Highway To Hell (5 page)

“Fucking cunt!” he snapped aloud, swallowing the last third of the glass in one cavernous gulp.

After leaving the kitchen, Richard wandered through the house holding the vodka bottle in one hand and the glass in another, taking alternate swigs from both. He moved across the large hallway. Now void of all furniture, it was used as the main party hall; it provided easy entrance and exit for the guests while also keeping them away from the areas of the house he preferred to keep private. Richard stumbled across the hallway, already well on the way to lunchtime inebriation. There were two doors ahead of him, and although both gave access to individual sitting rooms, Richard always chose the one of the right, closest to the front door. It was well decorated with two plush lounge chairs that took centre stage and faced a modest sized plasma TV against the left hand wall. The walls were a rich cream colour while the floor was both heated and tiled. A large rug separated the TV from the chairs, and in days gone by (when there had been a sofa in the room) there had been a coffee table pinning the rug in place. There was a window on the wall opposite the door, although Richard had covered it with heavy drapes as he tried to eliminate the light in what he liked to think of as his movie room. Beside the window and spanning both the wall opposite the door and the one immediately to the right as you entered was a custom made L-shaped bookcase, only it was filled with DVDs rather than books. Richard would sit for hours in this room. There was always a movie playing. Most of the time he didn’t watch what he played, but he found it comforting. He enjoyed the classics, sci-fi, horror, comedy, and action, and while thrillers were his genre of choice he had certainly been known (when he was certain that the house was empty) to watch the occasional romantic comedy. Pacing the room like a fighter in the locker room, just waiting for his turn to be called through into the ring, Richard finally felt his rage begin to subside as alcohol took over his body. Richard soon grew bored: even the idea of a movie didn’t appeal to him that morning. He left the room and just stood in the entrance hall for a few minutes before heading up the main staircase to his right.

The second storey of the building was governed by a long hallway that spread out in both directions. At the top of the stairs was the library/study area where he had always been forced to sit and complete his homework. The room to the left was the family room, and was followed by one of the three bathrooms on the floor, and then Richard’s room. His was the largest bedroom in the house, although originally it had been two separate rooms. The hallway bent at ninety degrees at either end and at the end of each ‘wing’ (Richard would often refer to his home in terms that were much grander than the reality suggested) was a guest bedroom, and a small bathroom where the broken shower door still hung and the shards of shattered glass glistened in early morning sun like small diamonds. A fresh wave of anger rolled through him; not at the girl, no, fuck her, the worthless whore that she was, she had cum before him on each occasion, and he didn’t like that: she had been lazy. The rage was his own; it was deep seated and locked away with a key he could no longer find, and nor did he wish to, because the idea of letting it out scared him.

The alcohol surged through his system. The world had started to spin and his movements had the unmistakable clumsy flow to them that could only come from a drunk. He finished the vodka and let the bottle fall to the plush carpeted floor. Richard turned and walked back in the direction of the stairs, towards the other side of the house. It was a side that he left alone. His parents’ bedroom was at the end of the hall, opposite to his own, but theirs had an en-suite bathroom and so while being smaller than his by some considerable amount it was still considered to be the master bedroom of the property. Further down the hall was the other spare bedroom, which his mother had claimed for herself, turning it into a painting studio; for all Richard knew it was still filled with her half-finished canvases. His mother had been quite the amateur artist and had shown several of her pieces in galleries across the country. The only difference on that side of the house was that the corridor was a few meters longer; it had been extended to make space for the room Richard’s father had used to conduct his business meetings it. It wasn’t accessible through the house and so was invisible to anybody inside. They had had an extension built not long after moving in to accommodate Richard’s father’s business meetings and conference calls. It was a giant room by all accounts, but Richard had never been inside it while they were alive, and since their death he had not even been able to bring himself to set foot in their side of the house.

