The Folly by Gemma Amor

Author:Gemma Amor [Amor, Gemma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781957957470
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

We didn’t see the man again after that. I wondered if he had crawled into his cave and died, which seemed a realistic outcome, given the state of him. Animated or not, possessed or otherwise, no one could survive a fall from even half as high up without hospital treatment. Adrenaline would only have carried him so far. Sepsis, infection, shock…they would all have been waiting for him in the wings, a deadly trio. I had learned from bitter experience how fragile the human body really was. Was he down there in that unseen rocky cleft, rotting away in the briny sea air? Did he have family? Shouldn’t we tell someone?

And what about what lived inside his body? Was that dead by now, too?

Whether it was my mother, or simple malice, a thirst for revenge, a terrible, terrible prank dressed up as “teaching us a lesson,” or perhaps a mental disorder, an obsession, a deranged desire to impersonate and perhaps be loved as she was…

Whatever it was, had it died, too?

Regardless, his whereabouts became a mystery, and I hated the lingering threat of him. If he had gone to the cliff wall, or maybe circled round, unseen, to the woods behind us, or maybe even fallen into the sea, or wandered out onto the main road inland, or…whatever, I would have felt better with confirmation of his exact state. Not to mention, there was an injured, probably deceased man out there somewhere. An unpleasant surprise for some other hapless, innocent person to stumble across. Didn’t we have a duty to report the accident, at the very least?

Yes.

We did.

We should have reported it.

But we didn’t.

Dad didn’t want to go back to jail. It was that simple. Because who, after all, would believe in two accidental falls? There wasn’t a police officer or judge or jury in the world who would be that impartial to his past history. How did the nursery rhyme go? Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty…of course they wouldn’t. They would take one look at his previous conviction, and back inside Dad would go. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, conspiring to put Dad in prison again.

Would that be such a bad thing, Morgan?

I thought this more frequently than I liked admitting to. I was just tired, I reasoned, and disappointed. Things weren’t exactly working out the way I’d planned.

Maybe it would be better, if he went back inside. Less confusing. For both of us.

My own momentary feelings of disloyalty distressed me so much I found it hard to look at Dad, and he noticed this, registered it, and became withdrawn.

Wherever the bald-headed man had gone, neither of us had the courage to seek him out. We were both too world-damaged, too cowardly. Once, we had been decent people, I thought, but now…not even the knowledge of a man dying, troubled and in agony, somewhere on the peninsula, could prompt us out of ourselves. Instead, we battened down the hatches, turned the heavy iron key in the heavy iron lock on the Folly’s front door, and hoped for the best.

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