Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (31 page)

Last night I heard the door to my room click.

It woke me instantly, if indeed I was ever fully asleep to begin with. I stared at it, or in the general direction of it, for in truth there was nothing to see because the lights were out. But I pictured it in my mind as vividly as if I saw it for real. Every damn scratch across it, every tiny ripple in the painted metal, because I’d stared at it for so long now, with hope, with trepidation, with desperation. That door meant more to me than just a door.

The minutes dragged by. I heard faint sounds of shuffling, cotton rustling like dry leaves tumbling over each other in the distance, the thinnest of noises coming from the hinges as the door was eased open a little. The scrape of laboured breathing.

“Who is it?” I said, my voice weak, a rattle in my throat, a star in my own horror movie, with my own clichéd lines.

There was no reply.

Whoever it was merely stood and gazed at the blackness that was me with as much rapt attention as I did the blackness concealing the door. A cold panic started to well up, and a considerable part of me wanted to hide beneath the bedcovers. II even grasped them with that childish thought in mind. Hide from the bogeyman. Was this it? Finally? Was it all coming to an end?

“Is that you, Max?” I said. It was him. I could sense it. I could feel him across the room as plainly as if I touched him. “I’m not afraid of you. I never was,” I said, though I was desperately afraid. “Are you going to get this over and done with or what?” I said, my voice sounding uncommonly loud in the quiet confines of my room. “Because if you don’t kill me, I’m going to kill you!” I screamed.

And with that scream my anger and fear melded into a dangerous cocktail of impetuosity and I threw away the bedcovers and ran for the door, but when I reached it the thing was closed. The door was locked. I refused to believe it had never been open.

“Bastard! Bastard!” I yelled, sending my fist crashing against the door heedless of the damage I was doing to me hand. “You took everything!
Everything!
I tell you, Max, if you don’t kill me, then God help me I’m going to kill you!
Murderer! Murderer!
”

I eventually slumped to the floor, my chest heaving and aching with a band of pain across the middle of it, tears hot in my eyes.

You took everything, I thought. Everything I ever had. You stole it from me. You took my life away a long time ago, little by little, piece by piece till I was sucked dry and empty and left here to rot.

I crawled to my bed and pulled the covers over my head. Hiding from the bogeyman.

Bernard wanted to tell me something, but I couldn’t be bothered with him and his stupid grinning head.

*  *  *  *

I tossed the bag containing the rat across the room –
my room
– and sat on the edge of the bed –
my bed
– my head in my hands. “What the hell is going on?” I said. I could hear the sound of the sea being stirred by the wind; it appeared to be laughing.
Hahhh hahhh hahhh hahhh.
I felt the springs of the mattress give as Ruby sat next to me, and it caused us to lean so that we pressed against each other. She put an arm around me and we sat in silence.

Ruby said, “When I first saw you I was so, so glad, and then immediately I realised the danger you were in. Max never intended you would leave this island. I ought to have considered he might do something like this. It’s the next logical step.”

“This is so bizarre, Ruby. What is Max thinking of? What on earth is going through that mind of his?”

She let out a breath that brushed my hand. “Max believes he’s the real Philip Calder.”

I looked at her, then I laughed again without much humour in it, dry and brittle. She stared me out, her lips set. “That’s totally ridiculous!” I said. “Why would he want to be me? I’m a nobody, I’ve been nowhere and I’m going nowhere. Max was always the one who would go places. Max was always the one who people liked. Max is a success. I’m Philip Calder, the bloke from the backwoods, still a part of the backwoods, no money, no future, no nothing. And you’re telling me Max somehow thinks he’s me? That just doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Sense doesn’t come into it, Philip. This is Max’s world and it’s turned upside down. Normal rules don’t apply. You have to see it as Max sees it. Look all around you. Look at this room. Is this normal? Max’s world is a twisted version of yours, because he’s always believed that you stole it from him. You are a changeling. You are his doppelganger that usurped his rightful place. At birth, whenever, Max is certain he was exchanged for you, and all that should have rightly been his was snatched away and he was forced to live this other life with a mother he never completely thought of as his own. Don’t ask how he came to believe it or why, but that’s the way it is. You are an impostor. He resents you, always has. He means to kill you for it.”

I rose quickly to my feet. “Rubbish!”

But of course I knew it wasn’t rubbish. It did make sense. My mind tracked back to various troubled memories from the past. They flashed on and off in my mind’s eye like a lurid slide show. Max in his garden telling me he didn’t want to be Max; atop The Mount and Max asking me if I knew what a changeling was; the time he stayed with us in our house and how he gradually took on my mannerisms; the night when I fell into the canal – I was there, in the water again, calling to Max as he stood immobile on the bank staring coldly down at me, and then striking out at me with the branch, intending that I never surfaced. Wanting me to drown!
Wanting me dead!

I looked at the dark patch that was the rat in a bag, and wondered whether symbolically this was Max or me. I would never know the full meaning behind this sad mummified creature with its stomach slit open and its innards piled up beside it. I could only guess at the possible answers. I shivered and folded my arms about me. But I found I could not blame him for who he was or what he thought. It was obvious there had been some damage done in childhood to his mind – possibly due to the beatings he’d had that Connie told me about. Poor, poor Connie. Was she ever aware of Max’s true condition, how he truly felt, what he believed? She would have been mortified. She doted on him like no other mother could. She gave him her all. Evidently, he felt a powerful bond for her, because he still felt they had to be together, her body enshrined like some ancient princess on a magical island, still close to him and never to be far from one another, even in death.

“Max and I met some years following our divorce,” Ruby said, shattering my thoughts. “My company was put in charge of marketing one of his many ventures, and when he found out by accident that I was employed as project manager there he insisted that I take charge in spite of me arguing otherwise. That’s his story, anyhow. I don’t believe it was an accident, not now, not knowing what I know. But I was flattered and pleased that we’d met up after all those years. We talked over past times, he talked about you, a lot, asked how you were, those kinds of things. One thing led to another. We saw more of each other, got closer, and eventually he asked me to marry him. I make it sound simple and short, but it was never that easy. I carried with me too much emotional baggage to make it a smooth transition. And we saw each other for quite a long time before either of us considered submitting to something like marriage.”

I turned away. This was hurting too much. “Go on,” I forced myself to say, because, in spite of this tearing away at my insides, I had to know.

“I guess why I was really attracted to him was the fact that I was trying to replace you, and Max made it easy to believe that this was exactly what I was getting. Another you. Another chance at being with you and making it work. But gradually it dawned on me that he was obsessed with you, first in little ways – constantly dropping you into the conversation, that kind of thing – to actually behaving and speaking like you. At times the likeness was uncanny. Scary even. Time went by and he eventually managed to convince me that I needn’t do the job I did, that I could somehow be more important to him and his writing, and like a fool I gave in, simply threw away all that I’d ever worked towards, and for what? Yeah, I know, dumb bitch. So I became more and more isolated and things start to get real weird.

“One night I found a photo album. Out of curiosity I flipped the pages. There was a black and white one of Max and Connie taken in the 60s; he was a kid, standing in some kind of park and holding up a white feather and an ice-cream. I moved on and came across photos of you and me, other kids we grew up with, that kind of thing. Then I saw one with you, Max, and your parents standing outside your back door…”

I remembered it well; it was during the fortnight or so Max stayed with us, taken by Connie when she and Bernard came back off holiday, to use up the few remaining frames of film in the camera. “Stand closer, darling!” she cooed at Max. “That’s it! Lovely!” Then she said, “It doesn’t work. Why won’t it work, Bernard?” He came over to her, his face ruddy with the effects of overexposure to strong sunshine. His massive hand took the camera and wound the film on. “Stupid, aren’t I?” she trilled. “I never did understand cameras, not like Collie here, am I? Not a photographer like you, eh?” And she clicked the shutter. My mother said she wanted a copy and Connie promised she’d get her one. A promise that, naturally, she never kept.

