Highway To Hell (6 page)

Richard raised his eyes from the floor, his body shaking. He spied the brandy bottle, and reached for it with a trembling hand. He took a long deep gulp; he drank until his eyes leaked and his throat burnt. When he finally lowered the bottle the image that was his father stood behind the desk chair. The clothes on the body were rotten tatters, long since victims to the natural process of decay. The blackened skin that still hung to the corpse peeled back like the skin of a roasted pepper, exposing yellow bone and sticky ligaments. The face was sunken and withered like that of an ancient Egyptian mummy, the lips rotten away to leave just the teeth in a wide ghoulish smile. The nose hung to one side, the skin slipping from the cartilage base, making the corpse push it back up every few seconds like a pair of ill-fitting glasses.

Richards’s dad had been a large man, not obese, but large; country strong would have been a term used for him, had he grown up or worked on a farm. But he hadn’t and so large was the word most people chose. Even in death his frame was impressive: the muscle still clung to his bones, dried and shrivelled like jerky, but there nonetheless. His eyes were glassy, the colour gone from them as if they had been whited out, and the entire eyeball was a milky white colour that reminded Richard of the porridge he ate for breakfast most mornings. A retch rose in his stomach, and he tried his best to keep it hidden.

The figure moved, and before Richard realised, it stood in front of the desk only a few feet away from him.

“You grew up fast, boy. You changed indeed. Now you wet the bed with a different fluid altogether, but you’re still a nothing. Look at you, drunk. You don’t deserve to be here. Now get out!” the apparition of his father roared at Richard, who felt the house vibrate with anger.

Richard shook as his father’s rotting corpse walked towards him, and as he inched closer, his body making raw wet sounds as it moved, his eyes began to glow a strange green, vivid yet dull at the same time. The corpse began to laugh; a booming, evil laugh taken straight out of the comic books Richard read as a child; a laugh he knew well as it had haunted his dreams both before and after his parents died.

Richard flinched, jumping backwards more from fright than self-preservation. He jumped over the threshold of the study and found himself back on the landing. While twilight still hung in the air outside, inside the study it was pitch black, and quiet. Richard strained to try and see the movement he knew was there within the shroud. When it came, however, it was his father rather than his rotten corpse; his business suit was impeccable, his hair well styled, his skin on fire. Flames engulfed his body as he stood in the doorway. His face contorted in pain, and as Richard watched in stunned horror, blood began to spread over his chest until his torso was drenched in it. His father stood in the doorway, supporting himself with both arms; he looked exhausted but managed to raise his head. “Richard,” It said, his father’s voice said, just before his eyeballs exploded. Richard felt the burning jelly splatter his face like the white headed acne swellings of his youth against the bathroom mirror.

Richard’s drunken legs failed him and he collapsed. He tumbled all the way down the faux marble stairs, landing in a heap on the cold floor of the empty entrance hall. His left leg was twisted and stuck beneath him and his chest felt as if someone had rested a heavy weight on it; he couldn’t breathe and strong, hot, metallic tasting fluid hit the back of his throat. Richard’s world faded and he felt a warm puddle spreading around his head and neck. Richard looked up and saw the doorway to his father’s study. It was open, and it was empty; daylight flooded the room, filled the entire house. The white walls of the hallway and the light coloured floor reflected every beam.

Richard felt it rise from his stomach, but couldn’t bring himself to roll over: his body was simply no longer under his control, and for once it had nothing to do with the alcohol he had consumed. Richard vomited; hot acidic chunks spilled from his mouth. They covered his face and mixed with his blood on the floor. As his lungs filled, panic ravaged his body, for while his mind was clouded, the synapses inhibited by the excess alcohol, his survival instinct still attempted to prevail. His one good leg kicked and thrashed, as his breaths began to shallow. His struggles eased as the colour drained from his world, and finally from his dreams.

Richard wasn’t discovered until the following morning, when Lisa Atkins arrived just as she always swore she would do. Richard lay on his back, staring up at the empty house, his eyes wide with terror. The semi-digested contents of his stomach had dried to his face like a bizarre spa treatment mask. Lisa Atkins called the police and washed the body once they were finished. She dressed him and kissed him goodbye before the coroner’s office took away the body of the young man she thought of as a son. It was the last time she saw him. Lisa opted to keep the casket closed during Richard’s funeral; she was, after all, the only one there.

