PREFACE

And there I was, face to face with her. I looked her straight into the eye and remembered her face well, as though I had taken a snapshot through my eyes. There she stood. The one who had made me all I was. She who had made me into something I could never have imagined was possible. She who had changed me, who had changed everything. And in that moment all I wanted to do was kill her.

1. REMINISCE

I returned to Kilkee every once in a while. Before I learned to drive it was with my parents but of late I'd found my visits becoming more frequent. Perhaps my memories there had been fonder, a legacy of happiness from my childhood. Something that I held close through the roughest of my days. Yet there is only so much comfort a candle can bring you in a blizzard.

The blizzard of course was life in Galway City.

As a place to live it would definitely not have been my first choice. It was a city of culture and of music, festivals and partying in the summer months but for me that was a façade. If you looked passed the outward portrayal it was no different than any other big town or city. Hustle and bustle, traffic, nine to five jobs and suburbia. Why my parents, Martin and Orla, opted to live here rather than commute the two hours to work from our old hometown was beyond me. It was for the convenience they had told me and they made no effort to sugarcoat the whole event of moving there. To me there was nothing convenient about being ripped from my home, my town, my school and all my friends and transplanted to this alien world of brick, cement and tarmac.

I was ten at the time and perhaps I had no concept then of how stressful work was and that this was so much easier for them. Yet their gleefulness over finally being able to realise their long awaited dream of living in a nice house in the city was somehow insulting to me, aggravating.

Our rented two-storey house where I had grown up with my older brother Kevin and my younger sister Chloe was cosy but had two huge gardens that I wiled away many a day with my many themed versions of common games like catch and hide and seek. It was almost in the country; not right in the middle of town but near enough that the beach was within walking distance. It was as though the world was wide and open and everyday there was another adventure to be had, and because Kilkee wasn't absolutely tiny there were always a lot of other kids to share them with. Contrast Galway City with that picture and you would have its polar opposite.

The house we moved into, although bigger, was one of several dozen clone buildings in our "housing estate" and had two puny lawns that certainly did not deserve the honour of being referred to as gardens. That meant nowhere to play because we weren't allowed out on the streets. My room was a good deal bigger, too, but being stuck there for most of my free time made it seem like a cage. No amount of square footage could ever suffice when compared to my old room with its big windows open on the world, the endless rolling fields of green, and ever-changing sky.

For all the disadvantages of suburban living, they paled in comparison to school life. My primary school back in Kilkee had no more than twenty people per class; it was brightly coloured with artwork everywhere and the teachers answered all your questions no matter how ridiculous. Here my 4th class teacher, Ms. Willis, was a major battleaxe with a chip on her shoulder that almost physically made her lean to one side. She obviously hated her job and simply expected her students to sit quietly, listening to her drone on for six hours and not interrupting her unless it was a dire emergency. Woe betide the poor child who raised a hand or spoke out of turn, as it was always only her turn to speak.

The other children were not much better. In fact they were invariably worse. I was short and a little weedy for my age and my sallow skin, light blue eyes and dirty blonde hair made me look vulnerable...and therefore a target. I remember the first boy I introduced myself to in the school playground. He was much taller despite being my age and had been watching me in class, smiling weirdly. Naïve as I was, I misinterpreted derision for friendliness.

My introduction went as follow: "Hello, my name's Jason Culhane. What's yours?"

"What's it to you, dwarf boy?"

Taken aback I stammered, "I...ah...just...am."

The boy laughed. "Haha, hey everyone, dwarf boy's gotta speech problem, too. Sure you're in the right class?"

"Wha-what do you mean?"

"Like maybe you should be in low infants, or special needs!"

I didn't understand him. I had never known this kind of bullying back in Kilkee. I didn't even know what a bully really was until then. A crowd had gathered round and I was getting laughed at by kids even younger than I was. So I thought maybe I'd had a bad experience, maybe I had just picked the one jackass in the bunch. However the following weeks saw many of my attempts at making friends being rebuffed with cold shoulders, verbal abuse, or a good thump now and then. It was disheartening and over the year that followed I became more and more reclusive. My workaholic parents never noticed though, too busy furthering their careers to pick up on my sudden seclusion.

