Page 59 of The Spiral
Chapter 21
Jack
They’re dead.
The issue troubles me as I wander backwards, towing the fog with me and watching as she stands above them. It irks me, as if my protégées have been taken from me without consent. I frown at the vision, a melancholy etching my bones that makes no sense. I should be elated, touched by her offering in this final stand, but I’m not. I feel deadened, as if the weight of loss has become unbearably heavy rather than the light I assumed would come.
And it’s cold. Stone fucking cold. Selma’s warmth around my legs is suddenly gone, her panted breath at my shoulder fragmented back into the night around us.
“Where are you, baby?” I ask, still looking at Madeline.
No glow or mystic apparition comes to eclipse the gloom. It hovers around the space still, Madeline slowly beginning to move through it towards the stone. She halts a step or two, looking around her as if searching for something, her lips moving. I can’t hear her, though. There’s no sound as she starts moving again, feet slowly trudging to the place they all lie, lifeless. There’s nothing but silence, not even the sound of the sludge beneath her.
The crow jumps and clacks his wings, lifting from the stone and flying into the air as she approaches him, beady eyes focused on her. I watch him, wondering where the hell he’s come from as he squawks at her. She looks sullenly at the stone, her colour turning pallid as she finally sees what she’s achieved with her gun. I sneer at the thought, wrenching at memories of Selma’s corpse again to prolong my disenchantment, her equally violated frame on show when I found it.
I scan the area and blow out a frustrated breath, looking for signs of my wife other than this fog, but there’s nothing here. I thought she’d be here now, thought she’d come and show me what this has all meant, but it’s just Madeline and the stone she eventually puts her hand on. Nothing to finish this. No miracle of my wife coming home. Just a woman who looks like her again.
Misery crawls over me, a deep seated and clawing desolation. It binds my guts with a sickness, swathes of it rising through me as I gaze at the woman who holds my wife inside her. I should have shot myself when I had the chance. I should have pulled that trigger, let the bullet kill me. I could have made my own way back to Selma and Lenon then. Instead, I’ve waited for this to end, only to be dissatisfied with the fucking result. I’m alone still, regardless of all that she’s done. Desolate.
Even my damned dogs are dead. And for what? Nothing.
“Jack?”
Selma.
I turn slowly at the sound of her voice, not convinced of my own rationality, and look back into the trees behind me. She’s there, her body encased in nothing but white silk that drifts out in a light breeze, framed by the woodland she adored. I smile at that and gaze, unsure if she’s real or still a ghost, but at least she’s here again. Mad or not I don’t care.
“Are you real now?” I ask, ready to turn back for Madeline if she’s not. Perhaps I could go reach for that gun, use it and finish this off the way I should have done.
The thought makes me wander towards Selma, hoping she might have something more than ghosts and blurred edges to bring to me before I kill myself for her. I will if I have to, happily. I’ll put it in my mouth and watch her, let her take me through to wherever she is because I can’t go on anymore. Not now. There isn’t any point without my dogs to keep hurting.
She seems so still this time. No floating, no drifts of imaginary lines. I peer closer, observing her against the tree she softly fondles. She’s sharper now, crisp, like she’s part of reality rather than the cloudiness of feeling and sensation we had before. And the smile that breaches her lips as I watch causes a rush of heat to come at me, readying me for whatever she wants.
“You’re home, Jack.”
Me? I snort and glance back in the direction of the house, not knowing what she means as I notice Madeline lower herself to the floor, a choked sob retching her throat as her hand scrubs the stonework. I’ve always been here. Always been here harbouring these thugs, turning them into their worst nightmares, waiting for my next chance at revenge and using my memories to inflict retribution for her. She’s the one who’s come home. Finally.
Madeline hunches down to her knees, her fingers running over something beneath the fog. She just stares, a flitter of tears coming down her cheeks at whatever she’s found. I smile at that, too, knowing she’ll be free regardless of whatever atrocities she’s looking at now. The abuser is no more. She’ll move on with her life without him to threaten her existence, whether here or not, but that sadness etches back into me as I watch on, some part of me remorseful at the thought of not dancing with her again now my wife is back, not feeling her between us.
“We did it, Jack,” Selma says.
I’m not sure what we did, but I smirk as I keep watching Madeline and wait for Selma to come to me, wrap her skin around me again. She does after a minute or two, her hand slotting so easily into mine just as it always did. I squeeze at it, feeling the flesh of her in my hold, and pull her into my back so we can watch together, know what we’ve done and remember this moment. She links her arms around me and rests her chin on my shoulder, her scent coming so quickly it nearly cripples any sentiment for Madeline I might have sheltered inside.
“You after a fucking?” I ask, remembering the first time I saw her in that dead-end town, her eyes watching me like a hawk as I entered the bar. She just sat in the corner, her nose in her book as a ruck of us walked in drunk. She giggles softly and cuddles tighter in, filling me with more memories of our son and the way they laughed with each other, clung on. “Will he come home, too?”
“Soon, Jack,” she says, brushing her lips over my neck. The feel of them sends shivers over me, riling my dick up into thinking about anything but our son, but she loosens her grip and walks past me before I get the chance to think anymore. I frown and follow her, gazing at the way her bare feet leave no impressions in the wet ground beneath. “We need Maddy home for that. In love.”
Both the statement and the lack of prints confuse me as I gaze over her frame again, watching the way it glides and glitters against the slow light that’s beginning to return around us. She’s so beautiful I almost don’t care, part of me wanting nothing more than to touch her again and feel the reality of her against me, but if she’s real there should be footprints, just like mine. There should be a presence of her against this earth, a weight in her balance as she lands on it.
“We just have to be patient, Jack.” I don’t know what that means as I keep following her, waiting for her to give me more answers to the thousand questions I have. “She really does look like me,” she says, standing feet from Madeline and casting her hand out to the right.
The fog starts clearing with her movement, ribbons of it reaching out onto the horizon before my eyes, creating pathways. I frown and survey its touch across the headland, watching as the flow of it bobs and dances, clearing further, wondering how she’s still doing it if she’s really here.
“Selma?”
“Mmm.”
I wave my hand to her, reaching for the back of her dress to ensure she’s real, but then notice the body Madeline’s leaning over for the first time. The abuser lies there, his body clear of my dog’s mutilation, just three bullet holes in his chest, blood seeping from them. I scowl and look for my dogs, needing to see them for clarification. They’re nowhere to be seen. There’s just his lifeless body becoming encased in mud and soil, the ground around them both coated with Selma’s mist as it bubbles below them.