Home Intruder: An Extreme Horror Novella (2 page)

“Hi,” Jaz said, getting to her feet and extending a hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Linda accepted the offered hand. “Likewise.”

The two women stared at each other for a fraction too long than was polite, leaving Ed feeling distinctly uncomfortable.

Not that he had anything to feel uncomfortable about, he reminded himself. Linda was ancient history and there were absolutely no pangs on his part, nostalgic or otherwise. They had ended because he had fallen out of love with her and university had been a natural break.

“It’s just so good to see you, Ed. What are you doing tonight?”

Ed was crap when put on the spot. At work he thrived under pressure but when it came to his personal life, he was a total pushover. His mind went blank and out came the classic:

“Nothing.”

“You are now. Me and Boko are going to come round tonight with a takeaway. I’m just
dying
to go inside the house again, I haven’t set foot in it since you left. And you can tell us all about you getting married.”

“Well, I… Yes. That would be lovely. Who’s Boko?”

“You know Boko. He was in our year at school. Boris Coleman.”

Boris Coleman?

For a moment Ed just couldn’t think. He pushed his glasses back up his nose as he tried to place the horribly familiar name. Then it came to him.

Bully Boris Coleman? The same guy that once flushed my head down the toilet?

“Yeah. Now I remember.”

“Good. Me and Boko have been together
years
now. That’s that settled then. Nice to meet you, Jaz.”

Ed and Jaz stood side by side, watching her retreating figure.

“The ex?”

“Uh huh.”

“Cosy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Although he could tell from her tone that it probably did.

“How about I buy you that pint now? I have a feeling we’re both gonna need one.”

They chose The Fox and Goose opposite the harbour slipway. It was a popular spot with tourists and locals alike, who congregated in the busy, concrete beer garden overlooking the fishing boats. Ed and Jaz elected to drink inside, away from the crowds.

“Nice pub,” Jaz said, instantly soothed by the dark interior and black wood.

“Yeah. I didn’t really come in here much. Wasn’t much of an underage drinker.”

“Bet you made up for it when you went to uni.”

“Yeah. I guess I did.”

Her tone was light, but truth was, she was shaken up by the meeting with Linda. Not to mention slightly pissed off. How the hell had that woman managed to wheedle her way into their home tonight? Honestly, when he wasn’t at work, Ed really needed to grow a pair.

Home.
If only. Jaz had only been here a few hours but she was already head over heels in love with the place.

“She still fancies you.”

“What? Who?”

Jaz rolled her eyes.

“You
know
who.”

“Don’t be soft. Course she doesn’t.”

Jaz regarded her fiancé thoughtfully. Part of his charm was that he genuinely didn’t believe women were attracted to him. But they were. In droves. He had this kind of geeky charm, this hapless, bumbling quality. He was the kind of guy that flew around the house looking for the glasses that he was wearing, or the keys that he was holding. He was the type that made five cups of coffee for himself in the morning in quick succession because he couldn’t remember making them and he always came home from work to find full cups of cold coffee languishing on every window sill and table top.

He was also incredibly good looking. Tall and slim to the point of thin, he had big, puppy dog brown eyes and a narrow nose, lending him a studios quality. His face was lean but comprised of hard lines, and his upper lip curved upwards in a pronounced cupid’s bow that reminded her of Jonny Depp’s mouth.

Sometimes it was charming that he didn’t believe women fancied him. Other times, like now, it was just plain annoying.

“Okay, fine, she doesn’t fancy you. She’s just coming round tonight to get to know
me
better.”

“She has a boyfriend. He flushed my head down the toilet once when we were at school.”

Jaz sprayed beer across the little wooden table.

“He did
what
?”

“It was only the once. I said that if he ever pulled a stunt like that again I would ram his head up his arse and shit down his neck.”

Jaz could well believe it. Ed was more than capable of looking after himself. He looked like a victim, up to a point. He was sweet and skinny and studious, but he could turn in a heartbeat.  A look would come over his eyes like he was capable of murder. She had only seen it once, in a nightclub when some guy had groped her breast as she stood talking to Ed at the bar. The man had been much bigger than Ed, but that hadn’t stopped Ed from pinning him to the bar by his neck and very quietly warning him that if he so much as looked at Jaz again, he would not be responsible for his actions. It was his calmness that had unnerved her, rather than the threat of violence.

“And you want to spend an evening with these people? A woman that still fancies you, with her boyfriend that wants to beat you up?”

“I’m sure that Boko can’t even remember flushing my head down the toilet. We were only fourteen at the time.”

“Trust me. He’ll remember.”

