Story Series | Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight | Then

Riley listens to the sirens as they draw nearer, trying not to panic. He finds himself doing what he usually does when he’s anxious: meditating on the thought of Norah’s pixie-like face, her hard-won sense of humour, her brilliant eyes, but this only worsens his state; what if he never sees her again? What if she isn’t okay? What if this is it for him, what if this is his afterlife? This sad, strange existence in a musty attic facing her father’s beloved graveyard? 

Thoughts of Norah are interrupted when flashing lights slice through the attic window, and Riley watches four emergency vehicles pull up and park hastily along rue Saint-Vincent. 

In seconds, the sound of the front door crashing open reverberates up the walls and dust tumbles down from the attic ceiling, falling directly through Riley, who’s now contemplating whether he should go down there to eavesdrop — what if they have information about Norah, about any of this? 

Just as he starts to consider what the consequences might be (would they be able to see him?), he finds himself hurtling through the floorboards, landing abruptly to hover a foot above the ground of the main floor. 

Holy shit, he thinks, again unable to comprehend what just happened, but he’s quickly snapped to attention by the shouts and multiple torch beams bouncing off the brick walls of the main floor like ping-pong balls. 

“Brickley, it’s the police,” one officer bellows, coming to a halt a few feet in front of Riley, the rest of his team piling inside behind him. “The house is surrounded. Come downstairs with your hands up.” 

The officer raises his gun and points it directly at Riley, who panics, instinctively raising his arms, then remembering he doesn’t have any. He looks down, sees that his body, or whatever it is now, is still invisible; then he looks behind him and realizes the officer is simply directing his gun at the spiral staircase. 

After a few moments of complete silence, the officer gestures towards the stairs and a few others scurry up to the second floor, weapons raised. 

“You think he’s up there, sir?” one officer asks the first. 

“I think he’s either gone or dead,” he says. He returns his gun to its holster and in the darkness seems to notice for the first time the scratched, bloodied floor at the foot of the stairs where Riley pulverized Brickley last night. He bends to examine it with his torch. “I’m worried for the girl.” 

“Fucking Brickley,” a third officer mumbles. He begins pacing dangerously close to Riley, who doesn’t know what to do with himself but has determined that none of these men can see him. Before he can move, the officer actually walks directly through him. Riley feels nothing but the officer shivers. “Jesus Christ, it’s cold in here. What’ve you got over there, Losier? Is that blood?”

“Looks like there was a struggle here,” answers the first officer, Losier. “Blood. Scuff marks.” 

Another officer steps forward with a camera and follows murmured instructions from Losier, snapping photos of the scene. As the flash pops, Riley’s sense of vision explodes in a technicolour rorschach test. 

“Woah,” he breathes. Losier peers over his shoulder. 

“You say something, Bennet?” 

“No, sir.” 

For a moment, Riley is intrigued; did they hear that? Can they hear him, but not see him? He considers saying something else, to test the theory, but is distracted by a shout from the second floor. 

“Sir, Brickley’s up here. He’s dead.” 

As Losier sighs, Riley’s thoughts veer upwards and in seconds, he finds himself upstairs in Norah’s room, hovering amidst the other officers who just discovered Martin Brickley’s mangled body lying beneath the open trapdoor to the attic. 

“Who is this guy?” asks one of them, the youngest-looking one of the group, and a few of the men emit grisly sounds. 

“An old nutter,” one says. 

“More than that, though,” says another, crouching next to Brickley and bending down to examine the old man’s bloodied face. “Brickley was a strange man. A very strange man.

“Hey, don’t lean in so close, it’s making me uneasy.”

“What?” scoffs the crouching officer. “You don’t believe all that crap, do you?”

“His Occult shit? Come on. I just mean…” This one takes a few steps back. “He gives me the creeps. The way he treated his daughter…”

“Occult shit?” the first one asks, his voice a pitch higher. Before he gets an answer, the group from downstairs bustles in and Losier steps immediately over to the body, scanning it with his torch. 

“My God. Looks like someone attacked him,” he says. 

“I thought you expected him to be dead, sir?” 

“By his own hand, maybe. This was someone else’s doing…”

“The girl, you think?” 

Losier bites his lip and scans the room. 

“You checked the other room? All the closets?” 

“Yes, sir.”

Losier notices the trapdoor. He nods to it. “And what about up there?”

“No, sir, we didn’t even notice—”

“I’ll go, sir,” pipes up the nervous one, the young one. Losier nods at the rookie and watches him scramble up the ladder to poke the upper half of his body through the opening. 

