Holburn by Tim Jeffreys

Author:Tim Jeffreys [Jeffreys, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manta Press, Ltd.

Chapter Five

I dreamt I was in a windowless room with bare concrete walls. It could have been a basement room. A single lightbulb dangled on a cord from the ceiling. I stood with my back against one of the walls. In the centre of the room a group of maybe twenty or thirty people were clustered around a small desk, like a child’s classroom desk, at which sat my sister, Ava. Ava was hunched forward with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands pressed over her ears. There was a look of anguish on her face. The people who crowded around were all pushing and jostling each other in order to get as close to Ava as they could, and they were all shouting and pleading with her, their words intermingling into a cacophonous babble. Over the noise of all these people I could somehow hear Ava calling to me.

“Gael,” she begged. “Please, Gael. Help me. Make them stop.”

I tried to push my way into the throng, to reach her, but I couldn’t find an opening. When I pulled one of the people back in order to try and force my way through, I saw that it was Elaine. Seeing her there I understood who all those people crowding around my sister were. The dead.

“What are you all doing to Ava?” I shouted over the roar. “Why don’t you leave her alone?”

“She’s not natural,” Elaine said to me, her voice hollowed out. “She’s a freak.”

“She’s my sister.”

“She’s not right.”

Ignoring her, I continued trying to push my way in among the bodies, calling to Ava: “Ava, I’m coming. Ava, I’m here.”

“Gael,” Ava called back. “Make them stop. Make them stop. Please. Make them leave me alone.”

“Ava!”

The scene changed and I saw myself at seventeen years old, sat on the sofa in the front room of my parents’ house in Galway. It was the day Mum brought a newborn Ava home from the hospital. She had placed the swaddled baby into my arms, and I’d held her, this tiny new life, this fragile thing. My sister. Right then, I’d made a silent vow to be her protector. I didn’t know if she could even see me, but her eyes held mine. They were an opaque blue. I couldn’t shift my gaze away from hers. There seemed to be some understanding which passed between us. I felt that she knew who and was and what I had vowed. But then, in the dream, I heard a thudding noise and I looked up and I saw that there were faces crowding at the window. It was them again. The pale anguished faces of the dead. The doorbell started to ring, over and over again, and the letterbox flapped and fists pounded on the door. I looked down at baby Ava and her tiny mouth opened and she said, “Gael, make them stop. Make them stop.”

At this point I started awake. The lamp on the cabinet beside the bed and been left on. I had

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