THE WIDOW

 

RIO YOUERS

 

 

Rio has already made his mark on the horror genre with his moving and dark novella Westlake Soul (ChiZine Publications, 2012) and continues to make an impression with a slew of incisive short stories. What follows is Youers at his best, displaying his horrific sensibility with a gift for characterization that makes ‘The Widow’ a compelling read.

 

 

“WHAT ARE YOU doing?”

“I’m stopping you.”

The man drew whistling breaths and his chest strained against the rope that bound him. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth. Harsh light washed him, emphasizing every bruise and abrasion. Had she thought him immortal... supernatural? Here he was now, weak and bleeding all over her floor. His ancient skin could break, after all.

“Stopping me?” He blinked and shook his head. “From what, exactly?”

She stepped towards him, throwing her shadow like a blanket. A large woman. Not fat, but solid. Her thick arms were packed with toil and angst. She had a prominent brow and square shoulders. Very little could be described as feminine. Not her military surplus jacket, nor her scuffed leather boots. Only her fingernails, perhaps, painted – incongruously – bubblegum pink.

“By my count, you have killed a total of fifty-three people.” Cloud-coloured eyes peered through unkempt hair. “Fourteen of them were children. I can only go back to when records began, of course, so the actual number may well be greater.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“And now it ends.”

“This is madness.” He fought the rope again, twisting his upper body; it chewed into his arms and chest. No give. He pushed against the wooden post he’d been bound to. It creaked, but didn’t budge. More blood leaked from his nose.

There was a workbench against the back wall, strewn with tools. Various wrenches and screwdrivers. A handsaw. A nail gun. A claw hammer. She turned and walked towards it, her heavy boots kicking up dust.

“Timothy Peel,” she said.

“What? What?”

“One of the men you killed... Timothy Peel.” Her hand moved from the handsaw to the nail gun. Back to the handsaw. “He was my husband.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear I don’t.”

“We’d only been married eleven months.” She selected the nail gun. Cordless, 15-gauge, loaded with two-inch finish nails. Her fingers curled around the handle. “I loved him very much. He was my... my balance.”

No one would hear him scream. Not here, in the basement of her house, fifty yards from the road, and a quarter of a mile from her nearest neighbour. And scream he did, looking at the nail gun in her hand. A shrill and desperate effort. Eyes wide. Body jerking. His throat turned dark with the strain, like a bruise.

She let him expend both voice and energy, until he was left rasping and drooling. Tears soaked his shirt. His upper body sagged against the rope. He’d been tied in a sitting position. His legs were splayed. She kicked them closer together, then straddled them. The muscles in his calves tensed, but he couldn’t move. Another weak sound, and he looked at her with shattered eyes.

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” he said.

“Seventh of April, 2009. Almost four years ago. To the day.” She pressed the nail gun’s nose piece against his left kneecap and he squirmed and struggled, but was held tight. “Timothy wasn’t just an accomplished driver, he was a careful driver. Yet, mysteriously, he flipped his car one morning on his way to work. Conditions were perfect. No wind. No rain. Good visibility. He died while emergency services worked to cut him from the wreckage.”

“A car accident.” The man’s voice was cracked. His eyes pleading: blue and large and wet. “He died on the road.”

The widow smiled. She looped her index finger around the trigger and fired three nails into the cartilage below his kneecap.

He found the energy to scream again.

“But, mister,” she said. “You are the road.”

 

 

THERE HAD LONG been concerns about Faye Peel née Lester’s mental stability, but when she decided to have a house built on Thornbury Road – less than one hundred yards from where Timothy was killed, in fact – her friends and family deduced that she had finally come unhinged. Not irrevocably so, but sufficient to warrant professional intervention.

Her father was a worrisome rabbit of a man with fleet gestures and small eyes. He rarely finished a sentence.

“Your mother and I feel that...” He proffered a sheet of paper, upon which had been printed the particulars of one Dr. Matthew Claridge, MA, MBBS, MRCPsych. His logo was a smiling flower.

“A psychiatrist?”

