Mrs Blake screamed.
Chapter 5
_______________________
The loss of a friend is difficult enough for an adult to cope with, but for a child, to whom death is so distant as to be incomprehensible, it is a hundred times worse.
At least, that's what Hillie told me.
Dr Hilary Bestwick was my therapist. She insisted that I called her Hillie, as if we were the most familiar of friends. She was a plump, middle-aged woman who always wore jeans and T-shirts in the belief that it made her more accessible to her younger patients. I had no idea how long our therapy sessions would last. As it turned out, I saw Hillie on and off for nearly five years after Leo's death. Too long. And not, I realise now, because I was slow to recover, but because Hillie herself was ineffective as a cure.
In the early sessions, we discussed anything but Leo. We should only broach the subject, Hillie advised, if I felt up to it. Well, most of the time, I didn't. Leo no longer existed. He had been pushed from my mind. Denied. Buried. Forgotten.
And then, about six months into my treatment, the nightmares began.
They were always the same.
Over and over again, I would see his calm face gazing up at me through the hole in the cow shed roof, and I would suffer the agony of knowing what was about to happen while being helpless to prevent it. Sometimes, I would be able to reach out and take his hand, but the outcome never changed. His fingers would invariably slacken and slip from my grasp, and I would jolt wide awake, heart pounding, Mrs Blake's scream still loud in my head.
To begin with, I kept the nightmares to myself, not wanting to discuss them with anyone - least of all Hillie - but she deduced from the shadows under my eyes that something was wrong.
"I have an theory," she said. "I think you feel guilty. Is that what it is? Do you feel guilty that you let Leo down?"
I didn't answer. But yes, that was exactly what it was. And I didn't need therapy sessions with Hillie to point it out.
In time, the nightmares became less frequent, but I was never entirely free of them, and nothing Hillie could say really helped.
As my fifteenth birthday approached, it became clear to me that drastic action was called for. without a word to Hillie, I decided to take matters into my own hands and confront my fears head on. I would visit the Blake's farm.
Chapter 6
_______________________
It was a late November morning, steely-skied and threatening snow, and the cold hurt my cheeks and turned my breath to silver as I vaulted over the five-bar gate into the farmyard. Outwardly, the farm had not changed. No time seemed to have passed at all. I half expected to see the farmhouse door swing open and for Leo to be standing there, grinning from ear to ear. "Gotcha!" he would say. "Ha! You should see your face!"
If only.
In fact, I knew that the farmhouse was empty. I had made certain of that. Mr and Mrs Blake had driven into the village on their weekly shopping trip and would be gone for at least an hour. It would pain them to know that I was here. Although they had never directly blamed me, I was aware that in their eyes I was somehow accountable for what had happened to Leo. They had made no attempt to contact me since his death and I had been equally reticent about contacting them.
I took a diagonal route across the farmyard.
Looming before me was the cow shed, a bleak spectre against the wintry landscape. The sight of it made me uneasy, but I refused to look away. A couple of panels in the roof were a lighter shade than the rest, I noticed - the passing seasons had done nothing to rob them of their newness - but apart from that it was unchanged.
As I neared the gaping entrance to the shed, my unease deepened into outright dread. I told myself not to be so foolish. I was nearly fifteen, taller than my parents and within grasping distance of manhood. There was no reason to be afraid. No reason at all.
I went into the shed.
It was full of shadows, oppressive and gloomy, and seemed, to me at any rate, to reek of death. To my right was a row of empty stalls where the cows stood twice a day to get milked. Above me, sparrows flitted in the roof-space, irritated at my intrusion. I looked up, still walking, trying to gauge whereabouts Leo had dropped through, but it was too dark up there to make out which roof panel was which.
I looked down again - and stopped dead in my tracks.
Someone was sitting in a corner of one of the stalls.
It was a boy: pale, naked, and shockingly thin.
Our eyes met, and the ground dropped from under me.
"Leo… ?" I said, stunned.
