21. Few Truths and a Thousand Lies #2
Liam leans forward, elbows on knees, fingers threaded, as if he’s a lawyer about to explain how I’ve just gone and hung myself. “You don’t know why you have Simon, and that little girl, and that little boy, and Helena, and they’re all at your house?”
I swallow. Nothing this time. Pure anxiety. “I don’t know.”
“And you don’t know where this thing came from?” he pursues.
“No, I don’t.”
“And you don’t know what it wants?”
“Liam…” I’ve said his name just to slow him. To put a pause on whatever conclusion he’s about to draw that is feeling right now like it’s going to be far too close to the truth. “I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at. I called you because I wanted help getting rid of spirits. Not…”
Not because I like them. Not because I want them around. Very obviously not because I’m actually a necromancer who routinely invites dead people home until I raised something worse than all the rest that just resulted in two people being killed.
But Liam cuts into my blathering attempt at an excuse with the surprising, “Are you sure it’s evil?”
That one throws me so completely I can’t answer straight away.
He’s seen it. It’s a bloody skeleton. A creepy skeleton who shuts down reality and throws you into the deep end of a pit of spiders. More or less. “I’m pretty sure it is evil.”
“Because I…” His eyes shift away from me, towards the fire, where he gets a faraway look. “I think it could have killed me. I think, very easily, if it had wanted to, it could have killed me. But it didn’t. And I don’t understand why.”
“What? When? Last night?” Why is this just coming out now? I also lean forward, reach out a hand for him, then withdraw it quickly before he sees. But he’s not looking at me. He’s still staring into those flames. “I wouldn’t have let it do that.”
“It touched me,” he says, raising a hand to his arm as if he can feel it there now. “It said my name. I don’t know how it knows my name. If it’s real, if I didn’t imagine that, it can’t know my name unless…”
“It was in the house,” I attempt to explain, though I’m no longer sure of my own conclusions. “It lives in my house. It would have heard your name there.”
His eyes flick up to meet mine, alarmed, wary. “What if it didn’t?”
My stomach curls inward. “Liam, what are you trying to say? You think your brother…”
It’s the first time today either of us have mentioned him outright.
Liam shakes his head a little. “I don’t know.
But he was there. And I don’t understand why he was there.
And I want to know… can that thing get into my head?
Can it see what’s in there? Can it read my mind, my thoughts, my history?
Can it create these things? Did it do that to you? ”
The way he’s talking, it’s like this is so fresh.
And this ever-sinking feeling won’t go away.
In fact, it only gets worse when I suddenly remember how he looked when he came out of the house today.
How red his eyes were. How shaken he seemed.
I thought it was finding Fabian like that, but… “Did something happen today?”
“No.” He virtually snaps the word at me.
“Because you seemed upset. Now that I’m thinking about it, you seemed quite upset earlier.”
“Nothing happened,” he replies, too fast, too defensive.
“Because if it did—”
“Your house is fucking scary,” he cuts me off. “It’s full of bloody ghosts. And-and Helena? She was there.”
A frown slips over my face at the sharp shift in conversation. “Did she do something?”
“No. No, besides being a ghost. And you know…” He gives a small shrug. “For me, when you’re not used to ghosts, that is, in and of itself, quite scary, you know?”
Fair point.
He talks on. “But Helena’s so nice. She’s… She’s really incredible. She feels so human.”
I can’t help a slight smile at that. Of all the ghosts we could have run into, she’s probably the best introduction he could have had. “She is. Or she was. A long time ago. She’s nothing to be scared of. Ghosts generally aren’t, unless they’ve been bad people.”
His chin rises, and his eyes sharpen. “What happens when they’ve been bad people?”
He’s hanging on these words—it’s in his shoulders and his eyes and his set mouth.
And I have the feeling I need to step carefully here, because it’s clear, by that look in his eye and what little information I have, we’re straight back to his brother.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of angry spirits,” I offer.
“Violent ones. Those people were just the same in life. Or at least, that’s my understanding of them.
That they don’t necessarily change just because they died. ”
“But… but if they’re…” His fingers close on the glass, but he doesn’t lift it, just turns it as he gathers his thoughts.
“What if they’re not ‘bad’, or they weren’t, or maybe they just did something wrong in life…
What do you think happens to them then? Do you believe in… Hell? Or-or some kind of… Purgatory?”
