INHERITANCE

I buried my dad on Tuesday, but he was back again before dawn. I wasn’t surprised anymore. The first time his cold grey corpse came walking home, still caked in grave dirt, I’d been horrified. He’d banged on the door, that same great booming knock I’d heard all my life, and demanded breakfast. I’d hovered on the other side, not daring to open it. Even through the wood, I could smell the blood and booze on him. 

“God dammit, open this door! I’ve lost my bloody key!”

I could hear the rage growing in his voice. It crushed me down instantly into a whimpering, scurrying thing, desperate to avoid harm. Carried by terror and a nightmarish trance, I let him in and made his breakfast, convinced that I would wake at any moment and none of it was real. It was supposed to be over. He was supposed to be gone. 

But he wasn’t gone at all. He persisted, like black mold creeping up from the foundations of a building, regrowing stubbornly in spite of chemicals and scrubbing. After breakfast, he showered off the dirt and continued to ignore the fact his heart wasn’t beating anymore. He put his boots on and went to work, eyes bloodshot and lips blue.

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The second time he died, we buried him at a crossroads. The consecrated earth of the graveyard hadn’t kept him down, so we reverted to older methods, half-remembered superstitions and threadbare folklores. Wooden stakes driven through the heart and carved stones laid around the grave. 

They hadn’t worked either. 

He was back again, before the dawn, with the same booming knocks and bellowing demands. The same rage. I let him in again, and did as I was told, like always. I kept my head down, avoided looking at his shabby grey face, petrified he’d know it was me who’d killed him. 

The first time had been a heart attack but the second time was poison. I’d bargained with myself for three agonizing days of his undeath before I’d slipped it into his coffee.

If he knew, he said nothing. He didn’t mention the stake protruding from his chest either.

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The third time, I opened the door before he even knocked, resigned to my fate.

“About time you made yourself useful!” He snapped. There were worms at the back of his throat, I could see them thrashing as he shouted. His skin was coming off in places, peeling back like old wallpaper. “Bone idle since your mother passed away! Now: breakfast!”

He stomped into the kitchen and yanked back a squealing chair to plonk himself in. He couldn’t do anything quietly. Everything about him was noise, like he was determined to imprint himself on the universe by sheer volume.

I greased the pan and got the bacon, feeling the weight of his glare all the while. His eyes were milky, scratched up by grit and dirt. My hands shook so bad that I dropped the pan with a clatter.

“Now look what you’ve done!” He surged up from his seat, eager as ever to dole out punishment. “Useless! Your mother coddled you too much! All this pussyfooting and fretting and feeling. Clean this mess up before I get back!” 

I stood quivering and silent and ashamed until he left, then did as I was told. Always as I was told.

It didn’t seem fair to live my life according to the rules of a dead man but what else could I do?

One thing.

When my dad came home that night, stinking of beer, I stabbed him. For all his strength, all his noise, he fell without a word. I bundled him into the boot of the car and drove out to the woods. The others were waiting, a fresh grave dug already, below a lightning-blasted tree. What magic it was supposed to hold, I had no idea. I didn’t think it would matter, not really. It wouldn’t stop him.

The others kept their distance as I unloaded the body. Big Paul had known Dad all his life and had served him pints for half that time. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. Vera, who ran the shop where he bought his paper every morning, turned her head away and spat, clutching her crucifix in a liver-spotted claw. Mr. Patterson rumbled something unintelligible into his beard, some commiseration or condolence bereft of value.

They didn’t ask me about the stab wounds. They all knew how he was. They all wanted him gone.

We lined the grave with thyme and placed a coin on his lips.

“Use these.” Paul offered me nails. “Through the soles of the feet. I read about it.” He looked nervous. Pleading. They all wanted this over as much as I did.

“Listen,” Mr. Patterson took me to one side, once the hole was filled in. “We’re in this together. We look after our own in the village. But, if he does come back again, let him know there’s no more work at the factory for him.”

“Can’t you tell him?” I paled, imagining his wrath.

“Better it comes from you, you know? Someone close to him. It’s a difficult time, after all.”

“He’s not welcome at The Stag anymore neither,” said Paul. “Tell him that. I’ll forget his tab so long as he doesn’t come back.”

“But…”

“It’s your responsibility,” Paul insisted. “He’s your family.”

“Family sticks together,” Vera muttered, bony white knuckles around her holy savior. There was nothing in my hand but dirt and dried blood.

They left me then, becoming phantoms in the gathered headlights of their cars, and even less substantial as they drove away. I was alone. I returned home and waited for the knocking. The nails wouldn’t work. Nothing worked. Nothing could keep his hatred buried. 

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Dad started crying when I sawed his head off.

“Why is this happening to me?” he asked.

I’d never seen him cry before. Not even when Mam passed. I would have joined in, but I was already rung out. I felt empty, scraped raw to the marrow years. “I don’t know, Dad.”

“I was a good man, wasn’t I?”

“Yes, Dad.” I lied.

