Dead Yet
He
supposes he should call someone to tell them that she’s dead.
That would be the proper thing to do. The right
thing. The normal thing.
He doesn’t know why he didn’t think of it
before, when he first found her lying on the kitchen floor, except that it
could have been the shock.
Yeah. The shock. That’s what
he’ll tell them when, eventually, he does call.
But not yet.
He glances at her again. She’s
sitting upright in the armchair they bought from an antique shop that’s been
closed for years now. The bookshelves behind her look as if there are shadows
clumped against the spines of the old books she collected. Her grey hair looks
wispy, like webbing. Her eyes are cloudy. Her skin looks grey, like dirty
sheets.
Why did she have to die first?
He’s ten years older than her; it should have been him. That’s what they’d both
expected: that he would go first, and she would cope on her own. It had never
entered his mind that it might be him doing the coping. Or not. Because he
wasn’t. Coping, that is. Oh, no, he wasn’t.
Coping would have been calling
an ambulance, or the police, to tell them that she was dead.
He puts down his laptop, stands
and walks slowly towards her, one hand out, the other held by his side. He
stops and stares at the top of her head. Doesn’t touch her. Can’t do that.
Idly, he reads a few of the
titles from the bookshelf in his immediate eyeline: Dark Grimoire, On
Speaking with the Dead, A miscellany of Witches… so different from
the books he owns, the ones he never lets her see – the ones he can only get
from specialist dealers on the Dark Web.
“What am I supposed to do on my
own?”
She can’t answer. He knows that.
At least now she’ll never find out about those books, and the USB drives, and
the external hard drive he keeps locked up in his study.
He glances behind him, at the
laptop on the little table beside the sofa.
“I can’t do this.”
He kneels in front of her, his
face level with hers, and looks for signs of life – the life that has left her,
the life that once was but will never be again.
“I know you never loved me. I
never loved you. But we were okay together, keeping each other company. Isn’t
that better than some kind of romantic myth? Being together…protecting each
other. Keeping secrets that nobody else would understand.”
She turns her head. The movement
is jerky; a marionette on loose strings.
“I can’t do this,” he says
again.
Her mouth twitches into a weird
smile, baring her teeth. Her eyes go dark. Black. The wig slips as she begins
to stand, exposing the blotched, scabby skull beneath. She raises her hands,
clutching at the air above her head. Her slipper-clad feet whisper on the
carpet.
She’s miming something, as if
she were playing a game of charades. A book…it looks like she’s opening a book.
Does she know?
Has she seen his private library
after all?
She starts to move her fingers
in a way that suggests typing, as if she’s working on an invisible keyboard.
He looks again at the laptop,
then brings his gaze back to her.
When he blinks, she is no longer
there. It was all some kind of hallucination, a mad vision brought about by
stress. Awkwardly, he stands and turns around, walks across the room towards
the kitchen. A cup of tea, that’s what he needs. Weak and sweet. Just like the subjects
of the photos in the books and film clips he enjoys so much.
She’s lying on the kitchen
floor. Her hands twisted into claws. Her wig tilted at an obscene angle. Her mouth
is open, showing brown-stained teeth. Her eyes are as black as the liquorice
sweets he always buys her for Christmases and birthdays. Clutched in her hands,
and pressed tightly against her chest, is a dusty old book whose title he
cannot make out.
Is the book hers, or is it one
of his?
His vision begins to blur. His
throat is dry. He can smell something old and foul and deathless on the air.
She pushes herself upwards,
bending at the waist. Sitting motionless on the lino and still clutching the
book to her old, saggy chest.
What is this?
Some kind of hallucination…a
vision brought on by stress…
Or perhaps a premonition…
“Now,” she growls, her voice the
sound of rocks grinding together. “Where were we?”
© Gary McMahon
