Dead For Years

Ralph gazed at the star-filled sky, admired its beauty one last time, and accepted he was going to die.  It was equal parts terrifying and relieving.

“I’ll be honest,” Ralph said, the grass soft beneath his bare feet, “I thought you died back at the abandoned house on Wynnewood street.”

The figure behind him said, “I wish I had.”

“Sometimes I wish I had died there as well. For what it’s worth, Jeff… I’m sorry. I really am.”

His voice was a low growl, but behind that, Ralph could hear sincerity.  “Don’t be. You freed them.”

Ralph turned to face Jeff, and looked him in the eyes for the first time in five years.

“Then this isn’t revenge?”

“No. Redemption. I shall not kill you, I shall free you.”

“Free me from what?”

“Life.”

Ralph turned back towards the stars. “That makes me a little happier. Mercy, if misguided. Still, I’d have thought for sure you’d put yourself to sleep first.”

“And miles to go before I sleep.” Jeff drew his blade from his pocket, and the sharpness was almost audible.

“One last question. What happens when we die, Jeff?”

“It’s cold, Ralph.  So very cold.”

Jeff sliced the knife straight through Ralph’s throat, spaying crimson onto the dew-covered grass.

Five Years Ago.

“Bus wankers!” screamed Ralph, sticking his head out of the moving car.

It was a horribly overcast day, but that didn’t stop Ralph from being his usual annoying self.  As the car whizzed past, Jeff and Liu returned middle fingers, before laughing themselves.

“He’s going to do that every day, isn’t he?” said Liu.

“Let’s face it; we’d probably do the same.”

“Still can’t believe mum and dad can’t just give us a lift.”

“They probably just don’t want you ruining the car,” joked Jeff.  “Actually, we should ask if Ralph would just give us a lift.”
Jeff and Liu both sat on the rusted yellow of the shelter less bus stop; they had pestered their parents for the entire week of them going to their new school for a lift, and they had yet to concede.

“Who’s that?” Liu was peering over Jeff’s shoulder.

Three people had turned the corner from the far end of the street, and Jeff could vaguely make out their facial features: there was a skinny pale one, with a mop of brown hair and the first signs of a moustache sprouting on his face; the second looked massive, with big, beefy arms and a furrowed brow; finally there was the largest eleven year old Jeff had ever seen. He was at least two heads taller than the kid next to him; upon closer inspection, Jeff could see that the kid was holding his hand and that he was laughing to himself.

“Is that kid like, a retard or something?” whispered Liu to Jeff.

The three arrived at the stop; Jeff did not move along to let them sit down.

“Uh, ‘scuse me,” said the skinny kid, “Can you move up a bit?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Jeff, scooting along the bench.  There was enough room for the skinny kid to sit down, but not anybody else.

“We still can’t sit.”

“Then I’m sorry, but there’s not enough room.”
“Look,” said the beefy kid, pointing at the large kid, “He needs to sit down.”

“Then make this kid move,” said Liu.   The skinny kid jumped up.

“He needs to sit next to one of us,” explained the beefy kid.

Jeff was about to offer an apology, perhaps even give up his seat.  He would never know, for Liu decided to open his mouth and say the exact wrong thing.

“Look, it’s not my fucking fault Hodor’s fat arse takes up half the bench.”

There was a beat of silence.

And then the beefy kid walked over to Liu and slammed his fist right into his face.

“What the fuck?!?” said Liu, recoiling in pain.

He arched his hand back for a second attack, while screaming, “Leaving my fucking brother alone!”

“Randall, don’t!” said the skinny kid.

Liu jumped up and kicked Randall straight in the shin; Randall unleashed a flurry of punches onto Liu’s face and floored him.  Blood tricked from his nose.  Randall raised his foot for a kick, but before he could act on it, the skinny kid grabbed him from behind.

“Troy, get the fuck off me!”

“You’re scaring Keith!”

The big kid had, indeed, started bawling.

“Come on,” said Troy. “We’ll just walk.”

“I’m not walking.” Randall was indignant.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you?” screamed Liu, nursing his nose.

 “It’s not worth it.”

Randall took a deep exhale, and said, “Fine.  We’ll walk.”

