Post by FinlandiaWhiteEyes on May 3, 2011 17:12:01 GMT -5
Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with ALTCLAM, despite appearances to the contrary.
Salamander
‘Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.’
It was seven o’clock in the morning of the nineteenth of January, and this is the end of my tale. I walked the usual paths to the train station in much the same way as I had always done, if at a slightly slower pace. The wind fought me with every step, and when my foot was planted it seemed it struggled twice as hard to regain the ground it had already lost. The air was cold, grey and it wickedly hinted at holding rain, if not worse. On that morning I remember thinking that such weather was a god’s curse against the British. The cold crystallised even my breath, and stole it away. Little did I know that my fears about curses were going to become far too literally realised.
But I digress. My name is Melisa Scarpton, and every morning I catch a train from a quaint little station on the outskirts of a city. The exact identity of that city is not important, and I am bound by a combination of law and my own desire for peace to exercise some level of secrecy. The route I took that day is the route I still take now. It takes me past a field occupied by a very disgruntled pair of horses. On the morning of the nineteenth they looked at me glumly as I passed, and the wind snapped their chestnut manes and tails around furiously, fanning them into a blaze of rough hair. I could spare them only a brief moment of pity, as time was pressing. I hurried on through the wind that they were forced to stand and endure. Finally reaching the station, I went inside to find the little room irritatingly crowded for so early in the morning. Four travellers and the sour old ticket guard might not seem much to you, but to me it was far too many people. Seizing a copy of the free newspaper from the already messed up pile, I left the tiny room and elected to wait on the platform.
My train station was not old but recently redeveloped, in fact. They had, however, rebuilt and repainted it to look old. Thus I sat on a bench on a traditional looking platform that looked like it belonged in the countryside of seventy years ago. Every surface was charmingly painted wood; the signs were rustic and elegant. The effect was somewhat ruined by the electric lamps and large floodlights. And, of course, the huge metallic monsters that roared through the station every ten minutes. I watched one pass as I sat down; a giant red and grey behemoth that did not deign to slow down upon reaching my station. It was no doubt full of people that had no time to take a slower train and enjoy the world. They were far too important to give consideration to me and my problems. So they flew past in their man made miracle, to some distant place where urgent business awaited them. As they left, I glanced down at the newspaper lying previously untouched in my lap.
And suddenly the air didn’t seem so cold anymore.
A bleak black and grey image greeted me beneath an indecently bold and loud headline. A lump of charcoal had been burned into the front page of the newspaper, but it was huge, as big as a house. It was a house. Number sixty-three, St John’s Lane. It had been a lovely little home, bright, filled with life and laughter. The garden used to have flowers in it, and a little girl and her big brother would watch insects and birds and one little hedgehog wander through the rainbow jungle, whilst a pair of glowering eyes would watch them from an upstairs room.
Now it was gone. The flowers had been stripped of their colour, and the birds would not go there anymore, surely. No doubt the little hedgehog was dead too, and the ashes of his leafy nest would be mixed with his own, and those of the plants, the house. Four victims, the police report said. Four, not five. The cold air felt like nothing compared to the feeling that was slowly freezing my organs. It was as if I was being filled up from my feet upwards with ice water. I couldn’t tell then, and I still don’t know now, whether it was shame, fear, dread or hope. I did not feel sad, though. I was too numb to feel any emotion as humane as sorrow. I only knew selfish feelings at that time. The sorrow for a little girl in her bright blue dress, laughing and chasing pigeons, would come later. Much later.
Four victims, five family members.
The police suspected arson. I remember thinking ‘if I had known before then, perhaps I could’ve done something’. Well, the truth is, I did know. I watched that fire burn long before it was actually started. I watched it consume and destroy something that I could not save. The officer in charge was begging witnesses to come forward. I couldn’t have done anything. But I did know, long before that cold morning. And I knew something else, too on that morning, the morning of the nineteenth of January. As my train lumbered into the pretty station and collapsed onto the platform, I stood. The paper slid from my lap as six people wandered out to board the train. A few of them looked at me, I think, but at the time I didn’t notice. I walked out of the station like an automaton, my feet somehow managing to follow a path that I did not know nearly as well as the station path. A pair of crows that sat on the fence, the chestnut horses in their lonely field. Everything seemed to watch me leave. The train pulled out of the station, but I wasn’t on it. I was going somewhere else. It then occurred to me that the wind had died down.
