One Fat Girl And Her Thoughts: April 2016

...So! Why not say nothing, and let the start of The Story that has been driving me insane speak for me?

=shrugs=

Enjoy.*

~~~~~

Chap.1.

Ironically, it was only after he died that Barnabas’s life began to get interesting.

You wouldn’t think it would be that way, would you?

It seems a simple enough concept. Or at least it did to him. Either an afterlife exists or it doesn’t. Either you die and become a ghost – swiftly dispatched by those in charge of such things to either heaven or hell, depending – or you die and there is no afterlife after all, in which case instead of becoming a ghost you become nothing at all.

See? Simple.

And it is just like that, in most cases. But not in the case of Barnabas Barclay Burnstwick. In his case, unfortunately for him, things were not simple at all; they were most decidedly and bafflingly UN-simple indeed.

He hadn’t intended it to be that way, of course. But then again (also of course) he hadn’t intended to die either, particularly not at the tender age of thirtteen years and two days old. That had been as unexpected and sudden as all the things that had followed it. It was just that once it had happened and he had gotten over the initial shock, he had assumed that, well, that would sort have been it; that things would quieten down and that existence – if indeed there was an existence to be had – would simmer down into a nice predictable plod.

Calm. That was what he had expected. Calm, orderly, and above all, simple.

But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t at all.

Even the end itself was unexpected. Not that many people actively expect to die, of course, or at least not generally; the unexpectedness for him was caused by precisely how it had happened. He couldn’t have had a nice, gentle death in his sleep of old age, could he? Or a nice instantaneous heart attack? Or a brain aneurysm? Or even a common-or-garden tragic accident? Oh no. The demise that fate had decided he would endure was a violent murder – at the age of thirteen, no less. Couldn’t it at least have waited until he was old enough to smoke? – at the hands of a serial killer.

...Yep. Serial killer.

That sort of set the tone, really.

Things went quite quickly from strange to stranger from there...

***

At least it was quick. The death part, that is.

One second he was trudging his way through the woods near his house on a dark and stormy night, the next he was stood blinking in surprise at the sight of his corpse being horridly mutilated.

Needless to say, this came as a shock.

Looking back, though, the most shocking thing about it at the time had not been the murder, or the gory mutilation – awful though it was – but the fact that the coming of death itself had been so swift and, most importantly, utterly painless.

That oughtn’t be right, he had mused to himself as he gazed down at his rain lashed and mud spattered body (helpfully illuminated the large handheld torch that the killer had brought with him), surely? Death should hurt just a little bit, at least, shouldn’t it; particularly the kind that involved a person’s skull being completely caved in on one side by a mallet.

But it was what had happened, and so here he was: dead.

And the question was what on earth was he meant to do now?

He was to find that that question would be answered little by little in due course, but; in the meantime…

…He blinked again, finding himself suddenly stood in the room that in life had been his.

How he had got there or how long had passed between now and him being in the woods looking down at his body sprawled out at an odd angle on the ground, he had no idea.

It was dark in his room, but through the lowered blinds he could see the sun trying valiantly to push its way through. Daylight. Life was going on as it always had and always would; with or without him.

He found that thought oddly cheering.

There were voices coming from the bottom of the stairs. Barnabas walked out onto the landing. His mother and father were stood in the entranceway. There was a man with them, dark suited and wearing an appropriately grim-but-respectful expression. Not an undertaker; the suit wasn’t dark enough. Not a neighbour; they had none. Not a friend; the atmosphere was far too formal…

A policeman then; plain clothes. There to tell them the sad news of their son’s demise. And indeed so it was.

They walked into the nearest room, parents first and then Mr. Plainclothes.

Barnabas followed them.

Mrs. Bartholomew-Brisket was perched on the edge of her seat, straight backed and rigid and her face set in a closed mask of properness. Mr. Bartholomew-Brisket was stood at the back of the seat in much the same manner. After listening to what the man had to say, outwardly their expressions didn’t change, but Barnabas felt an invisible cloud of tension descend heavily into the room.

The man – an Inspector, he had called himself – was very sorry, he said, to have to bring them such news, and also that he regretted to intrude at such a time, but there were some questions that needed to be asked. Purely routine, he assured them, and he would get it all over with as delicately and swiftly as possible.