“You better, fag.” As Liu said it, Troy visibly recoiled.

Troy grabbed Keith’s hand, and lead him away.  Randall followed, but before he turned the corner, he said, “If you go near him again, I’ll get you.”

“You’re the one running.”

And Randall turned away and left.

“You alright?” asked Jeff.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got a bit of blood,” said Jeff, motioning to his nose.

Liu wiped it away, and said, “What a bunch of retards.”

At school, they met with Ralph during break and told him what happened with Keith, Randall, and Troy.

“Oh, I’ve heard about them.  The brothers Trevelyan. Bunch of arseholes.”

“That’s them, there,” pointed out Jeff.  The three of them stood on their own, talking near the fence.

“You see the retarded one?”

Ralph chuckled. “Who hasn’t? You’d have to be blind not to.”

Randall, from halfway across the school grounds, turned around and began to walk towards them.

“Shit, I think he heard you,” said Ralph, slowly slinking away. Jeff stood his ground and raised his fists. Liu did the same.
It was a tough, long, bloody fight, and all sides left claiming they won.

The fights continued for the rest of the week; Jeff managed to emerge victorious twice, but not without a cut on his forehead.

The next Monday, Ralph, Jeff and Liu met again.  Jeff’s face was covered in bruises of purple and yellow; when his parents asked, he claimed he fell over.  Liu had a scab formed on his leg where Randall kicked him so hard it drew blood.   Ralph was largely unscathed; a small mark on his arm was his only sign of battle.

“Here, I’m not happy about them beating us up,” said Liu.

“You’re not gonna grass, are ya?” asked Ralph.

“Course not.  We should jump ‘em on their way back home.”

Jeff nodded. “I’m listening…”

“You know that old abandoned house, on Wynnewood Street? Just around the corner at the bus stop?”

“Yeah.”

“We wait there, cause they go that way home anyway. Then we beat the shit out of them.”

“An eloquent plan,” said Jeff, “But sounds good to me. We can’t let Randall get away with this.”

Ralph nodded. The plan was agreed.

They skived off school that day, and spent hours hanging around in the abandoned house and planning their revenge.    Ralph said he was going to beat up Randall so hard he would cry; Liu claimed he would tear Troy’s head off; Jeff promised to give Keith something to really cry about.  Soon their minds wandered, and they decided to have a look around.

The house was the victim of a fire twenty years ago; now its charred skeleton remained, with broken timbers and chips of paint covering the floor. Ralph found a dead hedgehog, and they spent an hour  seeing who would hold it for the longest.  When Liu dropped it and hundreds of maggots exploded out of the carcass, they quickly agreed to call it a draw.

Liu did some digging, and found of sharpened spike; it looked like some kind of spear or lance. He jokingly stabbed it into the ground, and proclaimed himself Ser Liu of House Anderson. When Ralph pointed out that Sers have a very low survival rate, Liu stopped.

Finally, they heard the giggling of Keith slowly approaching, and all three of them moved into position: Ralph knelt beneath a broken wall, and Jeff was prone beneath a bush.   Liu stood on the top floor of the house, a collection of shattered bricks, stones and other projectiles at his feet.  He had reserved an especially large brick fragment for Keith.

It was at that moment Jeff felt a sudden sinking feeling in his gut.  He was about to beat up a disabled kid because his brother hit him.  What the hell was he doing? He needed to-

Troy stepped in front of the house, and at that exact moment, everything went to hell.

Ralph pounced out from behind his wall, and slammed his shoulder straight into Troy; his legs went out from under him and he fell, smacking his head against the pavement.   He brought his hands up in a pathetic attempted to defend himself, but Randall unleashed an unforgiving cascade of strikes straight on his nose.  Keith started crying and Randall ran over to Ralph, preparing to kick him.  Jeff lay there, frozen.

And then it happened.  Liu hefted a shatter of brick through the air; it span as if in slow motion.  All eyes went wide as they saw the chunk of rebar.  Even Ralph, Randall, and Troy looked up from their scuffle.

The brick struck Keith straight on the forehead with an audible crack; without a single word, his head snapped backwards and he collapsed slowly to the ground.   Beneath his head, a large pool of crimson slowly grew.

