Echoes (Whisper Trilogy Book 2) (6 page)

Marshall smirked and leaned close, lowering his voice.

“Shake my hand on fifteen, and I’ll go one better.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll give you the ones who got away.”

“Impossible, nobody even knows where they are!” Dane said, and yet, as he looked his brother in the eye, he knew he was telling the truth.

“I do. And I think I know just how to get them. Can you imagine, your investigation at my hotel, including the only living survivors of whatever they claimed happened to them the night of the fire?”

“They would never go for it. I hear the husband was in a bad way after what happened. I can’t see how anything you say would ever convince them to get involved, as spectacular as it sounds.”

“You forget one thing,” Marshall said, straightening and holding out his hand. “I can be very persuasive.”

“How can I say no? Okay, Henry. Fifteen it is.” Dane said as he shook on it. “I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Don’t you worry about it. You just think about how to make this night memorable. I know just how to get our former residents on board.”

“I hope you do. For the record, I’d have shaken hands with you at eleven.” Dane said with a grin.

“That’s fine. I’d have gone all the way up to twenty two.”

“Come on, give me a clue at least. How do you ever hope to get those two back to the site?”

“In my business,” Henry said as he finished his coffee, “anybody can be talked into doing anything as long as you have the right leverage.”

“And you have some with the Samson’s?”

“Yes I do. I have plenty of leverage where they’re concerned.”

CHAPTER 5

6 months later.

They were thrust into the inferno, the heat surrounding them indescribable. Donovan wasn’t fighting back, seemingly content to simply restrain Steve from reaching the front door, which looked out of reach as the flames licked at it hungrily.

He pushed anyway and tried to struggle past, but Donovan’s grip was strong and vice-like, and he flashed his sick, dead grin at Steve even as his hair burst into flames.

Steve stopped struggling and smiled at Donovan; whose skin was beginning to bubble and blister.

“You are dead Donovan. You can’t hurt me. You can’t hurt my family,” he shouted above the raging sound of the conflagration.

A moment of uncertainty passed over the Donovan thing’s melting face as Steve pulled out the protective cross from where it was embedded in its stomach. It staggered backwards, and fell to one knee.

“This House is no more. The Gogoku can rest, nobody will inhabit these grounds again,”

Steve gasped and coughed as the smoke began to fill his lungs, his own skin beginning to peel and blister.

“Leave my family alone,” he added weakly, attempting to ignore the agony of his burning flesh.

It wasn’t a request, but a command. Donovan appeared to shudder, then fell to his knees and sideways into the flames, which hissed as the fatty parts of his skin were devoured by the intense fire.

Close to losing consciousness, barely able to breathe for the thick, black smoke, he turned back to the kitchen and half-ran, half-staggered as fast as he could towards the glass-paneled door. He slammed into it at full-speed, the door exploding in a shower of wood and glass.

Steve always woke at this same point. For the first couple of years it had been with screams as he clawed at the sheets, imagining the agonizing burns were still fresh. Now, even though the nightmare still filled him with indescribable horror, he awoke only with a gasp. He lay in the dark, listening to the trip-hammer sound of heart beating against chest, then the pain came, and he was thrust into another day of perpetual misery. He glanced over to Melody’s side of the bed. She lay on her side, breathing slowly and untroubled.

He shuffled out of bed, gritting his teeth as he tried to keep his patched-together body quiet.

“Where are you going…?” Melody mumbled.

“I just need a drink,” he whispered. She moaned something in response then rolled over, draping her arm across his side of the bed. He shuffled to the sitting room, trying to ignore the deep, dull ache which seemed to fill his every muscle and joint these days – the after-effects from the dozen skin graft operations he had endured over the last seven years. He swept the curtains aside, looking at the blinking lights of the city and the never-ending line of car lights, resembling thousands of pairs of eyes. The sounds of the city soothed him after his dreams. The sight of the concrete jungle helped to remind him he was far away from that time and place.

And those trees.

Most of all he was away from those. He watched the traffic for a while, waiting for the awful memories to pass, then let out a deep sigh. Lately his thoughts were turning increasingly dark, to the point where he started thinking it might have been better if he hadn’t survived the fire. Even to think it made him feel ashamed and guilty, but he felt it nonetheless. The problem was, although he survived, the after-effects had meant the quality of his life had been vastly reduced. He continued to breathe, the engine continued to tick over, the days and weeks ticked by, and yet it was all without any enthusiasm. An apathy had set in and it was proving increasingly hard to shake off.

A yellow crescent of moon managed to briefly peek through the cloud cover, and Steve held his right hand up to the window. It was gnarled and thin, his index and middle finger fused together due to the fire. He had no real articulation or dexterity, no sense of touch or feeling. He often wondered if it had been some kind of bitter irony how the hands which could once play beautiful piano chords, and effortlessly pick their way through guitar scales when he was composing a ditty for a TV ad, could now barely hold a spoon so he could feed himself.

The rest of his body hadn’t fared much better. In constant pain, his skin was a jigsaw of grafts and scars. His right ear was mostly gone, his left a stumpy, fleshy lobe. What little hair was still able to grow did so in intermittent patches, which Melody kept trimmed for him. Even blinking hurt, the skin on his face feeling stretched and alien, which he supposed in essence it was. Although he wasn’t even forty yet, he looked like a ghoulish seventy-year old.

He was a complete and utter failure; a monster. Melody would never say it, and she didn’t have to. He saw it in her eyes when he caught her looking at him sometimes, a mixture of resentment and disgust. Those reactions he could handle, it was the pity he hated. He saw her watching him when she thought he was sleeping. The more he saw it in her eyes, the more he in turn resented her for it.

He had been contemplating killing himself for almost two years. With all their money lost when Hope House went up in flames, his first thought was to take out a sizable life insurance policy on himself and just disappear. When he was presumed dead, Melody and Isaac would get a nice payout to see them comfortably for the rest of their lives.

The idea was put on ice because no insurance company would touch him. Since the fire and the injuries he’d sustained, he wasn’t seen as a viable candidate.

As he always did on nights like this when his sleep was broken, he sat in his chair, the one only he used, stiff-backed and uncomfortable, but which made it easier for him to get up and down without assistance. He would sit there in the gloom, unable to sleep, desperate for a little respite from the constant pain plaguing his waking hours. Now, he closed his eyes and listened to the constant honk and grind of the city traffic.

II

Six year old Isaac Samson kicked his football around the garden, whooping with delight as he ran with tireless energy. Inside the house, Melody watched her son, feeling like an absolute failure.

“Everything okay?” Rebecca said, setting a cup of coffee down in front of her sister and joining her in watching her nephew.

“I’m fine, just… I don’t know. I hate how he gets this excited about playing in a garden. This shouldn’t feel like a special privilege to him.”

“After everything you said happened, it’s understandable – you didn’t want a garden of your own.”

“What I say happened?” Melody said, watching her younger sibling carefully.

“You know what I mean, all that… paranormal stuff.”

“You still don’t believe me, even after all this time?”

“What I believe doesn’t matter,” Rebecca said. “You and Steve survived. Everything else is unimportant.”

“I didn’t lie, Becca. Everything I told you happened, actually happened.”

Rebecca chewed her lip, and glanced out of the window, then turned back to Melody.

“Look,” she said, choosing her words with care. “Even if the things you say are true—”

“—They are,”

“—Even so, even if it was as you say or a combination of stress or taking on too much, the fact is a man came into your house and tried to kill you. Then with the fire… well, we’re just grateful you’re alive. You should be, too.”

Melody made no outward reaction. Inside, she screamed. Flashes from the past came with cruel clarity, their memory refusing to fade with the years.

“I am, really.”

Even as she said it, she could smell the forest, and could hear Donovan, his panting breath growing closer as he charged through the brush after her. She recalled the words he had said to her just before she’d managed to flee.

“They want me to show you, they want me to

teach you a lesson.”

That’s when he’d unbuckled his belt and tried to push himself onto her. There was something in his eyes, something beyond human as he grunted at her while she lay on the floor.

“You had this coming, don’t try to deny it.”

She suppressed a shudder, and stared at her son out of the window. As frustrating as it was, she no longer got angry – their account of what happened hadn’t been believed. Soon after the accident, whilst waiting in the hospital for Steve to come out of surgery, she broke down and told Rebecca everything. Although she listened without comment, it soon became obvious she didn’t believe a word of it, either. Since then she’d barely spoken of it, and hadn’t told the truth to anyone since.

“Hey, Mel… I’m here for you, you know?”

The sisters locked eyes, and Melody nodded.

“I do, it’s just… It’s hard, you know?”

“I can only imagine. How’s Steve?”

“Pretty much the same. He still won’t leave the house.”

“Maybe there’s someone you could talk to…”

Melody shook her head. “No, he has his reasons. I have to give him time.”

“It’s been years, Mel. He’s missed birthdays, Christmases, pretty much every family get-together since the accident. It seems unfair to leave it all on you.”

“You have no idea what he did for me,” she snapped, feeling the color flush into her cheeks. “He gave up everything to save me, and I won’t have a bad word said about him.”

“Hey, okay, just relax. I didn’t mean anything by it. All I’m saying is he could do more to help you with Isaac.”

Any further conversation was halted by the sound of the door slamming off the wall, and Isaac charging down the short hallway.

“There’s a man here!” he exclaimed as he entered the room.

“I’ll go see who it is,” Rebecca said.

“No, not for you, aunt Becca, he asked to talk to you, mommy.”

“Are you sure?” Rebecca said.

“Yes,” Isaac confirmed. “He asked to speak to Melody Samson.”

Melody’s stomach tightened and she glanced at her sister, who picked up on the signals sent without a single word having to be uttered between them.

“Hey, junior, how about you and I go make a sandwich?”

Isaac frowned, perhaps sensing the discomfort, then grinned, nodding his head.

“Yeah, can I have cheese?”

“You can have whatever you like,” Rebecca answered, ruffling Isaac’s blonde hair.

“Come on, you can butter the bread whilst I cut the cheese.”

Isaac charged away and grabbed the bread as Rebecca looked at Melody.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” she said quietly.

“No,” Melody said, shaking her head. “Nobody even knows where we moved to. We didn’t want to be found.”

“Want me to go and get rid of them?”

“No, whoever it is knows I’m here. I’ll deal with this.”

“Are you sure? I can come with if you need me to.”

Melody smiled, the expression tired and without humor. “I’m not as weak as I used to be, Becca. I can handle this. You just keep an eye on Isaac for me.”

Rebecca hugged her sister, clutching her tightly.

“When the hell did you get so damn strong?”

Melody beamed as she pulled away. “I had no choice. Everything that’s happened…”

“I get it,” Rebecca said with a smile. “You don’t need to say anymore.”

“Aunt Becca, come on!” Isaac yelled from behind them.

The sisters smiled at each other, then went their separate ways, Rebecca to the kitchen, and Melody outside to see her mystery visitor.

III

The man stood outside the gate in front of a black Mercedes. He was tall and thin, and clad in a cheap-looking suit which, even at a distance, Melody could see was a bad fit. She approached, remaining cautious. Whoever this man was there was a very official vibe about him. Melody stopped five feet short of the garden gate and looked at him. He looked back, his gaze cool and blue as he watched her.