“We’re worried about you, Faye.”

“Indeed.” She placed the sheet of paper facedown on the kitchen table. Her mother busied herself cooking, humming something, as if she didn’t have one ear – or both – on the conversation.

“It’s just that, since Timothy...” Her father made half a move to take her hand, but drew back. His mouth twitched. “And all that nonsense about... and now this, with the house...”

“Thank you for your concern.” Faye smiled, and it was she who reached across to take his hand. It felt small, somehow, and she noted how it trembled. “I’m fine, though. I feel stronger and more focused than I have in years.”

“But the house... do you really...? Oh, Faye, it’s just so close.”

She squeezed his fingers gently. Her smile was sure. Her voice confident.

“I have my reasons.”

And she did; the ‘nonsense’ to which her father referred was her erstwhile assertion that Timothy’s death had not been an accident, and her subsequent vow to find the man responsible. These claims were met with sympathy, a great deal of love, but very little understanding. Faye eventually let it slide – even professed a misjudgement, for her parents’ sake – although she secretly, passionately, pursued her suspicion.

It began shortly after Timothy’s death. The first two months had been an emotional blur. She recalled only damp and grey patches, like fragments of cloud snatched from the sky. The funeral was dreamlike. Red flowers. So many red flowers. Timothy’s brother playing ‘Let It Be’ on a guitar the same colour as his coffin. As many hands as there were flowers, all offered in support. The world revolved too slowly, and with a grinding sound that kept her awake at night. She imagined its ancient machinery full of pain, coughing black smoke, and God crippled by the weight of His dead.

This lassitude fractured, finally, when Faye opened the bathroom cabinet one morning and saw Timothy’s aftershave on the shelf. She’d been with him when he bought it, neither of them knowing that he wouldn’t live long enough to finish the bottle. It occurred to her – and it was like a hand gently leading her through the rain – that she would never again smell that aftershave on his skin, or the vague trace of it on his shirt collar when doing the laundry. She took the bottle off the shelf, unscrewed the cap, and lifted it to her nose. Her tears were copious, but not without healing. As she wiped the last of them from her face, she felt something give way inside her – an internal landslide that left her partly hollow, but with enough space to exist. She poured the aftershave down the sink and disposed of the bottle. She whirled, then, through the house, not removing Timothy, but clearing those possessions too replete with memories. His reading glasses. His favourite cardigan, threadbare and wonderful. The giant bar of Dairy Milk he’d been nibbling on since Christmas. In the end, a chestful of items that had no place in her half-formed life. And even though she still slept at night with her arm thrown across Timothy’s side of the bed, it felt like a huge step in the right direction.

Another step was to visit the site of the accident. Thornbury Road was a seven-mile pencil-line on the countryside, linking the A4301 at Abbotsea to the Paisley Wood roundabout. It often provided a beautiful drive, with raised banks of daffodils in the spring, and clutches of woodland that flared with oranges and reds come autumn. Strings of mist clung to the farmland at dawn, made pink by the climbing sun, and wildlife revelled in the fields that rolled southward, where, on clear days, the English Channel could be seen skimming the horizon. Despite its charm, though, it had, understandably, become a sombre route for Faye. The shadows seemed suddenly denser. The dawn mists obscured secret things. Broken things. It was here – a stone’s throw from where Timothy had died – that she first saw the sideways man.

He had a condition, she thought. Scoliosis, or perhaps spina bifida. His back was skewed and his head kinked to one side, always looking over his right shoulder. Uneven hips caused him to drag rather than walk, having to correct his direction every several steps. His face, too, sloped to the right, as if sympathizing with his body.

Faye had parked in a lay-by only a short distance away. She looked at the man through the windscreen. He had no purpose, apparently; he circled towards and then away from where Timothy died. Lank black hair covered his eyes.

