Stay in the light, p.5
Stay in the Light, page 5
‘She’ll never let me forget, will she?’ Mina said, hands fidgeting without her mug to busy them. ‘Hardly seems fair. It was as much her fault as it was mine.’
Their mum had been lucky to be alive, that’s what the doctor had told her, as though life and death were decided by a lottery. Who the fuck in their right mind says that to a child? In cases like hers it took a deft hand to pick through the details, to find those shiny little pieces of positivity. Mina’s mum was asleep but she wasn’t in a coma. She’d landed hard but hadn’t split her skull open. She was alive. And most importantly – the architect of all these minor miracles – she had been lucky.
Even at that age, Mina had to respect the doctor’s optimism. Though she couldn’t help but wonder: if not being dead was the silver lining, how dark must the clouds have been?
She’d recognised the lily-white skin of her arms. It’s strange what the eyes see first. Those familiar hands. Same nail polish. Same Claddagh ring. New cuts and bruises. The doctor had swished the blue curtains closed behind them. It felt safe in the cube. The light was softer. It seemed somehow quieter; not that nurses’ shoes ever made a sound. Machines watched on, monitoring vitals without need for eyes, their sirens at the ready. Mina had hated hospitals ever since. The whispers, the languor, the sadness, the clocks. Everything looked off-white and unclean, and yet there was never a smell. Not really. Just the suspicion of one.
How many people had fallen asleep in that same bed, hooked up to those same screens? How many had never woken up?
The bruises had leaked like oil beneath her skin, leaving it marbled in a million murky shades of green and brown, darkest around her right eye. The swelling had totally reshaped that side of her face. When eventually she woke up – before she’d even realised where she was – the pain had filled her skull like a thunder.
Her mum’s glasses had the thickest frames. They were practically indestructible. And yet they were in bits. Mina didn’t think plastic like that could break. She recalled the sight of their dismembered parts on the trolley beside her. The paramedics must have picked them up. They never abandon broken things.
It was an accident; a quarrel between two sisters atop the stairs. Their mum had thundered up to break them apart – to snuff out that angry spark that forever burned between them. They were so evenly matched in size and strength that usually any such fights ended in a stalemate. But this one, so fate would have it, was different. Mina hadn’t realised she’d pushed her mum aside until she was falling, and it was too late by then to do anything about it. There was only the sound of her body crunching down the wooden stairs and then the awful silence that followed. Her mum hadn’t died that day, but a part of Mina had, and Jennifer had hated her ever since. The fact that she hadn’t caused the row was irrelevant, apparently. All that mattered was how she’d ended it.
‘Fuck it,’ Mina muttered as she jumped to her feet and padded back to the kitchenette. ‘There’s only one way we’re getting any sleep tonight.’
Jennifer’s hair was probably still blonde; any colour that wasn’t Mina’s. A safe cut stolen straight out of a magazine. As was to be expected, she’d weathered the years better than Mina had; eyes were brighter, lips smoother, and her posture rivalled a shopfront mannequin’s. Hardly surprising, without a vice to spice up her days, of course her skin was creamy as a child’s. It was like staring at a version of herself from a parallel universe – the culmination of good decisions and healthy living; the person she could have become if she’d been better. The good twin and its wicked counterpart. The one who got the job, the boyfriend, and the lacklustre life she’d always dreamt of. And the one who’d wound up living with a golden conure in a borrowed cottage.
All paths lead somewhere. Perhaps Mina should have interpreted her mum’s adage as a warning. She poured out a glass, tensing her jaw in anticipation of another surge of vomit. Her hand still gripped the bottle while she drained it dry, trembling and poised for another. The taste wrung a fresh round of tears from her eyes. Mina rested her back against the counter and looked across the room to the yellow one.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ she said to him, swallowing back her nausea as best she could. ‘We can’t let this Sean lad dig up whatever is down there.’
Nothing good ever came from beneath the earth, certainly not when a Kilmartin was involved. However many people he’d hired for his dig, none would survive if even a single watcher crawled up to greet them. If she could only get to him – make him listen to her. Try as he might to dismiss her warnings, Mina knew how to cut to the very heart of the man and make him bleed belief in what she had to say, for she was one of the few who’d witnessed his father’s final testament – she understood the consequences of seeking out enlightenment in that darkest of places. Surely no man would step into his father’s grave if he understood the horrors that made him lie in it.
‘I think it’s safe to say that Madeline isn’t coming for us,’ Mina said, looking to the locked door as she did whenever she thought of her. ‘It’s fine though. Don’t worry, we can do this without her.’
5
CIARA
She took every care to slice the bread unevenly; a knack that had come to John so naturally and yet one that demanded her full attention. His eggs were trickier to replicate. Neither of them had figured out how exactly he messed them up time and time again, and after a hundred heartbreaking attempts later, Ciara still didn’t know. Sitting alone at the kitchen table, she’d shifted the food around her plate, glancing up to where her husband used to sit, picturing a smile where there was none and imagining the familiar lilt of his voice in the silence of their empty home.