Ed looked lost in thought, his big brown eyes glazed over.

“I didn’t start dating Linda until we were sixteen, but looking back I suppose there was the whole love triangle thing going on. Or love square, if there is such a thing.”

“How so?”

“I was totally in love with a girl called Kerry Brown, but I guess Linda had always liked me and we had been friends since forever. I always knew Boko liked Linda. Probably why he flushed my head down the toilet.”

Jaz couldn’t help but giggle, despite her irritation at him.

“So what happened to Kerry Brown?”

“She and her family moved away on my sixteenth birthday. She never even knew I existed and I just kinda fell into seeing Linda.”

“I had no idea you were such a Romeo.”

“You’re the one that wanted to come back here so you brought all the history of my teenage angst upon yourself.”

“Yeah.”

Jaz liked to consider herself an easy going kind of girl. But there was something about Linda that put her on edge. A look in her eyes that, if she was honest, made her flesh crawl.

She’s not right and I don’t like her.

You sure that’s not sour grapes talking, Jazzy baby?

Thoughtfully she sipped her pint.

“Penny for them?” he asked.

“Just a bit apprehensive about tonight.”

“Don’t be. We’ll get rid of them as soon as possible, I promise.”

She smiled across at him, but the vague sense of unease remained.

Linda paced the front room of the tiny, basement flat that she shared with Boko on the outskirts of town. The rough end of town. Seeing Ed had shaken her to the core. She had dreamed of the moment they would meet again after so many years. How their eyes would lock over a crowd of people and the world would stand still in respect for their profound love.

Except it hadn’t happened that way. He had that
bitch
with him. That skanky whore. How old was she anyway? Was she even fucking legal?

Linda seethed and twisted herself up into knots just thinking about him with
her
.

And then she thought just of
him
. He had hardly changed at all, and certainly not for the worse. Still the same floppy brown hair and those big, soulful brown eyes. His boyish good looks had morphed into something manly and handsome.

God. Those eyes…
They still made her stomach turn wild somersaults.

She closed her eyes, his face branded in her mind, like it always had been. She glanced at the clock. Boko wouldn’t be home from the job centre for a little while yet, she had time.

Her hand snaked between her sturdy thighs, feeling the heat radiating out from the crotch of her jeans.

Without bothering with the bedroom she eased her jeans down over her chunky hips and lay back on the tatty sofa.

Her fingers delved into her knickers and were instantly wetted with her own arousal.

“Ed, oh Ed,” she sighed, massaging the aching nub of her clit.

The orgasm quickly built and the nearer she came to release, the more her lurid fantasies starring Ed morphed into something else. The images in her head jumbled together; Ed between her thighs, his mouth and chin wet with her arousal, smiling up at her. Jaz’s head, a sizeable gap between it and the neck that had once carried it, lying on the pillow next to hers in a pool of blood.

Ed fucking her from behind as she crouched on all fours over Jaz’s decapitated, naked corpse. In her mind’s eye she smiled down at Jaz’s neck stump as she came.

CHAPTER TWO.

Jason Jacks stood in his little office overlooking Hyde Park, smoking a cigarette. His rucksack was packed and rested at his feet, ready for the train journey to Cornwall.

It wasn’t however, the view from the window that had captured his attention, but the thousands of photographs that lined every available inch of the four walls. Not a crack of wall showed between them from floor to ceiling.

With trembling fingers, he removed an A4 sized, glossy, black and white photograph.

“So beautiful,” he murmured, tracing a fingertip over the contours of a close up of Jazmine Sullivan’s smiling face.

The photograph he held was a wedding photo, as was ninety percent of the photographs that adorned the walls. Jason Jacks, he of J.J. Photography, was a damn fine wedding photographer, even if he did say so himself.

The other ten percent were snapshots of the couple taken from a distance. Edward and Jazmine emerging from the church where Edward’s mother’s funeral had been held. Edward and Jazmine, walking hand in hand down the busy streets of London.

Blurry images of Edward and Jazmine making love, taken from the bushes outside their London flat. Jason always found it amazing how many people kept their bedroom curtains open a crack.

He pondered on the smiling face of Edward Sullivan.

“How much do you love her, Edward? Will you lay down your life for her?”

Everything was set, Jason was confident he had covered all angles. He was tired of anonymity, tired of keeping his work a secret. No more bringing back the couples to his torture chamber and adding to Britain’s already extensive missing persons list. For the first time he was going to treat himself; he was going to have a married couple whose wedding day he had photographed. It could be the one and only time, he knew this.

