Bitterhall, Helen McClory [red queen free ebook TXT] 📗

and picked up the same pillow, in reflection. Behind and through it I could see the muddy suburban night sky and beside it myself. It held the pillow to hide its face. Tom was standing now in the same place as the figure. He held nothing.

‘Stop, Tom,’ I said, but he was raising his hands as the figure raised its hands, synced. And then I felt a pillow hit me and I momentarily stumbled and when I looked up I realised it had not hit me from the back – as if Tom had thrown it – but from the front. As if the figure in the glass had. And startled, I laughed loudly.

‘What a funny kind of game,’ I said. It smiled, sickly, back at me. But it was nothing. If you can hear me in my head, you’re nothing, I thought.

The figure moved nearer the frame of the window and Tom was nearer, though not as close. The figure reached up and put its hand against the glass, fingernails first and dragged them down it making a slow scraping sound, though there were no fingers touching the glass, no real fingers.

I put my hands up to my head. I shouted, I think, holding nothing but wishing for a blunt object to use to smash that glass and disperse the thing, and Tom was at my shoulders and pulling me away from the window. And the noise—

A Violence

Jamming up my ears in screeching, din-like-a-fire-alarm-cheeping-til-it-bursts, high, make-it-stop noise, everyone-flood-upstairs-tosee-what-it-is noise, but when I left the room, it stopped. And I could not hear it at all until I stepped back across the threshold and immediately had to hold my ears. Tom stood bent in the centre of the red room, clamping his hands to his head. I ran to the window like some genius and pulled down the blinds.

And the noise.

Just.

Stopped.

‘Are you all right,’ I said, grabbing at him. He leaned into me, curling himself up like a child. Sobbing. I threw off my suit jacket, slid out of my shoes and drew him over until we were in the bed together.

‘There, shh,’ I said. What else could I do? I stroked his hair and his breaths slowly became even. Never had I seen a grown man like this. He kept his devastating eyes mostly closed and his mouth slack. I took a notion that the apparition had moved. How would I know? You know these things the way you can tell a scent shifting in a room. I closed my eyes too on this sudden feeling: there, behind my eyes and Tom behind his, we lay, listeners.

We could again hear the party thumping away down below. And a gathering outside in which someone laughed. A dry tread on the stairs. Daniel coming up. Here let it be said that I was not the frightened one, but riveted, as if deep unease was something you might seek out at a theme park. The tracks crank as the roller coaster edges higher. Time seemed to slow. I heard, really, another sound. The sound of someone in the room. Almost imperceptible sounds of someone standing still, breathing, watching over us. But Daniel wasn’t here yet. I opened my eyes to catch it. Tom in sync sat up with me, holding my hand under the cover.

Against the far wall hung something shadowy, particulate, like the powder off a rose captured in old film stock. Gradually it fell. Gradually vanished. I could not turn my head away. I felt something sickly in the back of my throat. But as soon as it had gone I felt the weight of it lift. The wire of my blood, my shuddering breath too. There had been no better feeling in my life. I almost laughed from it. I almost raised my hands.

‘Who was that, Tom?’

‘James Lennoxlove, of Bitterhall,’ he said. ‘He’s always with me, James, and I am James.’

Daniel Avant

‘Here at last’, Daniel said softly, carrying a bottle of something dark.

Tom looked up at him and I thought for a moment there would be a burst of strange yelling and screaming and I braced. But instead Tom smiled at Daniel and patted the bed. Daniel hesitated – and came over and kicked off his shoes.

‘Light’s too harsh,’ I said and went about turning the sidelight on and the overhead off. The room glowed red. ‘Womb,’ I thought. I sat back down on the bed myself and bit my fingernails. Great spaces between us as we sat in our various parts. Tom propped near the wall, under blankets. Daniel in the middle, me at the very foot, legs dangling off. This tableau enacting the powerful rule of threes. A strange tale needs threes in it somewhere. Three strangers. Three choices – I scrunched up my face and tried to pin down only three, but my head just hurt. Three objects – we only had the one, I thought: the diary. Three ever-after haunted people. I was including Daniel in a haunting he might not admit to, having been offstage, momentarily as of course cynics always are. I wanted then something simple, three actions leading to a resolution and a happy ending but being not a simple person I knew this would not be my luck. Daniel wriggled and lay back, clutching the bottle to his chest like a baby. His head was in Tom’s lap.

‘I’ve been walking through this house,’ Tom said, ‘in a dream. A dream!’

‘Órla, have I missed something?’ Daniel asked.

Tom idly clapped his hand down on Daniel’s head, ‘Órla’s seen him,’ he said. He was running his fingers through Daniel’s thick hair, while looking away. I see it now, that tender, important gesture, though at the time I could have hardly noticed it being so preoccupied.

‘Who?’ Daniel said, lifting the bottle to his lips, slopping some on his face. He laughed at his own clumsiness. Tom plucked the bottle from his loose grip and drank before he answered. I got up and went to the