She surmised his challenges went beyond the physical. The poor man was lost, obviously, and confused. Thinking she could help, she stepped out of her car and onto the road. He looked up, alerted. A breeze blew back his hair and his eyes glimmered. They were notable not in their colour or shape, but in the way they regarded her. She felt suddenly naked, both body and soul laid bare. It was as if he touched – probed – her with those eyes, and examined her history. Every smile. Every tear. Every hope and sadness exposed. Faye shivered. She crossed her arms over her bosom and took a step back.

She was about to get back into her car – return another day – when the man dragged himself sideways, onto the bank, and behind a cluster of evergreens. She saw his jacket sway between their narrow trunks, then he was gone. Faye staggered into the middle of the road and waited for him to emerge one way or the other, or to see him shuffling sideways across the field beyond the point where he had disappeared. She adjusted her position and peered through the branches.

Nothing.

“Hello.”

Gone.

She shivered again, composed herself. Several deep breaths, focusing on Timothy and the reason she’d come here. She walked to the site of his death. Planted both feet firmly upon it. She thought she’d experience... something. A chill. A vision. A memory. There was nothing. The road felt the same here as anywhere else – as any other road. The broken glass had been swept away. The blood, too. As far as this unspectacular patch of Thornbury Road was concerned, it was as if Timothy Peel had never existed at all.

She cried again, deeply, and with a great pain in her chest. She got into her car and drove away. Too fast. Moving forward, or so she hoped. What else was there to do?

 

 

THE NEXT SIX months were better. The pain never went away, but she could fold her hands around it. Contain it. She went out with her friends and smiled more often. She even regained the weight she’d lost after Timothy died. Her parents remarked on how well she was doing, and how proud they were. One morning in December, Faye awoke with her left arm curled beneath her pillow, rather than clutching Timothy’s side of the bed. She gasped – feeling both delighted and guilty – and sat up quickly. Early sunlight seeped through a crack in the curtains.

That very day, a family of four was killed on Thornbury Road. Faye saw the wreckage of their Vauxhall Astra on the six o’clock news. Folded in the middle like paper. Roof pried away to get the bodies out. She saw the pulsing lights of the emergency services. She saw the POLICE ACCIDENT signs and solemn-faced officers at the scene. And she saw the sideways man, standing in the background like a large, stooped vulture.

From that moment, everything started to unravel.

 

 

SOMETHING THE REPORTER said picked at Faye’s mind and wouldn’t let go – that Thornbury Road had claimed eleven lives in the last ten years. An interesting choice of words that gave the seven-mile stretch of asphalt a certain character. She imagined it breathing, elongated lungs pounding beneath its surface, occasionally whipping snake-like to send some luckless vehicle spinning out of control.

Ridiculous, but it picked at her. Then it gnawed at her. Then it started to tear. She lay awake, night after night, grinding her teeth and imagining the road moving slickly beneath the stars. She often drove out there, stopping her car every two or three hundred yards, on hands and knees with her ear pressed to its gritty skin ...

No heartbeat. No movement. No life.

She researched the road. More particularly, its nature. She was intrigued to find out just how many lives it had claimed over the years. She spent what amounted to months at the library and on her home computer, scrolling through links and news stories. Tracking deaths within the last forty years was easy enough. Most of them got front-page coverage in the Abbotsea Echo. Beyond 1965, though, it became more difficult. The library’s files were incomplete, and search engines provided only the more notable stories. She persevered, though, following every thread, however tenuous. Sometimes she worked through the night, with her eyes stinging and her worn body slouched across the desk. When she wasn’t digging for information, she was cruising Thornbury Road, daring – almost willing – it to come to life.

She saw the sideways man twice. A different place each time. He scuttled along the edge of the road, and always disappeared before she reached him.

“Faye, what’s happening? You haven’t been...”

“You worry too much, Dad. You always have. Both of you.”

“We love you.”

“Then leave me alone.”

Her parents tried to coax her from her mania, using increments of support that were dwarfed by their lack of understanding. They saw her desk buried beneath notes and old newspaper clippings, and files with headings like NON-FATAL and DRUNK DRIVERS stacked in teetering piles. They saw the magnified image of Thornbury Road taped to the wall, with coloured push-pins marking accident locations. They saw her too, of course, having derailed from whatever forward-moving track she’d been riding. Their concern was evident.