Kevin was always different than me in almost every sense. He was fourteen when we moved and so attended secondary school. He was the apple of mommy and daddy's eye and that particular fruit didn't fall too far from the tree. He was a go-getter, an overachiever, and worst of all an attention-seeker. He always got good grades and all the parents' praise. To me he was like a shape shifter. No matter what the situation or stress he was under, he could adapt and make the best of it. Socially that meant he always had friends and was a hit with the girls. Envy would be an inadequate description of my feelings towards him.

As my eleventh birthday came and went without much notice, I knew I always had my little sister when the going got tough. Though she was only four at the time she managed to go to a corner shop down the street, buy my favourite chocolate swissroll with her few euros of pocket money, and stick one of our oversized, decorative candles in it. She knocked on my bedroom door where I lay upon my bed, hoping to sleep through this, and presented it to me with a pack of matches.

She said, "Happy birthday big brother! I wanted to light the candle but I was too afraid in case it burned me."

I smiled, but gave her a firm talking to for what she'd done. It was a testament to my mom's and dad's excellent parenting skills that their four-year old daughter could escape the house, walk down the block to a shady corner shop, prepare a birthday cake and grab a pack of matches without their noticing. Don't get me wrong. I loved my parents. It was just I didn't understand why they'd chosen to be parents. Clearly their primary concerns were their careers, my father a doctor and my mother the science department head at the university.

Kevin was just like them in every conceivable way and would probably rise quickly through the ranks of any profession he chose. He even looked more like them. His hair was perfectly straight and white blonde with sharp eyes of the deepest imaginable blue. He was built tall like my dad, and I often teased he got his pretty boy looks from mom. Chloe looked more like me, eyes that were almost baby blue and hair that rippled in alternating strands of golden tones to almost dark brown. Some people, especially kids my age then, might consider having such a meaningful relationship with your kid sister as being pathetic. I didn't, not for a moment, and even if I did who else was there? My parents and elder brother were so focussed on their goals that Chloe and I fell to the periphery. Our physical needs were always met and we had everything we wanted, but emotionally we could never count on them.

Kevin especially was aloof from us, as though we did not share the same blood in our veins. It was probably also the reason Chloe looked up to me so much, because her other elder sibling intimidated her and had no time for her. I had to admit I felt the same about him sometimes. Although he never overtly criticised or bullied me, his manner always conveyed a hint of shame. I was always drawn in by the fanciful and loved stories, the genres of fantasy, science fiction and horror especially. I could immerse myself in tales endlessly and be completely content in my little cage as long as I had reading material. Music, space, travel, nature were all amongst my multitude of fascinations.

All Kevin could ever say was, "What good's any of that ever gonna do you?"

Things grew steadily worse in Galway as fifth and sixth class passed me by and secondary school loomed. At the age of thirteen I had yet to make a single friend and the bullying grew so intense at times that I just ditched it and walked the city streets for the six hours. My parents' only concern when the school called was how badly my absence had reflected upon them, as though they couldn't keep tabs on their own children. You can't. I could never admit that I was picked on by my fellow students. They'd likely only tell me to toughen up and that it was good character building.

One day on a particularly miserable February morning towards the end of sixth class, I sneaked back to Kilkee on the bus just to get away from it all. Once again, despite the firm talking to I received from my parents, I had gone during school hours. The bus ride through the country was peaceful. Rain slapped against my window obscuring all but shades of colour that I discerned as trees, fields and buildings. The road was often bumpy but it caused a rocking motion that was relaxing like a child held by a loving mother. The school had been ordered to report my absence immediately if I'd skipped. Yet it would be a long time before I was found. I had left every trapping of my city existence behind.

No phone, no wallet, no keys.

Just money and a change of clothes which I donned in the bus station bathroom. I discarded my uniform in the litterbin as a final insult to that hellhole institution that had taken three years of my life. The bus trip took substantially longer than a car ride and I had to meet a connecting bus in Ennis. I didn't mind though. It gave me plenty of time to think through my options once I got there. After mulling them over for three hours I came to several disheartening conclusions. I couldn't meet my friends because they were all still in school. I couldn't go to their homes because their parents would immediately contact my mom and dad. I couldn't even really go into town because everyone would recognise me.

So that left one option.

The "Woods" was where my friends and I always had the most fun. It was a small copse just outside of the town limits, occupying what was once pastureland. A few dozen young ash and sycamore trees were spread randomly over about three acres of land intermixed with hawthorn and alder bushes. They were perfect for climbing and often we challenged each other seeing who could reach the highest but most hadn't the guts to climb past the lowest branches.

