Half-Sick of Shadows (35 page)

I stepped forward and dared to look inside.

Gregory’s face rose like that of a rabid tiger with a thorn lodged firmly in its dick. The living room, the fire ablaze in the hearth: Gregory hadn’t heard me entering by the back door. He’d been deaf to my instruction to Sophia, as he was blind to me now. My brother, about his mission, needed no assistance from me.

Having returned to the Manse half drunk from Maud’s shop, where poteen flowed freely in a smoky upstairs room, my only remaining brother had stumbled upon a fat male arse thrusting with all the inflexibility that arthritic hips are capable of. Appalled – for although he never showed it, Gregory loved his sister – Gregory hated the fat male arse with an intoxicated and murderous hatred.

Who owned the fat arse, he hadn’t a clue. Nor did he care. He grabbed the first weapon that came to hand. However, deeming Father’s bible insufficient for the purpose, he discarded it – hesitating only for a quarter of a second when a voice inside his head said, ‘Didn’t we put that in the coffin with Father?’ – and grabbed the second: Sophia’s knitting needles. With all his might, he plunged the needles into the fat neck some feet above the fat arse. Not only did they fail to go all the way through, they invaded the neck by only an inch. But an inch proved enough to startle and confuse Farmer Barry and put an end to his feeble thrusting.

With a moan of stupefaction, Farmer Barry toppled sideways as Sophia’s skirt fell down to cover her naked bottom and she scrambled over the sofa’s back on her knees and cowered for a
while
in a corner before taking flight and bumping into me.

As Gregory had pummelled Farmer Barry with his fists, then with a vase, choked him with his bare hands, and had another go at his fat neck with the knitting needles, I had sent Sophia to get Mother. It all happened so mindlessly that time had no involvement. And now, out of ideas concerning new ways of punishing Farmer Barry, Gregory looked up and saw me in the doorway.

That’s what happened!

‘Is he dead?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gregory.

Farmer Barry was certainly unconscious.

‘Torch it,’ I said, pushing the palms of my hands upwards, meaning, as Gregory well understood, the fat arse, the whole bloody Manse and everything within.

He looked over his shoulder at the blazing fire. Realizing that he straddled Farmer Barry’s exposed organ, he quickly jumped off and took to repeatedly kicking my real father’s head. I didn’t mind. I tore a handful of pages from Father’s bible, miraculously risen, set them alight and placed them under the curtains, which were thin and worn so that the flames caught easily. Seeing what I was doing, Gregory booted Farmer Barry’s head one last time and fled the Manse.

‘Sophia?’ I shouted upstairs, then ran up to see if she and Mother were still there. They were not. Having scampered through all the rooms like a madman in search of I knew not what, I hurried downstairs as Gregory returned from an outhouse with a canister of what I took to be some kind of flammable liquid. As the curtains burned, he splashed it around the carpet, chairs and sofa. Not forgetting Farmer Barry’s organ. The Manse’s walls were stone, but the ceilings and roof would go up like a bonfire. Good riddance!

In the courtyard, Sophia wept, sniffed, paced, approached the back door and retreated. Her trauma kept the Cold at bay, but not for long. She hugged herself and shivered, but couldn’t bring herself to return indoors.

Then, she caught sight of it … and him. Her knight in shining armour appeared from the side of the Manse – mounted. His helmeted head turned towards her, Alf raised his mop in salute and the horse sauntered off towards the Lane.

‘Go on,’ I called to her as I emerged from the back door. ‘Get after him! Follow him while you have a chance.’ Judging by the speed of the horse, Sophia could easily catch up if she ran – even if she ran out of puff after a hundred metres.

Sophia panted and delayed, looked at me then at the horse’s waggling bottom. ‘Gregory’s burning down the Manse,’ I said, shouting probably because of the cacophony inside my head. ‘Where’s Mother?’ Sophia turned to Farmer Barry’s lorry. Mother sat inside, hugging herself small and frightened, looking out. ‘Get after him, Sophia. You’re leaving the Manse. You have to leave it. It’s now or never. There won’t be a Manse tomorrow.’

We both looked. Alf and his trusty steed were further along the Lane. Soon, they would be too far along it to see.

Then: light. Frizzle. Gone.

My heart sank like a knitting needle into Farmer Barry’s neck.

‘It’s too late,’ cried Sophia.

Yes, I thought, but what could I say? ‘No, it’s not. It’s not. Take the …’ Farmer Barry’s lorry. She didn’t know how to drive it. Neither did I. ‘Gregory’s bike! Take Gregory’s bike!’ Sophia dithered. She hesitated. She started out and stopped short. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ She threw a leg over the bike, looked at me, saw Gregory emerging from the back door and froze. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ I commanded, jumping up and down, jabbing a finger towards the vanished horse’s waggling posterior. Sophia turned the key and revved the handle bar. My last advice: ‘Watch out for potholes.’

And off she went. Moped like a space rocket. The rear wheel skidded to the right. Her left leg stuck out to the left. They swapped positions a couple of times, hurling up gravel and mud, before at last Sophia got her balance. ‘Turn on the light!’ I yelled in her wake.

‘Come on, you,’ I called to Gregory as I marched to Farmer Barry’s lorry, with Mother safe within but looking … actually, looking the spitting image of the White Lady.

The resemblance broke my stride.

‘Where to?’ said Gregory.

‘I don’t know.’ But I did know: after Sophia.

We would never catch up with Sophia on foot. I climbed into the lorry behind the steering wheel. Gregory climbed into the passenger’s seat, which meant sharing it with Mother. We had enough room because Mother had little meat on her bones. The lorry faced the wrong way. I asked my brother, who knew more about such things than I did, ‘How do you make it go?’

