Jake hesitated. The pause in his response was born of simple fear; terror of going near the body, and exhaustion and a whole heap of other emotions.
“Please,” said Carl and the crack in his voice made Jake realise how near to the end his brother was. He softened.
“I’m coming,” he said.
The smell in the shed was worse now; sweat, wet earth and something else, something horrible, sweetish-sour and fetid. Jake put his hand over his face.
“I know,” said Carl tiredly. “Believe me, it’s better now that it’s covered up. Come on, let’s get the boards back.”
They bent wearily to their task. Dawn was just around the corner, a pale greyish glimmer beginning to stain the darkness. They hammered the nails back as softly as they could and stood up, moving like old men. Jake felt old. He put a dirty hand up to his sweat-stiffened hair, wondering if he’d gone grey overnight, as people were said to do.
They walked out into the gradually lightening garden. A few birds were beginning to sound their tentative, early-morning notes and Jake listened for a moment, almost swaying with tiredness. He was seeing things only hazily, blinking through a fog of exhaustion. Beside him, Carl clicked the padlock shut and tested the door of the shed. Then he stood by his brother for a moment, looking at the pearly dawn light and hearing the cool, liquid notes of the birdsong. The two of them stood silently, leaning against one another, too tired to move. Then at a ‘come on’ from Carl, they began to walk back to the house, stumbling groggily through the dew-soaked grass, walking slowly back across the garden to where Veronica waited for them in the silent house.
In the kitchen, Carl put a hand out to them both as they stood there, earth-smeared, shattered, swaying like zombies.
“Leave your clothes here on the floor,” he said. “I’ll take care of them. Have a hot shower and get to bed. And after this night, we never, ever mention any of this again. Right?”
“Right,” Veronica whispered.
Jake looked into his brother’s brown eyes, ringed in shadow, laced with tiny threads of blood. Eyes just like his. He saw the command and recognised it, but he saw something else that he’d never seen before – a wordless appeal. He felt a bone-deep chill take hold of him and yet there was relief there too, in the yielding to the inevitable. They were in this together, from this moment forward.
Jake took a deep breath. “Right,” he said and then turned away from them both, to begin the long, weary slog up the stairs to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Their vow of silence held. In the weeks that followed, they spoke of many things but Candice Stanton was not one of them. Jake went to work, came home, went to bed, got up the next morning and went to work. The dull routine of his days helped a little; it gave him something to focus on. It didn’t help much. The routine couldn’t help with the constant undercurrent of fear that ran through his days like a poisonous thread. It drove him from his bed in the mornings, to stand shivering under the shower. It was with him last thing at night, crowding his mind until the sleeping pills he was taking nightly began to wipe his thoughts away. He began to dread the landing, and the walk down the stairs, thinking of Candice’s head hitting the tiled floor, remembering the sound it made. After a while, he could only make the journey downstairs with his eyes shut, holding onto the banister and feeling for each step with his feet. He avoided walking on the cracked tile.
His work suffered. Luckily, the company was going through some troubled times and had no time to waste tracking each individual employee. Jake considered getting a long-term sick note but rejected the idea. The thought of being at Fever Street day after day, knowing what lay under the shed, less than forty feet from the house… it made him shudder.
By November, it was a bit – a little bit - easier. The days were short, the light draining from the sky at four in the afternoon, the sky gloomy and ragged with clouds. From the kitchen window, Jake could see almost nothing of the garden, just the ragged edge of the lawn, and the shed was hidden entirely from view. Those evenings, when the lamp light shone soft and golden, with the television murmuring quietly in the corner of the living room; when Veronica curled herself into the corner of the sofa to read her magazines and Jake could sit near her; when Carl was working late and it was just the two of them, being quiet and still together, he could almost manage to forget. Almost.
It was the dreams that were the worst. Almost nightly, they waited for him to slip into Temazepam’d unconsciousness. The drugs would stupefy him for four hours and then in the tail end of the night, in the coldest part of the night, the dreams would stealthily gather in the pit of his brain, ebbing into his unconscious. They were confused scrimmages – scraps of memory, images of desire. Once he dreamed that Candice Stanton was walking up the stairs, inexorably, unstoppable. He’d turned to get away, moving as if wading through treacle, in that dreadful way that dreams have of slowing movement, of being unable to get away. Then he’d woken in his own bed, drenched with sweat, trembling – turned, and found Candice lying next to him, her shattered head resting on his pillow. He’d really woken then, screamed himself awake with a sound that woke the others. He knew they were awake because as he lay there, feeling his heart thud away against the walls of his chest, he heard them whispering outside in the corridor. But neither one came in, or knocked, and in the morning, as he sat grey-faced and baggy eyed in the kitchen, neither one mentioned it.
The weeks passed. Christmas came and went, the usual day of so-called celebration at their father’s house, false smiles and making an early escape as possible. Veronica and Carl went out for New Year but Jake stayed in, working his way through a bottle of vodka, quickly enough to ensure he passed out at two minutes past midnight.
Spring became a hint, a whisper of warmth on the February breezes. Jake went to work, came home, went to work again. The dreams began to become a little less frequent but no less terrifying in their intensity. He took to staring out at the shed, just glimpsed from the bathroom window at the back of the house. The branches of the trees surrounding the shed grew buds, became filmed with a lacy green haze. The leaves grew thicker, hiding the roof from his gaze. The grass in the back garden grew slowly, inexorably, uncut for months.
And then, one day at the very end of June, Jake couldn’t get out of bed at all. He opened his eyes to the ceiling, to another day of this crashing, awful, unending nightmare, and he’d shut them again. He couldn’t move. He dismissed thoughts of work, of Jake and Veronica. He couldn’t move. He shut his eyes and slept again. When he opened them five hours later, he took two sleeping tablets and slept again. Dimly, as he drifted to unconsciousness, he heard the phone ringing. It was still ringing when he woke up in the early evening. He heard it picked up and Veronica’s voice. He shut his eyes again, drifted.
His bedroom door opened. Jake forced his eyes open. Carl stood in the doorway, looking at him, unsmiling.
“What’s up with you?”
Jake considered.
“Tired,” he said, after a moment.
“No shit. You’ve been in bed all day. Your work rang – V told them you were sick.”
“I am sick.”
Carl walked closer to the bed. Jake didn’t look at him. He stared up at the ceiling.
“Are you going to get up?”
Jake was silent.
Carl sighed.
“Have it your way.”
Jake closed his eyes again as Carl left the room.
He stayed in bed for a week. He didn’t wash. Veronica brought him cups of tea and plates of toast that he ate, grudgingly. She opened the window of his room and he waited until she was out of the room and then shut it again. He kept the curtains drawn.