The Woods was a place of adventure and imagination where our many scenarios came to life in a greater sense somehow. Perhaps it was our isolation from the outside world in this our own little microcosm that fed the mind fires that constructed medieval worlds of knights and kingdoms or prehistoric jungles filled with ravenous beasts. In this place time became irrelevant and we were often retrieved by irritated parents. I jumped off the bus on the last stop before town which meant walking for twenty minutes in the rain which had lessened to a drizzle, all the same it was clingy and unpleasant. I was glad I had not forgotten my jacket.

Having trudged along the narrow road through muck and puddles I finally came into view of my much missed playground. Nothing much had changed. The trees seemed a bit bigger and the undergrowth denser than what I remembered. A rusted iron gate futilely guarded the once tame field from any who dared enter it. Clambering over the gate my hands were made a patchwork of rust fragments and my feet landed straight in ankle-deep mucky water from an overflowing roadside dike. Still I laboured on, knowing the whole field would probably be a sinkhole.

I followed a mud path cleared of grass by constant passers through to the centre of the field where perhaps the most exciting aspect of this little world lay. An abandoned farmstead made of non-worked stones and mortar crumbled into rubble and attached was a completely rusted farm shed. It looked worse than I remembered. The chimney had collapsed in and knocked out a large portion of wall on the three adjacent sides. I was relieved no one had been hurt because my more daring friends often ventured inside claiming the house was haunted and they could convince the ghosts to come out and get us.

I glanced around to find other unwelcome changes.

A tyre swing we hung up ourselves from a low ash tree near the old house hung from one last tautened thread. The campfire we built using big rocks as seats and smaller ones to ring our imagined fire was overgrown and almost out of sight. Then I ran. I ran behind the house and followed the muddy trail splattering the thick sludge all up the back of my jeans. Then I saw it and my body fell limp.

The tree house was a wreck.

We had convinced our parents to help us build a tree house with two separate rooms on neighbouring sycamore trees and have them connected by a rope bridge. It wasn't far off the ground, perhaps six feet, still it was our cubby and our headquarters where we devised all our schemes. The rope bridge was ripped and tangled and barely hanging on. The timber tree houses had buckled and were missing planks as the tree limbs encroached upon them. Ivy added insult to injury as it crept over the remnant structures. It was a gut wrenching sight but maybe I should have anticipated it.

My friends had grown older, too, and most of them moved on a lot faster than me. The likelihood was that they hadn't been back here since I'd left. It was a kick in the teeth but they had grown and were passed this stage. Perhaps I only held on because at least they had the chance to grow out of childish games and fantastical notions. For me, I was torn from my imagined world prematurely and dropped in a bemused heap into the real one. As I trudged back towards the campfire I plopped myself down upon a frigid, wet stone and threw my head into my lap with arms folded around to block out the desolation all around that mocked me. I sat there for a long while, tearing up but never wailing.

It was several hours before I sprung up and realised I'd drifted off. What woke me were the massive rain drops pounding down upon me like water balloons. I scurried for the shelter of a tree but without leaves it didn't serve well in that capacity. The sky was darkening as the days were still very short. It was well after school hours and my parents were probably frantic. Good! For once they might feel some concern for the well-being of their child. Perhaps I should runaway altogether and save myself the horrors of attending another torture house like my primary school.

Still, my ruthlessness was stifled by my better judgement and thoughts of my little sister. My parents and Kevin would kill me when I came home but at least Chloe would be happy to see me back. I could never hurt her by disappearing like that. She could never forgive me. I wouldn't forgive me. Above all else I couldn't see her ignored and her imagination muffled like mine was. I would be there for her until both of us could fend for ourselves and we didn't need our family anymore. With that in mind, my next job was to figure out how the hell I was getting home.

It was half six according to my watch and the next bus back to Ennis was in less than five minutes. With the town centre the closest, I'd have to make it there by then despite it being more than ten minutes away. After that there was another hour wait for the connecting bus to Galway. I had brought only the money for my return ticket which was sodden in my jeans pocket. After that there was another twenty minute shuttle bus ride to my housing estate and a five minute walk from the stop home. So I was in for a journey and at the end of it I faced the wrath of my family and the authorities who they likely had called. Still, if I didn't make this bus I wasn't going home tonight, so I sprinted through my withered, barren dreamland and hopped the gate onto the flooding road landing with a splash.

