West

Chapter 1

Someone must have been telling lies to Sebastian Veillard. His father had not been arrested. It would have been easier if he had. What Sebastian could say was that his father had disappeared. That much was true. No current signs of the man remained in the house. The derelict building had exposed wires and missing floorboards. Sebastian had the feeling there was someone in the room, someone following him, but as he went from room to room he stood alone amid the decay of the house.

Ghosts of the past are hidden in the woodwork. That's what his father always said. By now Sebastian knew better. Houses don't have souls. There's nothing spiritual about them. Still they were his work. It's in the blood, his father would say. Now as he hammered his way through the old house, a flood of memories did not happen. There was only the one. His father broke a picture of his family and Sebastian left. Everything else had faded. Over time he had forgotten the details of his youth. Grain by grain the memories became dull. He felt numb all over just being in the house. It had been too long for him to feel anything real here again. The events of the past almost eluded Sebastian, but he felt them, dully, coming back. Sebastian's memory came back to him in waves. He had tried to forget. Almost everything had been erased. He moved on into a new city with a new life. Then the letter came.

The first few days Sebastian found his tools moved. He would leave them in one room and they would reappear in another. This and other occurrences made him think the house haunted. Stranger things have happened. In a house all but forgotten in the Old Quarter, this was a possibility. First the hammer disappeared from the entryway where Sebastian worked. He found it a few days later sticking out of a wall. The head had been pushed into the surface. The handle hung down from where it was lodged. Then hispliers disappeared. He couldn't do any work with the wiring without them. They reappeared attached to some live wires. He dislodged them with a broom.

These occurrences made him think there was someone else in the house, yet no matter how long he waited, he was the only one. That, too, eventually changed.

Upon returning Sebastian purchased wood to repair the house. His skills as a builder drove him, skills he learned from his father. The need to construct took control of him before he could sort through the mess his father left in the house. He knew something was wrong by the state of the place. His father wouldn't have left anything unfinished.

Something had happened, what he did not know. The city he left had found its way back into his life. He never wanted to come back. Too many painful memories lived here.

He felt the grain of the boards as he laid them down over the exposed beams. The edges were rough against his fingers. He imagined workmen paring trees down into lumber. Theirs was a life of division, of reduction, of making larger things smaller.

Sebastian eyed the stamp from the lumberyard as he aligned the board. Maybe the wood came from a factory. Trees were shoved through a machine, which sliced and separated the trunk at predetermined intervals. No piece was unique, just another piece resulting from efficient design.

He hammered a nail into the wood board. The report of the nail driving home echoed in the empty hall. Sebastian remembered fresh cut herbs placed in a vase in the hall. The place now smelled of dust. He aligned another board and hammered.

The heat was oppressive outside. He had shuttered all the windows he could to keep the inside of the house cool. Still, sweat rolled down his face as he hammered. A bead dropped on the floor.

Sebastian still could not directly face what had happened between him and his father. Even as he busied himself working on the house, he averted learning more about the mess his father left. The memories in the house were too strong.

Doors twice the height of an adult man had fallen off their hinges. The gaps in the doorframes connected the rooms of the house so that Sebastian could see from one end to the other without obstruction.