On some level, Jason knew that Mr and Mrs Sullivan would be his last. But that was okay. So much pain, and not just for the couples he tortured. Yes, he was ready for it all to end.

Jason picked up his rucksack. It was time to take his show on the road.

Ed’s easy going charm also hid an unwelcome angst. Why had Linda invited herself round tonight? Okay, so they had been each other’s first. First love, first sex, and they had grown up in the same town.

Had
being the operative word. He pretty much hadn’t thought of Linda for fifteen years. And now here she was, exploding back into his life like she had always been there, like it was
her God given right
.

Shit, he knew coming back here was a mistake.

They walked back up the cliff path in silence, weighed down by carrier bags from a trip to the local Co-op.

Ed was the one to break the silence as they neared the house, both of them slightly puffed from the steep incline.

“Why don’t we crack open the wine and sit on the front porch and watch the sunset?”

“A dying man’s wish before he’s executed.”

Ed opened the front door and gestured for her to go in first, frowning slightly.

“That’s a bit dark, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ll be fine, really, I don’t mean to be a sour puss.”

His frown deepened. Linda had had a dark side, he remembered that now, Jaz’s words had jogged his memory. Although why he should think of that, he did not know.

Damn Linda and her impromptu little visit
. It was casting a morbid glow over their time here.

Jaz busied herself in the kitchen, opening the wine and preparing snacks, and Ed wandered out into the hallway.

Yeah, Linda’s dark side.
Sometimes she had scared him. He remembered her cruel streak well, now he thought of it. On the surface she was bright, warm and bubbly, but underneath it all he caught glimpses of coldness. When she was seventeen for example, she had developed a thing for Nazis. Maybe that was normal, he didn’t know, but he sure as hell didn’t share her fascination with mass genocide, human skin lamp shades and the sick experiments Nazi doctors performed on live subjects. At the time he told himself it was just a silly, school kid phase, but now, looking back, it did seem a little
strange.

“Ed? Where are you?” drifted Jaz’s voice from the kitchen.

“I’m coming,” he said, shaking his head as if to dislodge the musings over Linda.

“Here.”

She passed him a glass of red in the hallway, and he accepted it with a thanks. Together they made their way outside, taking a seat on the wooden bench underneath the living room window.

“It’s so quiet here,” Jaz sighed, lifting her face to the low hanging sun. In less than hour it would be sunset, and the view of the setting sun over Levan Bay would be spectacular. “What are the neighbours like?”

Ed sipped his wine and smoked, he too enjoying the peace.

“This street has always been quiet. Mrs Harrison lived two doors down when I was here. If she she’s still alive she must be in her nineties. As for next door, I don’t know. Looks empty to me. Well kept, but empty,” he said squinting at the house. “Used to be a family that lived there, I can’t remember their names. Now it’s probably some rich bastards from London who come down for a holiday one week a year who don’t even bother renting the damn place out because they’re so stinking rich.”

Jaz laughed. “Like us, you mean?”

“We ain’t
that
rich.”

“You will be if you sell the house.”

“We, my darling. We.”

They sat there in companionable silence for a few minutes, enjoying the quiet and the clean, salt air. A seagull circled overhead, its war cries bringing back a hundred memories of his childhood all at once. Happy memories.

Discreetly he swiped away a nostalgic tear and pulled his love close.

Linda and Boko arrived just after sunset. As promised, they came armed with a Chinese takeaway.

Jaz opened the door to them, a bright smile plastered on her face. Boko returned it, although she didn’t much care for the all too obvious lecherous gleam in his little eyes set in the potato head. Subconsciously she tugged up the front of her flowery blue sun dress, thinking her tits had spilled out of it or something. Apparently Linda didn’t like the way Boko was looking at her either, for it seemed a take a lot of effort on her part to return Jaz’s smile.

Oh boy, this is gonna be fun
.

Linda was wearing too-tight blue jeans with a too-tight white t-shirt that accentuated her spare tyre. Jaz tried not to share at the woman’s muffin top, although for some reason the sight of it pleased her.

“Hello, you must be Boko,” she said, extending a hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

He held her hand for too long, and did he just
stroke
her palm with his thumb? She pulled her hand away with a shudder of revulsion that she hoped she caught in time.

Linda was positively effusive when she saw Ed in the kitchen. She kissed him and said how much she and Boko had been looking forward to this evening.

Jaz’s toes curled in embarrassment for her. Could she be any more obvious that she still carried a torch for him?

Never mind the torch. More like a fucking inferno
…

The four of them sat round the large, pine table.

