We mooched away from our father and joined our retreating mother. I remember I felt awful for him, so fucking awful. I looked back to see my dad just standing there, looking pathetic.
Remembering him like that was at odds with the picture my mother was painting of him inside my head. The contrast became even starker with the stories she continued to tell.
Chapter Fourteen
Jack
My mother’s bedroom was decorated with statues of the Elders. They were fucking creepy looking. They had been made in porcelain and were cracked all over. Their faces were covered with hoods and I would often wonder what they looked like. I think my mother had become obsessed with the Elders, and I often discovered her bent forward on her knees, rocking back and forth before the statues, deep in prayer.
Whenever she caught me goofing around or if I did anything she now considered wrong, she would tell me that the curse would get me – that it wouldn’t be lifted and I would never be free of it.
Although my mother told me that even telling the smallest of lies would cause the Lycanthrope curse to take hold of me, it didn’t stop her getting me to create an untruth for her.
One day, towards the end of that year, my mother beckoned me into her bedroom and closed the door. As I sat at the foot of her bed, she said, “Your father is denying the charges made against him.”
Hearing this, my heart leapt into my throat, and I gasped, “The Vampyrus have caught him then?” How long had she known and why hadn’t she told me? Did my elder sisters know? I had so many questions I wanted to ask her. I could see that my mother was so angry, I didn’t dare ask her the questions I now had screaming around in my head.
“He has the nerve to say that I am a liar!”
she barked at me.
She went on to explain that Father Paul, my newfound dad, had sat with my sisters and made written accounts of the alleged abuse they had suffered at the hands of my father. He was going to fight to prove that he was innocent, claiming that it was my mother, not him, who was dammed by the curse.
“Have the Vampyrus hunted him down then?” I dared to ask. “Do they have him?”
“No,” she hissed, shaking her head. “They nearly had him again. Your father is a cunning creature and managed to elude the Vampyrus hunters. He left them a letter, just like he left you that present. He wrote in it that he was innocent and was going to prove it!”
With her eyes blazing, she told me again how my father, like all those Lycanthrope who had given in to the curse, had attacked her and my sisters. Again, she stressed the importance of not letting them know I knew this. Then, pulling me close, she stared at me and said, “Jack, did your father ever hurt you?”
“No,” I said. “He never did anything to hurt me.”
“Are you sure?” she persisted.
I felt uncomfortable. I shifted on her bed so I could avoid having to look into her face.
Again I told the truth, my father had never hurt me. I could sense she was becoming frustrated with me and I just wanted to leave her bedroom.
“Listen, Jack, if we’re not believed, then your father…you know what that’ll mean, don’t you?” she barked at me.
I began to feel tears sting at the corner of my eyes and my bottom lip began to tremble.
“You will have to go back and live with your father,” she continued. “Do you want that to happen? After everything I have told you about him. How do you think your sisters will feel?”
I felt like screaming at her that it wasn’t my fault.
“Do you want to go back and live with him?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, you are going to have to help me and your sisters.” She looked straight at me with her blazing stare and spoke again. “You’re going to have to tell Father Paul that your father beat you, too.”
I couldn’t believe what she was asking of me.
“It is the only way if we’re going to be believed,” she insisted.
I began to cry and shook my head. I didn’t want to be in the room with her.
“Jack, you don’t want your sisters to have to go back to him, do you? Can you imagine what he would do to them?” she whispered.
“But, Mother, it’s wrong, it’s lying!” I pleaded with her.
My mother’s voice turned ever more hostile towards me.
“Don’t you dare tell me what’s right and wrong! I know what would be wrong, if you didn’t stand up for your sisters, that would be wrong!”I remember just wanting to vanish, to disappear. I slumped forward. She had asked the impossible. But I hated the thought of letting my sisters down, so I agreed.
My mother eased up beside me and placed her arm around my shoulders. She kissed the side of my face. She explained I was correct, it was wrong to tell lies, but there was always an exception to the rule. Saving my sisters was one of those exceptions, and the Elders would forgive me.
“Look, just tell Father Paul your father beat you a few times, that he scared you, was cruel, too.” She whispered in my ear, so it was just our secret.
