Amy sat on the floor of what used to be the living room. Head against the damp, rotting wall. She had taken back her earlier thoughts. The house she used to know was still there. Even in the short time she had been back, the layers had peeled away, like the blackening wallpaper behind her, and the house had begun to reveal itself to her as it once was. As she remembered it.
She swung her torch round, the light illuminating only in patches. She kept trying to make out what was in the shadows, the darkness. She thought she could see things moving in there, jumping out of the way of the beam, trying not to be caught by the light. But they didn’t scare her. She welcomed them. Because she knew what they were.
Ghosts. Memories.
The ghosts were all around her. In the darkness, the shadows, when the light moved away from them. She could hear them, see them running from room to room. Feel the warmth from them. Almost touch them. The happiness. Like paradise before the fall.
Before it all went wrong. A dead mother. And a retarded boy.
Then the end of everything.
And this was the room where it had happened.
She looked to where she had once stood. And she saw the ghosts live again.
There was Michael standing in front of her, holding out the shotgun. Pointing it at her. He had already taken care of their father and his new wife. Now he just had to do her and Graham would do him and everything would be set.
‘It’s going to hurt,’ he had said.
‘Just do it. Get it over with.’ She had closed her eyes. Opened them again just in time to see the look in Michael’s eyes, the smile on his face. Just in time to realise that it was going to hurt a lot. That soon she would be as dead as her father.
She had tried to jump out of the way, but the shot still hit her. Michael had been right. It had hurt. And that was the last thing she remembered about that day.
She blinked, back in the present. Looked round again. Saw the house as it was now. Left to rot. To waste away. To decay. To die. Unloved and alone.
She knew just how it felt.
‘No … ’ she screamed. The sound echoed and died around the walls. ‘No … ’ Much softer, just for her ears alone.
No. It couldn’t be the end. It couldn’t. There was still one thing she could do. One more roll of the dice, as her father used to say.
Or two, actually.
She took her phone out. Dialled a number she wasn’t supposed to know but could never forget.
Waited. For the end.
Or the beginning.