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  The Trade

  written by

  Andrew Cull

  Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Cull

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  1991.

  That summer should have been filled with laughter, with slip n’ slides in the yard, lazy afternoons lying watching ice cream clouds swirling through the blue sky, melting in slow motion. I watched a plane rising high above our house. From the ground it looked completely still, as if it hung suspended in the air, a model on a string. I wished I was on it, I wished I could escape. I was seven and that was the summer death stalked our home.

  It began with the offerings.

  Dad had opened the back door to have a smoke. I heard his swearing from my room, “Jesus Christ! For fuck’s sake!” I put down the book I was reading, switched off the fan that whirred noisily, and edged towards my bedroom door. I leant against the door listening. This was how their fighting often started. I didn’t want to get caught in the middle of it.

  No one responded to Dad’s shouts. After a time I twisted the handle on my door and cracked it open enough to look out. I could see Dad standing by the backdoor. He was stood, wrapped in cigarette smoke, looking at something on the path outside.

  Dad had spotted me and raised a hand to stop me. “Stay there son.” I didn’t stop. I saw the flies before I saw the thing laying by the back door.

  It might have been a cat, once, but now its body was broken, mangled beyond recognition. Bones tore through grey flesh, the fluids of decomposition had spread a putrid outline around the carcass. Its intestines and stomach had been pulled from its belly and stretched like bloated worms across the path. The stomach had either swollen and burst as it had rotted or something had eaten into it.

  Dad waived the flies from his face. He lit another cigarette off his last. Normally I hated the smell of smoke but that morning I was grateful of it. Underneath it the smell of the thing baking in the sun, the stench of spoiled meat, caught in my throat. Looking at it I noticed that the thing on the doorstep didn’t seem to have a head. Instead each end of it came to an abrupt, raw stop.

  “Probably foxes dumped it. They eat the rotten meat. Bury their catches, come back later to dig them up and eat them. Bloody grave robbers.” I watched Dad take a shovel and scrape the remains of the corpse from the path. He carried it along the path, the smoke from his cigarette chasing behind him as if it were afraid he’d leave it behind, to the edge of the woods. There he threw it back in.

  Our house was long and thin. It only had one storey and so the rooms had been lain one after another in a trail stretching from our drive to the woods behind. Our yard was thin too, lasting as long as a cricket pitch before the woods stepped into its path and claimed the ground for their own again. Dad had always said he’d put a fence up around the yard but had never gotten around to it. It wasn’t unusual to be woken at night by the sound of a stray deer or foxes scratching around by the house.

  I’d seen a documentary once where a wood had caught fire and the animals of the forest had stampeded from the cover of the trees, tearing away from the danger. I imagined waking one night to find those woodland beasts charging through the corridor that was our house, a procession of all the animals the forest held. I loved being so close to all that wildlife. That was until I learned what else lurked in the woods behind our house.

 

  *

  I switched off the fan. I’d fallen asleep on top of the covers. It was too hot to lay under them. The fan wound down, its fins slowing, no longer churning the stale summer air that filled my room. Something moved outside. I heard it trampling the dry leaves that piled like yearlong snow drifts along the sides of our house.

  The fan rattled to a stop and my room fell silent. I sat listening. The window by my bed was open, an attempt to draw some cool air into the room. Outside it was almost thirty degrees. There was no cool air anywhere. I leant close to the window and looked out into the darkness.

  I sat watching the darkness for almost an hour. No further sound came. I lay down on the bed, the silence and darkness calling me back to sleep. I closed my eyes. That was when I smelt it.

  The same awful smell of rotting flesh that had spread from the animal corpse Dad had found on the path. It poured into my room, reaching in through the window like a black hand, trying to force itself into my nose, my mouth! I clamped a hand over my mouth to keep the smell out and to stifle the scream that welled in my throat.

  I kept my eyes shut tight, terrified of what I might see if I opened them. Eventually the smell began to fade. I waited for what seemed like hours before daring to open my eyes again. When I did the night had begun to recede. The sky had begun to lighten above. I shut and locked my bedroom window. That had been its second visit.

  *

  It would be at least two more days before there was a break in the heat.

  Mum and Dad had been sleeping in separate rooms for some time. At first they’d tried to hide their fighting from me. To begin with maybe even they had thought that the feelings that drove them to anger might pass, the confusion and jealousy might fade. It didn’t. Their fighting became more frequent, until the only thing holding them together was me.

  Mum’s scream jolted me awake. I jumped out of bed and ran to my bedroom door. I opened the door just in time to almost run into Dad who came racing along to corridor to see what was going on. Mum stood by the back door, sheltering behind it from what she had seen outside. The smell stopped me in my tracks. This time it had left a dog.

  Dirt pressed into its flesh, the dog had been buried, left to rot before being placed outside our back door. Its fur had shed leaving large patches of bare skin, swollen against the liquefied meat underneath it. The head had been pulverised. “Aaron, no!” Mum yelled to Dad when she saw me coming. Dad quickly grabbed me and whisked me back to my room. He knelt to talk to me man to man, “Stay here buddy. Please.” I nodded, wide eyed and terrified, and then I threw up.

