“What … what did you say?”
“That I told you not to come in here.”
Edward is standing in the kitchen doorway. He is nearly two years older than Alan, and when their father left the house he told the two of them that Edward was in charge while he was out. In addition to the usual rules, neither of them was to enter the kitchen. But Alan has disobeyed their father, and there is a furious look on Edward’s face. Edward has always done what he’s told; to him, their father’s word is law. Even now, with their mother lying dead in a pool of blood, he remains at the threshold of the room.
Alan looks down at his mother.
The out-of-body feeling is intensifying, as though something inside him is wheeling upward and looking down at the whole spinning scene from above. It is not the sight of the blood, or the aftermath of violence that still hangs trembling in the air. On both counts, he has seen worse. It is not even grief yet. It is the knowledge that everything has changed. That some taut link binding the family’s existence has snapped and there is nothing left to hold it together. There is a sense of unraveling.
He looks back at Edward.
“But … he’s killed Mom.”
Edward stares at him, his face set hard.
“Deus scripsit,” he says.
God has written it.
Alan blinks at that. How can his brother be so calm? But then Edward has always had more of their father in him than Alan. It is Edward who was taken out the last time their father brought home a girl; Edward who crouched down over her in the night and joined in the work of making her into an angel.
“Get out of there now.”
Trembling slightly, Alan does as he is told; his brother is a head taller than him and there will be a beating in it for him if he doesn’t. Then Edward closes the door, shutting their mother’s body away.
“What are we going to do?” Alan says.
“What we were told to do. Now stop crying.”
Alan touches his face, surprised to find the tears there, and then follows Edward through to one of the front rooms. They sit in silence for a time. What they have been told to do is wait for their father to return home, but Alan has no idea how long that might be or what will happen afterward. Surely even Edward must feel it too—that this is different from the other times. That everything is different now.
Or can be.
And while the situation feels like a dream, the sensation inside him is more akin to having just woken from one. A kind of clarity has come over him. Five years from now, the man who will adopt him is taking him for an eye test. As the optician slides the lens into place and the world swims into focus, the sensation is the same.
He blinks again.
“Where are you going?” Edward says.
Alan doesn’t know; he hadn’t even been aware he had stood up. And yet here he is—standing—as though pulled from his seat by someone behind he can’t see.
“I … I need the toilet.”
Edward appraises him coldly, and for a moment Alan wonders if his brother will tell him to sit back down.
“Don’t be long.”
Alan steps into the hall, his gaze quickly moving away from the closed door of the kitchen and over to the downstairs bathroom, its own door slightly ajar. His footstep echoes as he walks toward it, a scratching sound against the tiles. But as he reaches the bottom of the staircase, he pauses, and a strange thing happens.
The sound continues.
Scritch.
Very slowly, Alan turns his head to look up the stairs. The landing above, where they double back on themselves, is dark and empty. The air is still. But while there shouldn’t be anybody else in the house, he senses a presence up there anyway, somewhere high above him.
Scritch.
Like a fingernail curling against wood.
He glances back. Across the hall, the door to the front room is open, but the angle is such that Edward is out of sight. Alan turns back to the stairs. And after a moment’s hesitation, he starts tentatively up them. Each creaks gently under his weight. When he reaches the first landing, his heart is beating hard and the silence has begun buzzing.
Scritch.
The sound draws him up, all the way to the top floor of the house, and then down the dark corridor that leads to his father’s chambers. The heavy oak door there is closed, but when he reaches out for the iron handle, it turns with a quiet cricking noise.
The door opens.
He swallows nervously.
Edward has been in here before, but Alan never has. This room is out of bounds; it is one of their father’s strictest rules. Alan blinks as he looks around now. It is a gilded room—far richer than the rest of the house. The carpet is soft and plush, the furniture ornate and expensive. Glinting brass fittings surround an elaborate fireplace in the chimney breast. The walls are bare aside from a single painting, hung so as to overlook the whole room. Alan finds himself staring at it for a few seconds in horror. It shows a tortured saint, arms nailed out, half the skin of his face peeled off and hanging down like a necktie, the ridges of exposed muscle dotted with beads of blood.
Scritch …
He looks ahead.
There is a closed door at the far side of the room. And even though the scratching sound is no louder here than it was in the hall far below, he can tell it is coming from somewhere on the other side.
Beckoning him.
He walks slowly across the room, every footstep farther into this forbidden place like a blasphemy that sets the silence ringing a little louder.
He reaches the door and presses his ear against the old wood—
SCRITCH.
—and then jerks back, his heart fluttering in his chest like a bird.
There is something on the other side of the door. He takes a few seconds to calm himself and then reaches out and turns the metal ring.
Pulls the door open toward him.
A narrow stone corridor. There is very little light, but he can just make out what seems to be a large room a short distance ahead. And as he stares into the darkness there, he has the impression that something is looking back at him. A shadow within a shadow.
He whispers.
“Is that someone there?”
But then he senses a different presence, this time behind him.
“What are you doing?”
He turns quickly to see Edward has followed him upstairs.
His brother is standing on the far side of the room, his eyes filled with rage and his face contorted with hatred and disbelief. Alan can tell Edward would kill him for this disobedience right now if he could.
But Edward always does what he is told—always follows their father’s instructions to the letter—and he has remained beyond the threshold to the chamber. His fists are opening and closing powerlessly by his sides.
“Get back out here now.”
Alan stares at him like a rabbit caught in headlights. Even if it means a beating—or worse—the instinct to obey the order is strong. It is all he has ever done in the past. Except that everything has changed now, hasn’t it? An end is approaching. A chance for things to be different. And he realizes that feeling is much stronger than the urge to follow the order he has been given.
Because he doesn’t have to do what he has been told anymore.
He turns back to the open door. He takes a step into the dark corridor.
“You can’t do this,” Edward screams behind him. “It’s not allowed!”
But he does.