His parents had died two years previously in a car accident as they drove home from a business meeting in Canada. They had taken the car and enjoyed a mini vacation as they travelled home. Richard had still been in school and had been (despite his rather inflated ego) for the most part just one of the kids in his class. His parents had decided before he was born that Richard was to attend public school as his father – a self-made man – had done. They did this under the belief that it builds not only character, but a determination to succeed on merit rather than inheritance; a common issue prevalent in upper class preparatory schools. The news of their death had been given to Richard by Lisa Atkins; she had sat him down in the kitchen and broken the news as gently as she knew how, after which she held him for hours as he sobbed, working his way through things as best as any teenager can do.

The funeral was a busy affair; the church and the graveyard packed full with mourners, ‘mourners’ and television cameras to the point that it looked like a film set rather than a real funeral. Yet once the coffins had been lowered and the sombre nature of the occasion concluded by the man in charge, Richard soon found himself standing alone. He looked around and saw that not one single person had remained any longer than was deemed appropriate, not even the many men who had worked with his father since he first started the company, men who were considered not just business associated but friends. Men who had given Richard birthday and Christmas gifts through the years, men who had offered him advice when his father was unavailable, men he considered to be the uncles he never had.

Richard remained by the graves, oblivious to both the passage of time and the heavy, stormy atmosphere that had grown in the air. It was only when Lisa put her arm around him that he came back to himself and snapped out of the trance he had entered. Together they stood in silence until the cemetery employees – for Richard couldn’t bear to use the term ’grave diggers’ – returned armed with shovels to complete the burial. Lisa Atkins took him home, and had sat with him the rest of the day, but as the sun disappeared, set no doubt, and the evening came, even she had to make her way home to her own family.

Now, stumbling along upper landing, needing to hold on to the banister to keep from falling over, with his vision double (triple in areas of poor light), Richard finally made his way over into the ‘dark side’ of the house. It felt colder, and he shuddered as he walked past the top of the stairs, which for so long had been the marker for the divide he had created. He stood and looked down at the entrance area from the upper right-hand side of the landing and it felt strange to him. He was sure it was just the drink, but it felt… creepy, as if his skin had been shrunk while his skeleton remained the same size. He itched all over and his forehead was covered with sweat. The house looked different from up here. He no longer saw the party arena, but the entrance foyer his parents had made so welcoming, the large antique table was back in the centre of the room. A large fern-like flower in a giant, Oriental pot stood proudly on top of it. There was a writing bureau to the left, between the door to the sitting (movie) room and entrance to the parlour that his mother had used to entertain her lady friends when they came over for drinks in the summer. He saw the large hat stand which housed his father’s many long overcoats, hats and umbrellas, not to mention his own Power Rangers rucksack. He hadn’t seen it since he was a kid, but now it hung there right before his eyes. He saw the doors to the main dining room, a large, permanently prepared room with a table that could host more than 15 people, 20 if you were friendly and didn’t mind a few elbows in your plate from time to time. Richard knew the door had been there, but he hadn’t really seen it since the first day he came home to an empty house. Beside the dining room was the side hallway that led into the kitchen; a large busy room even now, despite its more infrequent usage. Coming off from the kitchen was the family dining room; a jovial, colourful place decorated with happy, smiling pictures of holidays had and events celebrated over the years. For all Richard knew, the stereo was still running, playing his mother’s Boyzone album on one continual repeat. He closed his eyes and he could hear their words drifting through the dead air. He closed his mind, wanting desperately to block out the scene, to hold back the tears, but they always managed to find an escape route. When Richard opened his eyes again they were red and burning, not from the vodka but from the salty tears he had never cried all of those years ago which had begun to leak through the dam he had built to hide them.

Richard let go of the banister and pushed himself backwards. His world seemed to darken, as if an early and unexpected dusk had fallen.