I knew exactly where to find him.
***
I walked and it seemed that those two crows followed me. At least, as I walked to our place, there were two crows on the fence, in the trees, flying low in the air. I remember reading about crows, and how they are omens of death and doom. It frightened me for some reason, having those beady wicked eyes watching my journey. It was a path I knew well. We walked it every day, though never together. I squeezed my eyes shut, as one of the crows strutted along the fence next to me, and I walked a little faster. My feet seemed to dance over the path as if it was ice, and the wind hurried me along, forcing me forward. It was one of the few things that stopped me from turning around, and running in the opposite direction. The whole world drove me on.
I heard a rustle of feathers, and put my hands over my eyes. I escaped the crows, but not the memories that lit the corners of my head, taunting me, accusing me.
***
We’d just moved in across the road. It was a sleepy little country street. Everyone and everything was normal, and in their perfect places. My parents walked over paving and tarmac, practically dragging me with them, through the door and into our new neighbours’ home. Four laughing, happy faces greeted us. A normal family. The little girl had found a hedgehog, she said, and would I like to see? My mother remarked that I would very much like to see. Thus I was dragged off again, by a little cherub in a bright blue dress. Her brother watched us from a few steps behind. He was laughing at the girl’s insistence, in a conventional, handsome way.
I know what you think I was thinking, or at least, I think I know. But I’m not one of those girls who insist on everything being different and interesting. Certainly not as different as they would soon come to be. I think it’s important for you to know how normal this family was, you see, so that you don’t think they abused him. They didn’t. He was always that way.
We went out into the garden, all full of flowers in neat beds, and at the end there was some scrubby brush, where I was informed we were going. This was the domicile of the little hedgehog. We walked over, all three of us, and said hello. He was curled up into a little ball of bristles, hidden from the daylight by the leaves that clung to him. His name was Spikey, apparently, and the little girl held her breath as she watched him. Her brother watched his sister with as much tenderness as she watched the sleeping hedgehog. I felt like an outsider, though I had been invited on this little adventure. It seemed to me that I was looking through a window onto an incredibly private scene that shouldn’t be seen outside the family. I turned away, so I could stop thinking of myself as a voyeur.
And that is when I saw him for the first time. He really was staring out of a window, watching me watching them. Though the garden was large, and he was far away, I could see him perfectly. Dark hair that fell around his pale face, making a frame for the white skin that in turn framed his eyes. His eyes are the most perfect expression of him, windows to the soul, like that old expression says. They are black, but they glow from within, shining with passion, and intensity, fury and malice. He stared at me, and I stared at him, until the two people behind me took me by the hands and led me inside.
That was when I learned, from the chirpy account of the matriarch, that this middle class couple had three children, not two. I thought it was fair to assume that he was the third; hiding in an upstairs room did not seem to be behaviour befitting a guest, after all. My mother asked where their second son was, and they said he was out with friends. That was a lie, not just because he was on the first floor of their house, but because going out with friends was something he had never done before. So they were lying, and I never figured out why.
Then I discovered something even more curious. There were no pictures of him, not as a baby, toddler, child, or teenager. When my father asked how old the boy was, the family smiled and asked how old I was, and that led us down a meandering path of schools, friends and hobbies that never brought us back to the original question. The little girl sat on her older brother’s lap for the whole time we were there. She wriggled at first, but he put his hands on her waist and then she sat still, and the smile left her young face for the first time. It was only briefly, only slightly, and moments later it returned, shining brighter than ever. But I always remembered that. The mind focuses on the strangest, most unimportant details, I guess.
