CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - ALEC
Fuck do you mean you’re here? Here where? I text.
From underneath the bed, young Liam gasps in a snort and moans a bit. I really don’t know how much longer he’ll stay out. I consider going ahead and suffocating him just for good measure, but I’m still clinging to the fading hope that today will be one of those rare days where no one gets murdered.
When no text comes back my way, I try again. HERE WHERE MAN?
And now, from someplace that appears to be the front of the estate, I hear a horn. Not a trumpet. A horn. A car horn. And shouting. Liam snores and moans. And there appears to be some commotion inside as well, as I can hear boots running toward the main entry hall.
I dart over to the door and pull it open a crack. Sure enough, down the way a bit, I see some of the laaities who’ve been placed here to keep me held captive, making for the front of the manor.
HERE DUDE FUCKIN HERE THEYRE
That’s the text that comes through as Liam’s phone vibrates in my hand. Shit. Fokken hell, man. He’s here? Here here? How? And is Christine with him? And what does THEYRE mean? “They’re about to catch me?” I have to assume that’s what he was intending to write, because the one sound that I desperately wanted to keep from hearing today… I hear.
Gunfire.
Automatic gunfire.
What have you fokken done, Danny?
Well, it now seems I don’t have a choice, do I?
I reach under the bed to grab for the rifle and make my way out to see just how kind fate actually is, and when I do… Liam grabs my wrist.
He moans out something that sounds like, “Mr. van den Berg?”
Kak, fok, piss. Why couldn’t you just have stayed asleep, boy? He’s leaving me no choice. He’s grabbed my free arm, so with the arm that’s holding his rifle, I turn the barrel toward his stomach, hoping that I can just tap the trigger and put him away swiftly. As opposed to making a freight train of noise and lighting up the whole room in the process.
But just at the very moment that I’m about to apply pressure on the firing mechanism, he moans, “Are you safe, sir? He said to keep you safe.”
I am not usually distracted in a moment of crisis. One of my greatest superpowers is my ability to maintain my focus. But I have to be honest, I find that statement attention-getting.
“What? Who? Who said to keep me safe?” He doesn’t respond. “Hey, man! Eyes on me! Who said to keep me safe? Safe from what? How did I get here?”
It is a heightened version of our usual script. And, just as usual, I get no satisfactory reply from him. It would appear that he had just enough petrol left in the tank to make that gasp of effort before falling back into a state of unconsciousness. I double-check to make sure I didn’t actually shoot him after all. Nope, still has a pulse, he’s just a sleepyhead.
Danny? Is it Danny who somehow got me here? Is that who it is that the laaitie meant? Is Danny the one who is trying to keep me safe?
That don’t make any sense, though. Danny is, if all is to be believed, currently outside and possibly taking fire. What in the name of holy fokken Christ is happening?
And then, just at the moment when events cannot become any more baffling…
They do.
I grab up the rifle and phone, stand, ready myself to sprint outside and presumably shoot a bunch of people, and as I glance in the direction of the window, I see…
Eliza Watson. Standing three meters away from me.
I can’t be sure for a moment that she’s not an apparition of some kind. I thought I saw Danny and Christine in the bushes before, but it was just shadows. Wishful thinking perhaps. Figments of my imagination.
But then it turns out Danny’s actually here. So was it a fiction after all?
My doubts about whether or not Eliza is really here are quickly put aside when I see the look on her face. It’s something like exhaustion blended with disgust and a hint of resentment. Yes, it must really be her. I don’t believe my fantasy version of her appearance would be so precisely authentic and not sugar-coated.
I’m sure I must look to her like the proverbial deer in headlights. Of all the people on earth I could have imagined seeing today, she is likely at the end of that list. She shakes her head at me a tiny bit in a way that is very familiar. It’s the way that says, without words, Oh, Alec, you stupid fucking twat.
This oddness that is swirling around me keeps getting odder.
And odder.
Because as, once again, I feel we have reached the apotheosis of preposterousness, I am proven wrong.
Russell Watson, the eldest brother of the Watson clan, drops into view next to her. I need to repeat that to myself. He drops into view. As if from a roof. But, when I stop to consider, Eliza and Russell scaling a roof and plopping down somewhere they’re not supposed to be is far and away the least curious thing about now.
Russell lifts his hand in a totally casual salutation. Out of some kind of reflexive instinct, I return the gesture. And then Eliza and Russell both look up. It causes me to look up in kind, although all I see is the ceiling. And I wonder, what in the great wide heavens is going to happen now?
And when I lower my chin to face the window once more…
Christine.
Christine Keene drops into view beside Russell and Eliza Watson.
And I drop to my knees.
I’d like to tell myself that my ribs began hurting too much. Or that, perhaps, someone has just burst into the room and shot me in the back. Something dramatic, and heroic, and not simply the result of my normally immutable steadiness being stripped from me, incomprehensible event by incomprehensible event, until I just no longer have the power to support my inexcusably human form. But that’s what it is. My mind cannot process this moment and my body follows suit.
Seeing me drop to my knees, Eliza kicks at the frame of the French-style shutter and it smashes open, ripping free of the latch. She bounds through the window, Russell and Christine behind her, and lands in front of me. She looks down and says, “Hello, luv. Nice PJs. Very Hugh Hefner of you.”