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

‘…was thrown down to the…’

There was a snap.

The skeletal frame jerked. Renata released the broken neck, its head slumping back into the chair.

Thomas’s eyes groggily opened. ‘The hex…hexa—’

The old man’s words turned to gargles. A delicate line of blood traced the wrinkled trenches of his chin as fierce spasms shook his body. She reached forward and squeezed her thumb and forefinger over his nose, the palm of her other hand pressing firmly over his mouth. ‘This was you, it was all you,’ she said, then whispered in his ear, ‘Tell me you see.’

The time between spasms stretched. The tapping and scratching of his finger against her wrist slowed. Gradually the jolts became fewer, finally diminishing into mere twitches. There was one final, weak tap, before his hand dropped limply into his lap. The rain’s pattering ceased. Thomas Wakefield’s passing was marked by a silence of absolute solidity.

Then, without warning, the wave rose within Renata. It was warm, as if the dead logs of the fire were reborn inside her. It was all-encompassing.

It was the wave of inspiration.

Words bubbled within her. What words? She did not yet know. They were there, this she knew, and that was enough. Words buried, waiting to be exhumed, just like the worm she’d unearthed – but magnificent.

So magnificent.

She placed her hands on either side of her father’s face and pulled him close.

‘Father, I forgive you.’

21

She stood before the lifeless fireplace, rope in hand. The painting towered above the mantelpiece. Faces screamed through the spiralling flood, some succumbing to the oceanic claws, others fighting for higher ground. She imagined the waves as fire, reaching to claim its victims. For the Wakefields, flames are reserved, the corpse in the chair still seemed to moan. Forsaken is our blood.

Her hand tightened around the noose.

It was time.

Renata looked to the stained ceiling and saw no anchorage for the rope. Her search of the rest of the house for beams had yielded no results. There was a decrepit attic, but its rotting ceiling was too low. Door handles? No, she didn’t want to do it that way. She needed height. She could let nothing go wrong.

She thought of the clock tower, but frowned at the image of tainting her childhood friend. Finally she decided she would head back out into the dawn, the storm finally abated, and cross the fields to the trees beyond where a tall oak would facilitate her end.

She took one last look at the stiff shape of her father. Holding up her own long nails for comparison, she glanced at his talons still dug into the arms of the chair. She curled her fingers and stabbed her palms. Like daughter like dad.

Renata turned to walk towards the door, then stopped at the bookcase which had once housed her mother’s romance novels. It was these shelves that had birthed her love of reading, with countless nights spent sneaking downstairs to secretly pick a book once the shouting had subsided. Then, one morning, she’d found the bookcase empty, the black and blue of her mother’s smiling face renewed. She’d never seen the books again, never knew where they’d ended up, but she knew their removal had been the work of her father, his disapproval of that ungodly smut finally having had its way. Her father’s religious texts, discoloured and caked in dust, now occupied the shelves on either side of a packed folder, the words Quentin script scrawled down its spine.

Rage swelled.

The love, the romance in the books once occupying these shelves: she’d really believed it had finally found her. She’d given Quentin her body, but so much more, too. She’d reached out, revealed herself to him, spoke not in a pale imitation of what was meant to be said, but spoke.

She thought of his embrace and, for a fleeting moment, felt the warmth of his naked skin. The man she’d loved was as dead as the thing in the armchair, or the boy in the grave. Worse, he’d never even existed.

She tore the folder from the shelf and flung it across the room, smashing the pot of a blackened peperomia. Soil sprayed over the carpet. She spotted the envelope of cash perched at the back of the shelf and felt tears forming in her eyes. She threw her hands against the frame of the bookcase and shook it, throttling it like her father’s shrivelled neck, strangling the life out of that damned—

Something shifted behind the bookcase.

She froze.

Intrigued, she carefully pushed its weight into the wall, again feeling the disturbance. This time it was accompanied by the creaking of wood. She pressed the side of her face against the wall and peered through the narrow slot behind the bookcase, coughing on dust from the disruption.

There was a door handle.

She threw her weight against the bookcase’s side, but her father’s crammed tomes gave too much weight to the unit. She swung back to its face and started pulling off books, leather-bound volumes thumping to the floor, bibles thick as tree trunks piling at her feet. The envelope, having fallen to the floor, was now drowned in books. She swept her hands across the shelves until the thing was bare, then kicked the scattered texts from around the base of the bookcase and returned to its side. She pushed.

It moved.

She grunted at its weight as it slid aside, the hidden wooden door finally making itself visible. She turned the handle.

The door creaked open.

Black.

Renata reached through the doorframe, half expecting the dark void to form a solid, impassable wall. It didn’t. She watched the rope still in her hand pass into the darkness. She pulled the noose back, staring at her hand as she compared the sudden change of temperature, then stepped through.

The house was bitter cold, but as she passed through the door the air