Returning
by Wayne Summers
The house moans and creaks like an old man. Moonlight steals in through the windows and long fingers of shadow stretch across the wooden floorboards to the bed where Ciara lies, staring up at the ceiling through bloodshot eyes. For the second night in a row her daughter’s bed remains cold and unslept in.
Her husband’s breathing is heavy and slow. She envies him for being able to sleep so soundly; even resents him for it. She knows that there are tablets on his nightstand and twice she has considered taking some, but she doesn’t.
The sound of the front door closing wrenches Ciara from her gruesome thoughts and tears. She furrows her brow, trying to remember whether or not she locked it before dragging her body upstairs to bed. Then her eyes light up. Her heart skips a beat. Melody!
She leaps up and grabs the blue fleecy-lined dressing gown that had been flung across the foot of the bed. A half-smile plays upon her lips, fades then reappears. Her feet can’t carry her fast enough down the carpeted stairs.
“Melody!” she calls. “Darling, is that you?”
Even before she reaches the foot of the stairs she feels it. Something in the air. A chill. Beneath her thick robe she shivers. With one had she clutches the collar to her neck and notices how her breath forms a fine cloud as it hits the night air.
“Hello,” she calls hesitantly. Suddenly she isn’t in such a hurry.
She steps carefully around the sofa and past the dining table, which juts out from a corner in the living room. Everything is where it should be and nothing has been disturbed, though as she enters the kitchen she catches something moving in the shadows. She gasps.
Spinning around, her eyes dart wildly around the room and she notices it has suddenly become more difficult to breathe. The air seems to sparkle and crack. The hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention while the acrid smell of electricity invades her nostrils.
Something cold and dead passes through her, sucking the oxygen from her lungs and chilling her blood. She shudders.
Patchouli. Just a faint trace. A smile finds its way to her lips. Melody wears patchouli.
And then she sees it; a shadow much darker than the shadows of the night, sitting motionless on the sofa. She frowns and the smile slips from her face. She tries to remember if she looked at the sofa those few moments ago when she passed it.
“Hello?” she says, her voice cracking after the first syllable.
“Mum?” comes the faint reply. “I can’t see you?”
An explosion of adrenalin floods her body. Her eyes brim with tears as she starts for the sofa, but something makes her stop. Instinct, but why? She shrugs it off and settles on the coffee table opposite her daughter.
“Honey?” she says reaching out to Melody. Melody leans away from her.
Bewildered, Ciara asks if everything is okay.
Her daughter sits shrouded in silence, unresponsive.
Ciara reaches behind her and switches on the lamp. The light hits Melody and she recoils, casting her head to one side until her eyes become used to it. Now Ciara can see her daughter clearly. Melody’s face is pale and expressionless, and her hair is wet and hanging in tangles over her shoulders, stuck to her flesh like black worms, or leeches. Her lips are pale purple.
For a moment silence hangs in the air like a vulture waiting to descend, despite Ciara having a hundred and one questions swirling around inside her head.
“Mum,” Melody begins.
“Yes, sweetheart,” Ciara replies eagerly.
“I’m sorry.”
Tears well in Ciara’s eyes and she feels a thin, warm trickle down one cheek. She sniffs them back and swallows. She cocks her head to one side, forces a smile and swallows again.
“What for?” she asks.
Silence.
“What for, honey?” she repeats, wiping her eyes with a crumpled tissue she has found in the pocket of her dressing gown.
“For arguing,” Melody replies in a voice that is barely audible. “Baby, that’s alright,” she laughs, choking back a fresh stream of tears. “You’re home now and that’s the main thing.”
Ciara leans forward to stroke her daughter’s arm, but Melody draws back again. Her hand pauses in mid air and then is placed back in her lap.
“There was an accident,” Melody explains. “I couldn’t get home. I was lost.”
Ciara twists the damp tissue between her trembling fingers. The muscles in the back of her neck are taut and it feels as though there is a crushing weight on her chest. The tears finally win and snake down her cheeks, collecting on her jawbone before dropping onto the fabric of her dressing gown.
“What kind of accident? I mean, you’re alright, aren’t you? Would you like me to call Doctor Webber?”
Melody shakes her head.
Ciara opens her mouth to ask one of the many questions jostling at the tip of her tongue, but she doesn’t. Melody looks up at her mother and for a second or two their eyes are locked.
“You can’t help me now.”
And then the room gets even colder. Finally, Melody smiles. Her once perfect smile is now a graveyard of broken and missing teeth. A large gash, a large eruption of meaty flesh, zig-zags its way down the side of her face and a patch of hair falls from the scalp above her right ear leaving the raw meat beneath exposed to the night. Even the angle of her arm, which rests limply in her lap, suddenly looks strange. There are other, smaller, changes too. The tips of her fingers are bleeding and tears and holes appear in her clothing. What is left of her hair hangs soaked and matted with blood down over her shoulders. One of her shoes is missing.
Ciara’s eyes bulge and her mouth drops opens, aghast.
“No-one can help me now, Mum,” Melody says. “They hit me with their car then dumped me. It’s over.”
A thin trickle of blood spills over Melody’s bottom lip and drops into her lap, soaking into the stained fabric of her favourite denim jeans.
“I’ve come for Daddy,” she says, her voice seeming further and further away with every word. “He’s coming with me.”
Ciara notices a movement on the stairs.
“You’re awake?” Ciara asks, sounding surprised. “I thought you’d be out ‘til well into the morning.”
Phillip doesn’t reply.
“We have to go now, Mum,” Melody says as she gets up from the sofa. “I love you. Never forget that.”
Ciara watches her daughter walk around the couch to meet her father at the foot of the stairs. She whimpers as Melody takes her father’s hand in hers. Phillip looks blankly at his wife, at Melody and then turns his head in the direction of the bedroom. His brows knit together. Ciara can hear Melody talking to him, reassuring him then together they walk towards the door.
It might have been a trick of the dawn light but for a moment they seem to fade and then they pass through the unopened door. Ciara’s eyes are wide and unblinking. Her face is expressionless. The room already feels warmer though its comfort doesn’t touch her. Somehow she manages to climb the stairs to the bedroom. Phillip is still in bed but he has stopped breathing. In a moment of lucidity, Ciara walks around to her husband’s nightstand and snatches up the small brown bottle of sleeping pills. It is light in her hand. It is empty.
She moves sluggishly around to her side of the bed and collapses onto the mattress. Her eyes are heavy, as is her heart. She rolls over and puts a loving arm over the body of her husband and slips into a deep sleep.
She awakes to a room bathed in wintery light. She looks at her bedside clock but it has stopped. She hears the knocking that woke her up and struggles out of bed.
The two figures at the front door are policemen.
“Good afternoon,” says Officer Jenkins removing his hat. “Mrs Cooper?”
“Yes,” she replies.
“I’m afraid I have some…”
“Bad news?”
The policemen look at each other, puzzled.
“Yes, there’s been an …”
“Accident,” she sobs through quivering lips. “I know. You’d better come in.”
About the author: Wayne currently has stories in Issue 19 of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction; Volume 1, Number 6 of Art&Prose Magazine, The Willows, Vulgata Magazine and as the cover story in Issue 2, Niteblade Horror and Fantasy Magazine. He also has other stories about to be published in Issue 21 of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction, Aphelion, Cemetery Moon and Black Petals.