Story Series | Chapter Three

 

Chapter Three | Then

Riley almost tumbles off his motorcycle as he skids to a halt outside the old bar at the end of his girlfriend’s street, spewing mud and gravel across the rain-soaked cobbles. His hands shaking from the frigid, rainy four-hour drive, but also from the nerves, he cuts the engine and glances anxiously at the tall stone wall next to him, which he knows encloses the Saint-Vincent cemetery. Not a great omen. 

He sprints the few meters to Norah’s place. From the sidewalk, he gapes up at the old house, squinting through the rain and the darkness; it’s 4:00 in the morning and all of Montmartre is asleep under the storm. Ancient, desolate, despite being occupied by an architect, the house could out-spook even old Saint-Vincent. Trying not to think too much, he scales the low garden wall with a grunt and, heart thundering, approaches the front door, which he notices, with a shock of panic, is open a crack.

Taking a deep breath that doesn’t do him much good, Riley slides through the door, not bothering to close it behind him. He shivers in the pitch-blackness and waits for his eyes to adjust. They don’t. 

God, what is happening? Where is she? And where is her father?

In the silence, his mind summons Norah’s quivering voice from their whispered phone call four hours ago. 

“Riley. He’s going to kill me.”

He was back in Lyon, had just returned to his decrepit hotel room after a show, but the hushed terror in her voice was more than enough to send him flying back out of bed, into his leather jacket and onto his Harley for a long and fretful ride back to Paris, keeping the speedometer at 140 kilometers per hour the entire journey. 

But was he too late? 

Angry, anxious tears fill his eyes and mania multiplies inside him, but he tries to ignore his emotions and focus. If Norah is still here, he knows where she’ll be. He walks silently, blindly toward the spiral staircase at the back of the open main floor. He’s only been here a few times but he tries to remember which stairs creak and hopes to God the raindrops dripping from his hair won’t make a sound. 

He reaches Norah’s bedroom and he bites his lip. The room is trashed, furniture torn and strewn. Lightning flashes and he catches puddles of blood dotting the wooden floor. 

“No, no, please no,” he mutters inaudibly, his anxiety growing every second. The trap door to the attic is open. No sound emits from the dark hole in the ceiling, and he steps carefully toward the ladder, his fear of losing Norah vastly trumping the anxiety boiling in his stomach. Is she up there? Is she… 

He tries not to finish the thought as he climbs the ladder. 

The attic is Norah’s haven. It’s her escape from the waking nightmare of her everyday. Like a metaphor for her own life, she took the dark and ghastly space and made it hers, piecing together her treasures to transform it into her sanctuary. 

Riley pokes his head through the trap door, but in the darkness he can’t see a thing, and he can’t hear anything, especially over the rapping of the rain on the roof directly above. Soundlessly, he heaves himself into the low space and pulls a lighter out of his leather jacket, his fingers skimming the small velvet box in the pocket. After a few exasperated clicks with quivering hands, the lighter shines brightly enough to take in his immediate surroundings. Like her bedroom, the attic is wrecked. 

“Norah?” he whispers, unable to hear his voice over his own thundering heart. Lightning flashes through the tiny east-facing windows, displaying a brief glimpse of the cemetery beyond. Riley gulps. Is Brickley out there? The hairs on his arms prickle at the thought of the old man stalking amongst his beloved mausoleums. 

Wherever Brickley is, Riley needs to hurry. 

“Norah?” he tries again. He gently probes the darkness with his small flame, which flickers over a hundred trinkets and even more books scattered across the floor. These books are portals into the different worlds Norah would escape to back when she had no one else but these dusty old pages. Back when she didn’t have him, she once told him. She still loves to read, but now, she reads to him. 

He whispers her name again, his voice breaking in a quiet sob. But this time he hears a rustling in the back corner of the room. He points his lighter in the direction of the noise. 

“Riley?” A whisper.

Riley hurries over to find Norah crumpled on the floor, face-up, her forehead splattered with blood. He kneels beside her. She tries to move, breathing sharply and painfully. 

“Are you okay?” is all he can manage to say, stroking her hair with a shaking hand. Tears fall from his cheeks and onto hers. 