***
I was forced out of my reverie by the loud bleating of a car horn. I was in the middle of the road that marked the halfway point of my journey. A woman sat behind the wheel of a Ford something-or-other was shouting at me, waving her fist. Her face was bright red. I stumbled over the road and she drove off, still shouting and honking her horn. I watched her leave from the other side of the road. I watched her a long time after she’d driven out of my sight. The wind had died down, and I had nothing driving me on. I stayed there for a long time, staring into the midst of nothing, waiting for my mind to stop arguing with itself. I wanted to keep going until I got to our place, but it took me some time to convince myself again that this was a good thing. As I waited, I pulled out my phone and looked at it for a long while, my thumb hovering over the last number, undecided. Nothing in my mind was certain, at that moment.
***
Before I go on, I should explain how we came to know each other without a pane of glass between us. Beneath his window, trailing down the wall to the ground was a slash of red ivy. He told me he had always been a good climber, and that the ivy was safer for him to climb down than the stairs within his house. This was one of the few times he ever bragged about any skill he possessed. It wasn’t that he was humble; he just never spoke about himself much. Well, on that first day, he climbed down and followed me home, watching where I lived. When I got into my own room, and looked out my own window, I saw him staring up at me from my own front garden.
After that, we met often. For the first few times, he simply stared at me with those frightening eyes, and the whole time I felt myself wanting to run away. When I stopped being scared of him, he started to talk to me. We forged something like a friendship. He asked me about myself a lot. When we met, the first thing he would do was ask me about my day. He showed me the place I was walking to, on the morning of the nineteenth of January. It was our place. Only we knew about it. It was one of the secrets he told me, one of many. Sometimes, it felt like I was the only person he spoke to. It certainly sounded like he didn’t use his voice much, hoarse and quiet as it was.
***
After my long stillness, I had decided to turn and run away. I put my foot onto the road, to cross it again and go back to the train station. On the fence on the other side of the road, a crow sat pecking the wood. It was by itself, even it was even the same crow. I froze again, and as I stared the bird turned its ugly head to look at me. I remembered from my book that crows were thought to be black because they’d rolled in ashes, or because Apollo had cursed them for allowing his mistress to cheat on him. I closed my eyes again, and took another step. Then the crow let out a loud harsh caw. I don’t know why I was so scared, but that fear made me turn the other way and run. So, I continued my journey out of sheer irrational terror. And as I ran, I remembered that last day.
***
We were sat in our place, talking to each other. He watched me carefully, because for the first time in a long while I had asked him a question. He had a black eye, and I recalled asking him how he had gotten it. He, as skilfully as his parents, avoided the question and instead told me a story. I remember most everything he has ever said to me;
“It was late, and my parents were in bed. So were my little angel and the eldest sibling.” When he spoke of his family, it was always in this manner: indifference about his parents, sarcastic bitterness towards his brother and sister, especially towards his brother. Sometimes it seemed he loathed them. I often wonder if they had different parents, but he assured me that they were related by blood.
“I went outside and sat in the garden. Couldn’t come and see you, because you were sleeping. So I sat outside, away from mother’s flower beds at the end of the garden. Then my darling brother leaned out from the angel’s window and shouted at me to get inside. The neighbours would see and talk about the weird boy from number sixty three. I wasn’t by myself though. I never am, not with my friend in my hands. He got annoyed when I ignored him, and started to laugh at me. Again. I let my friend play in the bush with the angel’s hedgehog. That shut him up.”
His friend. Matches, a lighter, and those two small pieces of flint: they were all the same friend. He spoke about fire like it was a person, a person that spoke to him and caressed him and loved him. His eyes became brighter and scarier when he talked about it. I tried to get him back on topic, asking him again how he got his black eye.
“Father dearest hit me.” He laughed at my surprise. His father was a kind, gentle man. I’d never even seen him shout. He was very gentle with both of his children, as far as I had seen. Those fierce eyes narrowed when I told him as much. He stood up and lifted his shirt. His pale skin was a mass of scars and burns. I’d told him a lot of times to be careful with the fire he played with. I told him again then, my eyes on the burns. He laughed and stalked away.
***
That was two weeks before the nineteenth. He hadn’t come to see me since. I got to our place, and there he was. Sat on the little hillock, a lit match in his hands. As I sat next to him, he smiled at the flames.
“I knew you’d come.”
Then I heard the sirens wailing. I told him to run away, and he laughed, high and clear.
Salamander
‘Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.’