He displayed not a flicker of recognition. His eyes were dull and lifeless, and his head had a disturbingly crooked look, as if his skull had cracked and then been clumsily set. His clothes and shoes lay in a careless heap by his side. He seemed oblivious to the cold. A large sliver of glass was in his hand - a dagger-shaped fragment of broken milk bottle by the look of it - and I realised, suddenly appalled, that he had been cutting himself with it, hacking and stabbing at his own bare flesh. There were horrible wounds in his thighs, abdomen and forearms. By rights, he should have been drenched in his own blood, but there was hardly a trace of it. Even the deepest cuts had surrendered no more than a trickle.
It was as if he lacked the ability to bleed.
Leo held out the broken glass, wanting me to take it from him.
"Please," he said, his voice weak and slurred. "Leo… want… to die."
His eyes slowly looked from me to the glass, and then back at me.
"Please."
I shook my head and backed away. "No… "
"Want - to die."
"No!"
Disappointed at my unwillingness to help, Leo raised the lethal shard and stuck it deep into his wrist.
I turned and ran, and didn't stop running until I got home.
Chapter 7
_______________________
"I see," Hillie said, her gaze intent, the tip of her pencil resting thoughtfully against her lower lip. "Tell me, what do you suppose that means?"
"Means?"
"Well, that you should hallucinate in this way. What do you suppose it means?"
I said nothing. Hillie had no idea. To her, everything I said was just another piece in a psychological puzzle.
Again and again, I thought of what Leo had told me that last afternoon together - that his parents were witches, that they used black magic to get what they wanted. At the time, I hadn't taken him seriously, but now my scepticism had been thrown into doubt. Could they have raised their son from the dead? Was it possible? If so, they had done a poor job of it.
The Leo I had seen in the shed had been a dullard, barely able to speak properly. And he hadn't looked any older than the day he died. Admittedly, Leo had always been small, but he should have grown at least a bit, he should have begun to mature.
The more I thought about it, the more upsetting and impossible the idea seemed.
Over the next few weeks, clutching at the loose threads of my sanity, I fell prey to Hillie's persuasion and allowed her to convince me that what I had seen that day was a phantom, a manifestation of my own disturbed state of mind. It was a necessary belief. The alternative was too awful to contemplate.
"Good," said Hillie, satisfied with my acceptance of her ideas. "Good. I think we're beginning to make progress. Don't you?"
Soon after that, I gave up going to see her.
In the years since then, Leo has always lurked somewhere in my thoughts. Occasionally, it's the good times that come to mind, but more often than not it's the horror that returns to unsettle me, and every now and then one of the old nightmares will fetch me breathless from my sleep. Generally speaking, though, I've learned to cope with it. It's history, I tell myself. It's done. It's past. There's nothing I can do to alter what happened, so there's no point torturing myself over it.
The one thing I had never intended to do was revisit the Blake's farm.
But thanks to fate, that's exactly where I find myself.
&nb
sp; I stand alone at the top of the stairs, surrounded by a scene of fire-damaged devastation. Even though the roof is open to the sky, with gentle morning light brightening the gaps between the rafters,the air is smoky and unpleasant to breathe. A couple of massive timbers, still warm and smouldering, have crashed down and punched holes in the floor.
As I walk, I tread gingerly, testing each footstep before trusting it with my full weight. The floorboards will have been weakened by the blaze and I don't want to risk an accident.
I reach Leo's bedroom door. It appears to be made of charcoal. The tell-tale pattern of burn marks on the surrounding wall indicate that behind it lies the seat of the blaze.
I shove at the door, forcing it open, and step inside.
The bedroom is an empty shell, bereft of colour, reduced entirely to black and shades of grey. Only a small, irregular piece of ceiling remains tenuously in place. Every vestige of decoration has been stripped away.
The sole suggestion that this room was once inhabited is an iron bedstead, and even that is damaged - its blackened rods have warped and snapped, and it looks like the carcass of a monstrous beetle, tipped helplessly on its back.
My boots raise slow clouds of ash. It's like walking on the moon.
On the floor, under the gaping window, I notice a paraffin can lying on its side. It is partly concealed under a fall of debris. Undoubtedly, this was the fuel that started the blaze - but what of the spark? I scout carefully around the can, foraging through the ashes, fully expecting to discover the remains of a box of matches or a cigarette lighter. Instead, to my surprise, I touch something soft, and when I see what it is, I recoil in absolute horror.
It is a three-fingered hand.
