SANCTUARY

(Follow up from Heart, Liver and Soul)

1

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh ~ Leonard Cohen


The Speckson house had been empty for over ten years. It stood with the overgrown lawns and had boarded over widows. A typical early cape cod.

The Speckson family had been loners and chicken lovers. They sold eggs at the roadside at the weekends… children standing with glum expressions next to the mother who sat there looking as though she'd just stepped out of a modelling magazine and not out of the battered building behind her. The children always dressed immaculately and always stood in silence. They were, so it was said, home tutored. The locals guessed that must have been so as they didn't attend the local school and had to be educated somewhere.

Mr Speckson was a tall rough looking fellow who never gave a 'hello' or a wave to a soul.

The house though, that stood just off the main street going into town loomed and wailed and scared the hell out of the local kids. It was a short ten minutes walk to the first lot of shops which sprawled at first and then closed up and became blocky modern buildings. The town was ugly. The streets wide, the parking bays painted brightly, the shops with the big plate glass windows displayed wares, but the place lacked character. The main buildings were all built in the past thirty years or so. There was a school, a high school and bus and trains. There was nothing obviously wrong with the place except that it tended towards the ugly side. It wasn't a place tourists rushed to. It had no big lakes, no amazing trees… nothing wonderful at all except for The Speckson house which kids crept by and adults didn't want to look at and drove quickly past.

You might occasionally see a group of kids standing at the big metal gates and gazing up the over grown driveway to the house and those windows which had hidden a thousand sins, but today there were other things to look at. Trucks had turned up. People had been looking around. Raised voices had been heard and boarding had been ripped down. Building work began.

The interior of the house was being gutted which seemed like a good idea. The only way to get rid of all of that blood. Not that anyone had ever seen the blood but they'd all been told by someone who had been there. That night when the Specksons had been found torn to a thousand pieces, there must have been two hundred people crammed into that house if everyone who had spoken to someone who had been there at the time was to be believed.

A murder so horrific that a decade later it was still talked of as though it had only just happened. Children were not allowed on the property and most children were locked away inside of their homes by the time it was dark. Teenagers roamed… teenagers are immortal in their minds. No monster was going to fuck with them… and they were probably right. The adults were wary. They carried mace, rape alarms, cell phones always charged up and ready to call… and they were overly suspicious of strangers.

Initially there had been a very large police presence – to calm the locals and stop them from saying that the cops did nothing. How could the cops do anything when the horrific murder had taken place without them even knowing about it? A family of six… wiped out… and still no one knew who had done it… still everyone looked at their neighbours as though they were the guilty ones. Still they left porch lights on at night and all windows and doors were kept locked. That lovely open and carefree life was gone… that left the day the delivery boy looked through the lounge window and couldn't see anything because of the blood covering the windows.

That didn't matter today… today bathtubs, sinks, old doors, rusty beds, curtains… carpets… cookers, toilets… everything which had once been inside of the house was now in a large pile at the front of it.

'There was no For Sale sign.' A small but rotund man with white hair was complaining. 'How can someone buy something that wasn't for sale? That don't make sense. I thought that place belonged to the town. I thought it was going to be pulled down or something.'

It was the general thought from everyone. They assumed that the house would be there forever, slowly rotting, until there was nothing left of it and they could stop seeing it out of the corner of their eyes… they could stop imagining the screams that were never heard and maybe then they themselves could begin to relax.

Maybe.

o-o-o

Did they have any idea what it was like trying to please everyone? Floyd thought that they really had no idea.

Spencer said, 'I don't care, as long as I'm with you.'

Which Floyd knew what bullshit and Sam said it was too.

Sam wanted the city. He wanted bright lights, nightlife, people… stuff… music pounding… technology.

Floyd wanted peace and quiet. He would have been happy living in a ditch in the forest as long as his boys were with him.

A compromise wasn't going to be easy.

'You must have a thought on where you'd like to live.' Floyd threw down the pile of paper with pictures of houses for sale.

Spencer smiled slightly inanely and shook his head. 'I've come to realise that unless wherever we go is perfect in your mind then you'll never be happy and that's all I want. I just want you to be happy.'

