Free Dead Seth by Tim O'Rourke

pictures you see of diseased lungs on the backs of cigarette packets. You’re being scared into quitting.”
    “So she was surprised then when you said it was the landlord’s actions that you hated and not your father’s?” I asked him softly, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of my sessions with Doctor Keats after returning from the Ragged Cove.
    Would Jack see what I was up to, just like Doctor Keats tried to see through me?
    “She was surprised, and I think angry at me,” he said, his gangly legs opening and closing like a pair of scissors as he continued to stride back and forth across the room.
    “Angry?” I asked. “How?”
    “It was like she wasn’t getting through to me somehow – that I wasn’t hating my father quickly enough,” he said.
    “Why do you think you found it so hard to hate him, despite everything she had told you about him?” I asked, glancing down at the little pile of dust which was growing bigger. “Was it because you could sympathize with him in some way, could understand what he had done? Just like how you understood his motives for killing the landlord?”
    “No!” Jack suddenly spat, shaking his head from side to side as if confused. He rubbed at his narrow temples with his fingers and looked at me. “I just couldn’t ever remember my father being like that. My memories of him were different to the pictures she was painting inside my head of him. So one day, I went to my mother and said…

Chapter Thirteen
    Jack
    “How did my father get away with behaving like he did?”
    “Your father had two sides to him. He acted normal in front of others, but in our cave, when the shutter was down, his true self would come out and he would hurt me and your sisters.
    Then there were those darker times when he would disappear for days beyond the fountain and the forests into the human world. I did try telling my mother once, but even she didn’t believe me.”
    “How come?” I asked her.
    “Well, your father was so plausible.
    Whenever my mother came to the cave, she would see how nice it was, the tidy yard, and all of the toys he had given you. Joshua would be on his best behaviour and be very polite and courteous.
    She fell for it.”
    I accepted her explanation and used it in the future to try and reconcile the conflict I had when remembering him alongside the terrifying stories my mother continued to tell me about him. I believe she told me these stories to instill in me what a monster my father could be. I racked my memory but could not recall any incidents of my father acting in an aggressive way. I remembered him as a soft and quiet man. See, one of my clearest memories showed my father in a completely different light, and I just couldn’t get it from my head, however much my mother tried to hide it with her tales.
    We weren’t the richest of Lycanthropes, but we weren’t poor, either. My father was a carpenter. I remember my father had just been paid, and we had congregated by the shutter to our cave. We were going to the marketplace to buy meat and vegetables to keep us fed for the week.
    My father always kept his money rolled tightly together with a piece of string. He would free several paper notes and hand them to my mother to pay the market traders for the food. The rest of the money he would deposit with the bankers on the other side of the market. He would go ahead, deposit the money, and then meet us in the market in time to help my mother carry home the sacks of vegetables. So as usual, he set off minutes before us and disappeared between the maze of narrow passages. As we left our cave, mother spied something on the ground on the other side of the shutter, and picked it up. As she straightened, I saw the money, rolled together by that piece of string, in my mother’s hand. Lorre spoke up, stating that our father must have dropped it.
    Mother turned and pulled us close, and whispered, “Don’t you dare tell your father that I have this money! I need it more