They were very routine. When had they last seen Barnabas alive, what had he been doing, did they know where he had been going at that time of the night…that sort of thing.

His mother answered.

Barnabas looked at her with a sad fondness as she spoke. Her face was serene, as it always was, and her voice was light, as it always was. Only her hands betrayed any kind of feeling indicative of anything being amiss. They were clasped on her lap, as they always were when she was sat down and there was nothing else to do with them, but now rather than being sat neatly within one another they were gripped together so tightly that her fingers were red and her knuckles were white.

The Inspector waited a respectful amount of time between each question and nodded understandingly at each croaked answer. Once he had finished an uncomfortable silence reigned until Barnabas’s father shattered it. Speaking for the first time since the Inspector’s arrival, he uttered one word; harsh and loud.

“How?”

Barnabas looked round at him in surprise and noted with even more surprise that for the first time in his memory, his father’s closed mask of indifference had melted away leaving an expression haggard and overwhelmed.

Glaring at the Inspector as he waited for an answer, his eyes brimmed with emotion and his skin was pallid and grey. He looked, to put it bluntly, gosh awful.

Instead of answering, the Inspector gave a meaningful glance toward Barnabas’s mother, a gesture that Mr. Bartholomew-Brisket immediately understood.

“Hatty,” he barked. Barnabas winced, as he always had done, at the tone of voice his father used when speaking to her; “tea. Go.”

Obediently, Mrs. Bartholomew-Brisket stood up and left the room. Once they were sure she was gone, Barnabas’s father positioned himself on the spot his wife had just vacated, drew his shoulders back to give at least a vague impression of a man not on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and repeated his question.

Briefly and as gently as he could, which considering the situation wasn’t very, the Inspector told him the full story of his son’s demise (the later details of which Barnabas listened to with great interest, as he had missed them first time round). Mr. Bartholomew-Brisket made no further sound; merely sat there rigidly, listening.

Once the story had been told there was another deafening silence, broken this time by the return of Mrs. Bartholomew-Brisket bearing a heavy looking silver tray loaded with sundries. They both watched her lug it in and place it on the ornate wooden table that sat between the sofa and two armchairs.

As she began stirring the contents of the pot, Mr. Bartholomew-Brisket spoke again.

“…thank you, Inspector,” he said, stiffly; “please take some tea before you leave.”

With that, he stood and walked out.

The Inspector watched him go before turning his attention to the remaining parent in the room. Reverting instinctively to the role that she was most suited to – that of the perfect hostess – Mrs. Bartholomew-Brisket asked him the usual questions one asks a stranger when serving them tea; relieved, presumably, at the prospect of having something mundane and familiar to concentrate on.

Barnabas watched for a few minutes, then wandered out to see where his father had got to.

He found him in the master bedroom, sat at the dressing table his mother used each morning to ‘put on her face’, as it was called in the days when she was a girl.

He was staring into the mirror and for a moment, nothing happened; he just sat there with his face gaunt and his shoulders drooped and stared into the mirror and Barnabas stood in the doorway and stared at his father staring at himself.

But after the moment had passed, something happened that he hadn’t expected and was in no way prepared for:

Producing a gun from his pocket, his father put it to his head.

With an un-ghostlike gasp, Barnabas took a step forward and gaped at it; half uncomprehending, half horrified. He started to try and say something – when asked later, he realized that he had no clue what – but as he stumbled and stammered trying to prise whatever it was out, his father drew himself up and glared into the glass.

His lips curled into a scornful and contemptuous smile.

“You lose,” he said cryptically; “and I win.”

After saying those words, his finger tightened around the trigger.

Barnabas yelled out “no!”, but it was no use.

It came anyway.

There was a loud bang.

Blood spurted across the mirror and at the same moment the gun dropped to the floor and his father slumped forward in his chair; lifeless.

For a moment, time seemed to stop.

When it started again, Barnabas blinked, hard, but the view didn’t change. His father was still dead. The blood was still spattered from one corner of the glass to the other in its horrifically smooth and vivid widening red stripe. The gun still lay on the floor.

He walked forward, slowly, stiffly.

Before he reached the chair, he heard footsteps on the stairs and turning to look at whoever was coming, uttered a desperate prayer in his head that it not be his mother…

It wasn’t. It was the Inspector, and close behind him, Mr. Greenward the long serving butler.

Together they surveyed the scene in silence, with expressions of horror not dissimilar to Barnabas’s own.