It was seven o’clock in the morning of the nineteenth of January, and this is the end of my tale. I walked the usual paths to the train station in much the same way as I had always done, if at a slightly slower pace. The wind fought me with every step, and when my foot was planted it seemed it struggled twice as hard to regain the ground it had already lost. The air was cold, grey and it wickedly hinted at holding rain, if not worse. On that morning I remember thinking that such weather was a god’s curse against the British. The cold crystallised even my breath, and stole it away. Little did I know that my fears about curses were going to become far too literally realised.
But I digress. My name is Melisa Scarpton, and every morning I catch a train from a quaint little station on the outskirts of a city. The exact identity of that city is not important, and I am bound by a combination of law and my own desire for peace to exercise some level of secrecy. The route I took that day is the route I still take now. It takes me past a field occupied by a very disgruntled pair of horses. On the morning of the nineteenth they looked at me glumly as I passed, and the wind snapped their chestnut manes and tails around furiously, fanning them into a blaze of rough hair. I could spare them only a brief moment of pity, as time was pressing. I hurried on through the wind that they were forced to stand and endure. Finally reaching the station, I went inside to find the little room irritatingly crowded for so early in the morning. Four travellers and the sour old ticket guard might not seem much to you, but to me it was far too many people. Seizing a copy of the free newspaper from the already messed up pile, I left the tiny room and elected to wait on the platform.
My train station was not old but recently redeveloped, in fact. They had, however, rebuilt and repainted it to look old. Thus I sat on a bench on a traditional looking platform that looked like it belonged in the countryside of seventy years ago. Every surface was charmingly painted wood; the signs were rustic and elegant. The effect was somewhat ruined by the electric lamps and large floodlights. And, of course, the huge metallic monsters that roared through the station every ten minutes. I watched one pass as I sat down; a giant red and grey behemoth that did not deign to slow down upon reaching my station. It was no doubt full of people that had no time to take a slower train and enjoy the world. They were far too important to give consideration to me and my problems. So they flew past in their man made miracle, to some distant place where urgent business awaited them. As they left, I glanced down at the newspaper lying previously untouched in my lap.
And suddenly the air didn’t seem so cold anymore.
A bleak black and grey image greeted me beneath an indecently bold and loud headline. A lump of charcoal had been burned into the front page of the newspaper, but it was huge, as big as a house. It was a house. Number sixty-three, St John’s Lane. It had been a lovely little home, bright, filled with life and laughter. The garden used to have flowers in it, and a little girl and her big brother would watch insects and birds and one little hedgehog wander through the rainbow jungle, whilst a pair of glowering eyes would watch them from an upstairs room.
Now it was gone. The flowers had been stripped of their colour, and the birds would not go there anymore, surely. No doubt the little hedgehog was dead too, and the ashes of his leafy nest would be mixed with his own, and those of the plants, the house. Four victims, the police report said. Four, not five. The cold air felt like nothing compared to the feeling that was slowly freezing my organs. It was as if I was being filled up from my feet upwards with ice water. I couldn’t tell then, and I still don’t know now, whether it was shame, fear, dread or hope. I did not feel sad, though. I was too numb to feel any emotion as humane as sorrow. I only knew selfish feelings at that time. The sorrow for a little girl in her bright blue dress, laughing and chasing pigeons, would come later. Much later.
Four victims, five family members.
The police suspected arson. I remember thinking ‘if I had known before then, perhaps I could’ve done something’. Well, the truth is, I did know. I watched that fire burn long before it was actually started. I watched it consume and destroy something that I could not save. The officer in charge was begging witnesses to come forward. I couldn’t have done anything. But I did know, long before that cold morning. And I knew something else, too on that morning, the morning of the nineteenth of January. As my train lumbered into the pretty station and collapsed onto the platform, I stood. The paper slid from my lap as six people wandered out to board the train. A few of them looked at me, I think, but at the time I didn’t notice. I walked out of the station like an automaton, my feet somehow managing to follow a path that I did not know nearly as well as the station path. A pair of crows that sat on the fence, the chestnut horses in their lonely field. Everything seemed to watch me leave. The train pulled out of the station, but I wasn’t on it. I was going somewhere else. It then occurred to me that the wind had died down.