“What exactly,” her mother sobbed, “are you hoping to find?”

“Connections. Evidence.” Faye shrugged. “Maybe a motive.”

“But it’s a road.”

“It kills people.”

Her many hours of work were not without reward. She learned that the road claimed its first victim in 1877. Clyde Tummond, forty-three years of age, died of massive internal injuries after being first thrown and then trampled by his horse. Before passing away, he recounted how Dolly, normally so stalwart, had been spooked by a man lurking at the edge of the road – one ‘of frightful countenance’. Faye was willing to accept this as a chilling coincidence... and then she uncovered a photograph from 1928. Its subject was a battered Austin Seven lying on its side, with its deceased driver sprawled nearby, covered by a sheet. The caption read, WEEKEND TRAGEDY. Harold Leggatt, 32, was killed Saturday evening after his vehicle overturned on Thornbury Road. The photograph was as grainy as one would expect of the era, but the crooked figure standing in a field to the left of the frame was unmistakable.

She searched, then – and with a frantically beating heart – every photo hitherto discovered, studying the periphery for anything she may have missed. She spent further weeks unearthing more photographs, and found three instances of the sideways man. Two were, admittedly, inconclusive – faceless smudges that could be anyone, if not for that crippled stance. One was definite. From a May 1957 copy of the West Country Voice (she hadn’t found it before because they’d misspelled ‘Thornbury’), the grim wreckage of a Ford Anglia wrapped around a tree, with the sideways man hovering in the foreground. He was staring at the camera, perhaps caught off-guard. Looking into his eyes, Faye again found herself laid bare to him, the strands of her life unravelled for him to paw among like a cat.

“Who are you?”

She arranged the photographs on the floor. From 1928 until the most recent: a screen grab of the mangled Astra news footage. She studied the sideways man in each. Never changing. Never aging.

“What are you?”

Faye sought reason – an explanation so obvious she would flush with embarrassment. Every lucid argument felt desperate, however... that it wasn’t the same man, how could it be? Or maybe it was a hoax; photography as fake as that of the Loch Ness Monster. Having exhausted logic, she was left with hypotheses that could only be described as paranormal. She pondered them, and found they had substance. They took root in her mind and grew.

Countless nights were lost to nightmarish thoughts. She envisioned this man – this creature – scuttling along Thornbury Road in search of victims. A scourge that spanned generations. She wondered if every road in Britain had its own sideways man. The idea was ludicrous, but it felt right. She couldn’t look at a map of the UK without imagining the motorways as arteries, the A- and B-roads as veins, all teeming with infection. A virus in the blood.

 

 

“FAYE, SWEETIE, YOU’VE been under a lot of stress lately.”

“Don’t patronise me, Megan. Just tell me what you see.”

Faye had, delicately, taken her findings to her parents, and received the response she expected: a concern so deep it drowned any vestige of open-mindedness. So she called upon her friend, Megan, who deodorised with alum crystals and practised Reiki – an alternative disposition that would, Faye hoped, make her more accepting.

“Car crashes,” Megan said, flipping through the photographs that Faye had handed her. “On Thornbury Road, no less. Oh, Faye, what is this all about?”

They were in Costa. A quiet Tuesday morning, with few of the tables and chairs occupied, and the occasional sound of the coffee machines grinding and steaming in the background. It was the first time Faye had been anywhere other than the library and Thornbury Road in so long, and she felt self-conscious, decidedly unattractive. She wore a too-big sweater and her hair was greasy. It didn’t help that Megan was so pretty, with her swirl of chestnut hair and green eyes, and just a hint of patchouli on her skin.

“Not the crashes,” Faye said. “The man. Look at the man.”

“Which man?”

Faye pointed out the crooked figure in each photograph, from ’28 to ’09.

“And?”

“It’s the same man,” Faye replied.

There was a pause while Megan went through the photographs again, reading the captions, her brow furrowed as she counted the years. She shook her head, set the photos on the table between them, and sipped her rosehip tea.