Chapter 8
_______________________
If I'm truthful, I suppose at some denied, subconscious level I had expected to find him here - otherwise, I wouldn't have entered the house in the first place - but even so, it sickens and appalls me to find him like this.
A noxious stench emanates from his corpse, and I struggle to keep from gagging. My breath comes in ragged, hitching gasps as I begin to uncover him, brushing away the thickest of the ash and picking off bits of rubble. It is a job best done swiftly and without too much thought. But no matter how hard I try, I can't help imagining how Leo must have suffered - and how desperate he must have been to resort to this.
From his posture, with one arm stretched out towards the dropped paraffin can, it seems clear that he doused himself with fuel before striking a match. His body is hideously burned. In places, his flesh is eaten all the way down to the bone, and his face is a grotesque ruin, bearing only a passing resemblance to anything human.
But the single most disturbing aspect, to me anyway, is his size.
He hasn't grown one bit. He is still no more than ten years old.
My eyesight blurs with hot, furious tears. Angrily, I wipe them away with my knuckles. Damn Leo's parents. Damn them. How could they have been so blind to the pain they had inflicted? What perverted kind of love could have inspired them?
I have no idea how they managed to bring him back to life after the accident - whether it was Satanism they had dabbled in or some form of voodoo, no one would ever know - but I hated them for it. All these years, Leo had been imprisoned inside the body of a child, his brain a sullied parody of its former self.
How many times, I wonder, had Leo tried to kill himself before this - and how many times had his parents selfishly saved him? Were they blind to his suffering? Surely they could see that the kindest thing to do was to release him from his tortured existence.
Of course, they are not alone in their guilt.
That time when I had discovered him cutting his wrists and he had offered me the shard of broken glass. I had turned and fled and convinced myself that the whole thing had been an illusion. And I was supposed to be his friend. Some friend. When he needed me most, I had failed him utterly.
"I'm sorry," I whisper. "God, Leo, I'm sorry… "
A sound catches my attention - barely audible, right on the limits of perception. It is a faint, intermittent whistle, like air being forced through a painfully restricted gap.
Suddenly, a grit-sized fragment of broken brick rolls off Leo's chest and tumbles to the floor.
I stare at it, and my blood runs to ice as I realise what is happening.
He is breathing.
Shallowly, scarcely at all, but breathing.
"No… !'
Shock sends frenzied impulses to my legs and I stagger backwards, away from him, anxious to put some distance between us. My heel strikes an obstacle and I stumble and fall, landing with a leaden crash, clattering my elbows and bumping the base of my spine amidst the dust and debris on the bedroom floor.
As I lie there, hearing the thunder of my pulse, waiting for the cloud of ash surrounding me to settle, I try to believe that my imagination has played a trick on me - surely, Leo is too seriously burned, too hopelessly damaged, to actually be alive.
But it is true.
As the air gradually clears, I see the tiny movement of his lungs. The vile sorcery that restored him to life seems reluctant to release its grip on him.
I get slowly to my feet.
My initial panic subsides. Leo is my friend, after all, and I am his. That means something. We have a duty to one another.
Beside me is the wrecked bedstead, the slender iron rods of its frame splayed out like giant needles. I grasp one of the rods and twist it free. It breaks off with an easy snap.
With it in hand, I return to Leo's side.
I rest its cold tip lightly on his sternum. Amazingly, I can feel the rise and fall of his chest through it. I can almost feel his heartbeat. His head turns towards me just a fraction, all the movement he can manage, as if, through his agony, he wants to acknowledge my presence.
Does he know who I am? Does he sense what I am about to do for him? I hope so.
"Deeper than blood, Leo… "
With all my strength, and all my will, I force the lethal rod downwards, deep into Leo's grateful heart.
###
About Antony Bennett
My first published story appeared in the collection "Nightmares 3" after encouragement from the wonderful editor Mary Danby, and after that my stories have appeared in many magazines - Fear, Xenos, Not One of Us, etc.
My stories vary from the spooky to the downright gruesome, but they all explore how ordinary people react to extraordinary situations.
If you've enjoyed what you've read, please contact me through my Facebook page or via Twitter - I'd love to hear from you.
Connect with Antony online
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Antony-Bennett/233732153376298
Twitter @derbyant
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