Free Leave the Living by Joe Hart Page B

to even consider it. Mick’s eyes roamed around the room and came to rest on the phone again. Without pausing to flip off the lights, he walked to the entry and began to gather the clothes he would need. His father’s boots, jacket, gloves, hat. An extra sweatshirt would be smart, but that would mean going back up to the bedroom and—
    His thoughts were cut off by the creak of the stairs.
    He waited, his body thrumming as adrenaline flooded his system once again. The silence roared in his ears, and he knew that if he heard footsteps coming across the kitchen toward him, he would flee into the storm, adequate clothing or not. The quiet stretched out, punctuated only by the wind, and the teetering within him finally tipped one way fully.
    Mick set the jacket down and made his way back into the kitchen, stopping to peer around the corner. Everything was in its place. The vase still lay broken on its side; the phone hung from its cradle. As he walked toward the stairs, his eyes kept flicking to the basement and dining room, searching the shadowed corners for movement. At the base of the stairs, he paused, staring up their length before climbing them, each step an effort to make his legs propel him upward, his mutinous feet attempting to stop the progress. His hand grazed the wall and found the light switch there, the split second it took to turn it on stretching into millennia. The fixture lit up the loft, pouring light across the landing to its far end, and Mick stiffened, goose bumps rolling over his flesh in a prickling wave.
    His father’s bedroom door was open again.
    “Hello?” he said, his voice dying in the air.
    A shushing came from the bedroom followed by a short squeak like a mouse being crushed beneath a heavy boot. There was someone in the room. A sudden anger blossomed in his chest, driven by the knowledge that he was in his childhood home, his father’s dominion, being immobilized with fear of the unknown. The words came back to him again from the letter, and he shoved them aside as doubt, both from whatever waited in the room as well as who his father truly was, tried to unhinge his resolve. He stalked forward, each step draining the fear to replace it with rage.
    Mick shoved the bedroom door all the way open and flipped the light on.
    The bedroom was the same. Nothing had been moved. No chairs sat on the ceiling. And no words written in blood coated the walls.
    “If someone’s in here, come out, and I won’t beat the shit out of you,” he said, his voice stronger than he’d expected.
    He waited and then moved forward, ready to search the bathroom and under the bed, but halted when he saw the closet door was open again, wider than it had been on his first visit to the room. Jerking it all the way open, he stepped in and snapped the switch up, lighting the interior of the long closet. Unmoving racks of clothes hung from one side along with several stacks of jeans that sat amongst shoes and boots on the floor. The space held the odor of his father’s aftershave, more condensed and powerful, and he wondered if he’d ever be able to smell it again without being buried by the avalanche of sadness that accompanied it.
    Mick swept through the hanging clothes, pushing them aside to reveal the wall behind them. He traveled methodically sideways, pausing to part each article of clothing. Memories of times past when his father had worn different shirts assaulted him, but he continued until he reached the back wall, which was mostly bare save for a higher shelf above his head. Pushed to the very back was the edge of what appeared to be a mottled green steel box with two clasps that he had never seen before. Above it was an inset square of wood partition large enough for a man to crawl through that led to the attic. Leaning against the wall was a short stepladder, which he unfolded and climbed up.
    The top of the shelf was dusty, as was the container, which wasn’t very deep, but wide, like that of a mechanic’s