 

  *

  Mum threw my old clothes in the wash basket. I stood in my underpants in the middle of the bathroom, quarantined to the centre of the room. “I just got really hot” I said, embarrassed.

  “It’s OK to be scared. I was scared.”

  “You didn’t throw up.”

  Mum put her hand on my forehead, “Maybe you’ve picked something up.” She smiled, a warm, comforting smile. “You can’t be sleeping well. I know I didn’t last night. I heard you moving about.”

  I hadn’t gotten out of bed the night before. I thought of the stench, of that awful smell reaching in through my window. Mum could see how scared I was, “How do you think it got there?” I asked.

  “Your Dad thinks it’s foxes. They bury their kills, dig them up later on to eat them. Maybe it got scared off, left its dinner behind.”

  “Yuk!”

  “Yuk indeed! They pick their noses too you know…” She smiled. She washed my face with a cool face cloth. “… and they eat that too!”

  I screwed up my face in disgust. “Eeewww!” Mum laughed. I laughed too.

  *

  Outside the fly spun, a spiral flight path, bouncing off the window one, two, three times. Even it wanted out of the heat. There was no respite in my room. The fan churned the sweltering air. Despite the heat I kept my window closed and locked.

  The wood surrounded our house on three out of four sides. We had trespassed into its domain. A path ran from the yard, past the sunroom, alongsid
e my bedroom to the shed where Dad kept his tools. The sun was high and bright, casting black finger shadows through the shifting canopy onto the path below. They scratched back and forth waiting to catch any unwary prey that should stray beneath them. I tried to picture a fox dragging the dog’s corpse from the woods, along the path.

  After Mum had cleaned me up I’d gone into the lounge and taken the encyclopaedia volume D – F from the TV cabinet. I’d carried it back to my room and had begun reading everything I could find about foxes. The heat made my head swim. The words on the page seemed to sway as I read them. Foxes did bury their kills, to stop other animals stealing them. If that was the case why would they bring them to our house, leave them for us like an offering?

  At the other end of the house I heard Mum shout. Her shout was followed by Dad’s, the heat making their already short tempers flare quickly. My head had begun to pound. I couldn’t listen to them fighting again. If I stayed in my room I was going to be sick for the second time that day. All I could think about was the cool shade of the wood. How even in the height of summer it was always cooler under the cover of the trees. I ran for my door, out into the corridor and before I knew what I was doing I was standing where Mum had been when she had screamed a few hours before.

  Dad had cleaned away the remains of the dog. Likely thrown it back into the forest where it had come from. I could smell the bleach he’d used to wash down the path. The water had long since burned away in the heat. I hurried along the path into our back yard. There I stopped on the edge of the wood.

  I could feel the sun burning the back of my neck, an angry voice urging me into the cool shade of the trees. I looked back to our house. I could hear Mum and Dad shouting, the hate they hurled at one another. I stood on the edge of our brown, dried up lawn and looked into the wood. And the wood looked back at me.

  I froze. The heat of the summer day immediately drained from my body. I looked at my feet, too scared to look up and see what eyed me from the trees. I could feel its gaze locked onto me. Had it been waiting for me?

  I couldn’t move! I wanted to turn and run but my body wouldn’t listen to me! In the split second we’d locked gazes I was sure that what I’d seen wasn’t a fox. Those eyes. The shape was wrong, they were too high off the ground to be an animal on all fours. Something moved in the trees in front of me. I stumbled backward and fell onto the lawn.

  The pain of the fall brought me to my senses. I rolled onto my front and, grabbing handfuls of grass, I pulled myself to my feet and ran.

  I ran for the house, tumbling down the path and slamming into the backdoor. I burst into the house, spinning and slamming the door behind me. I tried to pull the bolts shut but they were old and stuck. Dad was standing in the corridor. The house seemed hotter than ever. “What’s going on?”

  “I… I…” I managed that much before I passed out.

  *

  I remember the cold, the gentle pressure on my forehead. I thought the cool change had come, that the heatwave had broken, but when I moved I could feel the heat returning, my clothes sticking to me. Mum looked down at me and smiled.

  “Hey you.”

  She took the face cloth from my forehead and dipped it into the bowl of cold water on the arm of the chair.

  “It’s OK. You’ve got a fever.”

  We were in the sun room. The amber light of the dying summer day poured through the large windows. The air was heavy and stale, the windows specked with dirt and dust, the history of our summer baked onto the panes.

  When I try to remember Mum’s face we are always in that room. The setting sun is so bright it hurts my eyes. I can still see its glow through my eyelids. When I open my eyes again Mum has leant forward, her red hair a curtain of gold protecting my eyes from the glare. I can remember every word from that evening but, no matter how hard I try, I can’t remember her face.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Hot.”