“You’re here.”

Riley examines her in the dim light. There’s a deep gash on her forehead and another on her neck, and her arms are splotched with blossoming bruises. He swallows the primal growl rumbling in his chest. “Norah, what happened?” 

She just shakes her head. 

“Later, then,” he says. “Do you know where he is now? The front door was open… ” 

“I think… I think he’s in the cemetery,” she says, her voice a horrified whisper.

Of course he’s in the cemetery. Riley stands to glance out the east window again and realizes with another sharp pang of fear that perhaps right outside the cemetery gates wasn’t the best place to park his Harley. If Brickley emerged and saw his bike… 

He kneels back down beside Norah. “Can you ride with me?” 

She bites her lip. “Okay,” she grunts. 

“Can I help you get up?”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. Okay.” 

Riley grips her gently as she tries to sit up, but she yelps, then quickly bites his arm to muffle her own moaning. 

“Ow, babe, fuck…”

“I think I broke a rib or something,” she pants, removing her mouth from his arm. 

Riley nods, trying to remain calm. “Have you called the police?”

She shakes her head. 

Riley squeezes his eyes shut in frustration. She called him, but not the cops. Her lack of trust for other people, especially older people, never ceases to amaze him. Had he known she hadn’t called the cops, he would have called them himself before leaving his hotel. But it doesn’t matter now. 

“I’ll be right back.” He kisses her hand and ignores her whispered protests as he climbs back down the ladder. There’s a phone in the kitchen. 

Trying not to slip, throw up or make a single sound, Riley creeps down the ladder into Norah’s destroyed bedroom and sprints to the landing. But before he can descend the stairs, he hears the front door burst open and he nearly screams. 

“Do you have a death wish, Sheppard?” he hears the croaking voice of Martin Brickley bellow from the main floor. So he saw the Harley. Feeling the blood draining from his face, Riley backs up, pressing himself against the wall between Norah’s room and Brickley’s, his eyes on the dark staircase, and listens to the old man make a racket as he stumbles, obviously drunk, across the main floor of the house… 

The first step creaks downstairs. He’s coming. Riley manages to gulp down some oxygen and tries to visualise himself in a video game. Just protect Norah. Stop the old freak from getting to that attic. Simple. If he dies, he’ll regenerate. No biggie. 

He almost laughs. 

After a few very long, silent seconds, Riley peers down the stairs to see the crooked figure of Martin Brickley climbing slowly, clumsily. Riley holds his breath, waiting for the old man to reach a certain point, and finally, after blessing himself with the Sign of the Cross, he hurls himself off the landing, bracing his rain-soaked body for impact. 

Bull’s eye. With a sickening crunch and a strangled moan from Brickley, Riley lands directly on top of him and they both tumble down to the hard wood of the first floor. His bones aching, Riley scrambles to his feet in the darkness while Brickley shrieks in pain. 

Riley frantically reaches for a light but when he flicks it, nothing happens. The power is out. He wouldn’t have been able to call the cops anyway. 

In the darkness he can just see Brickley splayed on the floor, his arm bent at an awkward angle. It looks broken, but that’s not stopping the old lunatic from quivering to his feet. Riley backs into the staircase, his mind racing: knock him out? Kill him?

“You’re dead, kid,” Brickley breathes, his stale tongue clicking as he sways uneasily, clutching his maimed arm. “You’re both dead...”

Riley decides to hurl himself at the old man and just see what happens. He slams Brickley back to the floor and scrambles on top of him, where he pounds his fists into the old man’s bony face. Brickley kicks and screams and emits glass-shattering, otherworldly shrieks that make Riley’s skin crawl even as he’s beating him half to death. Upstairs, he can hear Norah screaming. 

After however many minutes of pounding Brickley’s face in, Riley leans back, gasping for breath. The old man’s left eye is already purple and swollen shut while the rest of his face is torn apart and oozing blood. 

Get Norah. Get out of here. Get help. 

Running on adrenaline, Riley hurries back up to the third floor, wincing against the fresh bruises blooming all over his body. He finds Norah right where he left her, though she’s sitting up, her face twisted in agony. 

“Riley,” she breathes. “Are you okay? Is he…?”