The rain pounded down in torrents that immersed me in a frigid film and soaked me to the skin. The sky was pitch black as thunderous storm clouds moved in obscuring the last shimmers of light cast by a retreating sun. The downpour was relentless and blasted into my face with every gust of wind. Water ran down my forehead and collected in my eyebrows where it dripped frequently in my eyes. I blinked like I was having a fit but it was useless. My muscles felt stiff and my whole body was tremulous, frozen by the raw wind, icy rain, and the bitter air.

I convinced myself I didn't have far to go even though I was inching along and would never get to town on time. Failing the bus, I could drop in on one of my friends and call home from there. I was quickly losing my pace, though, and my legs refused to budge. It took all my strength just to keep standing. My eyes stung from the amount of liquid that flowed over them. My cheeks, nose, and ears were so cold they hurt. My teeth chattered so hard I feared dislodging one of my many fillings. I shuffled sideways trying to force blood into my legs by simple movement but for my efforts I was rewarded with massive gusts of wind that chilled my very soul. My legs finally had taken enough. They buckled and I found myself kneeling on the eroded tarmac.

I had no idea where I was.

My eyes squinted incessantly, but it was too dark to see anything anyway. I felt like sleeping, but somehow I knew that was a desire best ignored given the circumstances. I sat there dazed for an immeasurable amount of time. My only point of reference was the faint lights of Kilkee to the southwest. I could continue just trekking towards them. The road would wind its way there eventually, but my muscles were unresponsive and every concerted effort I made to stand was met with a disturbing numbness. I checked my watch.

It read 6:35 p.m.

Too late, and the cherry upon my cake of misery was the digital display flickering and suddenly flashing off. So much for being bloody waterproof, my parents had probably gotten it out of a twenty cent machine. I had no idea what I was doing. I was sitting in a back road in the middle of nowhere and just wallowing in my own self-pity and several inches of rainwater. I had even forgotten what I was hoping to achieve by coming here. Besides the act of rebellion, there wasn't much else to it. Subconsciously my occasionally logical mind had ruled out meeting friends and strolling round town before I'd even got here. I even had suspicions, though I wouldn't admit it to myself, that I would find the Woods in such a state. This had been a gigantic waste of time that had dragged me further into the abyss of anguish. A few stray tears mixed with the pounding rain.

I was still there after seven or so I guessed.

There was a lull in the cloudburst but the winds had grown stronger, creating mini waves in the puddles that lapped against me. Then things went from bad to worse.

It hailed.

The tiny pellets of white ice were no bigger than a pea but boy did they sting. They showered down so densely that it felt like I had been swarmed by angry wasps. I rolled onto my side in shock from the sudden rush of sensation and quickly found my limbs to be functional, at least in a limited sense. I stumbled and tripped forward thinking I was running for the shelter of a line of trees I'd seen earlier from a distance. In reality the road was curving here and I was staggering almost down the middle. I gazed firmly at my feet and cupped my hand above my eyes trying to shield them.

It was no surprise that I didn't see it coming, until it was too late.

A sudden brightness seeped between my fingers and reached my strained eyes. Just as I lowered my hand it happened.

A third party observer might have seen the event transpire within seconds but for me time moved in ultra-slow motion. The headlights belonged to a car as far as I could discern. I could make out nothing else about the vehicle or its occupants besides those brilliant full beams. The distance between it and I closed both in the blink of an eye and in a moment that for me was timeless.

The impact was horrendous.

They must have seen me in the last second because they swerved enough that only my right thigh was struck by the car's bumper. I felt and heard the sickening crunch of breaking bone and the squelch of pulverised flesh. For a few brief moments I was hurled upward. My momentum carried me above and over the car as it sped on under me. In midair my body flipped over until I was facing skyward. The hailstones that beat down were nothing but inconsequential midges. I descended back to the hard tarmac landing flat on my back, my head cracking off the rough edge of a pothole. I had barely inhaled when I felt the first inklings that something was very wrong.

Clearly being hit by a car was something seriously amiss, but it was not that reality which gripped me in the coming seconds.

