The Ghost of Winn Peterson

34. Vicar

Vicar dreamt long and hard of things better left forgotten. He awoke in the middle of the afternoon, or so the clock by the bedside table said, but the heaviness of the curtains on the windows and thickness of the sheets that draped over the bed gave the room an oddly night-like quality. Pushing himself up, Vicar found that he'd been sweating - whatever it was that he dreamt of, it had no doubt been an extension of his waking woes. He wiped the cold salt from his neck and looked around. It was impossible to ascertain how long he'd been in here. He couldn't remember what time he'd staggered into bed, nor what the sky had looked like. The hallway leading up to this room was, after all, dark; the doors were dark wood, the floor was a dark carpet. How anyone could make their way down here without tumbling down and rolling through a wall was a mystery indeed to Vicar.

Once he'd collected some of his bearings, he staggered out of the bed, eyes opened as wide as they could go. This was Gaston's old room (not the one he'd taken to hiding in when he died, but the master bedroom he'd moved into after their father had finally given up the ghost), and it still smelled of him. Vicar wondered if any of the guests or relatives had riffled through its contents in the days leading up to the funeral. A flick of a switch and an orange, dying light strobed briefly before maintaining a steady illumination over the mess. The bed was itself not too much of a disaster, but the chest at the foot of the bed quickly disrupted the illusion of neatness. There was a severe scattering of money, envelopes, letter openers, quill fragments, emptied ink bottles, all strewn about on the limited space.

Now wobbling to a stand, Vicar found he'd crunched on something when he fell onto the sheets earlier in the day (or night?), and had neglected to clean it in some sleep-induced haze of guilt. His foot stung; was he bleeding? The light was paltry, barely lit anything in this den of gloom.

Cursing, he limped to the window and threw aside the curtains to better inspect himself. At least the carpet wasn't white! He didn't know how to clean blood out of anything, but he would have to learn fast at the rate his foot spilled it's contents on the floor.

"Damn it all." The smell of copper and wet filled his nose and he held back the urge to gag. The last time Vicar had smelled blood was in America. It was the smell that had woken him up, not the fire or the screams, but the smell of blood filling his nostrils. It had given him nightmares, flooded his mind with horrific dreams of murder and torture and slaughtered animals. The reality wasn't far off - Henson's voice, so perfectly suited for high volumes, had broken sound barriers, so shrill did it grow amidst the inferno. At the time, Vicar hadn't been able to hear Bobby or James or Harrison, but the other three! By God, they had squealed like stuck pigs as the fire swept them up, as they pleaded with anyone, with Vicar, to rescue them. Still, he hadn't woken up, not until a shelf came crashing down on Bobby. Poor Bobby, only a few feet away, and still unable to cry out. The hand that reached out so close to Vicar had been right in the way of the unstable shelf Vicar kept his most important papers, the ones due within a day. It fell every evening when the library door was opened and scattered the contents on the floor. If Vicar had an ounce of sense in him, he would have had it repaired, but always so tired! He was always tired. He should have fixed it that day, but he hadn't any sleep the night before, had too many things to grade for the French professor, too many notes to take for tomorrow's lesson. 

The shelf fell and the nails that stuck awkwardly out had come crashing down with a violence on Bobby's outstretched arm. It was only a few feet away; the sound of the skin tearing ought to have woken Vicar up, the deep tearing noise like paper being shredded, or perhaps fabric being torn. Alas, it was that horrid smell that reached him first. He'd twitched and writhed in his sleep until it finally forced him awake. If it was the smell that woke him, it was the blood itself that he recognised next, the boiling liquid running on the floor and his desk. It was rather impressive how far the blood had spattered once the shelf fell. Vicar could even remember the taste of it, how it fell in trickles down his lips. He sat, unrecognising for a moment, until he noticed Bobby's silent cries, the tears that evaporated as soon as they touched the poor boy's skin. Even the blood was crackling and crisping, turning into a sleeve of reds and browns on his arm.