I knew exactly where to find him.
***
I walked and it seemed that those two crows followed me. At least, as I walked to our place, there were two crows on the fence, in the trees, flying low in the air. I remember reading about crows, and how they are omens of death and doom. It frightened me for some reason, having those beady wicked eyes watching my journey. It was a path I knew well. We walked it every day, though never together. I squeezed my eyes shut, as one of the crows strutted along the fence next to me, and I walked a little faster. My feet seemed to dance over the path as if it was ice, and the wind hurried me along, forcing me forward. It was one of the few things that stopped me from turning around, and running in the opposite direction. The whole world drove me on.
I heard a rustle of feathers, and put my hands over my eyes. I escaped the crows, but not the memories that lit the corners of my head, taunting me, accusing me.
***
We’d just moved in across the road. It was a sleepy little country street. Everyone and everything was normal, and in their perfect places. My parents walked over paving and tarmac, practically dragging me with them, through the door and into our new neighbours’ home. Four laughing, happy faces greeted us. A normal family. The little girl had found a hedgehog, she said, and would I like to see? My mother remarked that I would very much like to see. Thus I was dragged off again, by a little cherub in a bright blue dress. Her brother watched us from a few steps behind. He was laughing at the girl’s insistence, in a conventional, handsome way.
I know what you think I was thinking, or at least, I think I know. But I’m not one of those girls who insist on everything being different and interesting. Certainly not as different as they would soon come to be. I think it’s important for you to know how normal this family was, you see, so that you don’t think they abused him. They didn’t. He was always that way.
We went out into the garden, all full of flowers in neat beds, and at the end there was some scrubby brush, where I was informed we were going. This was the domicile of the little hedgehog. We walked over, all three of us, and said hello. He was curled up into a little ball of bristles, hidden from the daylight by the leaves that clung to him. His name was Spikey, apparently, and the little girl held her breath as she watched him. Her brother watched his sister with as much tenderness as she watched the sleeping hedgehog. I felt like an outsider, though I had been invited on this little adventure. It seemed to me that I was looking through a window onto an incredibly private scene that shouldn’t be seen outside the family. I turned away, so I could stop thinking of myself as a voyeur.
And that is when I saw him for the first time. He really was staring out of a window, watching me watching them. Though the garden was large, and he was far away, I could see him perfectly. Dark hair that fell around his pale face, making a frame for the white skin that in turn framed his eyes. His eyes are the most perfect expression of him, windows to the soul, like that old expression says. They are black, but they glow from within, shining with passion, and intensity, fury and malice. He stared at me, and I stared at him, until the two people behind me took me by the hands and led me inside.
That was when I learned, from the chirpy account of the matriarch, that this middle class couple had three children, not two. I thought it was fair to assume that he was the third; hiding in an upstairs room did not seem to be behaviour befitting a guest, after all. My mother asked where their second son was, and they said he was out with friends. That was a lie, not just because he was on the first floor of their house, but because going out with friends was something he had never done before. So they were lying, and I never figured out why.
Then I discovered something even more curious. There were no pictures of him, not as a baby, toddler, child, or teenager. When my father asked how old the boy was, the family smiled and asked how old I was, and that led us down a meandering path of schools, friends and hobbies that never brought us back to the original question. The little girl sat on her older brother’s lap for the whole time we were there. She wriggled at first, but he put his hands on her waist and then she sat still, and the smile left her young face for the first time. It was only briefly, only slightly, and moments later it returned, shining brighter than ever. But I always remembered that. The mind focuses on the strangest, most unimportant details, I guess.
***
I was forced out of my reverie by the loud bleating of a car horn. I was in the middle of the road that marked the halfway point of my journey. A woman sat behind the wheel of a Ford something-or-other was shouting at me, waving her fist. Her face was bright red. I stumbled over the road and she drove off, still shouting and honking her horn. I watched her leave from the other side of the road. I watched her a long time after she’d driven out of my sight. The wind had died down, and I had nothing driving me on. I stayed there for a long time, staring into the midst of nothing, waiting for my mind to stop arguing with itself. I wanted to keep going until I got to our place, but it took me some time to convince myself again that this was a good thing. As I waited, I pulled out my phone and looked at it for a long while, my thumb hovering over the last number, undecided. Nothing in my mind was certain, at that moment.
