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A Guilty Conscience (Henrietta Branford Writing Competition Winner)
The unmanned rowing boat escaped the current, and veered towards the quay. Wood struck wood, sending a shiver through the planks beneath my feet. The boat came to rest with its flank against the wooden ladder that descended into the water, as if inviting me to climb down and board it.
It was still now, but not silent. On the deck lay a long box of wine-red wood, studded with tiny, tarnished mirrors. From within came a soft but insistent knocking.
I closed my eyes. That horribly familiar flood of fear returned, the taste of it on my tongue like acrid, rotten fruit. It couldn’t be there. It just couldn’t. There’d been no boat a few moments earlier, just a blissfully blank expanse of water, and yet there it was, carrying its cargo with blithe disregard for my sanity.
The box glittered in the tired sunlight and I tried to swallow, to think rationally. Just a box. I knew that there was nothing inside it – of course there wasn’t.
But that didn’t explain the terrible sensation of being dragged backwards, or, for that matter, the knocking…
The pebble skimmed the water, skipping across the surface like bare feet on cool grass.
“One! Two! Three! Four!”
“Five! Five!”
“No way was that five.”
“It so was!”
“So wasn’t!”
“You’re just jealous.”
A pause.
“What?” The voice was cooler now, the edge of heady laughter smoothed away with the ripples on the water. The pebble had disappeared into the depths.
“Just ‘cause I found something I’m better at than you are!”
“That’s not true.”
“What isn’t? That you’re jealous, that I found something I can do better than you, or that you’re better than me at bloody everything?” A new pebble was thrown with force into the water, sending up droplets that caught the sunset and burned an angry red.
“Don’t swear.”
“See? You’re doing it again. You always think you’re better than me.”
I shook my head to dispel the memories before they could continue. The sun-flecks on the water blurred and shimmered, and for a moment I wondered whether they were drawn across the surface of my eye rather than the surface of the water.
It was so horribly familiar. New place, new time, but the box itself was just the same. It was as if it radiated memories, a sickening heat that reached me even here, at this distance. The reassuring safety of sunlight was rapidly disappearing behind the skyline and I tried to back away and leave that wine-red box where it was, glinting in the dusk, but my feet were rooted as if they grew from the wood of the quay itself.
Each tarnished mirror reflected back a shattered sunset, warping and twisting it until it became something blood-red and clotted with cloud, losing its pastels and gentle glow. The fear grew stronger until I could almost smell it against the most amicable scents of the warm, summer’s evening. Knock. Knock. Knock.
“I came here with you to be nice.”
“Oh, I feel so privileged!” Anger and sarcasm, punctuated by the heavy splash of stones thrown with vehemence into the water.
“Stop acting like a child.”
“You’re fourteen! Stop acting like an adult!”
“I don’t even know why I came.”
“To be nice – remember? I’m your latest charity case.”
“Why do I bother?”
“Perhaps it gives you a nice warm, superior feeling inside?” another angry splash.
“You’re not worth it. Everyone was right – messed up, malicious… just like your parents.”
Clenched fists, squared feet.
“Shut up!”
“What, you’re going to fight me? Sure, that’ll prove me wrong. Grow up.”
“Leave me alone.”
“With pleasure. Good luck with living up to your family traditions, Matt – perhaps I’ll see you on the news one day. Arsonist, rapist… what’ll it be?”
A roar, anger itself embodied in sound. A pushing hand, a scream of protest laced with fear and horror, the last, taunting words still hovering in the air as their creator fell against a backdrop of sparkling blue water.
A splash. She hadn’t sunk like the stones, she’d…
“I hadn’t even meant to! I hadn’t known she couldn’t sw…” I stopped myself, brought back to the present with a nauseating jerk by my own outburst, and looked around furtively. There was nobody nearby to hear my damning words. The memory was worse after being so locked away, every detail carefully preserved. I could still feel the roughness of her denim jacket on my palm as I pushed, still hear the echo of those pinching, biting insults as they took charge of my muscles and moved me on impulse.
