The photo was taken thirty years ago, four years before I was born. Though it appears someone has sifted through the piles of Dad’s papers looking for something because I can see gaps, disturbed dust, and missing stuff, this album has been left alone. Or perhaps it was opened and dismissed.
My suspicions are already high.
Hailey and us. How sweet to recall her like this before she grew up and we played secret messages.
The ink is darker than the other writing.
More significant: the baby isn’t me and Dad would never write that unless… Unless this is a message to me—to the current me.
When I was little, we would mess about with the letterbox on my two-story doll’s house. I scurry upstairs and find the house on a shelf in my old room where I’ve already dumped a bedroll and hauled some bedding from a cupboard. The dollhouse is dusty and derelict, with plastic pieces missing, and the letter box has fallen over due to the little plastic strut having snapped.
The dust is thinner here, scraped away by large fingers. Tucked inside the letter box is a tiny note on a thin strip of rolled paper. Getting it out of there takes some doing due to my fingers being too big and I have to break the plastic and swear at it.
I sit on the bed to read the note with the lantern perched on the mattress. The springs squeak under me. The scrap of paper is so tiny and tightly rolled. My fingers are clumsy, and I have to close my eyes and draw two deep breaths before looking. My father was the last person to hold this.
Dad’s tiny writing. From six months ago, or more, really. Of all the things to make me tear up. I swipe at my eyes. At the top I read:
Check the cache. I may add more there.
The cache? On that I am puzzled.
Carefully, I unroll the rest of the note, squinting to read some of the jammed-together script.
A tear spills as I read his words. The writing evokes amemory of his warm hand stroking my hair while he reads me a story. That was years ago, and I can still remember the sweet scent of the plants flowering outside my bedroom window.
“If anything happens to me, it was murder. There is a secret in this town. They’re trying to make special soldiers called frankenstructs, and no law is keeping them from doing terrible”
Terrible what? What are frankenstructs? Who isthem? This sounds insane but he was murdered, and I have to believe there is a kernel of truth in there, somewhere.
Why did he go fishing if he suspected someone wished to kill him? Would they kill him to stop him spilling information?
Someone did. I feel that truth in my bones, my flesh, my blood.
Now, what do I do about it?
This is the big question I have no good answer to.
Which is why I return to the balcony with what’s left of a bottle of Dad’s ancient whisky to try to drink some sense, or is it nonsense, into myself. I’m somewhat drunk, angry, sad, and stupidly fatalistic.Come and get me, assholes.I switch off the lantern despite the ominous storm-clouds rolling in. After an hour or so, it begins to rain. Cold, freezing rain and some spatters in under the roof. The weather with its occasional crack of blinding lightning is appropriate for my mood, to the last dot of the T in lightning. And the little noose in the G?
What am I drinking again? Is itLaphroag? It’s lapsomethingI decide, peering at the label getting spotted by rain.
“Lap dancing,” I declare, gulping another few swallows and raising the half-full, half-empty bottle to the grumbling, light-blasted sky.
This is why I am sitting with my ass on the floor in soaked leggings. I’m drunk as an alcoholic skunk, wet and shivering, and the rain is mixing with my tears and making it difficult tosee, when a man climbs over the railing and drops with a soft thud. The timber vibrates from the force of his landing.
Startled, I squint up at him, until my thoughts and fears catch up to each other. I shove myself backward and stand, leaving the bottle spinning as I retreat, slowly, and wobbil-lily? I cannot eventhinkthe word in this state. My feet turn inside out, and I stumble. He frowns at my feet, slowly shaking his head.
Am I to die here, tonight?
I’m only wearing my now-sodden wolf socks and of course that is stupid, but I never expected this, this…whoever this man is…to visit me. Feet are the last of my worries because this is the man from the door. I’m almost sure of this since he’s bald and huge, and the visual of him easily pulling the other man over my fence is pinned to my memory board.
He’s also the man who kept the other dude from, I guess, gutting me like a fish. The man who dragged a killer away and vanished them.
He’s back and maybe he wants to kill me, too? He climbed up my house like it has a beanstalk on the outside. My heart is beating so fiercely, I’m waiting for it to explode from my chest, then a world-swaying nausea arrives to add to my woes. I hold my stomach, wondering if I should try to pull off my socks before I run.
A bolt of lightning skewers the sky behind my visitor, reflecting off the house walls behind me, painting him in a stark palette of light and dark.
For a second, he’s this beautiful combo of Freddy Kreuger and Hannibal Lector lit up like a Christmas tree.