Sam objected. 'You disgust me! You're from Vegas… you must want to live in a city!'

'What point is there in living in the city if we are not all happy? I'd love to live in Vegas, but Floyd doesn't want to and so I'm not going to kick my feet and throw food until he gives in.'

Sam objected again. 'I've not thrown food in over a week!'

'Yesterday… lasagne…' Floyd pointed at a smear of a grease stain on the wall.

'That was boiled muck, not food, which was why I threw it. Oh my god… you two do my head in. You feed me pig swill…'

Spencer stood up and folded his arms across his chest. 'It took me all day to cook that!'

'And you wasted your time!' Sam snapped back and kicked out at the pictures of houses.

Floyd leaned back on the couch and watched his boys sniping and bitching at each other. It was constant. It never bloody well stopped. Actually the only time they stopped snarling and snapping was when they were asleep. It was giving Floyd another of his headaches.

'So I'm going to stay on the east coast.' Floyd told them. They both stopped grumbling and looked at Floyd. 'I've found a place in New England. I like it. It needs a lot of work done on it but I've already got people there stripping it out ready.'

Spencer picked at the skin where his fingers could reach. Sam made a small mewling sound and walked quickly to the bathroom. Floyd shrugged. 'You bought somewhere even though you promised that we would decide together?' Spencer asked him.

'Sure. But I've not said you have to live there have I? You don't have to. I'm just keeping options open and as you two can't agree on shit, I might just take a trip over up there and see how things are going. You two can stay here and keep out of trouble for a few weeks. Or of course you can join me in the town of Sanctuary.

o-o-o

Discussions were held.

This was a new thing they'd decided to try. They would discuss everything and make joint decisions. Floyd had initially thought that this was a good idea, but now it seemed that Sam was trying to block anything and everything he tried.

'Three votes are needed!' Was Sam's new battle cry. And this was getting tiresome. Floyd was going to go visit the new house whether the pair of them liked it or not. The only problem was that he had no intention of leaving them behind and Sam was stubbornly refusing to even consider moving there. 'I'm happy here.' That was his new thing.

'I like my apartment.' Was Spencer's constant whine.

'I don't want to live with people who wear rubber boots in the summer!' Sam howled when Floyd showed them the photographs of the house. Spencer though went very quiet, took the photos and looked at the floor plans. It was a lovely place. It was big and not completely cut off from civilization. There was though something horribly familiar about it and he knew that he'd either seen that house before or had seen pictures of it. The town of Sanctuary seemed familiar too. He blamed his lack of being able to pull information up on all the damage he'd had done to his head in the past. He just didn't seem to have the recall that he used to have… either that or he was mistaken. He carried on looking at the pictures until they were snatched away from him by Floyd.

'Why there? Why that place?' Spencer asked him. 'There's a lot of work you're having done. You could have got a new build for that price.' Not that Spencer wanted to live in a new build, but he was just curious about why this particular place.

Floyd took a deep breath. 'The place had been on the market for nearly a decade. No one wanted it. Allegedly – and I'm not sure about this, but it's haunted… no one wanted to live there. Ghosts don't bother me. I don't like new builds… I've tried as you know. I wanted somewhere with character. Somewhere we could get into the city easily. Somewhere Sam wouldn't feel cut off.'

'I hope they've got a local burger place. Spencer's going to get bored if he doesn't get a job.' Sam told Floyd.

Spencer prodded the papers in Floyd's hand. 'And why do I know that place?' He asked.

'Maybe your father took you there once.' Floyd snapped back at him. 'We leave tomorrow. Just to look. I'm not asking you to move in. Can we at least go and look?'

Sam told him that there was no point.

Spencer said that he'd go. Though he would rather stay where they were or go back to the small house with the lovely wrap around porch that they owned somewhere else… or maybe to the big white house on the top of the cliffs, or perhaps to the cottage by the sea. He did want to go and look though. He wanted to know if anything else in the town was familiar. He needed to know why it was he knew that house.

Floyd had his own reasons for wanting that house. He had his own reasons for having it stripped out and put back together. He was keeping those reasons to himself for now.