House of Scales

Epilogue: Without you

I woke up to the clarity of the meridian sun brushing my cheeks. The pristine whiteness around me was slightly blinding. It took me a while to react and realise where I was. I only had to look to my left to see where the weight on my arm was coming from. I could see the blue reflections from the braid that was brushing my hand. She lay on the bed beside me, dressed only in a gown like the one I was wearing. I couldn't help but smile at her. Indeed, she would have run away to come and visit me and spent the night by my side. She had been worried sick just as I had been when we were taken to the hospital. Luckily, Luanne had received only a shallow cut, due to the dragon's claws. She had been unharmed, and I was glad about that. I could say the same, although the excessive weight of my leg indicated that I was wearing a plaster cast to immobilise it. I couldn't even move it, although I tried not to worry about it too much. After all, we could go home without any problem.

In front of the bed, two chairs were leaning against the wall, which I hoped would have been Sasha and Charles'. I had seen the four of us being taken to the hospital. They didn't seem to have been injured badly enough to have to spend the night in the hospital like Luanne, and I had. On that cold morning, I was grateful for the warmth of the softness and tenderness of her fingers intertwined with mine. Her hand rested on my chest, and her head lay on my arm, waiting for me to wake up. I remembered nothing of what had happened after the collapse of the Devlin house by the great fire, my memories were blurred, and I found it difficult to discern between all that had happened, to separate the nightmare from reality.

It was her smile when she saw me awake that told me everything would be okay. The next morning, we were joined by my best friend and my sister, and to my surprise, Caroline, who was still in the hospital and had decided to stop by to see my sister. It was ironic that although we had thought about going to see her that afternoon, it had been the other way around the next morning. She told us her side of the story: how those lizards had chased Robert and how he had sacrificed himself so that she would run away. Robert's body was the only one found on the hill under the ancient oak tree. Anthony hadn't accompanied Caroline that morning but had stayed with the family to make the final arrangements for his brother's funeral. In the end, it had been his help that had brought the authorities to the hill. He had to survive the chase of the lizards before he met a hooded man who freed him from those monsters. These were the legends that would spread through the town. Some would believe Caroline and Anthony, others would think it was an exaggeration, but no one would ever know what the four of us had experienced there. To them, it would always be a haunted house that fell in a fire. They never saw the green-eyed dragon collapse into the nest of fire in the moonlight.

It was that old house, now in ruins and full of ashes, that we first visited when we left the hospital. Charles was pushing the wheelchair I had borrowed from the hospital. We were responsible for notifying my uncle's death to my family and the authorities. For them, he had died in the mysterious fire that had destroyed the house. They would never know the truth. There, hidden under the ruins, we found the way to the basement that had been hidden and closed. We made sure that none of the beasts was alive and destroyed the documents of his research there. The only thing we took from there was a small diary that my uncle had written. Sasha and I read it in silence, as tears streamed down our cheeks. Once we had finished it, we went to the cemetery to visit the Devlin family grave. We lit four candles: for Richard, Belinda, Ursula and Aodhan. It was my uncle's words that made known to us the tragedy that that family had suffered in absolute silence, unaware of all the others. Sasha and I couldn't even imagine all that he had experienced.

Aodhan had been the first-born of the family before Sasha was born when my uncles were young. My aunt had had fertility problems, so that child had been a blessing. However, death had taken him away before the child was one year old. Dismayed by this, the Devlin family locked themselves in the house with hardly any sign of life. Perhaps that was when my uncle went mad, blinding himself in his research that, sometime later, he would be able to revive the little boy, who would have been born of fire and with the same eyes as the monsters we had faced. His body had regenerated and, thanks to an unknown miracle, could grow. However, no one could know of its existence, and so the basement was given a small underground cage where the little one played and slept, protected from the rest of the world.

After the blessing of that move against God in which Richard won, misfortune came, and the fire took Ursula and Belinda, who protected her. Belinda didn't die, and a fate worse than death awaited her, a more ominous one. My uncle's care protected her, sacrificing her humanity and turning her into the monster that had died with him the night before. Her voice was lost, and all she could do was hiss something like the name of her children. Ursula seemed to have more luck, and the investigations progressed. Richard didn't realise that the body he had created for the little girl couldn't withstand the beast inside her. The new body lived, grew and had the little girl's organs and memories, although she wasn't the same. Soon the Devlin house wasn't enough to lock her up, and the voracious hunger of the monster inside her became insatiable gluttony that would relentlessly cloud her reasoning.

My uncle was right. That had been the price for playing God. Now, however, their spirits rested in peace under the hill in a small altar we built away from the local cemetery, forgotten as the Devlin secret.

Everything had passed and, like all seasons, winter ceased before the arrival of spring and the end of the last year we would all spend together. The year we would leave Lacerty Hills, each by a different path. Luanne would march east to study at a fine arts school, with the promise in her heart that we would meet when she returned to the country after studying abroad for a year. I would stay close by, go to a bigger city to start my journalism career, and begin to take a path where my pen could help people like my hand hadn't been able to help any of the Devlins. Charles would say goodbye a few days after Luanne, he and I would celebrate our farewell in the well of bones. We met there to say our final good-byes and to part ways. On that stump where we had sat, Charles opened his heart. We spent hours talking about his feelings, about how we both felt and thought, about our illusions. That truth that he had kept for so long melted us into a warm and comforting embrace that, deep down, would unite us in the future; much more than anything we had experienced before our strange friend came to town to revolutionise everything under her emerald and sapphire vision.

We drank for the first time with the license that being an adult gave us, while he smiled saying that he had to keep a promise. He accepted an athletic scholarship to study at a county university and moved there with the money his father had set aside for him.

I counted the springs that followed our goodbye. Life was passing by, and we both kept chasing our dreams. Luanne's letters pressured me to use my writing to do something else. Her insistence and support made me decide to write short stories, and one day I began writing a short novel about an extraordinary, paranormal event that happened in Lacerty Hills, the peaceful, boring place where nothing ever happened. Charles boasted in his letters that he had got his driving licence the first time around, a long-awaited goal, just as he wanted. He was my first reader, in confidence, of the story I would create to leave in fiction the authentic nightmare that had brought us together forever. To Lacerty Hills we would return, a year later, to celebrate the publication of what would be the first story I would reveal to my audience; to tell what had made me decide to hold on to life with all I had and never let go, fighting and living for the dreams of those who were no longer there. We took the opportunity to publicise the book the summer that Luanne returned to the country to spend the remaining years of her career at the same university where I lived. There, amidst laughter, we took a toast to the moments of the past that would remain enveloped in a halo of fiction challenging to distinguish from our reality.

I took advantage of people's credulity to hide the truth and turn it, thanks to fiction, into an immortal memory. I decided to leave only our names and the family name of my uncle, something that people already knew. Berger, Babineaux and Bernhard would go the Devlin mound, on the forgotten hill, the one that would become the first step on my path, at the foot of the House of Scales.