“Why would they fire me? Why would they ban me from The Stag? I’ve worked hard all my life!”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

His face turned savage, white eyes blazing. “It’s you, isn’t it? You did this! Your whole life has been a curse to me! Why couldn’t you just be normal?”

I said nothing. I kept sawing, ignoring the spray of bone dust and flesh. I clamped my mouth shut. I didn’t want to breathe it in. Dad was already a part of me more than I’d like, that black mold growing up inside my bones from his genes.

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I buried the body but kept the head on the mantel. Dad couldn’t walk around anymore, so there he stayed. Sometimes he cried. Sometimes he shouted. More and more he was silent. Sometimes I would sit in the room and drink and think about all the things I could say to him. I never dared to say them. I never threw the head away. We sat in silence and darkness together.

People stopped coming to the house. They begged me to throw it out. They said I was mad to keep it. They didn’t understand. I’d thrown him out again and again but he always came back when I did.

I hated him too much to let him go.

His teeth blackened, and his skin rotted away. His jaw fell off and his eyes decayed to nothing. I didn’t know if he could still hear me, but I kept quiet anyway. I tiptoed amongst the dust of our wretched lives the same way I always had, closing doors softly and flinching at any sound. An animal, shackled for too long, doesn’t understand freedom when the binding is removed.

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Despite his skull staring from the mantel, over time I felt his presence less. I stopped flinching at creaks in the house and stopped having the nightmares about his walking corpse. I still couldn’t throw the skull away, but I buried it in the closet instead of the earth.

I cleaned up the house and cleaned up myself, scrubbing that black mold with chemicals and rough scrapes of a scourer, removing any trace of him. I threw open the windows and let light and air inside. My lungs creaked and inflated. I breathed deep, my chest uncrushed by the grip of my father for the first time.

Years rolled on, and life was better. Like a plant, I pushed out through the dirt towards the light. I grew a life. Friends. A family of my own. He was reduced to a ghost inside a memory.

Except when I punched the wall or smashed a plate or screamed. It wasn’t often, at first. Just when they pushed me too far. When I felt that rage rising in my throat like thrashing worms and that blackness seeping out of my bones and into my blood. Then Dad was with me. Then I heard his booming voice from my own throat and saw his ragged shadow towering on the wall behind me. Then I realized I couldn’t remove all traces. I couldn’t get rid of him.

The skull was still in the house and it always would be.

Each time, when the fury subsided, I scoured that dank rot off again in futility. “It’s your grandad’s fault,” I explained, scrabbing raw skin. “He was like that. He treated me so badly. You’ve no idea how lucky you are.”

Each time they forgave me less and the ground between us crumbled to a yawning chasm. I hated them for it. Ungrateful. After everything I sacrificed for them. They couldn’t extend even the slightest understanding for how I’d been treated, for what I’d been through. For my pain.

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Before I knew it, the house was empty again, and those years of fullness counted for nothing at all. They wouldn’t visit anymore. Wouldn’t even let me see my grandkids. 

It was my choice, they said. I was toxic.

Fine. I closed the windows, drew the blinds and paced the rooms, leaving angry trails in the dust. I left the house only to buy more booze. I even broke into dad’s old stash, that I’d sworn never to touch. The mold crept up the walls and I let it. In my seething, I encouraged it. Let it consume everything. Let it eat me alive and then they’d realize what they’d done to me.

Even with them gone, I was never quite alone. I saw my dad in the darkness they’d left behind, growing to fill the vacuum. I always knew he’d come back. He was inevitable. Every morning, I woke to those booming knocks and the stink of stale booze. Every morning, I made his breakfast even though there was no-one to eat it. The sludge on the walls grew into the shape of him.

I got the skull out from the closet, throwing aside boxes of old photographs and mementos to find it nestled like a parasite in the brain matter of my past. I set it back on the mantelpiece and, finally, plucked up the courage to speak.

“You did this,” I told the skull, while my stomach roiled with bile and whiskey. “You made this happen. You ruined my life!”

“You did this!” Dad’s voice hissed back at me from between those blackened teeth. “You made this happen! You ruined my life!”

“You always blamed me! But it’s you. You’re the monster!”

“It’s you! You’re the monster!”

“I hate you!”

“Hate you!”

I couldn’t tell whose voice was whose anymore.

I stormed into the kitchen, grabbing a knife before stalking back to the skull, but he didn’t have a body for me to stab anymore. I seethed in impotence, spit flying between my teeth. I looked down at the knife, as if for instruction, and saw the truth: the only real monster left in the room was bearing their teeth at me in the flash of the blade. In that moment, everything became clear. I knew what I had to do.

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They buried me on a Tuesday, beneath a lightning-struck oak with nails in the soles of my feet. After what happened with Dad, they weren’t taking any chances.

None of it would have stopped me if I wanted to go walking. I had all the same rage and stubbornness my dad had. But I stayed down there in my grave of hatred and rot, bones thick with black mold. I wouldn’t plague my children until they sawed my head off. I wouldn’t haunt them the way he haunted me. This was my gift to them. It was over.

In my hands, I gripped my father’s skull, and we stayed in the dark together.