Here To Stay

by Mark Edwards

Jeff said her name again, desperation in his voice and something else. Realisation. He was holding his belly now, and his face had turned red. He retched, put a hand to his mouth, and then vomited, all the undigested food he’d just eaten forming a pool that spread out beneath the table, filling the room with a terrible stench.

mm idk..

Lizzy had gone still, eyes staring into nothingness. Still on his knees, face screwed up in agony, Jeff turned his face towards Gemma and Stuart, and then, finally, me. ‘You idiot,’ he said, and fell to the ground. His head struck the floor and he made a croaking noise that I will remember forever. He spasmed, arms twitching, lying beside the puddle of his own stinking vomit, and then lay still.

ion think they dead yet

‘They’re dead,’ I said.

Stuart was silent for a second. Then he whooped and punched the air. He put out his hands to Gemma and said, ‘High five, sis.’ To my astonishment, she high-fived him back, a smile creeping on to her face. Stuart stepped around the table and unleashed a volley of spit on to his dad’s back.

BYE SPITTING ON HIM IS CRAZY

‘That’s for all the times you said I was a loser.’ He jigged from foot to foot, unable to stop grinning. He looked manic. ‘Come on, Gemma. You do it too.’ She didn’t move. Shaking his head in disgust, Stuart knelt between his dead parents. He stroked Lizzy’s hair. ‘I told you, Mum. I told you I’d get my own back.’

He laughed again, then lifted Jeff’s head up by the hair and sneered into his father’s face. He let Jeff’s head drop. It thumped against the floor. Stuart got to his feet and reached over to grab my hand. I tried to pull it away but he clasped it with two hands and shook it vigorously. His hands were slick with sweat. ‘Thank you, Elliot. Thank you so much.’

dude is losing it

How the hell had I got to where I was now, with two corpses in my kitchen, with the son of these dead people dancing around like he’d just won the World Cup?

lmao

She had got what she wanted. And it was what I had thought I’d wanted too, since I found Amira’s body. I had thought I was calm, but I had acted out of rage, a man who had been pushed so far that he couldn’t take any more.

And when I looked at Gemma and examined my heart, I found nothing good there either. No love. All I felt was shame and resentment and bitterness. She had done this. She had turned my perfect home into a house of horror.

While I was staring at my wife, Stuart took his phone out of his pocket and wandered out of the kitchen. I followed him. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I demanded. ‘Who are you calling?’ The look he gave me was shifty, and he tried to turn away from me. Needing to know who he was phoning, I lunged at him. He squirmed away, running back into the kitchen, attempting to thumb the phone as he went.

wtf who you calling??

He had dialled 9-9, but hadn’t got to the third digit yet. ‘What the hell?’ I said.

omg no way

‘You were going to report me to the police? Tell them I poisoned your parents?’

He was practically dripping with sweat. He cleared his throat, glanced over at Gemma then back at me. Gemma didn’t look at all surprised by what was happening and I realised, with a fresh jolt of horror, that she was in on it.

i fucking knew it.

It was exactly the kind of thing Jeff would have said. ‘You’re just like him,’ I said.

Until tonight, I’d have said Dad was one of the world’s great survivors. But he finally met a better man.’ Was he really trying to flatter me now?

That was crap, and he must have known it. Even if it was proven that Jeff murdered George, Edith and Amira, I would still go down for what had happened tonight. This wasn’t a movie where the vigilante is allowed to walk free at the end.

I saw the punch coming and sidestepped. And as he lunged forward he lost his balance. His back foot came forward and he trod on the spot where the wine bottle had landed. It happened in a split second. He slipped in the red wine and went down, crashing to the kitchen tiles. And as he landed he made a strange gasping sound.

Stuart wasn’t getting up. Instead, he pulled one hand up to the side of his neck which was against the floor. He took his fingers away and studied them, his face slack with shock. They were coated with blood. I crouched in front of him. I’d thought his head was lying in a puddle of red wine. It wasn’t wine.