  Mum wrung out the face cloth and placed it back on my forehead. I closed my eyes again.

  “Well, I guess this proves that it takes more than a fox’s lunch to shake your nerves of steel. I think you were sick earlier, because you’re, sick.”

  Somewhere in the dark I could hear pipes knocking, a rattling approaching. I opened my eyes.

  “That’s the heating. It blew a fuse while you were asleep. It came on and it’s stuck on. Your Dad’s trying to fix it now.”

  The sun room was the only room in the house without a radiator. “Until it’s fixed you and me are camping out in here.”

  The old, wire framed camping bed that Dad hauled down from the attic each Christmas, had been set up in front of the sun room’s floor to ceiling windows. Mum helped me down on to the bed. My thoughts were a jumbled mess, a fever dream. As I lay on the bed watching the night creeping from the woods all around us I remembered the eyes that I’d seen watching me from the cover of the trees. I tried to pull myself from the bed but I was too weak. I thought I called out but my cries were swallowed into my dreams.

  *

  I woke to the sound of muffled crying. It wasn’t the first time I had heard Mum crying in the night. She sat on the couch looking out of the black panes of the sunroom, a hand held over her mouth to try and stifle the noise. She was trying not to wake me. I could get through their fighting, the shouting and screaming at one another but the quiet, mournful sound of Mum’s weeping filled my heart with ice. The terrible sadness she carried with her filled me with more fear than any creature I might have glimpsed in the woods. I rolled onto my front, burying my face in my pillow. I could feel my chest heaving, sobbing taking hold of me. Then I felt her hand on my back. “It’s OK” she whispered. Fortunately sleep stole me quickly back into its darkness.

  *

  The next time I awoke I was facing the mottled windows of the sun room. Outside the darkness pressed tight up against the glass, watching us. I lay looking into the black. The room was stifling. My mouth was dry from the heat. My throat hurt from crying.

  I could hear a TV on in the distance. Even with the broken heating Dad would stay out of the sunroom tonight. In the darkness I could hear Mum quietly breathing. She’d fallen asleep by my bed. I pulled the sheet off of me and placed it over her. I sat on the edge of the folding bed and looked out into the yard.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the dark I began to be able to make out the outlines of the trees that lined the yard. I watched their huddled forms, rows of dark figures surrounding us on all sides and I thought of the eyes that had watched me from the woods. I was sure that they had been the eyes of whatever had dragged the putrid animals to our back door, whatever had been outside my bedroom window the night before.

  I needed to pee. I didn’t want to leave the sunroom but more than that I didn’t want to pee where I was sitting. Slowly, feeling my way across the dark room, I made my way to the sunroom door. I stood, listening at the door. Now I really needed to pee so I had no choice but to venture in to the house.

  The sunroom door was further up the corridor than my room. I would have to pass the backdoor to get to the toilet.

  I edged along the dark corridor. Ahead, at the far end of the house was the lounge. The sound of the TV was louder now, reaching along the hallway towards me, drowning out the other sounds of the night around me. The door to the lounge was ajar, a thin beam of light escaping to stripe the hallway carpet.

  I stopped by the backdoor for a moment. In the darkness I leant against the door and listened. The night was still, hot and quiet. All I could hear was the sound of the television behind me. I thought of the cat’s corpse, how its stomach had been pulled from its belly, how it looked like something had chewed on its entrails. I turned my back on the backdoor and hurried for the toilet. I locked myself in and switched on the light.

  When I was done, the sound of the cistern filling crowded the room. Slowly it faded leaving me alone in sil
ence. Out of habit I switched off the light and was about to unlock the door when I heard it.

  At first I thought it was the heating. It was distant, quiet, it took a moment for me to realise where the sound was coming from. The wheeze came through the vent in the wall above the toilet. Air escaping, like a whisper, deep and rough. I froze, listening in the dark. The sound came again, a wet breath, air rattling through mucus. I froze, listening in the dark. The breathing, laboured, painful, drew closer. Something was moving along the path on the other side of the vent.

  I had to stop myself from screaming. I was sure that the breathing belonged to the thing that had watched me from the woods. Slowly it drew closer, along the path, until I could tell that it was right on the other side of the vent. Even though there was a wall between us I felt its breathing moving over me, as if it were in the room with me. I tried to hold my breath, as if that might hide me, but my asthma meant I could only manage a few seconds before I spluttered the air from my lungs. I slammed a hand over my mouth. Had it heard me?

  I could taste its foul breath in my mouth. The stench of decay reached into the toilet with me. I pressed hard, back against the door, trying to get away.

  And then it moved off. The breathing began to fade. I could hear it heading along the side of our house. I stood, my hand clamped over my mouth, until the sound had faded to a murmur.

  *

  I stood in the dark for what felt like hours, locked, terrified, in the toilet watching the vent and waiting. My mind squirmed with terrible images of what had been circling our house. Finally I turned back to the toilet door and quietly unlocked it. Trying to be quiet I turned the handle and slowly pulled the door towards me.