The pain in my leg felt like a raging inferno but it built up like a static charge. As I concentrated on it my world began falling away until the pain was all that existed. The fire drew in my senses, seemingly sucking up every ounce of energy from my body and feeding itself like a gluttonous parasite. Sensation from everywhere else in my body either seemed dulled or virtually nonexistent. I was distinctly aware that the concentration of pain had a boiling point, a critical mass, call it whatever you will but it was coming and I had no idea what that could mean. Then that point arrived and this insanity took its course.

Like a static charge going to ground, the fire traversed the path within me of least resistance. From my thigh, it shot straight into my lower spine and my back arched in response. It forced its way up my back like red-hot magma climbing a lava tube. Suddenly, my shoulders seized and my arms stretched out, my elbows locking and my fingers clawing at the impenetrable road. The fire seemed to hit a roadblock at the base of my neck before, like a dam that could not hold back a flood, it erupted forth and filled my cranium with flaming agony. Had I not known better I would have believed smoke was puffing from my ears and little bursts of fire were being carried on my breath. I felt my eyes widen involuntarily and suddenly, I was aware of much more in the night time gloom. My pupils had probably dilated a great deal but then the really terrifying thing happened.

I found the fire had transformed into something I could not quite identify, it felt like an energy, as though the searing heat had become some form that really had no comparison.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed, a fact of existence I knew well. Yet I feared this new force of nature that resided inside my skull like some malign entity. It frightened me, and as it coursed through my mind I could not help but feel that I was being possessed. I tried to view this force in my mind's eye and could see nothing but a billowing blackness like thick smoke. This only reinforced the notion that I had an unwelcome visitor. Then my focus returned outward and through my eyes I witnessed the unbelievable. The hail continued to pelt at me but it fell short. The fragments of ice shattered into a million imperceptible specks as though they were evaporating above my body. This invisible barrier hung about a foot in front of me and nothing could traverse it.

I didn't even feel the wind.

For a moment I let go of my terror and admired the serenity of it all. The hailstones fell against it one after another and each time they popped out of existence with a faint sizzle. The puddle that had done little to break my fall now parted around me and the road under my hands was bone dry, almost too hot to touch. I smiled despite my circumstances not bothering to ruin the moment through dissection of this phenomenon. Then a strange image popped into my head.

A wall, a solid brick wall.

The black smoke drifted in at the fringes of the image curling and tangling strands much like the limbs of an octopus. One strand seemed to become denser until it reached a solidity where it became like onyx. In a lightning strike it shattered a brick near the edge of the wall. I gulped as awareness of my aching head wound from my hard landing returned. Then other black tendrils solidified and lashed against this barrier. Brick after brick shattered, popped or disintegrated. Pain signals rushed through the gaping holes like the inferno I'd felt earlier.

Everything hurt.

It was far too much to withstand and as more flaming bolts burned through my nerves I witnessed the blackness grow. Then as the wall became unbalanced it came down like a line of dominoes and the full, uninhibited torture of my crippled body was unleashed upon my frayed mind. Unbearable as it was, I did not scream. Instead I seized up and bit down hard, grinding my teeth as I felt not just my awareness expanding but also my influence.

The smoke was stretching everywhere around me. I could feel it, manipulate it like a tangible limb. It caressed everything nearby. I felt every minute flaw in the tarmac. I sensed the shape of every ripple in the pools of water. I touched every blade of grass and every tree branch and understood them down to the infinitesimal atoms that formed their being. And further up the road I reached out to my tormenter, the thing that left me in this state.

All this things had transpired in a mere half a minute and the car had not travelled far. They had slowed, checking to see if I moved. The blackness enshrouded them. I sensed rapid pulses, laboured breathing and fidgeting hands. There was more than one occupant. Several in fact and they all seemed equally frantic as the driver. I knew they were all male and from the shape of the car's body I knew it was a sports design. Boy racers, the kind of people with the kind of car I hoped to have ironically. They had slowed to a crawl and the passengers glared back at me through the rear window. Then I sensed air molecules dancing and rippling in the vicinity of one of their mouths. He had said something, something I could interpret to my surprise. Three words that inspired panic: "He's dead. Drive!"

