Granny’s Favourite

It had been a month and his grandmother was still dead, so George really didn't understand why his mother continued to spend so much time at the old farmhouse. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. The big hand was after the six and the little one... well, it could have been ten or eleven, it was hard to be sure. The clock had belonged to his grandmother, and it had funny squiggles instead of numbers. ‘Ruins’ his father had called them. They didn’t look like ruins to George, but the face of the clock was certainly a mess. Either way, he was once again getting to stay up past his bedtime. He looked over at his father, who was glowering at the television.  

    'I want a drink.'    

    'Don't we all.' His father scratched a cheek of oily stubble. The sound reminded George of a frying pan being scoured with a wire brush. The boy swept Lego bricks off his lap and stood up to try again.  

    'I want a drink, Daddy.'   

    His father grunted. 'Those legs work. Get it yourself.'   

    George grimaced. His father had not yet replaced the lightbulb in the hallway. Home repairs were not exactly top of his priorities. The hole in the bathroom door had only been fixed the previous weekend, and whatever had caused that happened way back on the night of his father's birthday.   

    'When will Mummy be home?'   

    The volume of the television seemed to expand to fill his father's silence.   

    'Daddy, when will-'   

    'How should I know.' His father reached down for a phantom glass, the muscles in his jaw rippling as his fingers clutched empty air. It occurred to George that he had not seen his father drinking in weeks. 'Get it yourself, cub, and close that door after you.'    

    George took in the solid white slab of the living room door. An ocean of darkness bulged against the other side. Had his mother been home, she would have fetched the drink for him, but she was visiting her sisters, as she had done every night since his grandmother had died. Four weeks now, but to George his grandmother might as well have died years ago, before he was born. All his memories of the old woman were of a living skeleton wrapped in wrinkled tissue paper reaching out a claw from a mound of stinking sheets.   

    'Granny wants to give you a hug,' his mother would say. Had he ever submitted to the embrace? He could not remember. It seemed his father's hand was always on his shoulder, applying just enough restraint.   

    George swallowed with a dry cluck. He was parched following the incinerated pork dinner his father had prepared. Every dinner these days was a piece of burnt meat due to his mother's constant absence. His father didn't like her visiting her sisters so much, but nothing was said. Nothing was said between them at all anymore. His parents had hardly spoken since the night of the funeral.   

    As with every event centred around his grandmother, the only people in attendance at the farmstead after the burial in Bradbury Cemetery had been family. His mother, stringy as a liquorice whip in her mourning dress, had assailed him with a comb for fifteen minutes before they left for the funeral lunch, but a pair of hairy horns still sprouted from his head as he sidled into the back seat of the car. His father had been in an especially good mood that day, whistling a tune George recognised from a movie. It was the one with the robot and the talking lion. His father’s happy toots had been cut short by a sharp glare from his mother. For the rest of the journey, nothing had come from the front seat but silence and the faint smell of whiskey. 

    George had always hated going to his grandmother’s. From the approach road, the slope of the land gave the illusion that the farmhouse was some monstrous stone slug that had slithered out from the earth. His aunts’ cars were strewn across the front field when they arrived, crammed nose to nose as though itching for a fight. George had tried his best to startle a murder of crows in a nearby tree as he alighted into the mud. His slamming of the car door had elicited a curse from his father and a flash of the eyes from his mother, but the birds merely cawed mockingly through stiletto beaks.   

    The portrait of a stranger had greeted them in the parlour. It was a leathery woman with coils of grey hair draped over high cheekbones that slanted toward puckered lips, the long batwing eyelashes turning the dark eyes into wells of shadow. George had turned to his father in confusion.  

    'Who's that lady?'  

    His father twisted his mouth into a leer. 'That's no lady. That's your grandmother.'  

    His mother's eyes became as narrow as her lips. 'I have things to get on with. Don't cause any trouble, George.'  

    After she strutted off with a swish of her thin hips, George's father had yanked his necktie into a slack noose. 'I'm off to get something to drink that isn't elderflower tea. If you must cause trouble, Georgie, don't get caught.'  

    “Lilith Cabot Hale, 1933 - 2022,” read the inscription on the portrait. It had meant nothing to him. Maybe someone put the wrong picture up? That would be funny. George had sniggered and looked around for one of his aunts to share the joke with. Hey, Aunty Jade, there’s been a mix-up. He had drifted through the cluttered downstairs rooms studying his grandmother's horde of junk, the coloured stones and wrought iron candlesticks, the antique daggers and odd-looking dolls, until he located his cousins the Bradshaws and they had all played Hide and Seek in the maze of bedrooms. The game went well until George broke an old chalice. 

    'Mammy would have your skin if she were here now,' Aunt Cassandra had shouted, chasing him with a broom handle as he scarpered down the stairs. He didn’t know what the big deal was. It was just a dirty cup embossed with rabbits and stars. There were crates of such stuff gathering dust in the rooms that were accessible, and who knew what else was packed away behind the many locked doors. He had sloped off to the kitchen, where his mother was hunched over the breakfast counter using a kitchen knife to turn amaranth bread and fish paste into soggy triangles, while Aunt Ursula complained about everyone else over her third goblet of wine.   

    'Well, I'm not doing it,' Aunt Ursula was saying as he entered. 'Let Cass do it, she's married to that pig farmer so she should be used to the smell.'   

    'All must play their part.' His mother admonished her older sister with a flash of the blade. 'It was what Mam wanted.'   

    'What Mam wanted.' Aunt Ursula brought a sneer to the rim of her glass. 'You above all should be glad that woman didn't get what she wanted, Sybil.'   

