The Monster Man of Horror House (9 page)

“I
didn’t know about the sport when I gave it to her. I still thought I was
bargaining for our lives, so I paid her off with your medal and made it look
like a disappearance. I thought I was doing the right thing at the time,” I pleaded
wondering if this was a good time to tell him about the mattress cash he no longer
had either.

“So
you gave her my medal. And how exactly did you explain this benevolence to
her?” he asked.

“I…
I just made out that I was a Good Samaritan, intent on saving fallen women,” I
blarneyed, though this blarney barely made it past his eyebrows.

“Did
you indeed?” he flickered.

We
stood facing each other across the bed for a second or two before I decided to
fill the air in-between us with a little more hot air to distract my father from
reading between the lines.

“She
doesn’t know about us, she doesn’t have anything on us, we don’t have to worry
about her,” I promised.

“Don’t
we now?” he replied, chewing on the gristle out of my assurances before asking;
“And so what about Sergeant Crow?”

“Sergeant
Crow? Who’s he?”

“Sergeant
Crow is the fellow who’s just rang me. He’s holding your young strumpet at
Lincoln Police Station after she was arrested whilst attempting to pawn my VC.
It appears she had all the correct documentation and everything, but the
proprietor… well, let’s just say he had reservations she’d come about the award
on the slopes of Monte Casino.”

“The
police have her?” I shuddered, the blood immediately pooling in my ankles.

“Yes,
and they have a few questions too. So now I’m going to have to travel to
Lincoln, avail myself to their sniggering inquiries and attempt to convince
them that I gave her the medal myself,” he fumed, leaving out the part about
how
he was going to convince them of
this – more less
why
. “Stupid useless
boy!”

“I’m
sorry father, what can I do?” I submitted, already mentally packing my bags as
I paid lip service to my father’s tune.

“Yes….”
my father growled. “What
can
you do?”

I
let the question hang in the air for a few moments while I worked through my options.
As I say, most of them concerned getting the hell out of there just as soon as
my father turned his back. Evidently, my father had been working on a similar
strategy for when he asked me to:

“Pick
up those socks would you. My arthritis is playing up again,” I complied, only
to catch a glimpse of silk flashing behind me in the reflection of my dear
mother’s picture. My instincts took over and without fully understanding why, I
dropped to the floor just as the snare cut through the airspace my neck had moments
earlier vacated.

I
gasped as shock at my father’s attack, and even found time to call him a “dirty
bastard” before he was on top of me again, throwing himself at me as the tie whipped
free in his right hand. I lashed out with my feet, kicking him in the chest,
face and hands, anything I could connect with as I scrabbled backwards across
the room, but he was not to be dissuaded, slapping my shoes away and fighting
his way between my flailing legs.

“No
father! No!” I shrieked when he pinned my torso down with one hand, while
stirring his tie with the other in an effort to form a lasso.

It
was a bit extreme, my father’s reaction, and some might even say Victorian, but
I guess as soon as he realised I wasn’t the prodigy he thought I was, a quick
solution was called for. And when it came to murder, loose ends so often
knitted together to form noose ends.

“Please
father, wait…”

But
my father didn’t reply, he merely bore down on me with a murderous intent as he
concentrated on the task at hand and I have no doubt he would’ve wrung the life
out of me had my mother not come to my rescue once again.

In
the struggle, I must’ve kicked the side of the dressing table, for the glass of
her picture frame shattered when it hit the floorboards. I sacrificed half my defensive
strength to reach into the shards and by some miracle found the glass dagger my
mother had thrown me. This in turn quickly found my father’s face and I slashed
it backwards and forwards until he tumbled away with his hands across his eyes.

“You
tyke!!!” he hollered, now beyond fury, and he thrust his hand into the top
drawer of his dresser to pull out his old service revolver.

Bullets
blasted out the plasterwork behind me as I threw myself at the door, and the
landing banisters suffered a similar fate, splintering to matchwood as he let
loose the rest of the barrel at his errant son.

It’s
amazing the decisions you can make in the blink of an eye, but instinct once
again forewarned me that I wouldn’t make it to the front door if I ran down the
stairs – not even if I hurled myself at them headfirst – for my
father would have a clear shot at me, so instead I launched myself at the
nearest door, crashing through it a millisecond before my father’s final .45
did the same.

As
luck would have it – bad luck that is – this door shielded a second
staircase, though this one led up to the eaves. There was only one way up and
one way down from the attic, so I’d be trapped once I was up there, but as my
father slung his now empty sidearm and wrapped the silk tie around his knuckles
behind me, I realised that my first concern should be with the next few seconds
of my life rather than the minutes or hours of whatever future I had after that,
because if I didn’t get a move on I wouldn’t have such problems to ponder for
much longer. So I took to the stairs, heading into the low cottage roof and the
shadows of the attic.

My
father was hot on my heels, scaling the stairs two at a time and intent on
cornering me in amongst the cobwebs, but this was trickier than he’d bargained
on. See, the floor of the attic wasn’t boarded out up here; my father had made
a start on it several years earlier but contrary to recent evidence he wasn’t much
good with his hands and as such the attic sported only two fixed floorboards, a
pile of planks and a box of nails to show for several years of good intentions.
In place of a floor, the lath and plaster ceilings of the rooms below crisscrossed
beneath the sturdy joists, ready to suck our ankles through should we be careless
enough to lose a footing. I recognised the dangers of charging around up here,
but I rushed into the darkness nevertheless, desperate to put as much distance
as I could from my beloved father’s cold embrace.

I
wobbled across the beams, making for the tiny gable window at the far end of
the attic, but it was so slender, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to squeeze through
it even if I tried. Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to, what with
it being thirty feet up in the air and above a picket fence. But it overlooked
the road outside and in an afternoon of increasing desperations, I was ready to
start screaming from windows.