No I'm not. Don't leave me here, you cowards. The sentiment inspired a response in the blackness. It convulsed and tautened as it had before in my mind. Like the hand of a mighty giant it clasped around the car. The driver had just shoved the gear stick into third and was pulling away when his wheels spun. His breath came in short, shallow gasps as his anxiety grew. He struggled against the black smoke putting the car into full gear and pressing the accelerator down as far as it would go. The car shimmied from side to side. I sensed the friction of the wheels on the tarmac. The heat splintered off tiny particles of rubber and the odour of it burning was all the more intense. The air vibrations grew tempestuous like waves on a hurricane-whipped sea as they shouted over each other in panic.

I didn't want this.

It was too dangerous what the blackness was doing. I felt a growing strain upon it as the driver seriously put the pedal to the metal in a desperate bid for freedom from his unseen captor. This strain translated into further agony within my battered head. I whimpered as I tried desperately to let go.

I shouted inside my mind, Stop! Stop now! Someone will find me! Let them go!

I really believed then that the blackness was a separate being, for it refused my direct commands that were more like pleading. I visualised the hand that held them. The "fingers" stretched thin like vines trying to hold up a falling tree. Two snapped simultaneously and the car jerked forward a little. That felt to me like red hot needles jabbed in my scalp. Two more gave way and I roared at the top of my lungs. The last finger held out as the car swayed violently. Its continuing extension wrenched at the front of my brain making my forehead feel like it was being pulled by the car's building impetus. I cried and shouted and screeched and when the pain became all too much I bellowed out loud, "Stop!"

The finger released instead of breaking in a gentle movement whose consequences were anything but. The car lunged forward having built up considerable forward momentum. In seconds they traversed the road, mounted the ditch and shot straight up before flipping upside down and crashing into stand of bare alder trees strangled by thorny briars.

I felt my mind failing.

The exertion and stimuli had been all too much. Yet in my last minute of fading consciousness, I reached out to them.

The last finger traced their path like a sniffer dog. I felt the skid marks already being dissolved by a fresh shower of rain. I reached out to the broken grass blades and uprooted plants and felt their very cells respond to the injury like damage control teams. Over a short patch of undisturbed vegetation I raced quickly over to the car. I slithered and winded around broken twigs and fallen branches to reach the car and its occupants. I no longer sensed the glass in the windows. The finger split into four little tendrils as it peeked within the wreck. They each extended out finding necks and wrists.

I sensed no sounds, no nerve signals, no pulses and no breaths. They're all dead.

I reached out to a smaller shape in the back. It was one of the occupants. His proportions were similar to mine if a little stockier. This new sense was not the same as seeing as such, I couldn't picture his face very clearly but an object he wore drew my attention. It was a chain with a single object attached, a scorpion with the word Scorpio engraved on a narrow strip of metal below it. It was familiar and I knew exactly why. It belonged to my best friend in Kilkee, Fionn O' Reardon. I had given it to him on his eight birthday because of his fascination with astrology, a subject I found repulsive. We had been like kindred spirits, equally weird and flighty in our interests. It was hardest to leave my best friend behind when I left to move to Galway, but we kept up contact and he felt really bad for my situation in the city. He had wanted me to come down this month but I hadn't tried till today because I was grounded. So I build up the guts to come here, and it comes to this.

My head slipped sideways against the road facing toward where the wreck lay. The tendrils began withering back and I lost my visual of the Scorpio chain. My mind began to dull as my breathing shallowed and my heart rate slowed. Darkness crept in upon my vision though it hardly made a difference. My body went limp and my eyelids were betraying my will not to sleep. However even as my body shut down, my emotions writhed and clashed brutally as the strange blackness retreated into some hitherto unknown recess of my brain. I sensed its presence constantly but my tenuous control over it had vanished. It was just there, mocking me, much like everything else in the world. My eyelids finally drew together and it was dark. My last thoughts were of my sister and that as much as I wanted to see her again I wished dearly not to wake up.

Of course my wish wasn't granted. I awoke several days later in Limerick Regional Hospital. My vision at first was nothing but a swathe of blurry pastel colours and indefinite shapes.

I believed that I had dreamt the whole thing.

That initial hope dissipated as my hearing returned at a much faster rate. My dad's voice emanated from some indeterminate place. I looked around but made out nothing that looked like his face and the sounds seemed omnidirectional as though he were speaking through a sound system. Of my parents my dad was perhaps the most compassionate. Don't get me wrong, he was still wound up in himself and his career but he wasn't entirely self-absorbed like my mother. Finally everything began to clarify and I was aware of my bed, a room of bland colours with not much else in it, the drips inserted in my forearm and my dad sitting close by in a metal chair. Nothing was fully in focus but it was enough. My hearing normalised a good deal more.