~

III

Helen

“You don’t take sugar do you, Marion?” Helen Attinson asked her three o’clock appointment. Thanks to the impending bank holiday weekend, Marion Dubois was scheduled be her last customer until Tuesday. Helen loved working in the beauty salon, but during the past few weeks her mind had been preoccupied with other things, and she had been looking forward to the four day break with the same enthusiasm of a kid in the last week of school before summer. She had found that her concentration had begun to wane just a little, and today it had just packed up and left for an even earlier start to the weekend.

“No, thank you, dear, just a dash of milk,” Marion answered. She came to the salon regularly – at least once a fortnight, although if she had the time Marion Dubious would have been there once a week. Her husband had died five years earlier of a heart attack at the age of 57. He had been an obese man who had treated her cruelly but at the same time given her everything she could ever ask. In return she had loved him, and even now part of her still did, but through his death she had discovered freedom and life to be a powerful tool in moving on both emotional and physical levels. She was dating, not men her own age, but those somewhat younger. Her years in captivity, as she herself referred to them, had apparently kept her looking young, not to mention the home gym she had had built one summer many years ago when she first hit 40 and wanted to get back into shape; it began as an attempt to entice her husband back into the same bed as her. Not for the sex, no – when it came to that she had a better time on her own anyway – but simply for the company, especially on those cold winter nights.

“Ok, I’ll be back in a second then, but you know the drill. Got a new magazine shipment in, second drawer down, same place as always,” Helen called as she walked into the small kitchen area.

She hurriedly grabbed two mugs from the cupboard and set them down on the counter, creating a clean spot between all the dirty mugs and plates. She made a mental note to have a word with Gwen, the young girl who helped them out in the afternoons after school. It was her job to keep the kitchen area clean, and recently she just seemed to have lost her motivation.

As Helen scooped two teaspoons of instant coffee, as she levelled the cup for Ms Dubois off with her fingertip – she knew Marion didn’t like her coffee too strong. She sneezed; a rather violent sneeze that caused her head to whiplash. Her brain hurtled forward and collided with the front of her skull as if she had slammed the brakes on without warning. Rubbing at the sudden pain in her temples, massaging them both with her index fingers while the water boiled, Helen took the time to check the mirror. She gasped when she saw her face. Her skin, although usually rather pale, was now ashen. Her blue eyes had lost their normal sparkle and instead looked dusty as if she hadn’t used them in years. Crow’s feet seemed engraved into the skin around her eyes, and even her hair, a vibrant auburn, had a sad and worn out look to it. Good God, take a look at me, she thought to herself, opening her mouth and sticking out her tongue as far as it would go. She didn’t know why she did this; it was a habit she had picked up in childhood and now, ten years out of high school, she still couldn’t take a look at herself in the mirror without pulling a funny face.

Coffees in hand, Helen walked back into the salon with a smile spread across her face, her mind once again wandering from the task at hand, instead focusing on her big plans for the long weekend.

Helen sat down behind her station and waited for Marion to have a drink and replace her cup before she got down to business. Beside her she had a small gurney, which made it look as though she was about to perform surgery, only in place of gleaming scalpels with blades of all sizes Helen’s was filled with nail files, lotions, varnishes, polishes of all colors, with a drawer filled with all other manner of small vials filled with liquids she had learned to pronounce effortlessly over the years without ever understanding what they were.

She picked up Marion’s left hand and moved it into position, leaving the elbow on the table. She pushed the headache out of her mind; it had subsided to nothing more than a dull thud anyway. It would pass in a few moments. With arms positioned as if they were about to wrestle, Helen slid a support underneath the raised arm and once Marion’s arm was settled, she picked up the first file on the tray and began to work on the nails.

“I tell you, I just can’t believe how free I feel, my life has completely changed since I started just having some fun. I mean, it took me a while to get used to living alone, of course, but then again you know that, I’ve said it often enough. But I mean, really, it’s such an enlightening experience to find yourself single and with a city like this around you. Why anybody ever thinks of settling down is beyond me,” Marion said, the words spewing out of her mouth as if a locomotive powered them from the tunnel that was her mouth.

Helen never said much. It was often hard to take a side because Marion simply ran on and on like a broken record, rehashing the same arguments time and time again, often within the same visit – and more often than not she would revisit a topic from the other viewpoint anyway.

“Well, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I do miss having someone around, somebody to talk to whenever I want, or to keep me company in that house, but I think I’m going to sell it anyway. Move to a more popular area. The suburbs were good enough once upon a time, but now it’s just too far to commute, and I don’t drive. I think I’m going to learn though,” Marion continued, and at the same time she managed to continue reading the magazine she had picked out and also acknowledge Helen, on both personal terms by praising her workmanship.

Helen liked Marion Dubois, not only because she was always happy, bubbly and full of stories that helped to pass the time, but because she did all the talking. Helen could just get on with her work, throwing in the occasional congratulatory phrase or non-committal thought on something and that was it. Helen preferred it that way; she wasn’t one to brag about things, or to go out and have crazy alcohol fuelled adventures with the girls.

She preferred a simple life; working, going home to her wonderful husband, cooking dinner together and then settling down on the sofa to watch a movie. It was a safe life, a simple one, but she enjoyed it.

Helen finished cleaning the first hand and then began the process all over again with the second, when out of nowhere a wave of nausea swept through her, followed by a dripping sensation in her nose. To her own surprise as much as Marion’s, Helen noticed that her nose was bleeding. The blood was dark, as good as black, and poured from both nostrils at an alarming rate.

“Excuse me,” she said, getting up from behind the table and half running back into the kitchen area, pinching her nose with one hand, using the other to keep her stable as she tilted her head back.

Once out of sight, Helen was more panicked in her movements; she swept with her arms in desperate search of a cloth or piece of kitchen roll to help try and stem the bleeding. Once she had tissue stuffed up each nostril Helen slumped against the wall and rested with her hands on her knees. Her shirt was soaked through with blood, and she saw a puddle on the floor that covered enough of the linoleum to cause her speeding heart to skip more than a few beats in her chest. When Helen stood up the bleeding had stopped. She stood braced against the countertop, waiting for the shaking to stop. Helen took the spare shirt she always had hanging on the coat stand and headed back out to Marion. She gave herself a cursory check in the mirror and wiped away the remaining blood, offered herself a half-hearted snarl; old habits really do die hard.

The salon was spread over two buildings, joined by a connecting door, one side dedicated to hairstyling and facials while the other section (where Helen was and her colleagues Rosie Singh and Martina Petrova were all busy at work on their own final customers) was set up for manicures, pedicures. The waxing rooms were split two at the rear of each salon area. Martina and Rosie chatted to their clients as they worked and didn’t even look up when Helen returned. Marion Dubois meanwhile had moved on to the matter of where she intended to spend her summer, and with which one of her suitors she was more likely to choose to take with her for company.

“I’ll just go for the opaque this time I think, I’ve got a busy week planned,” Marion said. The stride of her conversation wasn’t even broken. Helen considered it a near certainty that Marion hadn’t even stopped talking the entire time that she had been gone.

Helen heard her request, making a mental note on which of the many small colourful bottles she had lined up on the metal tray that she needed to use.

“So Venice, I hear it’s beautiful there. Mark and I looked at it for our honeymoon, but we couldn’t afford it,” Helen answered, feeling distant and generally strange.

She found out two weeks before that she was pregnant, she hadn’t told anybody, not even Mark, her husband. He worked for a medium sized insurance company in the city. It was a low pay job, but given the current climate they were both just happy to still have work at all. She wanted to wait until the time was right before she broke the news to him, and she blamed that on her distracted mind and apparently rebelling body. She knew he would be happy, there was no question about his reaction, and they had spoken about having kids at some length already. Helen was just concerned that their financial situation wouldn’t be able to support them. They still had to pay off Mark’s student loan, their wedding, not to mention the mortgage on their recently purchased house. It all came down to the fact that they didn’t have the stability that family life demanded. Helen was fairly sure that she could pick up some extra shifts in the salon one girl had just quit a few weeks before and had yet to be replaced, but that was only a temporary solution because once she gave birth she would be out of work for a while, and that was when the extra costs would be noticed most.