackness loomed upon her menacingly and, compared the other dreams she’d had of late, this one felt much more like a memory, like a reality even, than just simply a subconscious fiction.

              The lane stretched out limitlessly in both directions, shrouding all that Jen could see in darkness, and everything remained hidden from her.

A hint of devious, low hanging fog that she hadn’t noticed before brushed coldly against Jen’s face, wet to the touch.

There was no wind that she could feel, yet all about her the trees swayed and bowed this way and that, bending their wills obediently. Their huge looming trunks concealed much of the light from the streetlamps, dotted haphazardly along the lane, and beyond them the bushes and shrubs were shrouded in almost total blackness.

Jen knew that at one end of the lane lay the shop where Clare worked.

She rounded the corner that once again appeared from nowhere, and continued towards it, presuming that somewhere along the way she would bump into her older sister.

Checking her watch, Jen knew that Clare had already finished, for it was long past the hour, and the shop would be closed at this time. Surely she would be on her way by now.

But, as she peered into the distance through the dim light and the thickening fog, Jen could see no sign of Clare.

Suddenly a noise off to the side of the road startled her. It was a sound that she recognised all too well, but it still caught her off guard, and fear of the unknown began racing through her veins.

This time though, she didn’t call immediately for help, and took a few tentative steps towards the treeline, squinting to try to make out any shapes in the darkness.

She wasn’t far from a streetlamp, but ironically, if anything, that only hindered her view, for it cast yet more shadows onto the greenery beneath the trees.

Creeping forward, keeping as silent as she could, Jen edged closer and closer, stepping from the tarmacked road and onto the soft verge beyond, squatting down low and peering through the trees.

The cry sounded again, this time much closer, and much louder, and much more desperate.

And above all else, it sounded like Clare calling her name.

Jen’s lungs drove into action.

“Help!” She cried. “Is anybody there!?”

But no one came to her aid.

Then, just as she recalled from her last dream, a figure appeared from the shadows, separating itself from the blackness and the shadows as if it belonged to them.

This might have been a dream, but it was no fairy tale fiction, and Jen knew it.

No matter how much she might not have wanted it to be, this was a memory, and she had absolutely no choice in the matter.

With that knowledge, as she crouched, transfixed for barely a few seconds by the shadowy figure before her, Jen was gripped by fear.

All of a sudden the figure darted away between the trees, skirting round Jen and exploding from the treeline and out onto the road, sprinting off into the distance at full pelt.

He was dressed all in black, from his boots to his jacket, and he glanced back only once as he raced away, catching Jen’s eye as he did so by the light of the nearest streetlamp.

Her breath caught in her throat at the sight.

It was him.

The man who had broken into Keepers Cottage and tried to kill Deacon to get to her.

His hair was a little shorter, a little less unkempt and dishevelled, but it was most definitely him.

Jen didn’t have time to think on that however, as the faint cry sounded once more from beyond the treeline, and this time, following her own shout for help, there was a much more discernible word amongst the sound.

“Jenny…”

The voice was weak and desperate, clinging to faint hope, but it was one that Jen knew all too well.

Without thinking, stumbling blindly forwards, Jen hit her head on low branches three times before she pulled her phone from her pocket and fumbled to turn on the torch.

Finally she found it, and immediately the light shone just over the bush directly before her, and beyond it the sight than Jen beheld turned her stomach.

“NO!!” She screamed, diving immediately down through the shrubbery and to the side of the figure that lay on the cold, damp ground.

In an instant she felt her hands and knees turn sticky and warm, as she knelt on the ground by torchlight.

“No…” Jen’s voice weakened, overwhelmed. “No no no no…”

“Jenny…” Clare breathed, weakening more and more by the second, coughing up blood and spluttering as she spoke, choking and gargling.

The word seemed more like a reflex than a cry for help, and Jen looked on helplessly.

Her sister’s trousers and underwear were pulled down to her ankles. Her jacket and blouse were ripped open and soaked in blood, showing her pale, exposed skin beneath, sticky and black and oozing from a gash in her stomach.

Lying beside her head was a large rock, smothered too in thick, black gunk. Blood poured from a battered hole in Clare’s skull, seeping through her hair until it was completely drenched in it.

“Clare…” Jen words caught in her throat.

She tried to call for help, but she could not speak: paralysed by fear and shock.

But then Clare spluttered and gargled again, choking up vast amounts of blood as she tried to talk.

Jen found her tongue.

“HELP!!” She shrieked deafeningly. “SOMEONE HELP!!” Even as she screamed she dialled for an ambulance and bellowed almost incoherently down the phone at the operator.

Descending into the deepest depths of the blackness, there was simply nothing else Jen could do.

She tried to stop the bleeding, but Clare’s head was gaping, and there was so much blood pumping out of her stomach that Jen couldn’t even see the wound.

She just held her older sister’s hand as blood poured over them both, covering them in all that was left of Clare’s life.

Drowning and gasping, it wasn’t long before Clare succumbed, but every second was agony for them both, and Jen wailed and screeched and shrieked.

She couldn’t live without Clare.

She didn’t know how.

But from that moment on, regardless of whether she wanted it or not, there was a great cavernous void inside of Jen that could never again be filled.

Startling awake, Jen screamed, shaking and bawling in agony and grief.

Deacon was there of course, but for now at least, there was only so much he could do.

So far, time hadn’t been the greatest of healers.

But, as it stood, that was all that they had.

That’s all anybody ever has.

Some people go their entire lives thinking that void can never be filled.

Perhaps they are right.

Perhaps they are wrong.

Either way, often they put all of their trust in the miraculous healing power of time.

But sometimes, even that isn’t enough.

Not when there’s a festering thought consuming you.

Just like family though, that great void can mean lots of different things. And what we do with it, what we make of it, can perhaps lead us places that we have never even dreamed of.

Not all of us have the strength to follow such a difficult path.

But, for those who do, and for those who are fortunate enough to have someone to support them along the way, here's to a new life.