Brood

By R.W. Redwillow

The whiplash of lightening preceded the boom of the rolling thunder, as I raced down the dark hallway into the spare room, looking frantically for a place to hide. Seeing a wide and sturdy cupboard directly in front of me, I threw open its doors. Then, as my mind finally registered what I was actually seeing, a blue looking, not breathing, human baby, a cuckoo clock began chiming stupidly somewhere in a nearby room. Then the scrape of slippers hit my ears, as Karen, Vanessa and Joanne burst through the doorway and began jabbing me with their bony elbows, before becoming very still, as they too, stared at the forsaken, lifeless newborn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.W. Redwillow
• Release date: Mar 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370268016

Book preview

93

Brood

By R.W. Redwillow

Smashwords Edition

copyright 2017, R.W. Redwillow

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Contents

Part 1

1. Amber’s Story: The Beginning

2. 1996: Amber’s Story Continued

3. Hello Dolly

4. Kylie’s story

5. Amber’s story continues

6. Companions on a Journey

7. Edmund’s Story

8. Kylie’s Story Continued

9. Amber’s Story Continues

10. Edmund’s story continues

11. Kylie’s story Continues

12. Amber’s Story Continued

13. Edmund’s Story Continues

14. Kylie’s story continues

15. Amber’s Story Continued

16. Edmund’s story continued

17. Kylie’s Story Continues

18. Amber’s Story Continues

Part 2

1. Edmunds Story

2. Kylie’s Story Continued

3. Amber’s story continued

4. Harley has his say

5. Amber’s story continues

6. Kylie’s story continues

7. Amber’s story continues

8. The private Investigators Story

9. Edmund’s Story Continues

10. Amber’s Story. The End.

11. Kylie Signs Off

Amber’s Story: The Beginning

Part 1

Chapter 1

1992

The whiplash of lightening preceded the boom of the rolling thunder, as I raced down the dark hallway into the spare room, looking frantically for a place to hide. Seeing a wide and sturdy cupboard directly in front of me, I threw open its doors. Then, as my mind finally registered what I was actually seeing, a blue looking, not breathing, human baby, a cuckoo clock began chiming stupidly somewhere in a nearby room. Then the scrape of slippers hit my ears, as Karen, Vanessa and Joanne burst through the doorway and began jabbing me with their bony elbows, before becoming very still, as they too, stared at the forsaken, lifeless newborn.

Silence strummed in my ears, and then, there was a violent crack of thunder, like the world was splitting in two. The walls seemed to close in dangerously and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, and my mind was a roaring vacuum.

Abruptly the cupboard door whooshed closed, slammed, and we all turned around like automatons, to see sharp, green eyes upon us; her thin lips parted in what I suppose was a type of smile.

‘Come on, the game’s finished. We’re having a séance, now’.

The others ran off gleefully, while I faced Kylie, who had an ‘I dare you’ face, trained on me. My mouth opened and then closed again. The moment passed and I knew that I had failed some personal test.

I thought of those words that my English teacher had said at assembly, for reasons I didn’t understand, before she resigned, and just before she got the hell out of that stifling room, where eyes had been trained on her like a sniper’s gun: ‘The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.’ Later, I looked these words up at the library and I found that they belonged to Albert Einstein, and suddenly, I knew what they meant and that I was guilty.

Until that moment, I had been drifting along. Certainly I had been perplexed with life and not quite sure of all the social machinations that others seemed to understand so easily, but I had been puzzled and passive. Now the ground had shifted under me and I was flummoxed by this turn of events. I was shocked out of my skin and I knew I had to do something about it.

When I got back to Kylie’s bedroom the séance was underway. And as I stepped into the stuffy room, which smelt of fermenting old socks and cheap perfume, the light was switched off. I could hardly see a thing. It was steamy and airless in the room and black as the inside of a witch’s hat. I felt tense and nervy, as the other girls tittered all around me, like feeding birds at dusk.

Someone pushed me down roughly onto a stool with a fluffy top, and I heard the hard drumming of rain on the roof; then the chanting began, as Vanessa lit an old hurricane lantern, which swiftly set forth a nauseating vapour.

‘Oh spirits come to us if you can hear us’. Over and over again their monotone voices chanted, as the thunder boomed and cracked and the rain pelted down; soon, my brain was turning into baby food, and I was feeling very heavy, dull and tired. In this hypnotic state, I don’t think that seeing a ghost, would have surprised me.