“Impossible,” she said.

“The camera never lies.”

“It can’t be the same person,” Megan insisted. “Not with these dates. And honestly, Faye, the pictures are so grainy it’s difficult to tell anything for certain. It may not be the same man at all.”

“It is.”

“Then they’re fakes. It’s the only explanation.”

“I need you to be outside the box on this.” Faye sipped her own tea. Twinings Earl Grey. Very normal. “Shouldn’t be hard for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve heard you talk about auras and energy signatures. You once said that even inanimate objects have residual energy.”

Megan nodded.

“So is it possible for a road to have energy?”

“Yes, of course. Drive down any road where a fatal accident has occurred and it feels... different.”

Faye took another sip of tea. Her hand trembled. “A person’s energy manifests as an aura. A corona of colour around our bodies. But what if a road’s energy – its evil energy – manifests as a physical presence? A demon.” She tapped the photograph from 1957. The sideways man glared at the camera and his eyes were like probes. “Something cold and hateful. Something that kills.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

“Outside the box, Megan.”

“There is no box.” Her voice was sharp, touched with impatience. She sipped her tea and the expression in her eyes softened. She reached across the table and patted Faye’s hand. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but I can’t get behind this line of thinking. It’s too negative. And damaging.”

Faye tapped the photograph again. “What do you see?”

“It’s eerie, yes, but I’m telling you it’s not the same man.”

“Megan, please.”

“You want help from me?” Megan finished her tea, set her mug down too hard, and stood up. “I can recommend an excellent shiatsu practitioner. Failing that, a bottle of Jacob’s Creek and a night of hot sex. But all of this...” She waved her hand dismissively over the photographs. “You’re still hurting, Faye, and looking for a reason why Timothy died. You’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

It did exist, though. Faye had seen it – seen him – with her own eyes. Megan had kissed her goodbye and left, and Faye sat for a long moment, feeling both alone and full of resolve. She flipped through the photographs for perhaps the thousandth time. So much twisted metal and spilled blood. But there were no accidents here. There had never been an accident on Thornbury Road. The sideways man was responsible for it all. He had killed so many people. He had killed Timothy. And one way or another, she was going to stop him.

 

 

THERE WERE THREE lay-bys on Thornbury Road, and she started out parking in one of them and staying there all day, listening to the radio, eating junk food, only getting out if she needed to take a piss in the tall grass.

She waited.

Her rearview and side mirrors were positioned to give her optimum viewing without always having to crane her head. She had 10x42 binoculars with a dandy Mossy Oak camo and the seller on e-Bay said they were the kind used by the SAS. She had 1x26 night vision goggles and sometimes when it got dark she put them on, clambered into a tree where she couldn’t be seen, and perched like an owl. She had an elaborate digital camera that she didn’t really know how to use, but she could zoom in on a bird’s wing from one hundred yards away, and could push the button, which was all she cared about.

She had time.

She waited.

 

 

IT OCCURRED TO her after several weeks of being in one of three places that the sideways man knew her routine, such as it was, and was evading her. She thought she saw him on several occasions – a whisper of something dark in the binoculars, or in one of the mirrors – but by the time she positioned herself for a better look, he (or it) was gone. Maybe just dead leaves lifted by a breeze. Or a large crow taking wing from the hedgerow.

She needed to take him by surprise, which meant rethinking her strategy. Sitting in a car eating pizza wasn’t going to get the job done, and she was getting fat, too. No way she could give chase on foot with her stomach bouncing ahead of her, even if he was a cripple. She stopped with the junk food. Switched to raw vegetables and water. She left her aging Mondeo in the Waitrose car park just off the Paisley Wood roundabout, packed a duffel bag with her equipment and supplies, and walked from there. After a few weeks she started to jog. Then run.