“I don’t think he’s dead,” he says, scrambling over to her. “Norah, I know you’re in pain, but we need to leave. Now.” 

Her eyes lock on his. The only other time he’s seen her this broken and beaten was the moment they were found out, the moment her father forbade her from ever seeing him again. Her crinkled, tear-streaked face is too unlike her usual shy smile… 

More thunder. Up here, the house shivers and moans and it feels like it’s about to split in two. Riley reaches for Norah’s hand and presses it against his blood-splattered lips. He searches her watery eyes and, as always, sees his every prayer; their memories, the few and fantastic. Their plans and desires, childish but pure. Possible. 

“Come on,” he says, and she nods. But then her eyes flick behind him, and they flash with terror.

“RILEY,” she screams. 

Another explosion of thunder shakes Riley to his very core, followed by a harrowing silence. 

Riley swallows hard. It wasn’t thunder, he realizes, looking down to see his abdomen spewing blood. The bullet went right through him and into Norah’s arm, but she’s not even screaming. She’s staring at him, her eyes wider than he’s ever seen them, her face glowing white in the dark. 

Feeling nothing at all, Riley turns slowly to see the shadow of Martin Brickley just protruding through the trap door, his broken arm somehow clutching the attic floor and his good hand gripping a smoking gun. 

Then, Brickley’s arm gives way and he falls with a crunch to the bedroom floor below. 

“NO,” Norah finally screams. 

Riley gasps and backs against the wall, feeling the pain shoot through his stomach now, feeling the warmth where the wound is draining blood. Moaning incoherently, Norah scrambles to his side, shaking out of control. 

“No, no, no…” she whispers over and over again. 

No, indeed. Riley wants to take her face in his hands but life is gushing out of him at such a shocking pace all he can do is stare into her eyes like he’s done so many times before. Reading him, still sobbing, she presses her small palms into his cheeks and kisses him gently. 

“Riley…” 

“What a night,” he whispers. 

“No, no,” she goes on, kissing him again, “my fault… my fault, I called you, I’m… I’m having a nightmare… this isn’t real…”

“No. Not real. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s okay,” she repeats, her voice quivering, her eyes twitching as they scan every square inch of him. She sobs as she finds the bullet hole. She strokes his hair and his face and he blinks, trying to stay awake for her. 

“You look… you look the way you do when you’re about to puke,” he whispers. 

“I—I am about to puke,” she says. 

“Just give it another few, will you?” His vision is blurring and blackening. He can feel his life physically leaving him and he wonders vaguely why it’s not all flashing before his eyes. 

“Okay. Okay,” Norah whispers through a heaving, shaking sob. She buries her wet face in his hair and he leans in, breathing in the faint, pristine smell of her, letting her presence absorb his diminishing consciousness. 

“Hey,” he whispers. “Remember the beach? Remember what we said?”

He feels her nod. 

“Good.”

“Please just stay,” she whispers. 

“Love you,” he says. 

Her face is in front of him again. From deep inside her, she pulls out a smile for him. “And I love you.”

He squeezes her hand, then his grip slackens. 

Norah touches her nose against his, kisses him a dozen more times, sobbing silently, croaking for air. Before letting go of his hand, she throws her head back and screams, releasing an unearthly, guttural, inhuman sound completely out of her control, loud enough to wake all of Paris.

Rising to her feet without a flinch, without feeling any of her broken bones or the bullet lodged in her arm, Norah limps over to the trap door and lowers herself into her bedroom. Martin Brickley, mangled and splattered on her blood-stained bedroom floor, watches her through swollen eyes, unable or unwilling to move. She stares at him, her eyes wide and unblinking. 

“You should have listened to me,” he wheezes. “Look where your rebellion got you. Look where it got him. Stupid fucking bitch—”

Norah bends over Brickley and vomits earnestly in his face, leaving him gasping, snorting and spluttering. She wipes her mouth and removes his glasses so he can see her. She waits until she can decipher terror in his eyes. Then, leaning in so close that her skin nearly touches his, she begins to scream again, surrendering to something that’s been growing inside her, quietly, slowly, for twenty years.

Then she picks up the gun.