My
father took to the beams behind me as I flung the window open.

“Help!
Help! For the love of God help! My father’s trying to kill me!” I sang across
the fields, but my pleas were in vain. We lived half a mile from the nearest
neighbours and while they’d never murdered any young men themselves, they’d manned
the polls for Harold MacMillan’s Tories during the last election, so I wasn’t
entirely sure how sympathetic they’d be with my plight.

“Goddamn
it boy, be silent will you!” my father roared, closing in on me with every faltering
step.

I
made my escape, dashing back across the beams as I tried to circle around him,
only to strike my head on a roofing truss as my father herded me into a corner.

“Please
father, I love you,” I tried, seeing if I could wrong foot the old bastard with
that empty gush, but papa was nothing if not a wily old spook when his blood
was up and he dismissed my entreaties with a snap of silk.

“You
will submit, boy, you will submit. It is your father’s will,” he snarled,
paying himself more than a few compliments on my account there.

“Please
father, I won’t tell,” I promised, and I was serious too. I still had my head
in the noose for being there when he’d murdered Juney. I was an accessory after
the fact no longer – I was an accessory all the way along.

And
that
was
a Capital crime.

“You
lied to me, boy. You lied to me about ‘the sport’ and that cannot be tolerated.
You’ve shown that you cannot be trusted. You’ve shown that I can not trust you,”
he bellowed, almost mournfully, as if I’d somehow forced his hand. “You’ve left
me no choice.”

He
closed in on me some more, straddling the beams as he forced me back towards
the window once more.

“The
girl! The girl will know,” I warned, clutching onto increasingly brittle
straws.

“You
needn’t worry about her,” my father assured me. “No one will ever hear from her
again once I bail her out of custody.”

He
was now almost on top of me, but height and age were on my side – or
rather, a lack of either – for while my father was forced to stoop like
Fagin against the sloping timbers, I was able to squeeze into the angles with a
suppleness my father hadn’t known since the days of Neville’s peace plan.

“You’re
just making this harder on yourself, boy,” my father fumed as he scuffed his
forehead and cracked the bedroom ceiling with a careless footfall. “Son of a
bitch!”

“Son
of a
bastard
more like,” I taunted,
daring him deeper into the corners to come and get me in the hope he might jam
himself against the joists and allow me to make a break for the stairs, but he
was no mug my father, and accordingly kept me corralled me into the furthest
reaches of the roof.

“It
didn’t have to come to this,” my father lamented. “I only wanted what was best
for you.”

“No
you never,” I replied, finding a courage to back-chat my father that I could
have only dreamt about before he started trying to kill me. “You just wanted me
to be like you because you’re sick!”

“We’re
all sick,” he replied, almost reasonably. “This whole world is. We lost nigh on
half a million good men cutting the cancers out of Europe only to find them on
our own doorsteps when we returned.” My father drifted a couple of beams to the
left, circling around an oak support and neared me by a few more feet. I pushed
back correspondingly, but my head was already meeting roof. I was running out
of space in which to retreat.

My
father continued. “So I do what I can to clean up my little corner of the
world. For every whore I kill, I dissuade another dozen of our daughters from indulging
in such depravity.”

“You
are a good
sport
,” I sneered.

My
father glared at that. “Yes, we call it a ‘sport’, because it requires guile,
cunning and nerve, just as hunting foxes, stags or enemy snipers does, but at
the end of the day they are vermin. And vermin can’t be tolerated.”

“Much
like liars,” I reminded him, now so tightly crammed into the eaves that I
barely had the room to scowl.

“Yes,
much like liars,” he agreed, narrowing his eyes when he saw what I could now
also see – that I had nowhere left to go.

With
a drop of the shoulder, my father fell onto all fours and surged at me like a
stoat towards a cornered rabbit. I knew I’d reached the ends of all hope; that
I was about to feel the sting of death at the hands of the very man I should
have been able to rely on, but there was simply nothing I could do about it. I
was so boxed in against the joists that I could scarcely even raise a hand to
protect myself. I was a sitting duck.

I
pushed back against my wooden straightjacket, desperate to at least put up some
semblance of a fight, but my hand didn’t get within striking distance of my
father…

…
instead, it went straight through ceiling between the joists I was lying
across.

That
was it. That was my way out!

I
rolled off the solid oak beams praying I hadn’t left it too late and landed on
the slats and plaster skim a few inches below. The ceiling cracked, but my
weight was evenly spread so that the plaster momentarily held.

My
father roared with indignation when he saw was what I was attempting and raced
to snatch me from my flight, but the same roof that had confined me became my
saviour as I slammed my feet into the oak trusses above to send myself crashing
through ceiling and into unknown.

I
barely had time to twist in mid-air before landing on top of my mother’s tall
boy, killing a clowder of china cats that had lived there in relative peace
since they’d stopped being dusted six months earlier. The tall boy itself fared
little better, collapsing to its knees to spill me onto the floor just as fast
as it could throw me. I slammed into yet more china cats, the one’s that had
leapt out of my way in a futile attempt to escape me the first time around and
was finally rewarded when the tall boy itself dropped on top of me like an
all-in wrestler sensing a submission.

As
painful as this all sounds – and believe me it was every bit as painful
as it sounds – I didn’t have the luxury of time with which to enjoy my
injuries. My father had told me that during the war many a good man shot
through with grape could still fight on when the will was there. And the will
was most definitely still there, because that same old salty geezer was suddenly
crashing through the ceiling himself, though his descent looked more accidental
than by design. His legs came first, flailing like a parachuting pig while his
body straked the wafer-thin laths to decorate his sides with permanent
pinstripes.