She lived in the trees and the long grass, moving stealthily along Thornbury Road, blending in by painting her face and the backs of her hands with green and brown. No one saw her. Not even the deer. She sometimes skulked to within feet of them and they carried on eating leaves, oblivious. During quieter moments she worked on her strength. Sit-ups and push-ups, mainly. At first she could only do three or four of each. By the summer of 2011, eight months after committing to this new way of life, she could do three or four hundred.

She often sat beside the road where Timothy died and talked to him, feeling so desperately alone and with no one else to talk to. She couldn’t go to her so-called friends and family. They had no idea what she was going through. And they didn’t want to know. Not really. Better for them to live in ignorance. Timothy had always been her rock, though. He had always listened, and in doing so could make all the cracks in the world – and there were many – disappear.

“You once told me that I was fragile, like a book is fragile. That it can crumble with age, that its pages can tear and its cover fade. But even so, it remains a thing of beauty and depth. A limitless treasure that should be shared and remembered. Of all the wonderful things you said in our short time together, this was my favourite. It made me feel... alive.”

She wished to hear his voice. Even on the wind. Never did.

“Every breath is a word, and every word has purpose.”

She wished to see him again. Just a glimpse. Never did. But one time all the trees around her came to life, flaunting their leaves, and she looked at them with tears in her eyes and pretended it was him.

 

 

THE SIGN READ LAND FOR SALE. Faye saw it within an hour of it being posted. By the end of the day someone had slapped a red sticker on top of it and this one read SOLD.

 

 

THERE WAS A moment before building commenced on her new house that she really questioned what she was doing. It wasn’t the money. Timothy had been paying into a corporate pension since he was sixteen years old, and coupled with a sizable life insurance payout, Faye was able to buy the land and pay for the house outright. Nor was it the fact that she’d be so close to where he died. According to the architect’s design, she’d see that strip of Thornbury Road every time she looked out her bedroom window.

It was her parents. Their unending concern. She had told them about the house, showing them the strength in her words and a spine that wasn’t cracked at all, yet before she left her father had slipped that sheet of paper into her pocket and she’d found it when she returned home. Dr. Matthew Claridge, MA, MBBS, MRCPsych. That smiling flower. Tears welled in her eyes and she tried to fight them, and then she gave up. She cried deep into the night. Everything hurt.

She had her reasons, yes, but did she really want to live by herself in such a broken part of the world, chasing a shadow? Or did she want to be a smiling flower?

The next few days were spent in indecision. She kept that sheet of paper crumpled in her hand, and on several occasions reached for the phone – even dialled a few numbers before hanging up. She imagined Dr. Matthew Claridge to have a soft voice and a never-ending box of Kleenex that he’d keep on a table between them, and she ached for those comforts. They seemed enough to sway her, and then a cyclist was killed on Thornbury Road and that made fifty-three dead, assuming Clyde Tummond was the first and she hadn’t missed any. Fifty-three, including Timothy, who’d told her she was fragile, yet deep, and could make all the cracks disappear.

Faye took a flame to that sheet of paper and watched it burn, and she never saw that smiling flower again.

 

 

HER HOUSE WAS built seven months later. Set back from the road, stylish and, though modern, designed to blend with the trees. Faye also had the builders construct a twenty-foot tower in her garden. For bird-watching, she said.

 

 

THE CROSSBOW SHE bought had 225lbs of draw weight and, despite her new muscle, she could only cock it with a rope cocking aid. She practised in her garden. To begin with, she couldn’t hit a rain barrel from fifty feet away. Within weeks, she could nail an apple from one-eighty.

 

 

SHE CAUGHT HIM when the April showers were at their freshest and the evenings had that crisp reminder of the winter passed. She was in her tower, watching the east side of Thornbury Road through the trees. A rustling sound from the blackberry bushes where her land met the edge of Copp Farm. She swept the binoculars in that direction, expecting to see a badger or deer, and there he was, scuttling through the foliage at the side of the road.

She didn’t panic. She lowered the binoculars, cocked the crossbow, and lifted it to her shoulder. One second later and his jerky, awkward body filled the sights. She targeted the middle of his forehead. Held her breath.

Pause.

