Book by: Cobber

Chapter 19: Preston Goes Home

Reads: 613

They turned left onto Preston's street and it looked perfectly normal. It almost looked beautiful in the midday sun. The trees moved a little in the breeze and the flowers planted in front of many of the homes gave the neighborhood a splash of color and warmth. Halfway down the street, he could see the big pine tree that marked his house. It stood where it had always stood and Preston wondered if perhaps his fears had been unjustified.

"It's so quiet."

"What?" he asked, turning his attention back towards her.

"I said it's so quiet." It looked normal but Preston began to realize that his street had changed in subtle ways. The change was hard to peg and unsettling and it reminded Preston of the time he had been sent away to summer camp. When he returned two months later, his room had seemed different, alien to him. He realized that nothing had been touched, but the loss of contact and the changes he had experienced at camp had skewed his perception of his room. Looking down his street and walking through Wellow Falls he felt the same feeling, magnified and strengthened. Something had indeed changed, and his anxiety began to grow.

They turned a bend and Preston saw his house. It looked the same, exactly the same. It was a two family house with a short driveway at the side leading to a one car garage. There were several small coniferous bushes in the front that had not been pruned recently, and they had lost their shape and reverted to a gangly mass of branches and needles. The grass was browned from the summer heat and where the grass had not been hardy enough to resist the lack of rain there were clumps of dandelion stumps and other weeds. The brown paint was peeling off the house in several places and there was a large hole in the front porch where the wood had rotted away. Preston had never realized before just how run-down the house had become. His father didn't care to fix it up, and Preston had hardly cared himself. To him, the house was a reminder of hell, a place where the beatings occurred, and where he eventually returned to restart the whole process of reconciliation, short peace, anger, and then the beating that inevitably followed. His memories of the house were mostly painful and yet there was touch of sentiment attached to them. He wondered about this and thought back to something he had read.

Solzenietism, the Russian writer had suffered years of imprisonment and torture in the Soviet Union because of his critical writing about the communist party. Eventually he was released and left the country. Yet, when the opportunity presented itself, Solzenietism did not hesitate to return to the land in which he had undergone such hardship. It was his home, and it had shaped his person. Preston realized he felt the same thing, perhaps on a lower scale, looking at his house.

"This is my home," he said to Ryan as they stopped in front of the driveway. He turned to look at her and a slight wind rustled her hair. She was staring at the house as if hypnotized by its sight. Her gaze made him uncomfortable and he touched Ryan's arm to bring her back to attention.

"Oh!" she exclaimed after his poke.

"Are you alright."

"Yes, I'm sorry, its just that..." her words trailed of as she furrowed her brow in concentration. Preston waited.

"It's just that I feel like I have been here before. I don't know, there's a memory, something. Maybe just a sense of deja-vu." Preston considered her word for a second and then shrugged. Houses like his dotted the New England landscape.

"Ryan, before we go in, there's something I want to promise me that you'll do. It may be important. If you see my father and he looks angry, just leave. Don't ask me any questions, just leave and wait for me around the block." Her inevitable question came.

"Why?"

"I told you about my father. He sometimes gets violent and I never now how he's going to react. If he knew I was going to take the car..."

"Will you be okay?" It was a legitimate question. He hadn't been home since the last severe beating and he didn't know how his father would react. This was the longest he had stayed away. He was scared and Preston prayed that his father had decided not to come home early from the office.

"I'll be fine," he tried to say convincingly. "I just don't want you involved. Hopefully, he won't be home and it will only take a minute for me to get the keys." He took her hands.

"Promise me you'll leave if my father is there and acts angry."

" I promise." He kissed her on the lips and took her hand. Together they walked up the driveway, cut onto the lawn, and up the stairs to the front door.

Submitted: April 06, 2007

Horror fantasy horror evil forces monarch