Richard groaned, his head thumped and his thirst re-surfaced. All he heard was the same static sound that lived in the radio waves between stations, or late at night once the pay-per-view channels he watched so often finished their broadcast. The house darkened with every step. The sound of thunder rumbled in the distance and to Richard it felt as though the house itself was scared, shaking down to its foundations. Richard was transfixed on the front entrance. He felt along the wall behind him and when his hands found a door handle, he knew which room it would lead him into, but didn’t care: it would get him away from the vision he was having, and he knew for a fact that there would be something to drink in one of the Edwardian bookcases that ringed the entire circumference of the room, save for the door and large windows that were opposite the entrance.

The door opened and a rush of stale air spilled out. Richard cried out in shock: it burned his skin. Like traps within an Egyptian tomb, rigged to keep thieves – it wasn’t stealing when it was your alcohol – at bay.

Richard walked into his father’s study and reached the light switch. The walls felt rough to his touch, made his fingers burn as if being grated open by the abrasive surface. It was only when he found the switch and filled the room with a dull light, emitted from a dust encrusted bulb, a single glowing sentry in a chandelier filled with dead colleagues, that Richard saw the tips of his fingers were bleeding, cut open as a result of his altercation with the bathroom mirror. Now that he was away from the landing, the visions he had were gone, the house was empty again, and that room of all of them confirmed this. It was dusty and, well, empty. As it dawned on him that he had entered this room, out of all of the rooms in the house, he had broken his boundaries and chosen that one. Putting it out of his mind, Richard walked to the locked liquor cabinet, and without pausing to think grabbed a thick book from the shelf and smashed the door’s glass front. He put the book down, not even bothering to look at the cover – Dante’s Inferno – he grabbed the first bottle he saw, his vision too blurred to read the label. With the bottle open, Richard took a long drink. The fine brandy hit the back of his throat like liquid gold and ran down into his stomach where it sat floating on a sea of nausea.

“That’s just the kind of irresponsible bullshit I would expect from you,” a voice boomed out of the darkness.

Richard jumped, screaming, half choking on a mouthful of brandy. He let the bottle fall from his grip as he spun around, searching the room for his unexpected guest. He saw nobody; the room was empty save for him. He stood on the right-hand side of the office, facing the other wall; the door was to his left, and to his right was the desk and behind it the window. The decor was dark; the wood red in colour and hard. Nothing could put a dent in his father’s desk, and the Lord knew how hard Richard had tried when he was younger. He knew he had been drinking a while, but it couldn’t have been much past noon, yet outside it looked like heavy dusk, the sky a vivid swirling orange. A strong wind had whipped up out of nowhere, and the solid house seemed to creak and groan at every joint.

Behind him, the door to the office slammed shut. Richard spun around but saw nothing.

“You always were a loser, mooching from my fortune like you earned the right. Bet you’re happy now we’re gone, hey!” a voice said. It was alien yet familiar. It spoke from over by the window. Richard turned back but once again he saw nothing.

When the large leather desk chair that had been facing the window spun around, Richard screamed, or tried to, at least – but his throat had swollen shut.

“W-wh-what,” Richard stammered. The advanced state of inebriation he had been in was gone, slapped out of him with the effectiveness of a cold shower.

“Get out of my study, get out of my house! I worked my fingers to the bone to support you. To give you the best chance at life, a head start, and all you do is sit in here and waste it. You disappoint me once again, Richard; well done,” the corpse of Richard’s father scolded him, the final words filled with sarcastic praise.

“No, you can’t be here. You di-died.” Richard said the words, and then as if they opened up the old wounds he had kept sealed he burst into tears. His arms outstretched towards his father, who remained motionless, stoic. Completely unlike he had been in life, for Roger Hamilton had been a patient man, a loving, generous man. A man who had loved his son more than anything else in his life, a man who had cancelled numerous business meetings over the years should they run a risk of interfering with his son’s soccer games or other activities.

“You disgust me,” the corpse said again as Richard sank to his knees. “Look at me,” it demanded of him.