Bitterwood, May 1993
Once, he’d been tall, almost freakishly so. Now, time had bent him, buckled him into an old man who cared only for the company of shadows. He shuffled across his bedroom to the window and gazed out at the moonlight. It was time, he decided. He did not have long now, and it was time to cover his tracks.
Down in the kitchen, he rummaged through the utility drawer, found the matches, and then retrieved a jerry can of kerosene from under the sink. Outside, he went along the brick path, past the rearing house. Once, he had spent hours sweeping leaf litter from around the old barn. He had polished its windows and hung them with curtains, and kept it free of cobwebs and dust. Now, the place was little more than a storehouse for memories, overgrown and unkempt.
He hurried into the shadows of the orchard. The path ran downhill, beneath the cave-like overhang of mulberry trees. Their limbs were mostly bare; just a few stubborn leaves remained, rattling dryly in the night air. At the bottom of the orchard, he emerged into a shady clearing. A high grassy mound overlooked the clearing, shadowed by the remains of an enormous old oak tree. Two decades ago, lightning had struck and killed the tree. Each year since, Edwin had expected it to fall, but it never did. Perhaps it was waiting for him to go first.
He approached the mound and came to an overhang of ivy, which he pushed aside to reveal a heavy wooden door.
The door was three inches thick and reinforced with steel, specially designed to keep the cold in and the heat out. Behind the door, support beams bolstered a series of passageways that led to an underground icehouse.
In the early days, Bitterwood Park had been a thriving resort, attracting wealthy city people. During the summer months, trucks had transported enormous blocks of ice to Bitterwood, delivering them to the cool room inside the icehouse where they would store unmelted for many weeks. Edwin’s mother had given him the job of ice boy. His task was to go along the passageways into the cool heart of the place where the ice slabs were stored. He would chip ice into his bucket and take it back to the house, to keep meat and other perishables chilled during the hot weather.
Jangling the keys from his pocket, he unlocked the door and went inside. Unscrewing the jerry can lid, he splashed kerosene around the support beams and onto some wooden shelving until the reeking fumes sent him back out into the open air. He shut the door behind him, locked it, and then pressed his ear against the wood. He thought he heard a murmur from the other side. It might have been a leaf scratching on the flagstones, stirred by a draft under the door. It might have been a sigh, a soft utterance. But of what? If she could speak to him now, what would she say? And what would he say to her? That he had once killed for love and in light of that, telling one small lie should have been nothing?
He hung his head. Some nights he stood here for an hour or more, perhaps quietly weeping, or just lost in the maze of his thoughts. Anything to prolong returning to the lonely hole of his life. Yet tonight he must not linger. He wanted the sanctuary of his room, where the sound of his heartbeat would echo on the walls. He wanted to hide beneath his pillow while the past caught alight and burned.
He struck a match. It flared brightly in the darkness. The flame seemed alive, eager to leap and spread, impatient to sizzle. He drew it to his lips, savoured the tiny barb of heat against his skin.
The human heart was a dim, unwholesome place. Clarice had taught him that. Like the small flame dancing on its match-head, his passions had led him through the secret unlit chambers of his own heart. There he’d forged a path through darkness that at times seemed impenetrable. He had navigated poorly, for the most part. Let others dictate to him, permitted the gradual erosion of those fragments of himself that had once been decent.
The match went out, so he struck another. This time he didn’t hesitate. He released the match from his trembling fingers, caught his breath as it hit the edge of the kerosene trail he’d splashed under the door. The flame guttered and almost went out, but then whooshed suddenly as the kerosene caught alight.
His pulse hammered unsteadily, his legs turned to water. He went to stumble away, but something kept him. He did not press his ear to the door this time, only bowed his head before it as if in prayer. On the other side, he heard the roar of fire.
‘Forgiveness,’ he whispered. ‘That’s all I ask.’
He hadn’t expected a reply, of course. So when a branch creaked in the old dead oak above him, he flinched. Probably an owl or nightjar alighting on a bough, but when it hooted suddenly – a soft and eerie sound that pricked gooseflesh across his naked skull – he would have sworn on his mother’s Bible that somewhere in the darkness behind him, a woman was quietly sobbing.