The crossbow had an arrow speed of three hundred and fifty feet per second. The sideways man was a third of that distance away. He’d be dead in the blink of an eye. Too quick. Faye lowered the sights and targeted his crooked right leg. She curled her finger around the trigger.

“Suffer,” she said.

He dropped quickly, as if someone had yanked the leafy verge out from under him. He tried to get back up but fell again, and then he started screaming. Faye was halfway to him by that point, sprinting between the trees. When she reached him she saw that the arrow had passed through his leg. He clutched the hole it had left behind, blood flowing between his fingers. His endless eyes were filled with confusion. He pleaded for help and reached for her with one red hand.

She kicked him in the mouth and knocked out three of his teeth. He still reached for her, so confused. She kicked him again. Harder. The scream faded on his lips. He fell backwards into the leaves. His body resembled a gnarled branch hit by lightning.

Faye hoisted him onto her shoulder. An uneven weight. A bag of sticks.

She took him to her house.

 

 

“YOU CRAZY BITCH. Oh, you crazy fucking bitch!”

Twelve hours later.

Faye had fired one hundred and sixty nails into his left leg. Into his kneecap, his shin, his thigh. Sometimes the nails didn’t go all the way in and she had to drive them home with a hammer. After a while he stopped screaming. He fluttered in and out of consciousness. She recharged the gun and fired another one hundred-plus into his right leg. She thought he’d bleed more than he did.

Every now and then she read out the names of all the people who had lost their lives on Thornbury Road. In chronological order, except for Timothy. She saved his name until last. Vivaldi played in the background. Timothy’s favourite. He also liked Status Quo, but she didn’t think ‘Margarita Time’ quite fit the mood.

“Crazy... fucking...”

Admittedly, Faye was a little surprised to find a wallet in the sideways man’s jacket pocket. There was forty-five pounds in cash inside, some credit and store cards. She didn’t know what a demon would want with such things. They were props, she reasoned, allowing him to better blend with his current environment. The name on all cards and documentation was the same: Michael Cole. A very normal name. And while it all appeared genuine, it didn’t faze her. It didn’t stop her.

She selected the handsaw. He hissed and shook his head when he saw it in her hand. His ruined legs twitched, but of course he couldn’t move them; they were nailed to the floor. Faye crouched and pressed the jagged blade to his right leg, three inches above the ankle. She started to saw. He passed out when she was halfway through the bone. When he came to – ash-pale and close to death – both severed feet were bundled into his lap.

“No more walking for you,” Faye said, setting the saw aside. She was smeared with blood. It was even on her teeth. “Sideways or otherwise.”

“Crazy bitch.”

She picked up the nail gun, pressed the nose piece to his forehead, and fired two inches of galvanized steel into his brain. He didn’t die immediately. His eyes rolled crazily for a little while. Blood trickled from his nose.

Faye walked from the basement, leaving him close to death and with his feet – which had covered so many miles, over so many years – gathered in his lap. She walked from her house and into the pink grapefruit light of early morning. The grass was heavy with dew and the air smelled of new leaves and daffodils. She picked one, then pinched one of its petals between her thumb and forefinger, trying to turn it upwards in a smile. But it only bruised and drooped. A sad face.

 

 

MEGAN’S VOICE CHIMED in her mind: You’re still hurting, Faye, and looking for a reason why Timothy died. You’re looking for something that doesn’t exist.

Faye saw the sideways man multiple times that day. On a bicycle. Driving a tractor. In nearly every vehicle that passed her on Thornbury Road. She sat in the spot she had come to think of as hers. The place where Timothy had died.

“Does exist,” she said.

Her trained ear picked up the rumble of an approaching truck. She counted to ten. Stood up. Looked to her right. The truck – an eighteen-wheeled monster – rounded the bend. She would step in front of it at the optimum moment, giving the driver no chance to brake or steer around her. Not that he would, of course. Faye knew that, in the closing second of her life, she would see his buckled body propped behind the wheel, his timeless eyes reaching deep.

And like him, she would find what she was looking for.