Chapter Five

  “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, I smell the blood of a lesbi-an~” I hear through the fog of sleep, my eyes barely being able to open as I try my best to regain thought. A dream… it must be a dream still… maybe I have a few hours left until I have to get up… maybe someone else will want to use this space, it's not mine after all… With aggravation at the voice I curl up further into a ball, not letting it disturb me, not letting my dreams out. That voice haunting me since the day I left.

  I feel fingers through my hair, from the front to the back, dragging against my skull gently, for a second I dont think it’s real, can’t. My eyes snapping open, I throw my arms wide, having done enough training to defend myself from creeps, and had enough encounters to know better. I catch a wrist in my hand and pull them over, at the same time rolling my body around them to catch them off guard and pin them.

  “Kyaa. Jane, please, not so hard.” A monotone voice responds in fake distress as I look down on my intruder in panic.

  Beneath me, pinned to the bed is a dead eyed woman, a mole underneath her quivering bottom lip as she stares up at me in shock, although it doesn't make it into her eyes. Those same cold dead eyes that told me I wasn't worth leaving for. I push back off the bed, my legs nearly buckling under me in confusion as I hit the back wall, still not having time to properly wake up and instead using my adrenaline and panic to get me there. “Fuck! Ange-Angelica. What are you—Why are you here?!”

  She lifts herself up slowly, her long bck doll like hair falling around her shoulders as she looks at her wrist, a redness starting to come through. “Huh… it looks like you did injure me… that's no way to treat an old friend.” She looks to me and leans her head slightly to the side in question. She was the same but so very different from the st time I saw her… She had grown up, in lots of ways, but that look, it was like she was watching prey.

  “Wh-what are you talking about?! You threw me away!” Fuck. Fuck fuck I didn’t want to see her, not yet, not. Ever. I try to stand and make my way to the door.

  “I am here because of the dead body Jane. As the leader of Night Rock City, is it my duty to check on such things. We are now missing a member of our community after all.” Her voice grated on me, more hollow than ever. As if she cares about someone dying in the community, she could barely care about me. I can't see her changing much in such little time.

  “Bullshit.” She raises her eyebrows together, as if trying to emute more shock, before lowering them as she looks at me, then shrugs softly, the bck dress around her body raising slightly as she does so, showing more of her body shape than I was willing to observe.

  “You are still the same Jane, I’m gd. Still as crass as well.” I see her hand go into her bag, before pulling out a small roll of bandages and start applying them, wrapping them slowly and uncoordinated around it, her face seeming to give in to small bouts of frustration as she does so, that brings me great pleasure. Then guilt. As I was the one who just caused such a thing, yet she didn't compin… not really.

  I move over and take it from her hand, she doesn't flinch or shy away, instead waiting expectantly as I readjust it and then tie it off with the hooks. Before stepping back and admiring my handiwork. Her voice travels to me slowly as she does the same. “My my… and here I thought you would have become less of a woman, than more.”

  I scoff and look away in anger, still feeling guilty, not wishing to hurt anyone, even if they hurt me first… besides… we were kids, but I wasn't here to start a new friendship with her, much less to chit chat, there was only one thing I wanted to know. “Angelic-“

  “Angel, please, you always used to call me Angel.”

  “No. Angelica.” She looks down slightly and I feel a tinge of something in my chest, probably annoyance as I continue” I need to know why your name was on the death certificate for my mother? She was a monster to me, and what, you were around her or something?” I say bluntly, knowing that asking her directly was the best way to get information out of her.

  She looks up at me, that same bnk stare, I look back, hoping to see any sense of emotion from them, like she once upon a time had there, even if it was just a flicker. “Monsters flock together, Jane. Isn't that something you always said?”

  I stare confused back at her, not knowing if she was admitting being around my mother or that she still considered herself a monster? Or… I repeat the words that I used to say to her everytime she told me she was a monster, but stop painfully at the end realizing what it always meant to me. “You can’t be a monster, you have always been my Ang…” I feel myself jerk into motion as I run out the door, hot tears burning through my flesh as I try to go as fast as I can, knocking into door after door as I try my best to escape.

