He had not remembered, immediately. The words had been spoken years before and eventually forgotten. The memory had taken some days - perhaps waited until he had been weakened and compromised - until it had sprung.
When it came, there was no hiding from its content or its clarity. She had been candid in her desire and forceful in her request for assurance. She had articulated in detail her unwillingness to live if any tragedy should ever befall the child or if her own mental faculties were to be compromised beyond repair. He had sworn that in the absence of a legally sanctioned alternative, he would deliver her from life.
He had not acquiesced immediately. Her belief system was a spectral opposite to his own. To her, the promise of swift and certain death in the advent of accident or illness represented the promise of unshackling and a new beginning. It meant freedom from suffering or from the indignity of burdening others. And if the child had gone before her, above all it meant the promise of reunion, whether that be on a physical plane or within some energetically unique and unfamiliar state, some joining of souls.
His own interpretation of death was altogether different. To him, it was the cessation of everything they knew. It was infinite, dreamless sleep. It was undignified post-mortem, cold, damp decay and a return to the earth. It was the end of sentience. It was a farewell to the possibility of ever knowing anything again, pleasurable or painful. Vowing to deliver her to such reality was an overwhelming thing, even in the face of her conflicting convictions. He had agreed, not because he thought he could grant her wish, but because he believed such reality would never come to be.
And then that reality had come. Two possible scenarios could trigger the need for his words to be acted upon, each as unlikely as the other. The likelihood of both those possibilities forming some unholy union and interjecting in their lives simultaneously had been infinitesimally small, but nonetheless they had. Madness had come to her and it had travelled on the rancid coattails of the child's death.
He had brought them to the lake, had strived to portray as normal a self as he could, and all the time he had planned for the moment of finality and when it should come. The pistol he stored at the cabin would achieve it quickly. Two delicate squeezes of its trigger.
When he first thought of the weapon weeks before, the images of their death had come silently and without trace of emotion, but the growing reality of what was to come had approached like some plodding monstrosity, bringing with it uncertainty and terror and damn-near madness.
Be strong.
Doubt persisted like a ghost, but it was the time for ultimate self-honesty. Life, once precious had become poisoned, as a well tainted by animal matter. Madness had taken hold and choked the good from existence. He had waited for improvement, but change came in the only form of further deterioration of her mind and solidification of her symptoms. The pills had done nothing to help. The therapy had failed to penetrate even the outer shell of the issue. The life that remained was a joyless and degrading place. They had envisioned the possibility of cognitive degeneration in her old age, and the loss of dignity it would bring. Neither had considered the true nature of the condition that would come, nor the flavor of the indignity that would accompany it.
He recalled the car journey the previous evening, remembered her insistence that he participate in their imagined interactions while he drove. And upon the lake, her pressure to take part in a game of three when there were only two.
He thought of the morning's journey to town. Even seated outside the cafe, it was impossible to escape the glances or stares of curious customers. He saw again waiter's expression when she had ordered the child's food and requested it be placed at one of the table's empty spots.
The toy store. The old woman, viewed through a window, pointing a finger along an aisle and seeming to whisper. Then the younger woman staring after her and holding the hand of the laughing boy, him gleeful at the sight of the curious woman carrying toys in a bag for an imagined child.
There were a thousand more memories like these. Barbed things that assaulted him. Lashes of a whip that struck and tore across the surface of his battered psyche, only to strike again, merciless and ceaseless.
The memories summoned a bitter cocktail of emotions. Anger at the outsiders who looked in with their sickening curiosity and amusement. Embarrassment at the scenes that played out in public. Shame and guilt that so selfish an emotion as embarrassment could even be felt. And then there was pity for her and pity for himself.
But above and beneath and between it all there was grief.
Grief for a Beloved gone mad.
And grief for a child lost.
YOU ARE READING
Song, Unheard
Horror***Featured in Fright Profile*** Life has been different lately. She feels a growing sense of dread and wishes for things to be normal. His drinking is out of control. The child seems frightened and withdrawn. And then come the birds. Strange b...