Then, pulling himself together, the Inspector took charge. Writing a number down on a piece of paper in his notepad, he tore it out and handed it to the other man.

“Is there a telephone? (Greenward nodded) Good. Go to it and dial this number,” he instructed him sternly; “when you get through, give them my name and tell them that a team is needed immediately to deal with an I.D. Just that; I.D. Once you have done that, find someone, anyone, to stay with the mistress of the house and request that they remain in the room they are in until I say so. Don’t refer to what has happened, just give them my instructions; say it is an official police order. If they ask any questions simply tell them that you don’t know anymore than that, then come back up here; I will need you to assist me until my team arrives. Understood?”

Pale but professional to the last, Mr. Greenward gave a nod and his classic butler bow before retreating to do the man’s bidding.

Walking over to the dressing table, the Inspector surveyed the blood spattered scene. He made no attempt to touch anything, just walked slowly up and down looking at it all with an expression of professional regret. He had, Barnabas supposed considering his line of work, seen more and worse.

A few moments later Mr. Greenward returned with a message asking the Inspector to ring and give particulars (the Inspector uttered a stifled oath at this).

Mrs. Bartholomew-Brisket, he continued, was in the drawing room in the company of the cook, both agreeable with the prospect of remaining there until further notice while at the same time blissfully unaware of the reason for it. Nobody else knew anything bar the gardener, who had been tending shrubbery below the open window and heard the shot. A quiet word in his ear before going in to speak to the lady of the house had convinced him of the need for secrecy.

The Inspector nodded at this grimly. Leaving the room to make his phone call, he asked Mr. Greenway to follow and guard the bottom of the stairs to prevent anybody coming up, a task that the butler gratefully rushed to be getting on with. Anything, the elderly man’s face said, that meant he didn’t have to remain in the room alone with the corpse of his former master.

Barnabas watched them go.

The clock carried on ticking. Outside, the birds carried on singing.

Life was carrying on without either of them…

He was pondering, after a few more solemn, silent minutes had ticked by, what on earth he was supposed to do now when he noticed something else was beginning to happen; something that took his mind off the devastating problem of his father’s suicide altogether.

Rising up from his father’s slumped back in an ominous cloud was a mass of …well… of something. He didn’t know what it was, exactly; just that whatever it was there was an ominous cloudlike mass of it. It was shapeless and dark and angry looking. And unsettlingly, having risen up into the air as high as it apparently wanted to go, it was now heading towards him.

Barnabas took an involuntary step back, then another, and another. He kept taking backward steps until his back hit against the wall and stopped.

He just had time to think ‘well, ‘bang’ goes the theory that ghosts can pass effortlessly though solid objects’ before it hit him, full on.

The feeling was similar to the feeling of being punched in the lower chest. Except that usually when somebody punched you in the chest their fist tended to stay on the outside of you, whereas after the initial impact whatever this thing was kept right on going; seeping through his clothes, his skin – did he still have skin? – through everything, pushing and pushing until it had gathered itself into a little ball and reached the very core of him. And once it reached there, it did something even more unpleasant:

It exploded.

For just a split second, a shock wave ripped through him and he felt himself being torn violently apart from the inside out. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but at the same time it did; it was a mixture of numbness and pain mixed together so thickly that you couldn’t really tell one from the other.

With a shuddering gasp Barnabas fell to his knees, too overwhelmed and terrified to even cry out. And then the sensation was over, as soon almost as it began, replaced by a completely different one: one of unutterable, uncontrollable, inconsolable terror. Then, in an instant, just like the force created by the explosion, it changed and he felt his insides tear again, as though something deep within were desperate to get out.

The feeling was indescribable, and the pressure unfathomable. Doubled over, clutching his arms across his belly, Barnabas screwed his eyes tightly shut. And still, it got worse, building higher and higher and more and more, until the whole world was a swirling vortex and he felt himself aflame with it. And just at the point that he knew that if the pressure built up even a fraction more was going to burst into millions of tiny pieces – and take out anything and anyone that had to be nearby with him – and that things couldn’t possibly get any worse, he finally opened his mouth, took in a great desperate breath, and screamed.

