‘Mummy, why is Uncle Justin melting?’
My head snapped around to follow the voice, the wordsinstantly striking a whole new level of anxiety and fear into me. It was the kind of horror I imagined a rodent may feel just as they saw the wingspan of an eagle block out the sun from above.
From my small elevation of the entryway, I had a clear view of the casket and more specifically, Justin. The young boy I’d noticed earlier now stood frozen in fear, watching a scene that could have been ripped straight from some awful VHS Eighties body horror film. Justin’s chest, once still, tight and puffed, was not only sinking but it was starting to collapse in on itself. It was as though an unseen vortex were drawing the wings of his ribcage inward. His suit crumpling and creasing towards the black, gory, bloody centre, as the fabric of his shirt distorted in a way I didn’t even realise was possible, like a soufflé five minutes out of the oven.
The commotion of the blokes behind me dissolved into a form of background static. I could only stare at Justin’s stoic face, shades still fitted on the nose like he was the Fonz, giving the impression he was just so relaxed and oblivious to the grotesque transformation overtaking the remainder of his body a few inches below.
‘Ayy,’ I could almost hear him say.
See, I think I may have gone too far.
PART THREE
TWELVE
TWO YEARS AGO
Greta
I must tear
and shred
these feeble creatures to a desire of darker bliss
that lurks within these veins.
These ruptures I leave for you are my offerings,
perverse tokens to you tortured rats bound and imprisoned by your wasteful grief.
As flesh and stone alike shall crumble into dust
and rot,
so too will your vaunting convictions decay.
Yet I, remain.
As I read the passage again and again on my computer screen, it felt more and more like there was something strangely familiar in the writing, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on entirely. Why was the message giving me an uncanny feeling of déjà vu?
‘Greta?’ a voice called out, snapping me out of my concentrated glare of the article about the TellTale Killer’s most recentmurder on my screen.
‘What?’ I asked, a little dazed, trying to track where the sound was coming from and who was disturbing me from the swathe of IT tickets that I really ought to be actioning at manager-mandated speed. As the voice echoed through the circuitry of my brain, I registered its familiar tenor instinctively as a ‘green’ voice, friendly and amiable. By contrast, the deeper, bass-heavy tones of a more dominant speaker, e.g. my boss, would have registered as ‘red’ in the synaesthesia of my mind. Maybe I had been working in IT for too long.
Ruth came up to my desk and placed a refreshed cup of tea in front of me, made exactly how I liked it. Dash of milk, no sugar, because I’m not a psychopath.
‘What up?’ she said with a sly, sarcastic grin. ‘We still on for my pre-birthday dinner tonight at Sabroso?’
‘Of course we are,’ I replied. ‘Now stop nagging me, I have a lot… of work to do.’
Crikey, I did love Ruth, but she had always had a tendency to be a bit intense. Not in an ‘I need to move house and change my number’ kind of way, just a ‘full-on’ kind of vibe. She was such an isolated soul, bless her, latching onto the few things that truly mattered to her: me, her work, and her husband. And sometimes, I worried it was in that particular order. Throughout their whole marriage, I had tried to make sure that Ruth and Ben had their space, but I sometimes felt that she kept dragging me in to be a reluctant third wheel.
I’d mentioned to Chlo a few times that I thought Ruth needed more friends than us, but Chlo never seemed as concerned as I was about Ruth’s rather limited social circle.
‘What work do you have to do in IT anyway? Wiping people’s search history? Telling people to turn it off and on again? I reckon you’re just reading Obama for the eighteenth time,’ Ruth teased lightly.
‘I’m not reading Obama,’ I said, exasperated. Technically, I waslisteningto his smooth dulcet tones as he told me of ‘A Promised Land’, while the hardback lay nestled in my drawer at work, but Ididn’t have time to get into the nuances of what exactly constituted reading right now. Besides, I won’t be shamed for reading Obama, God forbid I like a stable, charismatic politician. The fact he was rather handsome had nothing to do with it.