“The strange thing was,” Ruby continued, ploughing into my memories, “Max had written
‘Mum and Dad’
on the back.” She looked up at me. “And he’d scribbled you out with a pen…”

I narrowed my eyes. “It’s starting to make sense now,” I stuttered. “I hate to admit it, but everything’s beginning to add up…” I went over to her, sat down on the bed again, taking her hand.

“That’s not all,” she said, drawing in a shaky breath. “When I came to this place a year and a half ago, Max confessed…”

“You’ve been here all that time?”

She nodded quickly. “Listen…”

It hit me what Ruby’s true situation had been all along. “And you’ve never been permitted to leave?” I was horrified. “You’ve been a virtual prisoner all that time?”

Her hand pressed against my lips, sealing them. “He confessed to me…”

I peeled away her cold fingers, holding them tight in my hand. I could tell by her expression she was deeply distressed. “Confessed what?”

“You see Max was convinced that other people knew he’d been replaced by you. In fact he believed there was a massive plot against him, that sooner or later one or the other of them would kill him so that you could take his place completely. Even his mother was in on it, but, he said, she’d grown so attached to him that she couldn’t ever do the dirty deed herself. Others had to be employed.”

“Others? Who?”

“Bernard,” she said.

He hated Bernard. That much was true. I could never understand why, though. “You mean he thought Bernard –
Bernard
– was going to bump him off?”

“So Max got in there first…”

I pulled away. “What are you saying, Ruby? That Bernard didn’t commit suicide?”

“Think about it. Who would have thought any different? Bernard was thoroughly depressed, drunk and potentially suicidal. All Max had to do was go in there and take a knife to his wrists. No more Bernard.”

“No…” I shook my head. I refused to believe.

“Philip, he
told
me he did it. He told me why, he told me how. Max murdered Bernard.”

“Then he’s lying. It’s a game he’s playing with you. That’s Max all over…”

“I’d love that to be true, Philip, but he’s done more.”

I didn’t want to hear any of this, because I still loved him, Max was a part of me and I didn’t want to learn whether that special chunk of me was rotten to the core, twisted and demented; I wanted him to stay as he was, good or bad, but not evil. “You’re making it all up, Ruby. Why? Why are you spinning me this ridiculous story?” I was angry at her, at myself.

She rose to her feet and went to the window. “Look around you, Philip. Is this a story? Is this a fairy tale?”

I groaned, feeling physically sick, my face covered by my hands, my body rocking slightly. “What else has he done?” I submitted softly.

“Remember old man Walton?”

I frowned. “Yes of course.” I couldn’t see where this was going or what my old teacher had to do with anything.

“Remember how he died?”

I thought for a moment. “House fire, wasn’t it? It’s so long ago. Didn’t they say he smoked in bed and that…?” My words ran out of steam. I eyed her, afraid she might confirm what I was thinking.

“Cast your mind back to dinner on your first night here. Remember what you were talking about?”

“I creased my forehead in thought. “Walton and the bird table, the half coconut. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“And what did Max say at the end? Remember?”

I shrugged. “I can’t see the relevance of all this, Ruby.”

“
Do you smell burning?
Those were his very words.
Do you smell burning?
”

“Max killed Walton too? Max set him alight?”

“He admitted he did. Both Walton and Bernard had behaved violently towards Max. In Max’s mind this was a sure sign of their ultimate intentions. He said it was easy, a matter of waiting for the old man to leave a window open one night and then he simply climbed in, struck a match and let it fall onto Walton’s bedspread. Drugged to high heaven with sleeping tablets as he was Walton was in no position to put up any kind of fight or save himself. And that’s why I can’t be permitted to leave. I know everything.”