Free The Monster Man of Horror House by Danny King Page B

as my
father slung his now empty sidearm and wrapped the silk tie around his knuckles
behind me, I realised that my first concern should be with the next few seconds
of my life rather than the minutes or hours of whatever future I had after that,
because if I didn’t get a move on I wouldn’t have such problems to ponder for
much longer. So I took to the stairs, heading into the low cottage roof and the
shadows of the attic.
    My
father was hot on my heels, scaling the stairs two at a time and intent on
cornering me in amongst the cobwebs, but this was trickier than he’d bargained
on. See, the floor of the attic wasn’t boarded out up here; my father had made
a start on it several years earlier but contrary to recent evidence he wasn’t much
good with his hands and as such the attic sported only two fixed floorboards, a
pile of planks and a box of nails to show for several years of good intentions.
In place of a floor, the lath and plaster ceilings of the rooms below crisscrossed
beneath the sturdy joists, ready to suck our ankles through should we be careless
enough to lose a footing. I recognised the dangers of charging around up here,
but I rushed into the darkness nevertheless, desperate to put as much distance
as I could from my beloved father’s cold embrace.
    I
wobbled across the beams, making for the tiny gable window at the far end of
the attic, but it was so slender, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to squeeze through
it even if I tried. Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to, what with
it being thirty feet up in the air and above a picket fence. But it overlooked
the road outside and in an afternoon of increasing desperations, I was ready to
start screaming from windows.
    My
father took to the beams behind me as I flung the window open.
    “Help!
Help! For the love of God help! My father’s trying to kill me!” I sang across
the fields, but my pleas were in vain. We lived half a mile from the nearest
neighbours and while they’d never murdered any young men themselves, they’d manned
the polls for Harold MacMillan’s Tories during the last election, so I wasn’t
entirely sure how sympathetic they’d be with my plight.
    “Goddamn
it boy, be silent will you!” my father roared, closing in on me with every faltering
step.
    I
made my escape, dashing back across the beams as I tried to circle around him,
only to strike my head on a roofing truss as my father herded me into a corner.
    “Please
father, I love you,” I tried, seeing if I could wrong foot the old bastard with
that empty gush, but papa was nothing if not a wily old spook when his blood
was up and he dismissed my entreaties with a snap of silk.
    “You
will submit, boy, you will submit. It is your father’s will,” he snarled,
paying himself more than a few compliments on my account there.
    “Please
father, I won’t tell,” I promised, and I was serious too. I still had my head
in the noose for being there when he’d murdered Juney. I was an accessory after
the fact no longer – I was an accessory all the way along.
    And
that was a Capital crime.
    “You
lied to me, boy. You lied to me about ‘the sport’ and that cannot be tolerated.
You’ve shown that you cannot be trusted. You’ve shown that I can not trust you,”
he bellowed, almost mournfully, as if I’d somehow forced his hand. “You’ve left
me no choice.”
    He
closed in on me some more, straddling the beams as he forced me back towards
the window once more.
    “The
girl! The girl will know,” I warned, clutching onto increasingly brittle
straws.
    “You
needn’t worry about her,” my father assured me. “No one will ever hear from her
again once I bail her out of custody.”
    He
was now almost on top of me, but height and age were on my side – or
rather, a lack of either – for while my father was forced to stoop like
Fagin against the sloping timbers, I was able to squeeze into the angles with a
suppleness my father hadn’t known since the days of