Riley shoots upwards to observe the rookie’s torch as it pores around the room, soon landing on his own body, broken and bloodied and folded against the far wall. 

“Shit,” the rookie whispers. He hoists himself into the attic and sinks to his knees next to Riley’s body, positioning his torch on the floor between them, then pulls a plastic glove out of his pocket and hastily pulls it on. Gently, the rookie presses his hand against Riley’s jugular, checking for a pulse that’s not there. Then he lets his gloved hand fall limply to his side. Riley, hovering unseen mere feet away, can sense the young man’s unease like a bitter cologne in the air as he removes his hat and scans Riley’s body with his eyes. Riley is just thinking they must be around the same age, mid-twenties, when the rookie’s head turns abruptly to stare wide-eyed in Riley’s direction. 

“Perrier?” comes a voice from the trapdoor, making the young cop jump. He returns his gaze to the body, his eyes wide. Again, Riley finds himself wondering what the hell just happened. 

“There—there’s a body up here, sir,” Perrier bellows, his voice cracking. 

“Is it the girl?”

“No.” Perrier stands and steps back from the body as Losier appears, scanning Riley’s body with his torch, the light eventually landing on the blank face, washing out the unseeing green eyes, making them look white. Hovering nearby, Riley looks away, feeling like if he still had a stomach he’d retch. 

As the attic crowds with more officers, the young Perrier backs into the shadows to watch, and Riley can see in the dim light that he looks pale as death. For a brief moment, Riley inexplicably wonders if he’s feeling the young man’s trauma second-hand; the fear, the nausea, the goosebumps… 

Again, Perrier’s head turns slowly to look directly at Riley, his eyes bulging. Invisible in the shadows, in whatever realm he now exists in, Riley stares back, and is alarmed to find he can hear Perrier’s heart beat faster. 

“Sir,” Perrier says now, blinking hard, visibly swallowing his fear; he looks back at his fellows. “Who is he, sir?” 

Losier is now kneeling next to the corpse, pulling on his own set of plastic gloves. 

“Not sure,” he says as he begins gingerly checking the pockets of Riley’s blood-splattered denim jacket. 

Yet another officer appears at the trapdoor. “Sir, we’ve checked the entire property. She’s not here.”

“My daughter Brittany goes to school with her,” Losier says with a sad nod. He peers up at his team in the torchlight. “I heard the rumours. I should have taken them more seriously. Been more proactive. Eighteen years that kid was holed up in here with that crazy bastard. As though on some leash.” 

He sighs and looks down at the item in his gloved hand. He blinks. Then he holds it up for the rest to see. 

“Well,” one of the officers murmurs as they lean in, squinting at the Polaroid picture, “looks like she managed to cut herself loose at least a couple of times.”

Riley stays back. He knows what they’re looking at. It’s a picture of him and Eve, shuddering and happy in the frigid winter air, that day by the water. He carried it with him everywhere. 

“So that’s the girl?” one officer asks. “This kid must be her boyfriend.”

“Possibly,” says Losier. He places the picture on the floor next to Riley’s limp, stalk-white hand, then probes the same inner pocket of Riley’s jean jacket to unearth yet another item: a small velvet box. “Huh.”

At this, Riley stirs. He whisks closer to where the group of men are staring at the ring box that once belonged to his parents. 

“A ring?” one of them asks. Losier opens the box to reveal an empty slot where a ring once sat. 

Riley suddenly surges with anxiety and hope and sadness. That box wasn’t empty when he died. 

“Seems it used to be,” Losier sighs, snapping the box closed and placing it next to the photograph. 

Riley can’t look at this anymore. He turns, finding himself face-to-face with the young cop, Perrier, whose arms are now wrapped tightly around himself, his hands clutching his own shoulders as though in comfort. There’s a wedding ring on his finger. Riley stares at the poor,  trembling bastard, feeling a torrent of jealousy and bitterness. Perrier continues to stare wide-eyed at the floor, apparently unseeing, but after a few seconds his eyes roll back and he collapses to the dusty floor. A few of the others rush to his aid. Riley takes advantage of their absence and sweeps back over to the small window overlooking Rue des Saules. 

Through the mesmerizing red and blue flashes of the police cars, he again stares out at the spot where he left his Harley last night. Norah took the ring, took the bike. With every ounce of his aberrant existence, Riley wishes that wherever she is by now, she’s on her way to somewhere safe. Somewhere she deserves.