* * *
He woke to twilight and pain.
Moving cautiously, he tested his arms and wrists, which must have broken his fall: sore, bruised, but not sprained or broken, thankfully. He sat up. His legs and feet checked out, but his forehead thumped an agonising beat, and his right collarbone radiated trouble. Gingerly, he touched his temple and felt the crusted scab. He whooshed out a few breaths, feeling the horror rise in him again, which was rapidly pursued by his disgust at his weakness. It prompted a maelstrom of memories replaying his worst moments: his younger sister Poppy defending him in school because the bullies learned they could make Owen faint if they cut him; avoiding any chance of conflict by playing sick and hiding; warping into a cynical little prick who mastered mimicking others and performing idiotic stunts to make his “friends” laugh; picking on Poppy relentlessly as a teen, trying to wear down her strength so they could be equally frail.
He clutched his hands to his head and moaned a little, because that sin hurt him more than anything else. He banished the past to deal with the present.
The room was deeply shadowed as the world dimmed into a rose-violet hush. The birds were not singing their farewells to the sun.
Owen looked over at the crevasse in the wall, a slash of black that seemed to bleed darkness into the room. He did not know what constituted concussion, but he wondered if he had it. It never sounded good when the concerned doctors talked about it as they shone a flashlight into the eyes of their patients on the telly.
He got onto one knee and levered himself off the floor at a sedate pace. The room tilted and distorted for a moment and he heaved in a breath to steady himself. The cage lay in crooked darkness, only visible due to a patch of white lattice.
A skull doily, Owen thought, and a fizz of weird laughter tickled his mouth, but he kept it contained rather than break the suffocating silence.
A city boy, Owen had trouble with the pervasive quiet at the farmhouse, especially at night. Worse still were the erratic unfamiliar noises that startled him out of the oppressive lull at odd moments: a fox yipping; the squeaking of hunting bats; owls hooting to each other. Whenever he went outside for a smoke break, and was engulfed in a soothing cigarette pall, dark shapes could suddenly flit about in the sky or zip low to the ground. The countryside was too full of unruly, strange life for him. He had set up a monastic existence in the bedroom upstairs, but he kept his wireless headphones on most of the time, listening to music and podcasts, or watching films. Anything to avoid confronting his jittery solitude.
He approached the cage and dragged it from its concealment and into the starlight squares cast by the windows. There was a latch at the front, and it lifted easily. Owen opened the door and considered what to do next. The idea of touching the skulls made his fingers draw back towards his palms involuntarily.
“Man up,” Owen whispered, and immediately hated that the phrase had passed his lips. It was a spiteful invective that had been thrown at him by his old man on many occasions.
He reached in and pulled out one of the skulls: it was cool to the touch and surprisingly solid. The bottom jawbone was attached to the skull by twists of copper wire. For some reason he thought this one was Faith. He left her on the wide window seat and retrieved her brother.
He sat Fred beside her and wondered why he thought of them as siblings.
Owen stood in front of them, looking at their dark sockets, brimming with secrets.
“What’s your story, then?”
They stared at him, smiling, steadfastly mute.
Behind them, through the window, two shadows flapped by.
Turn on a light, you idiot!
He darted to the switch, but the yellow light of the lone bulb dangling from the ceiling made it worse. A jaundice afflicted the space.
But it showed him the hammer lying on the ground where he’d dropped it earlier. He picked it up and its weight gave him confidence. Owen approached the skulls and made a practice swipe in front of them. As if to threaten them.
They were unimpressed.
He hesitated, wondering if there was a better way to deal with this problem, and considered that these long-dead people probably deserved better treatment. But plenty of people die alone, forgotten, and unburied. His own great-Uncle Spencer had died in this house and had not been discovered for a month. Which was how he came to inherit the place.
They’d had their life. Now he wanted his, the one where he became an older brother Poppy could respect.
He raised the hammer and brought it down on Faith’s crown. She burst apart into skittering shards.
He laughed, and pulverised Fred.
He fetched a dustpan, swept up their pieces, and dumped them into a black bin bag. Afterwards he moved the cage into his bedroom, covered it with a dust cloth, and sat his second-hand lamp on it. Then he went outside, under the pitiless vault of stars, and walked to the skip. Owen pushed the bag of bone bits deep under the assorted rubble, and strolled back to the house, whistling.
* * *
In his dream Faith and Fred were teenaged twins with black curls, dark eyes, and deeply tanned skin that bore the marks of torture and beating. They stood upon a makeshift gallows, the noose around their necks. Hatred burned in Faith’s bruised eyes as she glared at the Magistrate standing in the throng of baying townspeople.
“Obadiah Creaser: none of your line shall prosper. You, who swore to care for and shelter us, will never be quit of us now. We shall call out your sins to the Almighty forever.”
Then the terrible sound of two snapping necks followed by howls of jubilation from the crowd.
The shrieks continued as the faces of the watching people twisted and morphed into distended caricatures. It was a cacophony of righteous wrath.
Owen bolted upright in his bed, sweating, the sound ringing in his ears, and his heart thudding quickly.
The screams continued. Two voices sounding their anguished fury.
Owen leapt up, disorientated but desperate to end the horrible din. It was close, but not upstairs.
He slammed on the light and found shoes to slip on. Owen stumbled downstairs, flicking on every light switch he passed, urgently needing to push back the darkness. All the time the screams assaulted his ears, and kept the images of the twin children dangling, dying before an audience vivid in his mind.
He had to make it stop.
Owen nearly tripped over a box of tiles in the disassembled kitchen, but he noticed at the last second and jumped it before flinging open the back door.
Here, the noise was a piercing pain.
The reassembled skulls of Faith and Fred sat on the doorstep, screaming.
Owen reeled as reality crashed into disbelief.
They continued to voice their anger to the heavens.
Panicked, he ran over, gathered them up, and stepped back into the kitchen.
They fell silent instantly.
Breathing hard, he stood inside the threshold and looked out the door at the forbidding night. A chilly breeze swept past his bare ankles.
He glanced down at the skulls cradled in his arms, and walked through the doorway into the yard. Their cries pealed out again.
Owen marched back into the kitchen and laid the skulls upon the small, paint-stained table he was using until the room was kitted out properly.
The skulls locked their protests behind their teeth.
For a long time Owen stared at the de-fleshed heads and pondered his next move. Finally, he scooped them up, carried them to his bedroom, and put them back in their cage.
He covered it again with the thick cloth and returned to the kitchen to brew coffee and wait for the dawn.