For Rye Gavin Gardiner (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📖

Noah, could she really have…? She was the tool of a psychopath who was fuelling her unhinging, nothing more than the means for the completion of his grand work. Now, as every truth of her life crumbled, as the farce of her existence became clear, Thomas’s words lost their weight and floated like ash from the grate.

‘Answer when your father addresses you.’

The dried softwood birthed flame. Renata clicked the lighter shut as she stared into the dancing fire, a burning ballet of infinite permutations. She added more logs. The weight under her coat grew.

‘You must be cold,’ she said into the flames. The fire recoiled as if the lost weight of her father’s words was reborn in her own. The crackling of the firewood filled the silence. ‘Where’s Ramsay?’ she asked. She could feel Thomas’s fragility behind her, that frail frame ready to shatter.

‘Where’s Ramsay?’ his voice echoed mockingly, followed by a snort. ‘Where’s Sylvia? Where’s Renata? What does it matter? I told you, girl, this family is forsaken.’ His voice steadied. ‘Soon, the Lord shall pluck me from this cursed darkness and cast me into the void with all the—’

‘And Noah? Are you ready to speak of him, Father?’

‘The boy!’ spat Thomas. ‘Again with the boy! Let me tell you all you need to know about him. He left, as you did. But while you were scribbling pornographic sacrilege, he was unable to be with us. He was taken from us, he—’

‘Tell me who took him,’ Renata said, struggling to her feet. The unbearable weight under her coat continued to grow.

‘Taken from us, as the waters of the flood took the mistakes of the Almighty, that beautiful deluge. Except the boy wasn’t a mistake. No, child. You were the mistake.’

She stood over him, her shadow engulfing his lank form.

‘You were never meant to be,’ he growled. She unfastened her duffle as he spoke and reached for the weight. ‘It is evident to me in my final days—’

She pulled out the spade. Lightning lit her pale blue gown. Slowly she raised the red steel over her head.

‘—that it was the seed of Satan that grew inside your mother, the spoils of which yielded none other than you, an unclean—’ He paused to swallow, doing nothing to appease the tiny pendulums of saliva swinging from his lips. Dried, rust-tinted spittle hung tight to his underbite, quivering maniacally as he continued. ‘—The Whore of Babylon reborn, infecting by way of the page—’

A whimper came from the floor as she stepped on Samson. She looked down at the dog.

‘—and there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters—’

Its half-closed eyes looked up at her with dull concern as the spade remained poised above in her shaking hands. This mongrel specimen, this Samson and every Samson before it, had earned more looks of adoration from her father than she could ever have dreamt of receiving. Where was her love? Where was her look of adoration? She met its gaze, foot still on its leg, steel frozen in mid-air. The spade begged to be driven into the raving skeleton of Thomas Wakefield. She fought it, forcing her attention to the creature below. She pressed her foot harder into its leg. The grey mutt moaned, quivering in chorus with the demented old man.

‘—and I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints—’

Brittle dog-bone cracked.

‘—and with the blood of the martyrs—’

She fought the spade’s pull as sweat ran from her hands and down her wrists. She battled the will of the steel, elemental and unrelenting, struggling to keep it from driving down into her father. She focussed her attention on the moaning Samson, moving her foot up the canine’s body to its head. She grimaced as every muscle fought the strength of the spade.

‘—the beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition—’

She thought of that woodland clearing all those years ago…she couldn’t do it then and she couldn’t do it now, she couldn’t do it then and she couldn’t do it now, she couldn’t do it then and

‘—and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet—’

Samson’s skull became the pedal.

‘—with whom the kings of the earth have committed unbonded copulation—’

All she had to do was push the car a little further through the fog, that was all. Then the shape would become clear. Everything would become clear. She pressed the pedal harder against the carpet. A dull, outward gulp marked the expulsion of the hound’s eyes from their sockets. Its feeble struggling ended.

‘—and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk—’

A dying retch from below. The final Samson wheezed its final breath, then stilled.

‘—with the wine of her fornication.’

The fire’s crackling echoed in her ears. The grandfather clock watched on impartially, a silent monolith. Her shoe lay flat on the grimy carpet, cranial discharge encircling its sole. Lightning burst across the room, momentarily illuminating the rusted name tag on the dog’s collar, then its expelled eyes as they sunk into bloody mush. She lowered the spade.

‘You want to know the truth about Noah?’ he said, his blind gaze oblivious to the porridge of gore at his feet. ‘Your mother didn’t believe you deserved the truth. She wanted to protect you from it.’ He stuck his chin up at her. ‘But I’m beginning to think you deserve it. What do you think, girl? Do you deserve the truth?’

Renata turned from him, lifting her foot from the