He waggled the gear stick thing. ‘Turn the key.’

‘What key?’

He leaned across to my side, causing Mother to cry out as he squashed her, looked for a key, then jumped out of the lorry and ran back into the Manse – presumably to retrieve the key from Farmer Barry. Which was very brave of him because, although no flames licked through the roof yet, and there were no signs of smoke or flame, the living room must have been an inferno. I considered going in after him to help, but Mother looked so imploring, and I had always been and remained so cowardly, that I didn’t.

Gregory ran back out of the Manse in less than a minute, lightly smoked but not overdone. He entered the lorry on top of me and I climbed over to Mother’s side. Gregory turned the key in the ignition, the engine started, and we were off; the first time we had been in Farmer Barry’s lorry not going to or coming from school.

The headlights showed what I already knew: the Lane was almost narrower than the lorry, and had more pothole than lane. There were potholes like moon craters on the Road too, but far fewer of them. At the top of the Lane, Gregory turned on to the Road. A single eye, the headlight of Gregory’s moped, came towards us. Gregory
stopped
the lorry. The eye advanced more slowly. I opened my door and stood on the lip as Sophia pulled up before me.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, aghast.

‘Coming back. He’s gone.’

‘He isn’t gone. He can’t be.’

‘He is.’

‘What happened?’

‘He was there, ahead of me on his horse. Moonlight made his bucket shine in the dark. Then, the horse sort of disintegrated.’

‘And Alf? What …?’

‘He was on it.’

‘You can’t come back. We’re leaving. You have to find him.’ I was by no means certain that she could. Sophia might have been correct: it was too late. Nevertheless, I didn’t know what else to say. We could stop and reassess the situation at Bruagh. Or in town. Or somewhere. ‘We’ll follow you,’ I called to her. I think she wanted to find Alf even more than I wanted her to find him, because without argument she walked the moped one hundred and eighty degrees and took off the way she had come. Gregory put the lorry in gear and followed.

Soon, perhaps six hundred metres and nearly as many bends along the Road, on a strip of straight, two yellow eyes opened in the dark ahead of us, and ahead of Sophia. My sister, I’m sure, had been watching for potholes. Gregory didn’t have to: the lorry bounced over them … but not the moped. The yellow eyes must have taken her by surprise – they certainly surprised me – for she took her eyes off the road for a second or two and …

She left the moped and took to the air.
After all these years, Sophia has remembered how to fly!
She flew in one direction moonward. Unable to trick gravity, like my twin, the moped fell in the other direction. Sophia’s flight, doomed to be short, ended. She dropped like an Edgar and hit the Road. I can’t say which part of her hit it first. Her body rolled off the Road and into a Roadside ditch.

Gregory brought the lorry to an abrupt halt.

Mother’s eyes were huge and round. A hand covered her mouth. Gregory and I leapt out of the lorry and hurried to where our sister had fallen. Unable to locate her at first, my thoughts only returned to the yellow eyes when they began to move towards us. Caught between looking for Sophia and looking at the eyes, the eyes had it. The eyes had it for Gregory too. We watched, captivated.

I don’t know what Gregory thought or remembered, but I remembered a dream I must have had once, a long time ago. The vehicle in my dream said MORRIS MINOR on the front, and the man inside it had a beard not unlike Father’s. He was my friend.

Morris Minor, if the driver owned the name his vehicle bore, couldn’t steer it past the lorry on the narrow Road. He didn’t even look out of the window at us – which I thought discourteous – but turned the vehicle round in five tortuously slow forward and reverse movements before heading for Bruagh … or wherever.

The darkness was fresh and icy and the air thinner than normal; it stole colour from everything. Gregory looked almost like a life-sized cardboard cut-out. ‘Wait,’ I heard someone say, quietly. Me.

‘There she is!’ shouted Gregory, and leapt into the ditch.

‘Wait!’ I bawled after Morris Minor. ‘Wait for me!’

The lights stopped receding. They came back towards me.

Morris Minor stopped beside me. Aware of Gregory’s reappearance from the ditch, I ignored him. I ignored Mother – screaming now like a far-off banshee.

A window came down and I looked inside, across an empty seat to the bearded driver. ‘Can I go with you?’ I asked. And, even as I did, my voice faltered. I knew him from somewhere.

And the door came ajar all by itself even as I heard, in the background, Gregory calling my name and asking if I’d lost my fucking brain. I entered the vehicle because, instinctively, I knew I had no option but to do it if I were to continue. If I were to continue when the tale ended. As the window went back up, I heard Gregory for the final time. His words were clear, inside my head, and I knew I would
never
forget them. He said, ‘I don’t know if she’s alive or dead.’ Then the vehicle thrust forward, me in it. That’s the last I saw of Gregory. And Mother … And my beautiful twin.

I don’t know if they were even there to see Morris Minor’s back lights shrink. Frizzle. Vanish. Nothing. Dead silence.

About the Author

Born in Belfast in 1960,
David Logan
underwent neurosurgery in childhood and lost most of his hearing as a result. He left school at sixteen and worked briefly in various unskilled jobs before returning to full-time education. He has a BSc in Sociology and an MA in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion from the University of Ulster, and also a BA in English Literature and Language from the Open University. He has written fiction for the SF, Horror and Fantasy small presses and has edited and published his own magazine. David and his wife live in Carrickfergus but escape to sunnier lands at every opportunity. When in Carrickfergus, David can be found loitering in coffee bars, staring out of windows, dreaming up ever more fantastical excuses for not going to the gym – again.

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First published in Great Britain
in 2012 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © David Logan 2012

David Logan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448109289
ISBNs 9780857521163 (cased)
9780857520760 (tpb)

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