[2013] Sacrifices by Roger Smith

Author:Roger Smith [Smith, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Mystery
Publisher: Tin Town
Published: 2013-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

14

As he lifts his son’s amputated leg from the trunk of the BMW Lane hears the rattle of the garage door. It’s still dark when he surfaces, sweating and gasping, from the dream and he upsets the glass of water at his bedside in his haste to click on the lamp.

Lane, calming himself, lies listening to Beverley’s Pajero reversing out of the garage and receding into the soft wash of drizzle. She’s driving to the hospital, to be there for the surgery.

The image of the severed limb lying in the trunk of his car—the skin pale and bloodless, the bisected femur jutting from the torn meat of the thigh—returns and he realizes that, in the dream, he was about to offer up his son’s leg in an act of atonement.

A payment in flesh.

Lane understands that some irrational primitive impulses—dating back to a time before mankind lifted itself from its knuckles—are still hardwired into him, but the notion of prayer, of abasing himself before some fuzzy higher power, is ludicrous.

Yet it persists.

He leaves the bed, shrugs on a robe and walks to the window, opening the curtains onto a wet, gray dawn. As he steps into a pair of house shoes Lane sees his father’s feet—corded with veins, toenails yellow and unclipped—scuffing along in hospital slippers, a drip stand dragging behind, wheels squealing.

Bernard Lane, as bluff a pragmatist as any Lane has known, had undergone some kind of religious conversion in the weeks before his death. One day Lane arrived at the hospital to find the curtains drawn around his father’s bed. The old man was either dead or using the bed pan, but as Lane approached he heard a muttered incantation and cracked the drapes to see a Catholic priest praying at the bedside, Bernard mumbling along gamely.

Lane, unseen, retreated to the waiting room. A few minutes later the priest, a furtive man who carried with him an aura of shame, scuttled past clutching his Bible.

Lane never spoke of this with his father, but a thought had nagged at him: when his time came, when he was faced with the inevitability of his own death, would he, too, reach for some mumbo-jumbo?

Lane banishes this nonsense and heads for the bathroom. It’s only when he confronts his face in mirror that he remembers that today’s his birthday. He’s forty-five.

“Happy bloody Birthday,” he says sourly.

Spreading shaving foam across his cheeks and jaw he sees the small wound from Jade’s knife is all but invisible, a tiny blemish on the skin of his neck.

He shaves and steps into the shower. A moment’s dizziness has him closing his eyes, gripping the faucets, and he’s back in that dream, lifting Christopher’s leg from the trunk, turning . . .

Turning toward whom or what?

He has no idea.

Lane showers and wraps himself in his robe again and, without remembering how he got there, finds himself in Christopher’s childhood bedroom. The curtains are open and wintry light washes the action figures and the posters of forgotten rugby heroes.

Lane

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