I felt hot bile claw its way up my throat and into my mouth, where it burned like acid. I tried to think of something that would get her to change her mind.
“I can’t do this,” I howled, wanting this burden to be taken from me. I couldn’t remember my father hurting me – I couldn’t remember him hurting anyone.
I looked at the floor and wished I were someplace else.
“Say your father beat you,” she whispered again.
“What will happen then?” I asked.
“Father Paul will write down what you have said and pass it to his brother, who is tracking your father. It will be put forward as another piece of evidence against him. Then when he is finally caught, he will be imprisoned by the Vampyrus, or worse.” She made it sound so easy, so simple.
“And that’s it? That’s all I have to say?”
“That’s all. I know it’s a terrible thing to ask you to do, but just think of your sisters,” she said, staring back at me.
It was a few nights later, when Father Paul got me on my own with my mother, he looked very serious, his pale face looking long and drawn.
“Your mum says you have something you want to tell me?”
I looked across at my mother and she nodded. “Go on, Jack, it’s okay. Tell him what you told me,” she said.
Father Paul moved his chair next to mine, believing, I suspect, that he was offering me support. With a pen in his hand and a blank piece of paper before him, I opened my mouth and told the lie she had created a few nights before. I felt awful as I told this untruth. I was lying about my real father and lying to my new father. With each word I spoke, I felt I was somehow getting smaller, I was disappearing, and I hated myself.
The only consolation I took from this, the way I justified it, was to tell myself I was saving my mother and two sisters.
As I came to the end of my lie, Father Paul put his arm around me and said, “Thank you, Jack, I know that must have taken a lot of courage. But could you just give me some more detail for my notes?”
“Detail?” I whispered, glancing across at my mother for guidance. She hurriedly obliged.
“You know, Jack. Where did he hit you, and how hard?”
I didn’t want to say where my father had hit me and how hard because he never had. I didn’t want to lie to Father Paul anymore. I hated it and I hated myself.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said, knocking his arm from around my shoulder and standing up. I saw my mother lower her head and look away. With tears streaming down my cheeks, I left the room. Father Paul never mentioned that conversation to me again. No one did. But as I lay in bed that night, my mother came and spoke to me from the doorway of my bedroom.
“I won’t ever ask you for your help again.
You’re useless,” she said, switching off the light and throwing the room into darkness.
Chapter Fifteen
Kiera
“Did you feel you had let your mother down?” I asked, shocked by what he had just told me. Again, I tried to battle with the conflict that I was gradually feeling inside for him. Part of me didn’t want to know his story. I wanted to picture him in my head as the monster who, as an adult, had committed so many crimes; who had ripped the heart from my friend, Murphy. That’s what was keeping me focused on saving my own father and Potter. However, there was another part of me that couldn’t help but feel for him in some way – to see another side of him.
“I felt I had not only let her down and Father Paul, but most of all, my own father,” he said. “But what was I meant to have done? I didn’t want to be responsible for my sisters and my mother to have to return to my father to be beaten and attacked.”
With my arms, shoulders, and chest beginning to stiffen and tighten, I was beginning to find it difficult to breathe. It felt as if someone was standing on my chest. I took several short breaths.
Jack saw this, and said, “Do you want something to eat?”
I knew he wasn’t talking about a sandwich or anything like that. He was talking about the red stuff – my father’s flesh. I slowly shook my head.
“Are you sure?” he said, and he looked at me with some concern on his face.
This time I nodded and drew more breath.
“It’s your choice,” he said, heading back across the room to my father.
With Jack’s back turned to me, I slowly leant forward in my seat and looked at the floor beneath me. The stone that I had been grinding away from my wrists now formed a pile of dust about the size of a tennis ball. I knew that Jack might see this at any time and he would figure out what I was up to. With the chains not so tight where I had been slowly grinding my wrists against them, I found that I had a little more room to move. Careful to keep one eye on Jack, I leant forward as much as my hardening body would allow, and tried to flatten the pile of dust with my boot. My legs felt like dead weights as I slowly tried to brush away the dust.
“What are you doing?” I head Jack suddenly ask.