His words had a familiar tone probably because he had been repeating them to me from the moment I stirred, "Hey Jason, how're you feeling?"

I mumbled in response, "Fan-tastic!"

He smiled weakly but unexpectedly; his colouring was very red. I would have thought he'd have been pale. I asked slowly, "What...happened?"

"What do you remember?"

I wouldn't go in to details for fear I'd pass out again in despair so I simply replied, "Everything...until I passed out on the road."

He nodded and stared at his lap, he continued sombrely, "After the accident someone in a house down the road heard the crash. They called the Gardaí and a patrol car came out from Kilkee to check it out. They found you first and just in time. You've broken your thigh up pretty bad, the bone is snapped and there's a lot of tissue damage. If they hadn't found you then and got you to hospital you would have died of internal bleeding."

I knew my injury had been severe but not life-threatening. It gave me pause. Then the one element of that experience I needed not to be real flashed through my brain. The blackness pulsed with it and I suddenly became aware of its presence once more. I honestly believed my outer body experience, touching and seeing things without moving or looking, didn't really happen and was just delirium brought on by shock. It felt as though the blackness was reminding me of it to cause me more grief but I soon realised it was because a lot of the memories were associated with that sense. It was like recalling a sound and knowing you heard it through your ears. Knowing that my imagination hadn't run amuck I forced the hardest question from my lips, "Dad...what about the people in the car?"

He still didn't look at me but his colouration flared brighter. He cleared his throat and he replied shakily, "I-I'm sorry Jason but they died on impact. I'm also sorry to let you know that your friend Fionn was in the car along with his older brother and two of the brother's friends. I'm really sorry."

He seemed sincere but his remorse was tainted by the hint of shame and disappointment in his voice that he covered poorly. I guess part of me didn't blame him. Had I not decided to run off to my former hideout on the worst day of the year then this wouldn't have happened. Still I was carrying more than enough guilt and dejection by myself and no matter what mistakes I'd made, as a parent he should have cared enough to give me the benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being. Yet in comparison to what my mother was about to do he would've won parent of the year. A youngish female doctor led her and Kevin in. The doctor smiled amiably but before she could utter a word my mom had cut passed her and was at my dad's side.

Her hands were pressed down on the mattress firmly and she said through angry tears, "How could you be so stupid? Walking down the middle of a lonely road at night? Are you insane?"

Dad interjected, "Orla, darling, not now."

"Shut up!" she screeched. "Stop mollycoddling him. What he's done is terrible and he needs to know that."

"I think he knows that."

"What is the matter with you, Martin? If he knew better he would never have done it. If you weren't so lax with him he wouldn't act out like this."

He replied unconvincingly, "He didn't set out to cause an accident Orla. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Yeah and four boys are dead."

"Including two of my friends' brothers," Kevin added, "If you weren't such an attention-seeking brat then none of this would've happened."

I had to smile at the irony of his insult. You're one to talk. My mother had not stopped watching me from the corner of her eye for a single moment whilst she argued with dad. Catching my brief smirk she launched her finger at me and started berating me once more, "What in the world could you be smiling about? You really don't care do you? I don't know who you are but you're certainly not the son I raised. I am so incredibly disappointed and humiliated. You realise how difficult you've made things for all of us? The media coverage, the interference with our lives and schedules, all the time you've consumed rebelling and now you're just lying there a useless heap and the icing is that we have to hang around this bloody hospital and act like we care!"

I don't know which part triggered my rage the most. It certainly wasn't the attacks on my character because I knew well my mother didn't raise me to be anything. I was who I was through no influence of hers because she never cared enough to raise me. I also couldn't care less about her opinion of me. I think it started with the word humiliation because she'd managed to make it about herself. I had embarrassed her in front of her well-paid work colleagues and well-to-do Galway friends. The pitch of my fury rose a few more notes with the utterance of the words schedules, time and consumed. Here I was, her son, lying broken and battered in a hospital bed barely able to cope with the enormity of what I'd been through and all she could do was complain that her work and social schedules had to be reorganised just because I'd had a near-fatal accident. Then came the crescendo.

Saying that she didn't care.