I returned to the present, and to the box. It was still there, shifting gently as the water beneath rippled and swelled. Knock, knock, knock. I willed it to disappear but it refused, glinting horribly like a freshly honed weapon.
“Not another ‘true’ horror story…”
“What, you chicken? C’mon, Matt! Let your sister talk.”
The air was crowded with anticipation and smelt strongly of cheap alcohol.
“Ready, everyone? I don’t wanting anyone crying. Or screaming. The neighbours’ll come, nosy buggers.”
Tittering. The sound of shifting bodies suggests a cramped space.
“Go on. We’re not scared.”
“Ever heard the phrase guilty conscience?”
“Yeah.”
The sound of a plastic cup splitting under a foot or in impatient hands.
“There’s a cure for a guilty conscience that any murderer knows. You want to know what it is?”
“Yeah.”
“At moonlight, you’ve got to build yourself a box from wood of a tree someone was hanged on.”
Scoffing. The girl’s voice continued regardless. “Serious – if you can’t find one of those, it has to be from a really old tree, that’s seen a lot in it’s time…”
“This is so made up.” More shifting.
“No way. It’s all from an ancient Roman scripture. I saw it on my school trip to Italy, see, so I know all about it, but not many people do – it’s a secret. It’s called the Liber Noxiae – the book of guilt.”
They were willing to allow this, their logic and cynicism dulled by alcopops and the introduction of something plausible in Latin.
“So you build this box, right, and then you fill it with all the bad stuff you’ve done. You have to think of it really hard and then spit into one corner of the box. In the next corner, you have to let a few drops of your own blood fall. In the next, you have to put something that shows how you killed the person – a sliver of steel if it was by sword, a drop of poison if you tainted their food…”
A communal shiver.
“…and you leave the forth corner empty. That way your guilt goes away.”
“Then?”
“Then you have to take the box, right, and throw it into the sea.”
A yelp as a foot connected with a shin. Her audience was becoming restless.
“But there’s always something the murderer hasn’t accounted for. It’ll work a few years, right, but on the very last page of the scripture I was saying about… it says ‘pulsat’… ‘It’s knocking’. Then – in Latin, right – it says…”
A pause for effect. The room was silent, the air thick.
“When the past comes knocking…death’s on his way.”
Knock. Knock. Knock. I was shivering all over, covered in goosebumps. My box. I’d made it, following my older sister’s words to the letter, straining to find the memory of what I should do to wipe the guilt away. Perhaps I’d truly believed that by throwing it into the sea, from this very quay, I had disposed of it forever.
I hadn’t bargained for it following me.
For months now, it had been simply everywhere. I’d turn, glance in a shop window, and there – perhaps covered in a tartan cloth, but to me unmistakable – that wine-red box I’d been so sure was gone for good. I’d take one look and flee, the soft, unrelenting knocking echoing back and forth between my ears until it was drowned out by the panicked pounding of my own blood as I ran.
But now… I couldn’t. My feet seemed to move of their own accord, as my hands had done on that horrible, summer’s evening when the taunting words had captured my body and moved it without my consent. Perhaps, I thought, I could climb down and throw it back into the water where it belonged.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
My breathing was quick, my palms sweaty. I was afraid that my trainers would slip on the wet rungs of the ladder, so I jumped, bracing myself to land in the wooden rowing boat that waited just a few feet below me.
The water slammed shut over my head. There was no boat. There was no box, except perhaps the rotting remains of one, inexpertly made and tossed into the depths some fifteen years before. There had only ever been a guilty conscience, and the knock knock knock of a frightened heart.
Beth O’Leary (15) Winchester
1 response so far ↓
1 Charlotte Jacqueline Pearson // Jun 26, 2007 at 4:02 pm
This seems good, but is quite diificult to understand.
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