The sound that came out was unlike anything he had ever heard before. It was ghastly, deafening, terrifying. The pitch was unearthly, the volume immense, the force stupendous. It couldn’t be from him, not really. But it was. He knew that it was. His eyes still screwed shut, he could feel it; feel it pouring out of him in a great unstoppable tide, and as it did he could feel the pressure subsiding and the sense of relief growing.

He was dimly aware of other sounds, of crashes and groans and splinterings and shatterings, of explosions blasting things apart, but it all sounded muted and far away, and in any case, he didn’t much care. The scream went on, and on, and the other sounds sounded in the distance, and he didn’t care; the only thing that mattered right then was that whatever had been pushing and pulling inside of him was going away.

…This went on for some time, until a second screech; louder and more powerful than the one he appeared to be making, bellowed out from somewhere and brought him to his senses and at last he stopped.

Rolling onto his back, Barnabas lay there, gasping, eyes still closed. His chest and stomach, though much better, were still throbbing. Keeping his arms wrapped as tightly around himself as he could seemed to help. Opening his eyes the view before him was one of crazily dancing chaos, so he closed them again.

Eventually both the aching and the dizziness eased, or at least mostly they did. Cautiously he sat up, then when that went well, he risked opening his eyes and looked about him.

The room was demolished. And by ‘demolished’, I do not mean the furniture, or at least, not just the furniture; I mean pretty much everything. Walls, floor, ceiling; everything had been obliterated to the extent that there was little of it left. The only item left completely intact, bizarrely, was the mirror.

Curiously, Barnabas peered at it. It was sat on a bedraggled patch of what was left on the floor, turned on its frame so that the mirror itself was facing directly upwards, pointed towards the great void that had been the ceiling.

Edging his way towards it gingerly – what remained of the floorboards was hardly sturdy – he saw that the blood spattered surface appeared to be aglow.

Curiouser and curiouser…

Barnabas edged a little nearer to get a better look. Yes, it was definitely glowing. And, leaning over a little more, it was moving too; rippling and undulating as though the glass itself had come to life. Barnabas continued to stare at it with a sort of morbid fascination. It was terribly beautiful and terribly awful at the same time. He felt an urge, an almost irresistible urge, to reach out and touch it; indeed his hand began to move, stretching out of its own accord.

Just then a rumbling groan shook the earth, causing him to topple backwards, fall and roll over, nearly crashing through the floor in the process.

Coming to a halt, he rolled himself back over and stared up at where the ceiling had been again. The world was spinning again, and so was his head, because it made no sense. The sound had come from within the mirror. It couldn’t have. How could it? But it had, it had.

No sense at all, none of it. His death, his father’s, the explosion, the screams, the mirror; none of it made sense. Just none of it!

Another rumbling groan. A bright beam of light, tinted red and grey, blasted from the mirror’s glimmering surface up into the darkened recesses of the attic above.

Barnabas stared up at it with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

This, he thought miserably, could not be good…

And then suddenly and even more horridly unexpectedly - in a way - than his father's death, everything got a whole lot worse.

Out of the blue, a gloved hand was clamped over his face and an arm wrapped around his chest and he was dragged rudely and unceremoniously to his feet, then backwards.

Instinctively Barnabas lashed out, catching his attacker with a satisfying sounding thud and causing whoever it was to let out a grunt of “oof!” and let go. His relief was short lived, however, for seconds later as he tried to scramble to his feet after being dropped, another pair of hands grabbed hold of him; hands belonging to someone bigger, stronger and that unfortunately knew what he was doing. The next instant, Barnabas found himself roughly pulled off his feet and pinned down with considerable force.

Barnabas struggled, of course he did, but it was no use. He was overpowered and overwhelmed and, as the first attacker made a grab for his legs – saying “oof!” again as Barnabas kicked at him and caught him somewhere soft – he was outnumbered as well.

It was hopeless.

Hopeless.

That was the last word that his mind thought before descending into nothingness.

...Hopeless…

***

~~~~~

There y'go.

=shrugs again=

Alice x

* To anyone reading this; this is just a rough (very rough) draft of a (very rough) idea that has changed and twisted and turned and spiraled so many times that it is barely formed and I have the barest idea of where it is going to end up. So, just bear that in mind, will you?

Also, if you wish to comment on my general writing style (ignore the bad grammar; I seem to break most rules associated with that as standard), like or dislike, love or hate; please, be gentle.

One Fat Girl And Her Thoughts

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