I take a sip of my own beer, biding time.
Hell is very real. But Purgatory? I just don’t know.
“I have to believe that people who weren’t bad aren’t punished,” I try. “The injustice if good people who did bad things went to Hell… It would be intolerable.”
Liam’s lips press hard. The thought has clearly shaken him.
So I rush in to add, “And Hell would be overflowing, you know? I mean, who hasn’t done a bad thing?
Where do you draw the line? Stealing a lolly from Grandma’s sweets jar?
Coveting a movie star’s husband? Falling asleep on the job and causing an accident? ”
“How about selling drugs to kids?” He says it quiet and low and delivers a gut punch while he’s at it.
Probably not a tenth as harsh as the one he’s feeling right now.
“How about making money for people who do terrible, terrible things? Do you think that gets you Hell or Purgatory? Or does it get you stranded here?”
A thick silence passes between us while he holds my gaze, wills me to answer this dark question that I cannot possibly answer for him.
A waitress picks that exact moment to deliver the food. Liam smiles a polite smile, a glaze about his eyes. I try to make light conversation with her, while my heart breaks for him. He’s always smiling. And he’s always hiding something behind it. Some pain I’m only now beginning to understand.
The second she leaves, I don’t let it drop. He needs to get this out. “Your brother. He did those things?”
“They told us he did,” he says softly, pouring sauce onto his plate for his chips, not looking up.
“The police. But he wasn’t like that. He was raised well.
To be a good person. He was never like that growing up.
” He puts the bottle down, then adds, “Once someone starts with a bad crowd, it can be hard to get them out.”
“I know,” I reply. “People think this is it. Their small slice of life. That it’s their whole world and there’s no way out. Sometimes it’s hard to help them see the bigger picture.”
“That’s right,” he says, digging a fork into the flaky pastry on top of his pie, though I get the impression it’s more to do something with his hands than because he’s going to eat it. “And my mum, she did everything she could. Everything. But when you don’t have money to move away…”
His hand is shaking a little now, and he’s still not looking at me.
“I’m not like that. I never went with those people.” He pauses, looks up, as if he could read my mind—what I’m thinking of him now that he’s revealed this. As if he needed to tell me that. As if he’s worried I might think worse of him because of this association.
I’ve seen so much death. Heard every sad story there is. And it would take a hell of a lot more than a wayward brother to make me think any less of Liam. “We all have skeletons in our closets,” I try to reassure him. “All of us. Anyone who says they don’t is a liar.”
He scoffs, a touch of bitterness about it, and lets the fork drop, sticking out of the pie. “He was good to me. He was always so nice. You never would have known what he got up to. Because he kept me out of it. He never brought anything home. When I found out what he’d done…”
A second later, he’s stabbing away at the pie again, shutting down, shutting it out.
“What happened to him?” I ask, point blank.
He looks at me for a long moment, like he’s not sure whether to answer me honestly. But eventually he says, “We don’t know. One day, he just didn’t come home. And now…”
I give him a minute, move the sauce bottles around, though my appetite’s fled in deference to the urge to reach out and take his hand. Which I’m not going to do.
“We thought he was coming good for a while there,” he says, so quietly I can hardly hear him.
“He stopped hanging out with them, was around, just watching movies with us, playing football. Normal stuff.” He leans hard on one arm.
“You don’t notice the day to day normal stuff until it’s gone, I think.
Because suddenly, he went back. They were his school friends, you know?
And then I hardly ever saw him. He was never home.
And then, he just didn’t…” His voice breaks on the words.
“I’m so sorry, Liam.”
“It was years ago.” He shrugs, even if he looks like he’s reliving the moment right now, talking over it with the bravado of the kid who had to accept his brother wasn’t coming home.
But he admits, “You’d think I’d be over it.
And I am. Mostly. But my mum… she’s not.
And she won’t be. It’s left a mark on her that…
And so when I saw him yesterday…” The fork drops again, and this time he buries his face in his hands.
And this time, I can’t help it. I reach out and wrap a hand around his arm. “I’m really sorry you saw that.”
As if he can’t even feel me, he speaks into his palms. “I don’t know why he’s there. Why would he be there?”
“I don’t know.”