I couldn't take it. She could dislike me and disapprove of me all she wanted but I was her son and she should care. At least more than the fact that I was keeping her from her many engagements. The frequency of beeps emanating from my heart monitor increased wildly. I sucked in air and became more animated. My cheeks felt hot and flushed and my eyes widened. My hands dug into the fabric of the blanket.

The doctor, who had stood by watching the exchange in disgusted awe, lurched forward and said authoritatively, "All right that's enough. I'll have to ask you all to leave. Your son is in no condition to deal with this."

My face was burning, my body tremulous. My mother looked like she'd seen a ghost as she paled with my flushed ire. Kevin, too, seemed taken aback and moved slowly towards the furthest wall. The doctor was concerned momentarily until she was at my side faster than I thought possible looking frantic. One hand rested on my shoulder and the other on my clenched left hand. Her skin felt frigidly cold against mine and that shocked me ever so slightly, but I assumed it was because I was so warm. I still gazed fixedly at my mother who was finally looking a little ashamed of herself. My dad couldn't help the tears that rolled down his cheeks. Part of me felt bad for him because I knew he never wanted his family to be like this, but then I remembered that part of him also felt much the same as my mother did.

The doctor's words were calming but futile, "Jason, I know you're mad but you need to calm yourself. You are putting yourself at risk by doing this."

She glanced back at the heart monitor and gasped. My dad rose slightly from his seat and demanded, "What is it?"

"His heart rate is one-eighty beats per minute and his blood pressure is through the roof. If this doesn't stop now he could go into cardiac arrest. I'm going to have to administer a sedative."

I felt it again. The world slipping away, all I could feel was my pain but it was different this time. It was emotional pain. The physical agony of my injury was blocked by the morphine. This however I felt directly within my mind and it burned so much stronger than what I'd felt before. The blackness fed upon it like a dog served a five star steak dinner. It pulsed wildly inside my head with my ever increasing heartbeat. Faintly I heard the doctor exclaim that I'd exceeded two hundred beats a minute. I felt no imminent failure of my heart though, just undiluted rage from a lifetime of emotional neglect at the hands of the woman before me. I was tired of being stymied by her indifference and by that of everyone else.

From that moment I decided that no one in my life mattered but me, then the one other person who did burst in.

Chloe stood in the entrance and her little, melodic voice reached past my rage and I glanced toward her. Suddenly I was quieted and just as quickly as it had come my rage departed and with it the growing blackness. The doctor looked totally confused as my heartbeat and blood pressure fell back to normal levels in an instant. I was overwhelmed with relief having realised where that situation had been headed. I could not comprehend how much damage could have been done if I'd lost control there and then. I might have hated my mother in that moment but I didn't want her dead. My sister favoured my mother with an accusatory glance as if she sensed what had happened. Then using all the force her little body could muster she shoved her aside, slipped between me and my dad and hugged me round the neck as best she could finding it difficult to reach. My dad scooped her up onto his lap so she could see me better.

She said in a heartbreaking little voice, "I missed you big brother. You scared me when you went away. I thought you wouldn't come back."

I smiled replying, "I'd never...leave you on your own. I'm sorry...if I scared you."

Dismissively she replied, "That's okay." Then in a sterner tone she said, "Just promise you'll never leave me alone again."

"I promise..."

"Good." She looked at my mother disdainfully, "Because without you round, they'd all make me crazy."

I laughed but choked on it a little and coughed for a few minutes. Still in a second she'd made me forget about all that had happened in the last few minutes. It reminded me of how she'd distracted me from the misery of my eleventh birthday.

As Chloe continued describing how awful it would be to face each day in that house without me, much to my parents' chagrin, I caught a glimpse of the doctor as she quietly exited the room. Her features were stunning. Flawless porcelain skin, sharp, well defined facial features and curled, mahogany hair. What struck me the most were her eyes. They were simultaneously soft and warming but equally they could gaze upon the world with uncanny sharpness. Then there was the colour, a strange shade of red like burgundy or almost claret. Her eyes met mine briefly and my curiosity about her seemed to trigger my newfound extra sense, but only in the most limited way. I didn't realise at the time, it was completely involuntary, but a single tendril had stretched across the room just to touch her most fleetingly. It wasn't my imagination. She was cold, very cold. That was all I sensed before she disappeared. It would be many years before I would meet the cold woman again.