Brother
In 2017, I had the great experience of attending a 6-week course at Sydney Uni’s Centre of Continuing Education— Discovering Form and Voice, with Maureen O’Shaughnessy. Today I dug up one of the short pieces I prepared for that class. It’s a quick read, so if you’re interested, have a look below. My aim was to create tension and suspense, as well as a sense of place. Let me know what you think!
Scum-covered water stretched as far as she could see, pitted with clumps of earth and low-lying rushes. The air was heavy with decay, and salt, and the unmistakable sulphur stink of rotten eggs.
She crept towards the shack. Her boots made thup thup sounds, sinking into the spongy ground. Peepers sang out a constant, shrill chorus in the reeds.
“Jason?” she called out.
A pair of battered, mud-caked workboots lay at the side of the shack. Beside them were several empty tin cans on their sides, and a vodka bottle, also empty. A pile of gray ashes formed a circle a few feet from the door.
“Jason?” she called again.
A bird trilled from somewhere above. Another replied with a shrill whistle. She heard a steady tap-tap-tap, like someone hammering on wood. Nothing. She reached for the door, turned the knob and pushed it open in one motion.
Inside, it was much blacker than she had imagined. At first the opening behind her cast dim grey light ahead, and she could see the outlines of armchairs, a table, a stand-lamp. She wiped a hand across her face, fighting panic and the urge to turn and run back into the marsh. Instead, she took a step forward, then another. The light grew dimmer. Claustrophobia wrapped stealthy fingers around her heart.
Ahead of her, in the darkness, something moved.
She uttered a choked sort of scream and took two staggering steps backward. She made herself hold steady as she pulled the pen light from her pocket and flicked it on. The beam wavered crazily in her trembling grasp.
“Jason? Can you hear me?”
No answer but the creak of the floorboards. Her ears strained, and she heard – or thought she did – the quiet sound of a child weeping. She stood bug-eyed in the dark, the hairs along the nape of her neck standing on end. She held her breath. From somewhere outside came the high, mournful cries of the marsh birds. Silence. She was beginning to dismiss it as imagination when the sound came again, behind her, now … a single, wrenching sob.
She wheeled around. The light fell on a humped shape lying in the middle of the floor – a bundle of rags with two white, shrivelled legs. The hermit. He was dead. A smaller figure was crouched over him, rocking slowly, forward, backwards.
“Jason?” she whispered, and reached for the stake at her belt.
Her reflexes were quick, but not quick enough. Something struck her, and the force of the impact knocked her feet out from under her. She was thrown flat against the floor. The pen light slipped from her hand.
Jason seized the end of the stake, then screamed as he wrenched it from where it had lodged in his shoulder. It clattered to the floor, the point smeared with black. In the dim beam of torchlight, she could see the peeling marigold of the wallpaper, the blue velvet of the drapes, the stain spreading across Jason’s Dora the Explorer shirt.
But Jason was laughing. There were tear tracks down his once-chubby cheeks. “You missed my heart,” he said, and grinned for the first time, showing pointed white incisors. “Careless, big sister.”
She snatched one of the glass vials from her belt and flung it. Cool wetness splashed her face, and she heard Jason scream as the water touched his skin, hissing. She yanked her arm free, grasping desperately for the stake. Her hand closed around it, and she staggered to her feet. Jason was keening, now, a high-pitched sound that went on and on. Smoke rose from his hands, his arms.
Sobbing, she brought the stake up, and drove it into his heart.