“It looks so different,” Linda said, gazing around the room. “When you were here, it was so much more…”

“Old fashioned? Chintzy?”

“No, I was going to say homely.”

“I like all this white. Maybe people aren’t the only things that can move on. Perhaps houses can too.”

You go Ed,
she thought with a smile.
Put that slag in her place
…

She didn’t know why she was thinking like such a bitch.

Come on Jaz, make an effort. This isn’t like you at all
.

“So what do you guys do for a living?” Jaz asked brightly.

And unthinkingly. It was a pretty standard opening gambit when she was socialising with strangers on home turf. But in this instance, as soon as it was out her mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. She busied herself uncorking the wine to hide her blunder.

“I used to work at the fudge factory, ‘till they laid me off a few weeks ago. Ain’t much in the way of jobs down here. Boko does a bit of labouring, when he can find the work, that is.”

“Oh,” Jaz said, kicking herself, handing Linda a glass of wine.

She poured out wine for Ed and Boko, then took a huge gulp from her own glass.

I seriously need to be pissed to get through this night
…

“What do you do then?” Linda asked Jaz. “I expect you got some fancy job in London.”

“I’m a freelance photographer and a born and bred Londoner. But God, what I’d give to live in a place like this. Beats a career in London any day.”

She wanted to get across that she only had a career
because
she didn’t live in a small town with no industry. She was implying that if Linda were to live in London, then she too would have a brilliant career. Which was a load of bollocks, but she had a feeling it had fallen on deaf ears anyway. Either that or she had come off as intensely patronising.

“Whatever,” Linda said before turning her full attention to Ed. Jaz flinched inside at her rudeness. “I hear you’re an editor for a paper, Ed. That is so amazing, but then, you always were the one with your nose buried in a book. I couldn’t be doing with school myself.”

“Me neither,” Boko agreed.

Jaz could well believe it. He looked thick. Thick and unpleasant. His head was shaved and he was big, only just on the right side of fat. His eyes were too small and she didn’t like the way they continuously strayed to her breasts. He wore a plain white t-shirt that accentuated his broad shoulders and solid gut. The sight of him made her shudder.

I really don’t like these people,
she thought, then berated herself for being a snob.

“I love my job, it was worth all the years of study,” Ed was saying.

“So you ain’t ever moving back then?” Linda asked.

“No, we’re just here to fix the roof. And for me to say goodbye to the house I guess.”

“I do roofing.”

They all turned to look at Boko.

“You do?” Ed asked.

She wondered if Linda and Boko were also able to pick up on the alarm in his deceptively casual tone.

“Yeah. I could do it real cheap for ya.”

“That’s very kind of you, and everything, but I’ve already half promised the job to this other company.”

Jaz heard the lie, but could the others?

“My God Ed, Boko really needs the work. He’s trustworthy and he’ll be half the price of anyone else.”

“Well, I…” Ed stammered, put on the spot.

“I can start tomorrow.”

“Good, that’s that settled then,” said Linda, raising her wine glass. “Cheers everybody.”

“Cheers,” they all echoed.

Jesus Christ Ed, why can’t you ever say no?

No one spoke as Linda peeled open the tin foil tops of the takeaway cartons.

“So then,” Linda said, spooning noodles and limp vegetables out of the silver trays onto their plates. “When did you two get married?”

“Last week,” Ed and Jaz said in unison, then giggled sheepishly.

Linda did not look amused.

“Last week? What about your mum, Ed? I heard she only passed away a few weeks ago.”

“That’s right.”

There was a steel in his voice that Jaz had rarely heard before.

“Oh. How comes you two got married so soon after she died? You must have done it, in like, the
same week
.”

Jaz flinched. It was a sore topic. Ed had been all set to postpone the wedding. Jaz had been the one who had insisted they go through with it. She had got on with Ed’s mum, and felt sure she would have wanted him to keep the date.

And in a really sick kind of way, it had worked out well. Relatives that had travelled hundreds of miles did not have to go home, then come back again, to attend the wedding.

But it would seem that Ed was in no mood to explain the finer points of their decision.

“Excuse me a moment,” he said, standing up so that the chair legs scraped across the tiled floor.

“Where are you going?” Jaz asked.

“For a smoke.”

The silence in his absence was distinctly awkward.

“I didn’t mean to put my foot in it,” Linda said. “I should go after him.”

“That’s really not necessary,” Jaz said, her heart inexplicably quickening.

“Oh, but I think it is.”

The two women stared at each other across the table.

“He’s only gone outside for a fag. He’ll be back in a minute,” Jaz said, her voice surprisingly calm to her own ears.