Jeff would never know how long they all stayed there for, simply staring at Keith’s body; it might have been seconds or years.
The eye of the storm was broken by Randall turning away from Keith, tears in his eyes, and looking straight a Liu.

He ran straight for the house and stormed up the stairs; Jeff pursued quickly.

“I didn’t mean it!” screamed Liu.  “I didn’t mean it!”

Randall ignored him, and punched him twice on the nose.  It exploded in a shower of blood; all Liu said was, “Please, don’t.”

“You killed Keith.” Randall said it almost calmly.

He gave him a shove

Liu felt backwards, arms flailing;  the spear he had planted so proudly earlier marked his landing.  It sprouted, blood-drenched, from his stomach.  He slid down it slowly, coughing up fountains of crimson.   When he finally reached the ground, the entire spear had been dyed blood-red.  The coughing stopped, a silence smothered the world like a blanket.

Ralph jumped up from Troy, and ran; the next time Jeff would see him, it would be the night he killed him.   Troy dialled the police on his mobile, and then crawled over to Keith and cried into his chest.

Jeff simply stared at his brother.  Here, you saw that he did not look scared.  He looked peaceful.

“You killed my brother,” said Jeff.  It was not an accusation, nor a question.  It was simply the truth.

Tears ran down Randall’s face, and he was hyperventilating.  “He-he killed mine.”

He wasn’t even listening.  Jeff just thought of Liu; all the years they had grown up together, all the things they had done.
And now he was gone forever.

He looked at Randall; he did not look a killer.  But neither, he supposed, did he.

Rage hit him suddenly, and there was an overwhelming desire to grab the bastard and gouge his eyes out and crush his skull and-

Randall moved first, charging at him like a bull; Jeff could hear him scream.  They buffeted into each other, and Jeff could feel his balance being robbed from him by gravity, and he was falling and falling and falling.

His head impacted against the concrete with a thump.  Then nothing.

After that, there were dreams.   Dreams of wails, dreams of blood, and dreams of broken glass. Sometimes the dream was so clear it was almost a recreation of what happened; other times it was more abstract, but it terrified him nonetheless.

It could have been hours, days, months or years later, but his eyes eventually opened.

He was in a hospital; he could recognize the sterile smell and off-white walls.   Something was attached to his arm.  He tried turning his head to see it, but his head refused to move.

Panic hit him like a train. He tried moving something, anything, and it failed.   Jeff tried with every ounce of strength in his body to scream, and all that came out was a soft, slow hiss, like a breeze on a mountaintop.  His body was numb, cold and empty of life.

Nobody ever came to visit him; his parents, perhaps, once or twice, but other than that? Nobody.

He wished he was dead.  He wished with every fibre of his body for his heart to simply stop beating.  It was as successful as his attempt to scream.

Liu was the lucky one, really; he was dead, his pain was over, as was Keith’s.  But Jeff was here… forever… unable to move, scream, or sleep…

It was years later- although it felt like hundreds- when he heard a crackling noise from the far end of the hall.  And then there was a wave of heat; it washed over him, feeling like molten lead, as if acid was in his bloodstream.

He tried to turn his head; it failed, as did all attempts. But he didn’t need to; he knew what it was.  An alarm blared, wailing loudly as if that was somehow going to save him. A red glow was visible, slowly growing in the corner of his vision.  The room was on fire.

The flames crept slowly along the floor, as if they were taunting him.  He just needed to move…. He just needed to.
The heat was unbearable now.   It was as if he was on the centre of the sun; an all-consuming, eternal heat that would never diminish.

The fire consumed him, and he heard himself screaming.

After the fire came ice.
After the ice came light.
After the light came darkness.
After the darkness came screaming.
After the screaming came silence.

The darkness was absolute.   There was no light anywhere.

“Am I dead?” he said aloud.  Only then did he realize how deep and scarred his voice was.

He ran his hand down his face. He could move.  Finally, finally, finally, he was free.

His hands pressed upwards, all around; they could not get more than a foot from his face.  He kicked and flailed and screamed, and it did nothing. Jeff was in a coffin.