    'Ursula.' His mother had said the name in the same tone she used whenever his father started telling one of those jokes he had heard from his friends down the pub. George had felt something spark between them, something grown-up and secret. They both looked at him as though he had just fallen out of a cupboard with a glass to his ear. 

    'You were her favourite grandchild,' said Aunt Ursula, her smile showing every maroon tooth. His mother's face went as tight as the clingfilm stretched across the first tray of sandwiches.   

    'Go outside and play,' she said, shooing him with the knife.   

    'Can I feed the goat?'   

    Aunt Ursula had sniggered as she looked out the window at the mangy Saanen tethered by a rope to the blackthorn tree. ‘You’d better hurry.’  

    His mother had thrust two muddy carrots into his hands from the sack beside the sink, before turning him by the shoulders and pushing him into a stumble towards the back door. He had noticed his father lurking in the pantry watching everything, a beer can squeezed into one fist and his face pink as freshly sliced ham. George had just been glad to get into the open air away from the stench of his grandmother's favourite flowers, those puffy white blossoms that had been arranged in garlands and bouquets strewn through every room. The whole house had stank worse than the boys' toilets at school.  

    That night, he had listened to his parents arguing through the bedroom wall.   

    'You knew all along what she'd had planned,' he had heard his father say, his voice throbbing with anger. His mother had replied something in a faint voice that he could not decipher, before a sob of laughter from his father had made George squeeze Blanky a little tighter and pull the covers over his head.   

    That had been the last exchange between them. Every evening since, his mother had packed up her little carpet bag, which emanated a glass tinkle as she bent down to kiss George on the cheek, and left to visit his six aunts. His father would glare after her car as it disappeared around the corner of their street, before he brought the television to life with a whipcrack of the remote control and slumped brooding before its flickering indifference, his arms folded and his eyes boring inward. 

    So now, just for a cup of water, George must face the darkness alone. Even Blanky was currently unavailable, busy drying on the kitchen radiator. A flush of guilt burnt George’s cheeks. The "accidents" had only started up again a week ago. Had his mother even noticed the daily bundle of soiled bedsheets clogging up the laundry baskets? She had said nothing to him if she had. George could never recall the details of the dreams that wracked him each night, merely the wrench of relief and shame he experienced as he awoke to another damp mattress and the desperate hope that his mother be home to make it all better.   

    But she wasn’t home. And his father was wedged into the armchair as firmly as a whelk on a rock. The living room door seemed to elongate as George approached it, stretching off high above him with the vertiginous scope of a cliff-face. He turned the handle and peered into the gloom, into which the illumination afforded by the living room bulb seeped as dully as dishwater. His hand scurried up the wall in search of the light-switch; perhaps his father had... no. A few clicks did nothing to dispel the shadows. George shivered against the sudden chill as he closed the living room door behind him. The void he faced into was not just unlit but drained of light. The milky stain of a streetlamp on the glass panel of the front door was the only illumination in the hallway. His steps were sluggish, as though the darkness were holding him as tree sap traps a bug. A fire spread through him, his heart pumping the juice needed to power his limbs because his body already knew what his mind was just beginning to suspect: I'm walking into danger.   

    Gripping the kitchen door handle, he was dimly aware of a faint tremor through the wood, as though a great force was vibrating on the other side. He pushed - and it was not their kitchen that he entered but a dungeon in the pit of hell.   

    A howl of damnation filled the darkness with a symphony of anguish and pain. A limp white apparition floated up before him, its melted scream yawning beneath deserted eye sockets that gaped like empty graves. Worms of lank hair wriggled from a crown of bone as it raised its head with a blind and endless stare, and in its hideous shrieks, thundering to a crescendo that rumbled through the room to shake the walls until it seemed the roof would crumble, George heard not hatred or rage or sorrow - he heard desire.   

    It wanted him.   

    It needed him.   

    The soul of a young boy would free it from its limbo.   

    As two handfuls of taloned fingers came scuttling out of the shadows towards him, George released a scream that would echo in a distant corner of the universe to the day he died.   

    He collided with his father's knees in the hallway.   

    'A ghost, Daddy, a ghost -!'     

    His father paled in the half-light from the open doorway of the living room. He didn't move, merely stared at the darkened doorway of the kitchen.   

    'Stay here.' His father strode into the kitchen and flipped the light switch. George trembled, twitched. The campfire comfort of the muted television beckoned. But so too did the horror in the kitchen. He took timid steps in his father's wake. Deafened by his own heartbeat, he peered around the jamb.   

    It was their kitchen, the same old kitchen it always was. As the washing machine juddered into its final cacophonous spin, George looked at the white bed sheet hanging up to dry on the tenter beside the sink. Relief surged through him loosening every knot and he fell into the room.   

    'It was the sheet, Daddy, that's all.' He tugged on his father’s arm to offer up an embarrassed smile.   

    His father was scrutinising every corner. His face was as white as the clenched knuckles of his fists.  

    'Daddy?'     

    His father's head whipped around. He looked through George. He bent down on one knee with the pop of snapped kindling and ruffled George's hair just a fraction too hard.   

    'I shouldn't have sent you out here alone. Just be careful, cub,' he said.   

    With a grip on his son's shoulder that hurt as much as it guided, he ushered the boy out. George, tripping over his own feet in bewilderment, shuffled his way toward the sanctuary of the living room.  

    He stopped and looked back at his father, who was still in the doorway of the kitchen as though standing guard. His father turned off the light and the blackness oozed around him. Just before his father closed the door, George heard him whisper:    

    'You keep the hell away from him, you evil old bitch.'