I came back home.
Not to my house. That, of course, was inhabited by a new family. I pitied them if they knew what had happened within those walls, and small towns don’t tend to keep such secrets very well. I didn’t want to be in that house, not with my memories of what happened inside it. I didn’t want to be anywhere near. I found a B&B on the other side of town. A couple of nights at most was all I intended to stay for, and what little money I had after my helter-skelter chase back home wouldn’t stretch much further anyway. My beard was growing in and my frame was scrawny. Mirrors told me I’d be difficult to recognise.
As it turns out I only paused long enough for a meal. Evelyn, I knew, would not pause at all. Not for food, not for rest, not for sleep, not for anyone or anything. I wished good luck to any poor soul that might step in her way. The pulse in my neck injury was low but ever-present: I imagined each beat matched one of her footfalls as she straight-lined her way directly to me. I imagined her driving right through family homes, ripping and tearing, and that’s where I stopped imagining, and that’s when I set out on the final part of my single-minded mission.
I went to the graveyard. I had a knife tucked into the waistband of my dusty trousers. I had the sense not to approach via the front gates. I had a burning hate in my chest. I had very little else. Two years of wandering alone, no local family connections, no ability to make friends or form any kind of relationship knowing what would happen to anyone I came near, always moving on, always sensing her presence whether near or far. So many nights I woke up in darkness, doused in the fear that Evelyn had caught up and caught me off guard, lurking just behind a doorway. On too many occasions that had turned out to be true. I knew little of genuinely peaceful sleep, and everything of terror’s constant beat.
I wanted it all to end. I could not take one more day.
It was a cold thrill to trudge up the back of Daisy Hill, knowing what was under my feet. All those tunnels that Evelyn and I had run through, there amongst the dead. I wondered how much more digging her lunatic father had done since then. I wondered how it would feel to stab him in the heart when he refused to help. Even as a young, desperate man I was not so foolish as to believe the confrontation would smoothly go my way.
Did I, therefore, go up that hill and to that house with murder in mind? I have to say yes. I wanted him to stop Evelyn and I wanted him to put her to rest, but I also wanted vengeance, hot bloody vengeance for what I had suffered. If he would not cooperate, then I would bury the maniac in the graveyard, and I would be glad of it.
He was tending to weeds in the back garden as I approached. He stood slowly as would a man with a back complaint. ‘Actually found a little courage to come back, did you?’ he growled. ‘Took you long enough.’
I pulled out the knife. ‘We’re going to have a little talk,’ I said, ‘whether you like it or not.’
There was a trowel in his hands. A brutal weapon. It made us rather even. And he dropped it. ‘I won’t be talking to you. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not any day after that. So kill me if you think you can, boy. Stick me right in the chest if you haven’t used up the last of your guts coming here. Get it done with.’
I’d run through the scenario a thousand times on my way back to this town. I’d thought of as many possible endings as I could, all of them bad for one of us. This had not been one of those scenarios. I lowered the knife. There was no murderous instinct in me after all. ‘All I want is for you to undo what is done. Call her off. Send Evelyn back to the grave.’
He was steel through and through on that slate-sky day. ‘Why should I? It’s because of you that my Evelyn’s gone.’
My grip redoubled on the knife’s hilt. ‘You killed her. You brought her back. You sent her after me.’
‘No! You killed her!’ His bark was cigarette-and-whiskey rough. ‘You stuck your nose in where there was no room for it! You chased after something that wasn’t yours to chase! What else was I supposed to do?’ He started towards me; I threatened with the blade, holding the madman back, but his rage was building. ‘My girl! She was my little girl! She was not for the likes of you!’ He pounded his fist into his palm with every other word. ‘Stupid little boy, trying to take her away from me!’ He swung a hand to slap the knife out of my hand, only succeeded in cutting his fingers deeply. He didn’t cry out, and I cringed from the splash of blood, my skin bristling.
‘I wasn’t taking her away!’ I didn’t like the wobble in my voice, the weakness. I took a step forward, stabbing towards him with the knife, a warning to back off. ‘I didn’t even know what you were doing here!’
‘It was only a matter of time before she blabbed. You forced me into it! I should have killed her sooner! That little bitch took you into the tunnels!’
‘It wasn’t a choice! You were chasing us!’
I realised he was crying, thin tears tracing his cheeks. He didn’t seem to know they were there. ‘She was meant to stay with me. She wasn’t meant to go after you. But she picked up on my hate and how much I wanted you dead, wanted everything about you erased from the earth. So she went after you, didn’t she?’ A bitter grin. ‘And she’s kept you running all this time. All that running, and for what? To end up back here, back where it started. You’ve run to nowhere. You haven’t moved an inch in, what, two years?’ Laughing. ‘Almost makes it worth losing her to see what she’s done to you. Almost worth everything I’ve been through.’
Bile rose in my stomach. ‘What you’ve been through? What about me? You don’t know…’
‘I don’t want to know about you! And you don’t have a clue, boy! You don’t know about all the years! And all the work! And it was me that had to kill her, not you! I had to strangle her because you wouldn’t stay away! I had to squeeze her throat, squeeze until the life choked out of her! She was supposed to help me. I was supposed to train her for all of this! Instead I’ve been alone.’
The way his head lowered, the way his eyes dulled, I knew he was coming at me whether I had a knife or not.
I didn’t shout. I didn’t move. I didn’t step out of the way. He ran right at me, and onto the knife. His whiskey-stale breath burst over my face, and his eyes drew sharp one last time, staring right into mine. His whole body tensed up, then shuddered, as if the life was being shaken loose from his frame by unseen hands. It took a painful age for him to slump to the ground and finally die. My hands were bloody and I felt sick. With a struggle I managed to hold onto my dinner. The last thing I wanted to do was give his corpse the pleasure of upsetting me.
It was only then that it occurred to me to look around for witnesses. There was nobody. I almost wrote down that there wasn’t a single soul, but that would be far from true, wouldn’t it?
I dragged his body into the house. Whatever leaves the body in death is replaced by weight. My back howled as I lugged that meat-sack over the doorstep, limbs flopping about and getting stuck on everything. It was a better fight than he’d put me through outside. I dumped him in the hall, near the kitchen, locked the back door. An intense hunger seized me like none I’d ever felt before. My body cried out for energy, now, now, now. After a little rooting about for everything I needed, I threw together a thick ham sandwich, got through it in four large bites. It wasn’t enough. An apple was next, and I chewed it round and round while my stomach was already baying for the next piece of food.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I looked back at the body and wondered what I had become. The man, as vile as he was, had died on a blade I was holding. Coming after me was his dead, vengeful daughter. With the father gone I had no likely chance of stopping her. Yet there I was, waiting and refuelling, instead of running away from a crime scene and certain death. I hadn’t felt so good in a long, long time. Not, in fact, since my first kiss from Evelyn.
We would meet one last time. She would find me in the house where I lost her.