And then he began to laugh.  A deep laugh of a madman.   He needed to get out of here.  And when he did, he would kill them.   Free them.   Death was preferable to this; he had to spare the others.

How long he spent breaking through the coffin, he never knew.  But neither did it occur to him that he should have starved to death a long, long time ago. A timeless interval was spent clawing out the dirt that surrounded him.

His head finally breached the surface of the graveyard; it was night-time, and it was deserted.  Scrabbling around in the darkness, his hands finally clasped around something cold, hard, and metal; a knife.

Turning back to the gravestone, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

JEFFREY DAVID ANDERSON 2000-2015, his gravestone read.  There were no flowers around it, nor was there a message.  After much consideration, he decided not to fix the date of death.  Jeff Anderson really had died in that fire.


As Ralph’s body bled onto the grass, Jeff looked into the shimmering lake; the pale moonlight reflected off it like a mirror.  The wind howled softly.

His face was scarred beyond all recognition; large patches of charred, ruined skin corrupted his face. All of his hair had been burnt to nothing but a few stray strands, and half of his face had rotted away to nothing except dead flesh and a hollow cheekbone.   His body was abnormally skinny; his ribcage was visible, imprinted against his skin.  That, too, was reduced to peeling skin; half of it had simply fell off his body.

He smiled with his crimson lips. It hurt; moving hurt, breathing hurt, his heartbeat hurt.  And he would free them.

Randall Trevelyan did not flee.

He had spent his entire childhood simply refusing to let anybody get the better of him or his brothers, and that was what cost them in the end.   After Ralph Carton’s death and the desecration of Jeff’s grave, Troy had fled the country.  Their parents had died when they were five; there wasn’t anybody to stop him.  Randall had screamed at him, told him that he was a coward, that he should stay and fight.  It did not convince him.  Randall had always blamed his brother for what happened on the abandoned house on Wynnewood Street; deep down he knew that he only did it because he couldn’t carry the guilt himself.

He had spent the last day preparing for Jeff’s arrival.  Four years in Juvenile detention had given him a deep loathing for authority; besides, part of him wanted to kill Jeff himself.   The windows had been bordered up, the door locked, locked, and double locked.   He had thrown tacks on the floor, smashed glass all over the stairs, and did his best to barricade his bedroom door.  Kevin Mccallister would be proud.

His supplies were fairly decent; he had been there for two days, without washing or even changing clothes.   Discarded cans and wrappers littered the floor.    Randall was in the position he had been for most of the last twenty four hours; kneeling behind his bed, a shotgun in his hands.

He checked his phone for more information on the killer, and what he saw made his blood run cold.  Kenneth and Jasmine Anderson had been found murdered in their home.   Kenneth had been stabbed so many times in the face he was hardly recognizable; Jasmine had been strangled to death.

The words, “FINALLY FREE” had been written on the wall in their blood.

If Jeff’s parents were dead, then Jeff was the killer; it was certain.   Randall checked the time of the death.   Six hours ago.   Jeff could easily reach his home-

Randall heard the soft click of a door opening.  He froze for a second; even in his paranoia, he tried to dismiss it as nothing.
Then there was the crinkle of glass underfoot, and the slow, deliberate sound of somebody walking upstairs.

A warm trickle of piss worked its way down Randall’s trousers.  His heart felt like it was about to explode, and his knees felt weak.  Ignoring his trembling hands, Randall raised the shotgun.

There was a sudden slam that nearly gave Randall a heart attack.   Somebody was attacking the door.  Not wasting a second, Randall let off a blast with his shotgun.  Splinters flew everywhere, breaking a massive hole in the door.  There was a second of silence, before he fired again, and a third time, and a fourth time.

Another beat of quiet; Randall could hear nothing except his own heartbeat.

And then Jeff sprang from nowhere and rushed at him like a revenant.  Randall screamed and jammed down the trigger of his shotgun; Jeff’s leg exploded in a mess of tendons and blood, but still he ran at him.   Randall felt his legs fall from under him and Jeff pinning him to the ground.

Just before the ice-cold razor sliced through his throat, Jeff whispered into Randall Trevelyan's ear.

“Be free.”

When they found him the next morning, it looked as if he had been dead for years.