***
Before I go on, I should explain how we came to know each other without a pane of glass between us. Beneath his window, trailing down the wall to the ground was a slash of red ivy. He told me he had always been a good climber, and that the ivy was safer for him to climb down than the stairs within his house. This was one of the few times he ever bragged about any skill he possessed. It wasn’t that he was humble; he just never spoke about himself much. Well, on that first day, he climbed down and followed me home, watching where I lived. When I got into my own room, and looked out my own window, I saw him staring up at me from my own front garden.
After that, we met often. For the first few times, he simply stared at me with those frightening eyes, and the whole time I felt myself wanting to run away. When I stopped being scared of him, he started to talk to me. We forged something like a friendship. He asked me about myself a lot. When we met, the first thing he would do was ask me about my day. He showed me the place I was walking to, on the morning of the nineteenth of January. It was our place. Only we knew about it. It was one of the secrets he told me, one of many. Sometimes, it felt like I was the only person he spoke to. It certainly sounded like he didn’t use his voice much, hoarse and quiet as it was.
***
After my long stillness, I had decided to turn and run away. I put my foot onto the road, to cross it again and go back to the train station. On the fence on the other side of the road, a crow sat pecking the wood. It was by itself, even it was even the same crow. I froze again, and as I stared the bird turned its ugly head to look at me. I remembered from my book that crows were thought to be black because they’d rolled in ashes, or because Apollo had cursed them for allowing his mistress to cheat on him. I closed my eyes again, and took another step. Then the crow let out a loud harsh caw. I don’t know why I was so scared, but that fear made me turn the other way and run. So, I continued my journey out of sheer irrational terror. And as I ran, I remembered that last day.
***
We were sat in our place, talking to each other. He watched me carefully, because for the first time in a long while I had asked him a question. He had a black eye, and I recalled asking him how he had gotten it. He, as skilfully as his parents, avoided the question and instead told me a story. I remember most everything he has ever said to me;
“It was late, and my parents were in bed. So were my little angel and the eldest sibling.” When he spoke of his family, it was always in this manner: indifference about his parents, sarcastic bitterness towards his brother and sister, especially towards his brother. Sometimes it seemed he loathed them. I often wonder if they had different parents, but he assured me that they were related by blood.
“I went outside and sat in the garden. Couldn’t come and see you, because you were sleeping. So I sat outside, away from mother’s flower beds at the end of the garden. Then my darling brother leaned out from the angel’s window and shouted at me to get inside. The neighbours would see and talk about the weird boy from number sixty three. I wasn’t by myself though. I never am, not with my friend in my hands. He got annoyed when I ignored him, and started to laugh at me. Again. I let my friend play in the bush with the angel’s hedgehog. That shut him up.”
His friend. Matches, a lighter, and those two small pieces of flint: they were all the same friend. He spoke about fire like it was a person, a person that spoke to him and caressed him and loved him. His eyes became brighter and scarier when he talked about it. I tried to get him back on topic, asking him again how he got his black eye.
“Father dearest hit me.” He laughed at my surprise. His father was a kind, gentle man. I’d never even seen him shout. He was very gentle with both of his children, as far as I had seen. Those fierce eyes narrowed when I told him as much. He stood up and lifted his shirt. His pale skin was a mass of scars and burns. I’d told him a lot of times to be careful with the fire he played with. I told him again then, my eyes on the burns. He laughed and stalked away.
***
That was two weeks before the nineteenth. He hadn’t come to see me since. I got to our place, and there he was. Sat on the little hillock, a lit match in his hands. As I sat next to him, he smiled at the flames.
“I knew you’d come.”
Then I heard the sirens wailing. I told him to run away, and he laughed, high and clear.
Also, if I'm on the right track, does he hate his siblings for covering it up with lies and going against the truth, putting on happy faces? And maybe the others two get punished if the middle son goes out, or so? Dunno, again, very well written and a great read 