  From behind me voices yell out, finally ending with, “Jane! Good luck on finding more murders!” Before I crash out into the sunlight. I hear a gasp as I seem to have startled someone, I hastily dig around for my keys, thankful to have left them in my pocket when I got into bed instead of having them on a side table. Ignoring any words flung my way I make it to my car, hyperventiting as I try to control myself. “N-number seven, get your shit in order, get your fucking shit in order Jane.” Breathing in and out deeply I grip the steering wheel, feeling the heat of the sun burning my skin as it baked while I was comfortable inside.

  The pain seems to help as I manage to get the air conditioning on, the cold air calming me further as I breathe in and out, in and out. Follow the list Jane, get out of this town. Leave this fucking pce. But you have to follow the list! I turn the keys one more time and feel the engine underneath me come to life, the vibrations helping me focus as I look straight ahead. This time no one demonic is waving at me, and certainly not Angelica. I brush away the snot as I look behind me and reverse out of the station, thankful that the house isn't that far away.

  I hear my phone vibrate multiple times as I’m traveling, not daring to look at them, knowing of the possibility of who it could be, not even with the certainty that it is. That's enough to scare me, my head throbbing as it pounds painfully in my chest.

  “You are stronger than this Jane! You dealt with corpses for two fucking years. This is nothing.” After five minutes of traveling down streets I barely remember, I seem to pick up on one that looks too familiar. A driveway, unkempt and going up for at least 10 meters, the rge white and blue house, a pce that was once full of shine and love, easily turned to dread. Even in the sunlight it was dirty, instead now looking more like a grey and bck thing, abandoned like a scruffy cat.

  Maybe I could make it look nice again… but do I even want to? Maybe her next owners can do that… even if it will cut the costs… not like I'm looking to care how much I sell it for. I go through the driveway and park halfway to the house, not wanting to enter it just yet, it feeling like something from a dream, or a nightmare. My own personal haunted house… more like a mansion… at least it would be considered such in another city.

  Going to the letter box I see that it is full, and soaked, the letters having stocked up for a while now. I try and check the dates on them but it all comes out faded or mushed. I pile them in my hand the best I can before deciding to take a look around, wanting to see what has changed in the st ten or so years.

  The grass doesn't seem to have been tended to in the st few months, a small forest beginning to sprout, only the pathway leading to the house is unaffected, being made of gravel, although life is starting to come through it slowly. I scoff at the amount of work that will need to be done to this pce, at the mess that she left for me.

  At the side of the house I find a soccer ball, old and defted, not something that was mine, someone kicked it over and didn't retrieve it maybe? Walking around the back of the house I see the old swing, the metal has corroded, the silvery metal from my childhood turning into a coarse brown, fking in the breeze, the swing no longer doing its own name sake as the rings have melded together.

  Turning around, I freeze, along the back of the house, in scraped off spray paint, weathered by the rain and seemingly pushed into the wood from old age is the word, ‘Witch’. I stare at it, the word garish, making the dirty white of the house seem even more dipidated by its presence. “Ugh… now all you would need is water damage, maybe some mold and presto, an unselble nightmare house.” I wade through the grass on the other side of the house, dismayed at everything I’m going to have to do to even closely get it up for selling, knowing that the money left over in my bank account, on top of the cost of moving everything down here from storage, is not going to be enough… and that's even without checking inside.

  Getting to the front door I take the envelope out of my back pocket, ripping it in half and dropping the keys into my empty hand, the other still full of soaking letters. A single key, its surface still shiny as if it hasn't been used before. A newly made one? What happened to the original? Okay. I breathe out in frustration, getting the locks redone. another thing for the house list. Fuck.

  I put the key in the lock and try to turn it, having to then push it in further. Yeah that’s a different key, fucking cut key, they are never as good as the originals! I groan in annoyance as the door gives way, a creaking noise following me as I heftily push it open, it seeming a lot heavier than it used to be, I stumble and fall inside slightly, marking the doorway before I even have a chance to look.

  The air inside is… musty, the ground covered in dust, like no one had really lived in the house for a while, i-it has only been a few weeks since my mother died… right? Ugh, I could have gotten more information if she wasn't there! To see the corpse my ass, she only exists now to torment me.

  I step through, my shoes seeming to mark the house as I walk, kicking up more dust than I can handle. I will have to thank Tommy for making me stay the night, as well as kick his ass for letting her anywhere near me, especially sleeping! I pause and take a deep breath trying to calm myself, instead ingesting what feels like years of dust. “Ahh!” I start coughing, my lungs filled with dust making it hard to breathe. I run to the back of the house and open as many windows as I can, at least all the windows I remember before throwing my head out of one of them and spitting and hacking up all the dust I can that has now found a home inside me.

