The Sister (5 page)

I did it!

Across a silent sea of rippling ferns, there was a wood on the other side. The wind whispered as it blew, animating the mysterious feathery fronds. He walked among them, away from the sunshine, into the darkness of the woods beyond. Bruce watched himself enter the dark shadows the trees cast.

He followed the coolness in the air, which led him to a small stream, and he felt cold as 'other Bruce' skipped on and off rocks along the bank, challenging himself to leap greater and greater gaps between the rocks, oblivious to everything.

Even expecting it as he was, he still jumped at the sudden appearance of a man standing up, throwing the woman over his shoulder. 'Other Bruce' skidded as he landed, slipping partly into the brook. The resounding thud of his head against the rock made him hunch his shoulders as he recalled the pain. He scrambled hastily from the water, dazed and full of fear. Is this just a nightmare? Where are you, Dad?

The man was now just a few feet away.

He wanted to scream, but his voice wouldn't come. It was stuck in his throat. His legs felt disconnected from his body. The man was almost upon him, and he couldn't even run away.

Something wet and warm ran down Bruce's leg. Oh, now he'll be in trouble with his mum! He checked his pyjamas and felt considerable relief at knowing it had only happened to the 'other Bruce'. Wait a minute . . . It did happen to me! Suddenly, he was travelling . . . backwards and upwards, faster than falling . . . faster than he'd ever imagined he could move - then stopped - hovering like a bird of prey, looking down . . . His father and grandfather burst through waist-high ferns, leaving a trail of flattened fronds behind them.

Bruce cowered on the ground as the man bent over him.

Distracted by the voices calling out, the stranger stood, stared hard at the frightened boy and locked eyes with him. He put a finger to his lips and whispered, "Shhh . . . or I'll kill them all." Then he turned and sprinted away, back to where he'd left the woman, and swept her up over his shoulder with one arm. Her head came upright, balanced for a moment at the point of flopping back down. Eyes bulging; tongue stuck out of her beetroot face; she seemed to fix Bruce with an angry expression.

He tried to look away, but failed in this version as well, the look on the woman's face burned itself into his memory.

Then the man was gone.

He suddenly remembered the shell! It had saved him again. In the dream, he was telling them what had actually happened,
and he was afraid the man would know and come to kill them all. His father checked the bump on his head while his grandfather walked further down the slope to see if there were any sign of what Bruce had just told them he'd seen. There was none.

They spoke together rapidly, too quickly for him to understand. What he could tell though, was that his father didn't believe him. "It is the bump he has had on his head!"

His grandfather disagreed. "No, I feel him . . . somebody bad." Squatting next to him, looking deep into his pale blue eyes, he said, "Bruce, remember when you hear this?" His arm extended and came around in a semi-circular sweep.

"I can't hear anything." Bruce said, confused.

In his heavy Eastern European accent, his grandfather explained patiently. "Yes, you hear nothing. Remember, when you hear no birds in the forest . . . the birds, they warn you it is a bad place. You understand?" Bruce nodded; his brain jarred, making his head throb.

His eyes snapped open. The room was dark.
He was back in his bedroom.
Closing them again, his fears subsided; it was only a dream. Something made him open his eyes once more; part of his dream was still with him.

There was a presence in the room. He knew that it sensed him. Not moving, hardly breathing, he didn't dare cross the room to turn on the light. He wasn't sure where this thing was. It was everywhere around him; it was in his head just like when the garage-suited man was after him. His voice paralysed; he remembered what his mother had told him about the living and the dead.
You don't have to worry about the dead – only the living can hurt us.
Whatever it was in his room with him, it wasn't alive. He reached for the seashell that had protected him since he was four years old, and holding it tight, crossed the room to switch the light on; the urge to check under the bed quickly countered by the fear of what he might see. At last, exhausted and feeling safe with the light on, he slept.

A black fly started up, buzzing around, knocking against the lampshade. The droning announcement of its presence made him fearful.
If the room were in darkness, would it settle? Can I find it and swat it the instant the light goes back on?
He extinguished it, turning the room inky-black. The fly cut its engines.
Silence.
Then something cold and wet settled on his lips. He spat furiously, fumbling for the light switch. He crossed the floor and opened the window, hoping the fly would go out. Its abominable noise stopped. Sleep crept into his worried mind and took him over.

Something had wormed its way into his subconscious. Teeming sounds, distant and surreal, like a tiny Middle Eastern bazaar, drew him out sleep. He opened his eyes. The spotlight that the lamp shade threw up onto the ceiling, revealed a moving carpet of tiny insects, moths, midges and mosquitoes, and at the centre of it, unmoving
. . .
sat the orchestrator of it all. The bluebottle.

Suddenly, Bruce knew he was not alone; the presence that had previously intruded on his thoughts was back in his head, and he knew that something else lurked in the shadows under the bed, waiting for him. In stark terror, he shook as his imagination took flight.

Too afraid to look, he tried emptying his mind the way his grandfather had taught him. Deeply breathing in and out, he calmed himself, thinking about his father and grandfather. They always knew what to do, no matter what.

He floated in the transition between sleep and wakefulness.

Clunk!
The sound reverberated through the bed, jolting him upright. A few weeks before the same thing had happened,
and his mum said it was only the springs settling in the mattress. Uneasy, he tried to relax again.

Clunk!
This time, he looked under the bed.

He screamed.

The whole household came running to investigate. In a small voice, he told everyone he was okay; it was only a nightmare. He dared not tell them the real reason.

Over the following nights
,
Bruce would lay there like that, fighting sleep. He would see what happened over and over again, from perspectives that couldn't have been his. Sometimes it felt as if someone else was in his head; he kept seeing the woman's beetroot face, and the killer, finger on lips –
"Shhh…"
he fought to keep the thoughts down until exhaustion forced him into sleep, and then he'd wake in the grip of a nightmare, stifling a scream, afraid of the darkness in his room.

Over the years, he gradually weaved an insular blanket to throw over the intrusive thoughts and fears that plagued him. He hadn't removed the root causes, but he would never consciously allow them to trouble him again.

Chapter 9

Southern Ireland 1969

Brenda Flynn was Vera's aunt; once considered the life and soul of parties. Always telling jokes, many a stranger ended up with sore ribs after she'd elbowed them hard on delivering the punch line. While they doubled up in pain, her raucous laughter infected everyone around to join in, none more so than her previous victims.

Life changed dramatically in 1969 with the death of her husband in a farmyard accident. One cold morning, he started the engine and left it to heat up, then reaching back in to pull something off the front seat, he snagged the gear lever; the tractor started forward with him half in and half out. She saw it as she ran out to take him the sandwiches he'd left behind on the kitchen table. He lost his footing trying to get back into the cab and fell under the back wheel. Widowed and childless, part of her died that day, too.

She became embittered and sour.

A few weeks later, her brother and his entire family had burned to death when their home caught fire. Every single one of them perished apart from Vera. Alerted by the flames, some villagers found her wandering, aimless, outside the house. The fire brigade pinpointed the upstairs landing as the origin of the fire. They always left a candle burning there because of Vera's sleepwalking, in case she couldn't see and fell downstairs.

With no other family to look after her, she faced the orphanage and Ireland in those days was no place for a child to grow up in a Catholic institution. Her aunt would not allow that happen.

Her niece was only thirteen, but Brenda never knew what she was letting herself in for. Something played on the child's mind; whatever it was, it wouldn't let her rest. One night, despite what they say about never waking a sleepwalker, Brenda did just that, questioning Vera about the fire while she was in her somnambulant state.

"Is that how the fire started, when you were on your wanderings?"

She did not appear to wake fully. "No, it was the dog
did it, chasing a rat. It knocked the candle over at the top of the stairs. When I saw what happened, I was on the beach, too far away to get back to warn them."

The older woman stared in disbelief, and wondered if the child before her was truly awake.

In her mind's eye, Vera saw it all again, the way the fire caught quickly, the draught funnelling through the stairwell fanning the flames, the melted wax turning it into an inferno. The next thing she knew she was outside in her nightie, warmed by the heat of the fire.

She didn't tell her aunt she'd warned her mother about the fire three nights before. She didn't tell her because she was a child who'd not yet made sense of it all, who was afraid she'd frighten her and because she'd
known
it would happen in advance and didn't do enough to prevent it from happening. There was something else, too, that she didn't tell. While she was on the beach that night, she'd projected herself into her parent's bedroom to warn them. Her ma sat astride pa, riding him. Her father had seen her, but believing her to be sleepwalking, whispered, so as not to wake her, "I don't want disturbing taking what little pleasures there are to be had in this life. From now on, I'm locking that door."

"Wait," her mother said, raising herself off him. She'd seen Vera too. "There's something wrong. What is she doing here? Why is she pulling that face?"

"She's only sleep walking again, don't worry love. Get back into bed and be quiet, and then she'll go away." Vera looked sad. She knew she should have tried to wake the others first. It was already too late as her projection left the room.

One minute she'd been there, the next she was gone. They didn't question it until they heard the screaming. Her pa never noticed the heat of the door handle as he opened the door. A massive fireball engulfed them. It was only afterwards that she realised she couldn't directly interfere with what fate had planned.

Finally, Vera spoke. "I tried to wake them."

Her aunt berated her, "You stupid, stupid child, you should have tried harder! What you did not do killed your parents." She couldn't believe her own words as they tumbled out of her mouth. What she would have given, to call them back unheard; but it was too late.

It started a chain reaction. Vera retaliated by telling her she'd killed her own husband.

Stunned into silence, Brenda reacted with undisguised venom. "What did you just say?"

Vera was afraid of her anger.

"What did you just
SAY?
" she shouted; the veins in her neck stood out, and her piggy eyes bulged almost out of their sockets.

Vera looked down; she spoke quietly. Brenda leaned in to hear her better.

"The last time you were in the tractor, you left your jacket on the front seat. Uncle Tommy started the engine to warm her and jumped down. Seeing it there, and not wanting you to feel the cold, he reached back in and pulled it across the seat. As it came, it snagged the gear lever; he wasn't really looking. He felt it catch, and he tugged it harder. It slipped into gear. You know the rest."

Now she knew how it had happened as seen through the eyes of the child before her.

She'd been blissful in her ignorance. Now she knew that, in the simple act of leaving her jacket behind, she had contributed to his death.

She wept softly.

Vera woke and put her arms around her neck. "I'm sorry, Aunty Flynn. I thought you might have wanted to know what happened." She'd just discovered that the truth had the power to hurt.

After that, she always asked if someone wanted the truth first.

Brenda never woke Vera while she was sleepwalking again.

Chapter 10

Late May 1969

In the early summer of 1969, two memorable things happened to Dr Ryan, and they both occurred on the same day. One: a rainstorm the likes of which he'd never encountered before. The other: meeting Vera Flynn for the first time.