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  LIARHOLIC

  by

  Kingsley Ash

  Copyright

  LIARHOLIC

  Copyright © 2020 Kingsley Ash

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Author Note

  This love story is not all pretty stardust, sunshine and unicorns. It’ll bite your heart out, chew it for a bit, and then spit it out. Only, there is a rainbow at the end.

  It just takes the road to Hell and two twisted souls to reach it.

  ~ Kingsley Ash

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author Note

  Dedication

  Prologue I

  Prologue II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Epilogue I

  Epilogue II

  Epilogue III

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  To my baby girl.

  You are not gone, you just moved on ahead of me.

  You’ll forever live in my heart.

  Prologue I

  YOU

  Nine years old . . .

  I got this idea for an invention because he sometimes gets very sad. And I wanted to invent something to make him more happy. I’m always happy so I created the happiness machine to take away some of the happiness in my head and put it into his.

  Prologue II

  ME

  Fourteen years old . . .

  THE NIGHT THE SNOW FELL

  LOOKING AT YOU HURTS.

  It always hurts.

  Sunshine hair.

  Emerald eyes.

  ‘You still afraid of the dark, Shepherd?’ you whisper.

  We always whisper when we hide in the broom cupboard, under the staircase of the children’s home. They don’t like seeing you with me.

  Not the bad boy, Amy. Stay far away from the Lawson kid. He’s bad news. The cursed boy.

  I am nothing.

  Dust and nothing.

  Except, you never look at me like that. You never see me as the total screw up that I am. That’s why it always hurts to look at you.

  ‘It’s okay if you are afraid, because I’ve made you something,’ you say. ‘When I was seven, I was afraid of the dark. I couldn’t sleep, wouldn’t sleep. So my sister told me at night when it gets dark, if she’s not there to hold my hand, it’s because she’s up there in the sky, shining bright as a star, to fight off any monsters in my cupboard or under my bed.’

  You reach into your bright yellow bag that’s dotted in white seahorses, the one you take everywhere with you.

  You pull out something, and whatever it is, it must be small as your hand dwarfs it.

  ‘Open up your hand,’ you whisper to me.

  I hesitate.

  ‘Come on, Shepherd. