Wounds

Mother said I’d regret it, staying away for so long. She was right, of course. I’d been avoiding him like a suspicious blemish, convincing myself that he simply did not exist.

Meanwhile, my father wilted into some grotesque knot of wet flesh in the basement of my childhood house.

Not that she wasn’t doing the same. And my sister, Keira too. How either of them could go about their days, knowing that he was locked in a room beneath their feet, is beyond me.

When I arrived, the sun had long set; the sky was murky and giving way to the stars. The house stood tall against those purple hills, next to the river that cut through the endless fields like a shining wound. Every window—except the living room, which was amber with the skitterish light of a fire—was a yawning black square.

The land seemed intent to conceal the building, draping the cladding in a thick wall of ivy. The garden was a state too. It hadn’t been cut for years and was now a wild, tangle of grass and bramble. There it was: home, heaving with darkness and memories I’d tried to outrun, dragging me back in with invisible tendrils.

Such a large house for a family of four. Though, with that man in it, the place never felt empty.

Mother was a pale smear beyond the frosted glass of the front door. Who knows how long she had sat there waiting for me. She opened the door as soon as I’d finished wading through the long grass. She’d suddenly grown old; older than I had imagined during my absence. Her face all hollow and drawn out, settled in a mask of despair. She waited until I was within a whisper’s reach to speak.

“Glad you came,” she said, embracing me, then swiftly followed by, “you’ve been drinking again. Bobby, you said you’d stopped.”

I grunted, brushed her away and moved through the house. How dare she judge me for resorting to a little Dutch courage, especially when we both knew why she’d called.

Kiera was in the living room by the hearth, sat with her knees to her chin, quietly rocking and staring at the flame. She was in her early twenties, but painfully thin and looked worn out by the world. She didn’t react as I dropped my bags to the floor. Just sat there, frozen in a moment of heavy dread.

Mother entered and perched upon father’s old chair, combed her hands through her hair, blew out a sigh, then looked up to me, pressing out a sad smile.

“I know why I’m here,” I said, saving her from the guilt of asking. “You want me to put an end to it.”

She just nodded, wiped at the corner of her eye and played with Kiera’s hair. “It’s been too long, Bobby, and it ain’t getting better.”

“We’re sorry,” Kiera whispered to the flames. “It just can’t go on.”

“Is he still where I left him?” I asked, looking across the room to a doorway swollen with darkness. The corridor leading off to the basement stretched beyond all light.

“Yes,” Mother croaked out, unable to catch my eye. “Don’t reckon he’s moved much.”

I nodded, starting to form a plan. “And he’s still dead?”

Kiera flinched at my words and mother placed a hand upon her. Then, after licking her lips, she said, “It’s hard to tell without going down there. Is he still making all those noises? Yeah.”

I nodded again.

Three years. He’d been down there three years. And the fucker just wouldn’t let us go. A monster in life and death.

“You got anything I can use?”

“Use?” Mother said, her brow a knot of confusion.

“Use,” I snapped at her, causing her to startle. Guilt surged within me as she flashed those familiar fearful eyes. “You know what I mean. Anything I can hit him with if he’s still as bad as he was?”

She nodded, rose up and disappeared into a dark part of the house. I pushed my hands in my pockets and watched my little sister shiver like a stray cat. Her clothes draped over her sharp body like some ancient child pretending to be big. Moments later, mother returned brandishing a kitchen knife.

“Stab him?”

She shrugged.

I shook my head and took the blade from her. “Nothing else?”

She smiled apologetically, then shook her head.

“Didn’t work so well the last time,” I said, inspecting the blade, watching it flash gold in the firelight, “but okay.”

I turned to the darkness, then heard a rush of sound, a patter of feet from behind, and then suddenly arms tightly clasped around me.

“Please…don’t let it take you,” Kiera said, her face pressed clumsily into my neck.

I nodded and shrugged her off. For a moment, I wondered how life could’ve been between us if we hadn’t grown in a home held together with cruelty and control. Wondered if we could’ve ever gone on to live happy lives, make a mends and bring up a family each of our own, then meet up occasionally to talk about things that didn’t matter, things we could easily forget.

But no, that man had made us what he wanted. And choice was never a privilege he was willing to offer any of us. So we each had to keep swimming inside a fishbowl big enough to keep us small forever.

I was glad that Kiera did what she did. Her pitiful embrace got me ready.

Got thinking about how pathetic he’d made us all. Got that hate burning in the pit of my guts. The hate that’d lost me friends, lost me lovers, lost me a shot at life. But that very hate had been the only fire keeping me alive all these years.

“Chain it back up as soon as I close the door,” I said, picking up a lantern upon the mantle, sparking it up and walking toward the darkness. “Don’t unlock it until I say.”

Kiera held my stare for a moment. I saw tears well in the corners of her eyes. I hated that look. It was the same way she looked at him all those years ago. Must’ve smelt the booze too.

When you can never be too sure which Daddy you’re dealing with from moment to moment, a kid grows up with a keen sense of danger.

“Come on, Kiera. I’m better than that,” I said, trying to bite down the shame at even being compared to him.

She nodded, though her expression didn’t change.

Light pushed the darkness into the corners of the corridor. The walls were dull with dust and grime and stretched out until they finally reached the basement door. The chains and locks upon the door winked in the lantern light like pin-pricked stars as I moved closer.

Mother had left a set of keys on a hook nearby. They were cloudy with dust. I felt somewhat reassured that they hadn’t been stupid enough to venture downstairs in the time I’d been gone. I also felt a prang of frustration.

How could they both just ignore that he was here? And why did it always fall upon me to confront the fucker?

I took the keys and opened up each padlock, watched the chains gradually fall away like a king stripping away jewels. Then, finally, I was confronted by a crude door, and one last lock to go. The latch clicked loudly as I turned the final key. I paused noticing the scar tissue on my wrist, the churned hollow of shining flesh and my father’s last send off. If only all wounds could heal so well.

The door creaked open to a staircase descending downwards and disappearing into an impenetrable dark. The shadows did their best to swallow up as much of the lantern’s light as they could, reducing it to a pathetic dim glow.

I listened to Mother lock the door again. Slowly, I descended the stairs, each groaning with the burden of my weight—perhaps pleading with me to turn back—until I finally reached the stone basement floor. The ground flashed in the light, puddles of muddy, brown slop spread out beyond the lantern’s reach. A smell hit me, burning at the back of my throat, burning my eyes. The air was thick and wet with the stench of piss and vomit. I retched, doubled over and spat a glob of phlegm into one of the rusty puddles.

“You dead yet?” I called out, scanning my light across the room, watching the motes of dust flash upon the air. Forgotten furniture draped in sheets lurched out from the darkness; their shadows twitching in the light.

A sound, like the heavy wheezing of a fluid-filled lung, came from somewhere beyond the hunched dark shapes before me. Then, a loud wet rattling noise sounded out.

“Welcome home, son,” a voice like dirt rasped out from the shadows.

I froze. Ears pricked upon the sudden heavy silence. A sickly pinch in my gut.
I willed my feet to move forward, to venture closer to Father’s voice.

Another wheeze. This time followed by a faint clicking and gargling sound.

“You know why I’m here, old boy?” I said, scanning the room and readjusting my grip on the knife.

Father took in another chug of air and heaved it out. “I wonder who you are here to save?”

His words fixed me in place. I could lie all day and say I came home to help Kiera, help Mother, help myself. But he knew. The bastard knew why I’d driven all evening to get here, why, as soon as Mother had called, I’d walked out my office before finishing my shift.
Even at thirty-five, I was still that little boy chasing my father’s heels, desperate for him to just see me. I was here for him. Despite everything he had done to me, done to our family, I wanted him to be someone he’d long ago promised to be.

The stench grew worse as I moved deeper into the room and closer to his rasping breaths. The air thickening and feeling charged, like it does before a storm.

“I know you weren’t always like this,” I said to the darkness.

“How can you be so sure?” the darkness hissed back.

I rounded a disused washer-dryer, then pushed aside a stack of boxes, watched their innards tumble out into the pools of muck on the floor. Broken toys and ragged, burned clothes. Artefacts from his reign; some of the more favourable punishments he served out.
I swept the lantern around and the light shone upon him. He had grown worse.

A swollen, slab of grey flesh hung from the wooden rafters by thick, sinuous ropes of meat. His torso, headless and with ragged tears where his limbs once were. The skin split into vicious and bloodied smiles, exposing a yellowed ribcage.

I recoiled in disgust and slipped upon a smear of offal he’d at some point shed. I landed hard onto my back, felt the juices quickly soak into my clothes, splash up onto my face, my mouth. I gagged, turned and vomited.

“What happened to you? What have you become?” I said, spitting out the taste of rot.

I watched as a lung heaved slowly behind those ribs, painfully pressing against the bone. Air hissing out of the wounds in his chest in bloodied bubbles.

“I’ve become what I was always destined to be,” his voice gargling from a tangle of flayed skin, draped over a ceiling rafter. His face now a sodden rag of flesh, a rotten sheet of torn holes.

“And what is that?” I said, raising the knife to what used to be his face.

“A haunted man. A shivering sack of pus I allowed to fester and change me. And, my little shadow—”

I scrambled to my feet, body clenched in rage, eyes wet with those childhood tears. “Don’t fucking call me that!”

A sigh rasped out from his chest. “I’m sorry, son. I allowed my own shit to poison me and now we share the same old wound.”

A prang of searing heat. Pain throbbing up my arm. I dropped the knife and fell to my knees in the filth. The scar tissue on my wrist, the skin had split into a yawning wound, revealing not blood, but a thick, yellow ichor.

“What is this?”

I was breathing so fucking fast and so fucking hard. A heavy shudder moving under my skin as the cut tore wider and further up my arm. I screamed, dropping the lantern and sending it rolling into a mound of matted hair and meat. I pushed myself up, out of the slurry and scrambled for the stairs. My skin on my arm cracking and splitting like baking paper in an oven, revealing more churned yellow lumps of meat.

All the while, the rasping breaths of my father echoing around me in the hanging dark. His ruined torso lit up by the lantern like a vandalised monument to a fallen god.

I took the stairs, two at a time, shouting as pain shot up through my shoulder. A wet warmth spreading across my skin, soaking the sleeve of my shirt. I reached the top of the staircase and hammered upon the door. My ears pricked at a curious sound. A slight metallic rattle.

“Kiera! Mother!”

I slammed my fist against the door again. The rattle now louder. Half a gasp trapped in my throat.

The chains? Had they—

“Help! Please! Let me out!”

“I’m sorry,” Kiera’s whisper was barely audible.

I froze, placing a hand upon the door where I imagined her to be.

“But…Kiera…”

“All you did was run,” she said, her voice wobbling. “You ran from the pain. Ignored it. Buried it. Did nothing and…convinced yourself that you were a different man, a better man.”

“But I am, Kiera. Please!” I slammed at the door.

“I’m sorry. It didn’t just go away. That pain, you pushed it so deep, neglected it and…it took root.”

“No,” I cried, slumping down and coiling into a vicious bloody knot at the top of the stairs. “I’m not like him. I can change this—”

“We hope you can,” she said; her voice cracking, “You weren’t always like this. But until the rot is cleared from the wound, we can’t let you out. Our family cannot allow another home to crumble.”

I listened to her cry on the other side of the door, then quietly rise up and walk away. I listened to her argue with Mother then slam a door somewhere in the house. I listened to that awful wheezing sound vibrate upon the damp air around me.

I stared out into the darkness, toward the spot where father’s mutilated body had been, thinking of all the ways he’d ruined our lives, about how pathetic and helpless he’d been, about all the ways I was different to him.

There are graveyards within us all; but only fools choose to keep digging until they’re swallowed by the dirt and must mourn themselves. And that was what my father: a fool. Too arrogant to notice when he’d lost control; too stubborn to ask for help once knew he’d gone too far. Pathetic.

How could they even compare us? He was the problem, not me.

Credit: Matthew Tenwick

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