Chapter Four

Craig stared out of the window. The world was enticing. It appeared to be the perfect midwinter morning with a clear blue sky and no clouds. It was chilly, but not cold. A light jacket would be enough to be warm. The northern birds were making their homes in his yard now, blue jays and cardinals, bejeweled birds with bright plumes that flitted in and out of the scraggly brown bushes.

 

He didn’t see any glossy black crows, any ravens with their dagger beaks, waiting to peck out his eyes. He didn’t even see any seagulls, that tiny albatross, screaming overhead. No omens, then. But the omens were everywhere. He just hadn’t spotted the black cat on the wall or the frog in the bottom of the dead pond. The image outside of his window was a siren song, enticing him to leave the comfort and relative safety of his home for the dangers of the world. He couldn’t trust it.

 

People were fools to trust the world. Fiona and Todd, as much as he liked them and found them to be tolerable friends, too often went through life with blinders on. So many people refused to see. They wanted the world to be bright and wonderful, but Craig knew, he knew that the more beautiful it appeared, the more treacherous it was. Hidden dangers lurked everywhere in bright, sunny days. Death did not just stalk for victims in the gloom and darkness but you were more prepared to meet him then. He played the traitor when he killed on such a day as this, a day so ironically full of life.

 

Craig feared sunny days more than gloomy ones. He knew what to expect on gloomy days. Sunny days were traitors, you had to be careful, extra careful. His father -

 

He walked away from the window. His footsteps echoed in the hall as he walked to the dimly lit library. All the curtains were drawn against the sun and the house was cast into twilight tones so that everything was hazy and unformed. He paused at the foot of the stairs, as he always did, and listened. Three years later, but he still listened for the sound of the machines sucking his father’s life away, for when they’d stop. He listened now. Then, skuttled past the stairs when he heard nothing.

 

He didn’t go upstairs now. The entire second floor belonged to his parents. It was the domain of the mother he never knew. She’d left him when he was very young and never returned, swallowed by the bright terror of the Middle East, a place of sunshine and desert where there were no dark places to hide from death. It was the domain of the father who’d raised him and demanded things of him, to be wonderful, to do something with his life, but who gave him no guidance.

 

He feared them so he locked them both up in their rooms upstairs and purged their memory downstairs. He separated them from himself. He tried never to think of them but ghosts like them refused to be unheard. They followed him, haunted him, tormented him, but their voices were more comforting than the world outside, and so he stayed.

He wouldn’t be able to go to Fiona and Todd’s party. He sat down in the leather chair and picked up his book again. They’d call. He’d listen to Fiona’s poorly disguised disappointment on the answering machine and he’d feel guilty. The voices of his parents, the brave female traveler to hostile worlds, the steady-handed surgeon, would sound in his ears.

 

It made him angry. It wasn’t his fault that Fiona and Todd were too stupid, too stubborn, to see that tonight was an inauspicious night. Of all nights to have a party! A night when the sun is swallowed by the darkness, perhaps never to return, and the moon to be swallowed as well, taking away even that paltry light. Were humans so blind and arrogant to celebrate such things? To celebrate their own deaths? It must be the innate sense of the ironic present in all humans that when faced with their death they cheer. Inmates on death row, he’d read somewhere, usually asked for birthday cake, complete with candles, for their last meal.

 

He wasn’t going to the party. It was impossible, all so impossible. He couldn’t be around people at the moment, it was too soon, he was still in mourning. Wasn’t he? He was dressed for the party and had shaved. His usual glass of wine wasn’t sitting on the table yet and he had yet to pick up the book. He sat in the leather chair, listening to the house creak with the ghosts and the silence. There was something different about tonight.