She felt horrible for having lied to Mina again. But her intentions weren’t to deceive, at least not for any personal gain except to enjoy John’s favourite meal without feeling guilty for it. Besides, the truth felt less relevant and less appealing with each passing day. Mina often remarked on how brave she’d become – how her roseate take on the world was a sign of strength – but it made Ciara feel like an imposter. She hardly recognised the woman framed in all those photographs on the mantel, posing in her husband’s arms. So soft and childish, effortlessly beaming in every shot, spending a lifetime of smiles in a few short years. Her skin had been silken white back then. Curls of red bounced atop her shoulders as though she couldn’t sit still from all the excitement of just being alive and lucky and in love. It was pathetic. She was pathetic – that greedy little girl who thought she could have it all.
Ciara’s parents had kept her cocooned in a bubble her entire life, shielding her from the world’s many thorns and supplying more love and money than she’d known what to do with. Then they’d passed her – pristine bubble and all – on to John. Madeline had been right when she’d cut Ciara down with that barbed tongue of hers. She’d been too fat, too stupid, and far too naïve for a woman of her age. And with her bubble popped, there was no way to hide from the truth anymore. The old life that she’d cherished was over, and the only happiness that remained was through pretending that it wasn’t, like a child pouring imaginary tea into an empty cup and whispering aloud to a roomful of teddy bears, their glassy eyes saddened by the very sight of her.
Ciara placed her cutlery down and considered the waste left behind. She’d managed a few mouthfuls this time. Her appetite desired very little these days and yet still, somehow, she gave it even less. Grief had infected every part of her like a sickness, and her stomach was no exception. Cooking the food was far more enjoyable than the act of eating it, especially during those sought-after moments when she’d almost convince herself that she was cooking for two – that her love was sat at the table behind her, drinking his coffee, and that nothing in that perfect scenario had been lost. She used to dab the sausages and rashers with clots of kitchen towel to soak up the fatty oil. John would always joke that she was drying up the flavour. A pool of grease had bled into her egg white like an ugly bruise for that very reason. Everything had to be prepared to his liking, otherwise what was the point of cooking at all?
The kitchen alone was home to so many beautiful moments, when the daylight had been brighter and the tiles hadn’t felt so cold. But Ciara’s memories of herself were strangely absent, as if the happiest role of her life had been edited out in post-production and lost on the cutting room floor. She couldn’t recall how she’d passed her time when she was alone or what words she’d spoken to John when they were together. He did most of the talking. She’d been content to listen, and it was only his voice that she remembered. He’d been so busy all the time, doing odd jobs around the house, and prying her out from between the cushions of the couch like a stubborn barnacle whenever he got itchy feet. But what did she do? Had she ever enjoyed a thought without John at its centre?
She scraped her leftovers into the bin, full to the brim and alive with mouldy meals of days gone by. The plate was added to the pile by the sink. She’d have to wash them eventually, but not yet. She moved like a ghost haunting her own home, acting out the reflections of a past life on repeat, oblivious to the present and any pressing issue other than her own heartache.
There had once been a clock hanging in the hallway, at the foot of the stairs; now banished to a box of junk in the utility room. John was the punctual sort, as one of them had to be. Often when she’d be running late, he could be found leaning his back into the front door, shaking his head, grinning at the lost time. She still imagined him standing there whenever she descended the stairs, waiting to take her away with him.
Ciara had no recollection of hearing the clock tick or tock before. And yet, without John’s voice to fill in the silence, every second was hammered into her heart. The sounds of the house had gotten bolder without him around to keep them in check. She’d removed its batteries, clawing out its vocal cords. But the sight of its frozen hands was no better. It was as though the clock’s sole purpose was to remind her that this hell would last forever.
She still fixated on that night in the coop, when Madeline had stood between her and the door, abandoning John to the dark after he’d returned to her. Mina and Daniel liked to pretend that they’d each done Ciara a favour – saving her from certain death and their own lives too, conveniently enough. But what if that was meant to be the end? If she’d died with John there and then, she’d have been pardoned all this pain.
Ciara was haunted by his screams. The man she’d loved had called out for her and she did no more than listen. But knowing what she did now about the watchers’ mimicry and savageness – and having seen how they swarmed around Daniel – could they have possessed the patience and cerebral cruelty to keep John alive just to torment her? What if the voice forever ringing through the caverns of her hollow heart was not her husband at all, but a hundred foul things impersonating him?
There was so much she didn’t understand and too many reasons to be angry. Had Madeline known that John’s attempt at escape was doomed from his first step? She alone was privy to each of her pets’ weaknesses and all of the watchers’ strengths. Then why did she let him leave? Why did she let everything that Ciara had loved walk out that door?
She couldn’t be trusted. She wasn’t even human.
Ciara’s last memory of Madeline was of those branchlike fingers tightening around her throat, pinning her against the wall. By the faintest candlelight this woman – who she’d once obeyed like she would some overbearing headmistress – had transformed into something else entirely. Bones cracked and reformed, baring the powers she’d always wielded and yet chose to keep secret. Ciara had been strangled to within an inch of her life, awakening bruised on the floor, only to then be told that Madeline was, to quote Mina, one of them.