The pool of blood around Stuart’s head was growing bigger with every second. He tried to speak and a bubble of blood popped between his lips. A moment later, he died.

welp.. now what

She moved to run, to try to flee the room, but I grabbed hold of her upper arm. ‘Stand over there!’ I shouted, pointing at the back wall. ‘You killed Stuart.’ ‘Shut up!’

Because if I didn’t make the right decisions now, I would be going to jail. I would make sure Gemma went with me, but even though I was guilty of murdering Jeff and Lizzy, and felt that guilt in every cell of my body, I didn’t want to end up in prison.

Chloe was the only person who might possibly report them missing,

wait a minute- where is she ?

Now everything was different. Stuart was dead, his blood all over the floor. Jane knew he’d come here for dinner. What would she do when he didn’t come home? What would we tell her?

Think, Elliot.

I couldn’t believe that the police wouldn’t investigate and that suspicion wouldn’t fall on me. My neighbours were dead. My business partner – whose partner was a cop – was in the mortuary. I had found all of the bodies. The police knew I’d been in a dispute with Jeff and Lizzy. It could hardly look more suspicious.

Could Gemma and I convince the police that Stuart and his parents had all confessed to the murders of George, Edith and Amira, and that Gemma and I had found out?

Halfway through my garbled monologue, she said, ‘We should run.’

‘Leave the bodies here. Get our passports and get out of the country. We can be on a Eurostar within an hour. Then we can get another train out of France. Head east to Russia or Northern Cyprus. Somewhere without an extradition treaty with the UK. We can be thousands of miles away before anyone finds the bodies.’

mm idk

‘You’re insane,’ I said. She looked shocked. ‘No, it could work. We’ll change the way we look. Change our identities.’ ‘No, Gemma, you don’t get it. You’re insane to think I’d want to go anywhere with you now, after what happened tonight.’

LMAOOO

‘You set me up, Gemma. You were going to let me go to prison.’

‘I’m sorry for everything.’ ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry I ever met you.’

oop

‘I don’t think that would work. Where would Stuart get cyanide? Even if they believed it, they would suspect me of procuring it for him.’

and it felt like I was seeing her properly for the first time. The way her mind operated: scheming, working through problems.

‘Oh God. We’re so screwed.’

Except it seemed like an impossible puzzle.

‘We should start with Lizzy,’ I said. ‘She’s the lightest.’ I stepped behind Lizzy and grabbed her beneath her armpits. Gemma took hold of her ankles, face turned to the side so she didn’t have to look directly at her dead mother.

The hotter the water, the faster it would do its job, even though the KOH would increase the water temperature greatly, the exothermic reaction heating the water like a flame beneath a pan. Lizzy’s flesh would disappear, stripped to the bone. After a few hours, we would just need to pull out the plug and most of Lizzy would disappear down the plughole, through the pipes and into the sewers.

first of all, ew. second of all, EW.

Her bones would remain but they would be reduced to a soft, squidgy substance that could be scraped out and disposed of elsewhere.

‘Be careful not to burn yourself.’ ‘I didn’t think you still cared,’ Gemma said. I grabbed hold of Lizzy’s arm. ‘I don’t. I’m thinking about physical evidence.’

damn lmao

In the tests I’d carried out at the lab, the KOH dissolved most materials, so it was sensible to leave Lizzy fully dressed.

omg bye what if she wakes up

‘Gently,’ I said. ‘We don’t want to create a huge—’ A noise came from downstairs. We dropped the body back on to the bathroom floor.

oh shit oh shit

‘Hello?’ said a voice. Gemma and I gawped at each other. Chloe was home.

oh shit she gotta die next

I was standing right behind her. She saw Stuart first and her hand went to her mouth. Then she saw her dad. She took a step into the room. I think I had expected her to scream; to freak out in some way. Instead, she turned and said in a cool voice, ‘What happened?’