THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MAN

A man mourning a lost love

THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MAN
It was midnight when Ricky Damson woke up to see that his boxer shorts were dripping with what looked so much like blood it couldn’t have been anything other than blood. His eyes needed to be rubbed to make sure they were telling the truth, but when he left them alone and looked at the chair where he’d left the boxers before he put his pyjamas on only an hour earlier they were obviously very red and very wet. But what had happened? Where had it all come from?
Before he could climb out of his bed (wearily because it had been one of the worst days ever and he was exhausted) he heard a voice. There was nobody else in his room, not even in the house, he knew that, of course there wasn’t, not even Janice because of all the people on the planet she’d been consigned that very day to the hereafter via the town crematorium, and that was mostly why it had been one hell of a day for him and worse for her. He was going to miss her: he did now and, for goodness sake, he knew that he always would.
He’d loved Janice since he first met her, at school in the fifth form. His eyes moistened as he remembered the time they’d sheltered under the oak tree on the far side of the park when the rain had decided to thrash down, suddenly, out of the blue, on their way home from school. But under that oak tree was where nobody would see his fingers as they sought to explore as much of her as he dared.
And back then they’d gone everywhere together, been inseparable, until she moved into this house when her own folks died in that rail cash that everyone remembered. It was the house that he’d been born in and back then they’d shared this little room with its single bed, which led to the most wonderful intimacies. So a few years had passed like that, it was a wonder they hadn’t worn themselves out through kissing and just being in love, until everyone said they might as well get married. So that was what they’d done.
But who was talking to him and how, in the name of goodness, could there be any voice in the loneliness of his little bedroom. He was in that room because he couldn’t bear the idea of climbing into the bed he’d shared with Janice for most of their married life, since his parents had passed away. He knew he’d never bear to use that bed again. This smaller one was where their togetherness had started and now it was where it must end.
He stared at those boxer shorts of his, blood red, and were they even steaming? What was going on? Were nature and fate combining to be even more cruel than they already had​?
The air in the room was massaged by that sibilant whisper again, familiar and yet impossible. Yet its fragrance was so familiar, one he’d kissed and loved for so many years, Janice.
“Come,” it breathed at him so that he could almost smell the sweetness of Janice’s breath as it swept over him, “Come...”
That whisper, that wonderful fiendish whisper, that invitation... It was all too much for him. He’d watched the dreadful coffin containing the last mortal remains of the love of his life, and as far as he was concerned his own life might as well be over because he knew that he couldn’t live with the idea that Janice had gone up in a plume of smoke and that all of her, her flesh, her thoughts, her excitement during sex, her words, all of them, and there had been plenty. The whole lot were gone for ever. She had lived and breathed, and then she hadn’t.
For a moment he felt as if the scarlet blood on his underwear was dripping down, but when he looked up to see its source there was just a pristine ceiling. Yet was that a shadow on it’s whiteness? The room was black as night-time rooms should be, but yes, there was an indistinct shadow, and he remembered what it was.
That oak tree again, where they’d sheltered from the rain and then, in the summer so long ago, had lain impassioned together amongst the debris of dead leaves and rotting acorns.
“That’s where Sheryl was conceived,” teased the whisper from nowhere, “and when the sun shone,” it added, knowing his innermost thoughts.
Sheryl had been a beautiful baby, everyone said so, and their only child, but she had been destined to live for merely a few tragic years before the tumour consumed her brain and she died. Just like Janice, he thought, the same damned disease, the same damned cancer…
But they had loved the child while she lived and even while she faded away. The two of then, he and Janice, had wept together and back then he’d believed nothing could be worse that losing a child like that until Janice had done the same thing.
And the old oak tree where she had been conceived, they were never going to go near it again. It was as if it contained within its wooden heart the seeds of death.
“Come with me,” said the voice again, and this time the shadow on the ceiling morphed into the shape that could only be Janice.
“Where?” he asked, “I mean, where to?” he added as though the single word wasn't enough.
And the shadow that both was and wasn’t Janice stood next to him and reached out for his hand. Was the reaching hand a shadow or could it possible be flesh? It felt like both, though he had no idea why a shadow should feel of anything. Yet he grasped it firmly because whatever it was it smelt like Janice, and that was enough for him.
He couldn’t help whispering “Janice…”
“Come with me…” Her invitation sounded almost firm
Like her voice sounded when she teased him, flirting with her body, blowing her breath all over him, leading him up the stars and to their bedroom like she had so many times.
And he always went like a lamb to no slaughter, but to ecstasy.
And now she was leading him, but not to the bedroom but down the stairs. In the almost total pitch black of a dark night.
And out through the front door.
“Where?” he asked.
“You’ll know when you see it…” she whispered, “our own special place…”
How he didn’t trip or stumble he never knew, not that never was much time in the way of things. But the shadow that was the shape of Janice and with a firm grip like the hand of Janice, smelling sweetly of Janice, led him unerringly down the road and round this corner and then that corner.
Nobody saw him in his pyjamas walking like a zombie guided by a shadow, But then they couldn’t because he sensed that the shadow made sure of that, and in the darkness with hardly a glimmer of moonlight, who was going to be abroad to look their way?
Then he knew where they were going, when she guided him through the park gates which might have been locked to bar the way, but for some reason weren’t. Not this night. Not on the day when Janice became ashes and steam and smoke.
“I understand now, love,” he whispered.
“I knew you would. And keep on walking, darling, we’ve someone to meet…”
“I understand,” he repeated, because he did.
And he saw her underneath the tree, a child still, never grown, never more than she ever was.
“Daddy,” whispered Sheryl, and she hugged him.
© Peter Rogerson, 10.02.24
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