She refused to accept it. Wherever Madeline was, Ciara didn’t care. All of this was her fault – the fact that John and Daniel were dead, the even sadder fact that she was still alive. Cracking her neck that night would have been to do her a favour.
By the sitting room door she stopped, unsure where she’d been walking. She looked back to where the clock used to be, utterly lost as to the time, aware only that night had fallen. There was never anything to do; no meaningful act to occupy that same cyclical purgatory of lonely self-pity. Dust had gathered across the floor and atop every flat piece of furniture, glinting like a thin silver carpet whenever the sun shone. The putrid smell from the kitchen had now spread to the hallway, tainting the air rancid. Ciara looked to where she and John used to sit; where she still did occasionally, on her side, leaving his free, flicking through the channels, picking out those programmes that he used to watch. If only she could remember which ones she liked. Not that it seemed to matter anymore. It had never been about watching television, it was always for the company – for the feel of him beside her.
A crack of white glowed between the closed curtains. Ciara eyed it in a daze, aware but unaffected. The outdoor security light had clicked on again. She’d noticed it the past few nights but had yet to catch what was responsible for triggering it, most likely a fox or a badger, or a stray cat seeking out a new home; this was the countryside after all. With nothing else to do, Ciara padded over to the window, the bones in her feet cracking in the stillness, disturbing the dust that stained her socks black. She peeled aside the curtain, just enough for an eye to peep through. A fat moth flitted around the bulb. But the gravel driveway leading to the gate hadn’t felt the press of the lightest step. This came as no surprise. Even Ciara’s parents visited her less and less. A faint frost was clouding the pane. But no night could ever be as cold – or as painful to inhabit – as this tomb that her beloved had built for her.
Ciara tried to remember him as he was before the woodland, before its cold shadows sank into his skin and drained the colour from his eyes. He’d changed so much in that time, when the nights passed so slowly and the days were all too short. His beard grew fat and wiry. Fingers shrank to bone, their nails black and broken. What little nourishment they could forage was never enough, fistfuls of filthy nuts and berries so tart they made her tummy ache. John always gave most of his ration to her. And she’d taken it each time. She had eaten more than anyone else while her husband starved. There were days when she wouldn’t even leave the coop; too scared, too tired, too useless to carry her own weight. Every morning, John would brace himself to face the cold and the damp, breaking his body and torturing his mind for her. It was always for her – for the wife who’d awaited his return, wrapped in their warmest blankets, counting the days until her husband made everything better.
He was the only one who ever could.
6
MINA
Three short raps played on the door.
An eyelid peeled open – a strained fissure of sight with a mind too weary to grasp what it was looking at. This wasn’t Mina’s apartment nor – mercifully – was it the coop. The cottage resembled a faded photograph in the hazy light seeping through the windows below. She had no memory of going to bed. But she’d obviously climbed that rickety coil of stairs and somehow undressed herself. A cold veil had fallen over her face as she’d slept, chilling her cheeks and making the bed cosy as a womb. Whatever the hour, now certainly wasn’t the time to get up.
‘Are you alive in there?’ came Peadar’s voice, soft and fatherly.
She tugged the duvet up to her chin. Neither Mina nor the yellow one answered. The unspoken consensus being that if they kept their mouth and beak shut respectively, the man might leave them be. She couldn’t face another day yet, not until she remembered when the last one ended.
‘For the love of God,’ she whispered, ‘please fuck off.’
Another quick succession of knocks came as a response, louder this time. It wasn’t going to stop, like an alarm clock out of reach, indifferent to the basest sympathy.
Mina lifted up from the pillow and raked a hand through her hair. ‘Yeah, I’m up, Peadar,’ she shouted, each word ricocheting around the room like cannon fire. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’
She dropped back onto the pillow with a dull thud; it was rigid as a sandbag. Hungover again. Eyeballs only burned like this after an ill-judged skinful the night before, the toxic residue left behind by her repeat bad decisions. She pursed them shut, puzzled by the last starry shards of whatever freak show her subconscious had conjured this time. Had she dreamt of her sister again? Or had she caught sight of herself in one of those million mirrors that paved the walls of her mind? The more she tried to remember, the faster the reflection seemed to fade, but that was probably for the best given her tender state of mind; Mina’s days were dark enough without brooding over her nightmares.
‘Okay,’ she mumbled, kicking the duvet down to the end of the bed. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
A pair of skinnies were dragged up her legs. They were Caroline’s but fit just fine. Red socks, also Caroline’s; handpicked from the chest of drawers that’d been so meticulously organised before she’d got her hands on it. The ankle boots were Mina’s. All of the shoes on offer were a size too big and a tad too sensible in their stylings to ever grace her feet, with the slippers being the obvious exception. The throbbing above her eyes intensified as she staggered over to the wardrobe of which she was now sole custodian. Caroline had a tragic weakness for pastels and floral dresses, but there were a few jumpers that favoured comfort over fashion, and it was the mustard-coloured one of these that Mina’s hand seemed to independently reach for. She wore her own denim jacket whenever the chance presented itself. It was one of the few remaining vestiges of the identity she’d lost somewhere between the city and the coast, and acted as some proof to Peadar and June that she wasn’t taking too many liberties with Caroline’s belongings.