  Trying to breathe once again, I manage to regain my footing, slowly but surely pulling myself back through the window. Nearly everything is as it was when I’d left, the windows bringing a tiny bit more life to the pce, although it still feels like a discarded corpse of the pce I once loved… and then feared.

  I explore slowly, taking it all in, the tv in the loungeroom still the same as when I left, I try turning it on and find that it still works, although the channels are all static, maybe the antenna is gone? I go to sit down in one of the seats and then hold myself, realising that it is just a death trap of dust waiting to happen.

  Everything about it screams foreign, but the same, thankfully making it hard to connect my memories to. It's just… a pce… not my home… it's too dead to be my home… where is the fakeness of it all, the hollowed out feelings I had for this pce. I look up the stairs to the second floor. Probably all up there… I should… No… I need to check it out, I didn't take much with me, just my legal documents and those pictures… the only things that mattered to me. I never had anything important, she made sure of that after dad left.

  I clear my throat again, this time in fear at what I will find, the master bedroom and mine up the stairs as it looms over me, each step looking bigger as I break the surface of the dust with my shoes. I try not to hold the handle as I move up it, not wanting to show that I was more here than I always am. Not wanting the house to remember me, just as I didn't really want to remember the house.

  Count the steps, Jane, count them to the top, twenty steps high, let your feet move as your brain distances itself from it. I mouth the numbers as my feet hit the cold squeaky staircase, focusing on just the numbers, leaving everything behind.

  I emerge at the top, it's dark, darker than I would have expected considering how bright it was outside. The windows are covered, not that I could notice from outside considering how grimy they were. I pick my phone out of my pocket and gnce at the screen finally. Thankfully only messages from Tommy, having taken down my details before I slept. I quickly flick through them, the first few of worry, then of apologies, then of questions, questions that I can only guess came because of words from her lips.

  I swipe them all away before activating the light on my phone, desperate to once again open some windows as the dust wafts through the air. I make a mental map of the house, trying to make sure I don’t go into some rooms that I wouldn't want to… at least not yet. First… any windows not in any rooms… m-maybe the bathroom if I get desperate enough to need to use it.

  The windows have newspapers hastily pstered across them, stuck up haphazardly with what I can only imagine is glue, the doors to the rooms are closed, which I can only be gd for, not wishing to look in, only wanting to do what I can for the moment. Pushing open each of the windows I feel a breeze flow through, helping me to actually breathe, then opening the bathroom I see that like the rest of the house, it has been unused for a long time, just… nothing, empty, one dust covered toilet roll on the hanger, and no more around. The window is the same as the others.

  I suddenly get the bright Idea to turn on the light, I do and to my own stupidity it illuminates the hallway enough that I can turn off my phone light, realising that I should have just done it from the start, considering I could turn the TV on, surely there is actual power, wow Jane, you’re doing great.

  Turning around and looking down the stairs is when I notice it, the rge scratches in the wood, gringly obvious now in the all encompassing light. I put my hand on them and feel how deep they are… maybe not scratches, something pushing on it, it isn’t… thin, but, there are dents all over this area, the wood itself pushed in or damaged the whole way up… could it have been from moving furniture? I had accidently made my own messes when moving a few times. Although I could certainly bme Denise for some of the more recent ones while we were together.

  Weird… but at least the house isn’t a hoarder’s paradise, if anything, there's less than I was expecting to find. All the dust is weird, like she wasn't here for ages before she passed… but I don't know anything about her death, she could have been in an old folks home letting this pce rot for all I know before she passed.

  I stand in front of the door to my old bedroom, trying my best to stay calm, knowing that If I can't overcome this part of the house, I will never be able to get through the rest. And I have a list, and not enough money to just abandon this pce like my mother did. I don’t breathe deep, knowing what happens when I do. And open the door. Turning the knob it squeaks, barely giving way as I put more and more effort, it almost cracking as rust falls from it, the door eventually giving way in a burst of dust and small wood chips.

  As the dust clears I look inside the room and find my panic growing, not because of the memories and pain that was inflicted on me in this room, but because it is clean, a perfect picture of the days before I left Night Rock City, while the rest of the house is dust covered and has been undisturbed for what feels like years.

  Someone has been in my room. How has someone been in my room?!