Sunruined: Horror Stories (10 page)

The boys put him down on a wooden slab. It was a table of sorts. A fire crackled somewhere beside him but the boys wouldn’t let him turn his bloodied head. Instead they held it straight, so that he stared forward.

Sitting at the head of the table, looking at him with only a vague sense of familiarity, were his mother and father.

Suddenly, things made sense to him. They made sense and he put things together in his head but he couldn’t blurt them out fast enough.

No. His parents had never loved him.

And he thought he knew what had taken Dorie’s fingers.

Thought he knew how she had come about the burns.

And he thought he knew why she was able to love their parents and he was not.

She had understood.

She understood about the first born. About the first born being the only real child his parents had ever wanted and when that first born child had died, a part of his parents had died too because they realized something about mortality and then maybe somehow they found this place that allowed them to escape mortality and, feeling the boys’ hands on his body, Paul knew they had come here again and again. Here, to this place where the first child would always live. Where he would always be born into perfection.

Again and again.

These were the children his parents had loved.

And why not? Paul thought. They would never get old. They would grow to whatever age his parents wanted them to grow to and then they would stop and they would never die. They would never hate. They would only love. Unconditionally. Regardless of what the parents wanted them to do.

Paul started to say something to his parents, sitting there with their cold eyes measuring him, but he was yanked up by the throat and carried over to the crackling fire.

Dorie had got out. Somehow, she had escaped this fate. But Dorie had always been the strong one and, as the first of the flames licked his bare feet, Paul knew he would never feel the sunlight again.