The House Guest - Mark Edwards Page 0,56

He sat in an armchair and rested the pistol beside him, so he could easily grab it if he needed to.

‘Why did you run away when you saw me?’ I asked.

He narrowed his eyes at me. ‘I didn’t run away.’

‘Okay.’ Macho pride. One of the greatest obstacles to honest communication. ‘But you do seem scared of something. It’s Eden, isn’t it? What happened? Did she come back? With reinforcements?’

He didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t trust me or because he didn’t want to admit he was afraid.

‘All right, listen,’ I said. ‘I’ll go first.’

So I told him everything I knew, going back to Eden turning up at the house. The only thing I omitted was Jack’s death, as I thought that would make him even more scared. He listened with ever-widening eyes. He really was like a little boy. When I’d finished, I waited, convinced he would accuse me of bullshitting him.

Instead, he said, ‘A cult? Like the Manson family or some shit? I watched this show on Netflix. That dude was sick.’

I wasn’t sure if he was using ‘sick’ in the positive sense.

‘But it totally makes sense,’ he said. ‘Shit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The guys who did it. They were freaky, you know what I mean? Like they were . . . too normal. Does that make sense?’

I could only stare at him.

‘Soon as we saw them coming towards us, I said to Brandon—’

‘Wait, who’s Brandon?’

He stared at me like I was stupid. ‘The guy who was with me at the pool.’

Muscles.

‘I know you think he was a jerk, but he was my best friend since I was, like, six.’

Why was he talking about him in the past tense?

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said.

His gaze fixed on a point across the room. ‘So, it was, like, seven thirty, something like that? Not quite dark. We’d been hanging at the pool and we were going to go home, get dinner, before hooking up with these girls we met.’

‘You were heading out of the park?’

‘What I said. Only, these two guys started coming towards us. These preppy-looking dudes, young but wearing suits. I thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses or some shit.’

‘Hang on, what day was this?’

‘Sunday.’ That was the day Jack and Mona got back.

Jesse went on. ‘Anyways, they come up to us, like they’re gonna try to talk to us about Paradise or whatever, and Brandon and me look at each other, like, this is gonna be fun, and then one of them, the taller one, holds up a picture – a picture of that bitch you were with.’

I wished he’d stop saying that. ‘Eden.’

‘Yeah. Her. And the guy says, “You recognise this girl?” I right away think, Shit, has she sent her older brothers or something to look for us? And then my boy Brandon says something like, “Yeah, we fucked that bitch right here in the park and she fucking loved it”, laughing, you know? And the guy – the guy who wasn’t holding the picture – he shoots his arm out like this, and Brandon . . . Brandon just, like, crumples to the ground. It took me a second to realise this dude had stabbed him. Right here. In the heart.’

He looked up to Heaven. ‘The cops said he woulda died instantly. He wouldn’t have felt no pain. And then the guy turned to me, the knife dripping with Brandon’s blood, and he said, and this is the freakiest part, “Protect one, protect all”. And I think if he didn’t, you know, stop to say that, if he’d gone for me right away, I’d be dead too. But the couple of seconds he took to stop to say that, it gave me a chance. I kicked him in the balls.’

I couldn’t help but laugh.

‘Not the kind of move I’d usually pull. But he’d just killed my boy. I panicked. I kicked him right where it hurt and ran like fuck before the two of them could react.’

‘And did they chase you?’

‘Yeah. For a while. But I’m fast and I know that park like it’s my own backyard. I ran all the way back here and did something I never thought I’d do. Called the cops. Turned out someone had already found Brandon’s body and called them. Then I spent the next twenty-four hours answering their motherfucking questions.’

‘What do you mean, they looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses?’

‘Like I said, they were wearing suits. Nice suits, I think. Like, real expensive-looking. They were white and