It wasn’t scary at all, the séance, but my mind kept throbbing with the flashing image of that inanimate, bluish baby, and I found that I couldn’t move. I felt pinned down, and yet, inside me there existed a vortex of confusion, of apathy and shock, and the feeling that life as I knew it had gone off road. The rain too, was a real cacophony now: an orchestra of clashing sounds, which seemed to be beating and pummelling at the house.

A blaze of light zigzagged across the room, as someone opened and slipped out of the door, and still, I sat just there, trying to decide how I, a meek nerd lacking in confidence, should deal with this bizarre and disturbing situation. My head pulsed to the rhythm of doubt and indecision, and sweat trickled down my back, as the room became even more suffocating.

Finally after about an hour, or maybe five minutes, someone switched the lights back on, and as I blinked and buzzed in the florescent glow, I noticed that Joanne was clopping about the room, weeping and wringing her hands. She looked pale, almost greenish.

‘We haven’t done it for long enough. We’ve got to keep trying’, she cried.

As I sat and watched Joanne tripping about the crowded room, I became spellbound by a rip in her thin, washed-out nightie, which had been mended with tiny, red stiches. I kept staring at those red stiches, as though mesmerised; as though, those red stiches might impart answers, or might have the power to spirit me away.

Outside the downpour continued, but harder and heavier now and I pictured the heart of a giant monster, about to explode.

‘We’re finished’, Kylie stated, from where she stood leaning beside the now open door, with her lip curled in a mix of glee and distain and the backlight from the kitchen lending her a weird, blue radiance.

I looked back at Joanne, who was still going about the room, and wringing her hands. Joanne’s father had died a couple of years ago, and she was always taking about him, and working a story about him into any conversation. It was obvious that Joanne really missed her father and that she hadn’t got over his death. That is, if you ever really get over the death of someone you love. Perhaps we just anesthetise our pain, the best way we can, and then, we return, zombie-like, onto the treadmill of life. Anyway, I remembered now, how, Kylie had said, more than once, when Joanne wasn’t about, that Joanne’s father was a drunk, and that he had been in jail for something really bad. I didn’t think that this was true, because my dad had worked with Joanne’s dad, and he’d gone to his funeral. Joanne’s dad, he said, had been sick for a very long time. That’s what I knew.

I found myself standing up then, and before I knew it, I’d blurted out, ‘we found a dead baby in the cupboard’. Just like that. I looked at Karen, Vanessa and Joanne. They looked blank, and then, their eyes in unison, flicked over to where Kylie stood, dressed in an oversized man’s t-shirt, with her head on the side, and arms crossed. Kylie said nothing, but her eyes were hard as gun metal.

I heard the wind whipping up now, lashing the rain at the windows and bellowing madly about the eaves and the chimney pot.

‘You’re so full of it’, snarled Karen, as she bared her teeth at me. I felt like I’d been hit with a bullet. Karen had seen the baby and I could feel the bruise on my side, where her elbow had jabbed me, like a knife.

‘Let’s see this….er…dead baby then’, purred the golden haired Stephanie, who was parading around in silky, pink, baby doll pyjamas, which showed how physically developed she was compared to the rest of us 14 year olds.

So with me in the lead, we matched off, all ten of us, into the spare room, and as the other girls crowded around like a football scrum, I slowly opened the heavy, timber, cupboard door, which smelt of mothballs and mildew.

Abruptly, the rain stopped and all I could hear was the low wailing of the wind.

But there was nothing there. Not a sheet, not a towel and certainly no dead baby. And from that moment on, I became a pariah. This was to be the first and last sleepover party of my teenage years, and the start of me wondering if I was really crazy, and if that dead baby had been a creation of my own warped imagination.

In reality, I had only been invited to Kylie’s sleepover because I was friends with Vanessa. Vanessa and I had gone to primary school together, and when we started high school, we had naturally clung together, in those early scary days, when the older and bigger kids would shove newbies’ heads down toilets and lob water filled condoms at us, from the upper levels near the science labs.

I remember too, that during those first frightening weeks of high school, I felt like I had been hurled into a dystopian Mad Max world. I was shocked, I was fearful, and I was outraged. But after a time, I habituated to my new reality. You have to, if you don’t have the power to change things. And so, without really thinking about it, this world became normal to me, which is very warped and disturbing, when you think about it.

Vanessa, though, lately, had gravitated toward Kylie’s group, and I had just drifted along, hanging about on the fringes, the merest thread of friendship holding Vanessa and I together. Since that sleepover and ‘the baby incident’, as I called it in my head, that thread had snapped, and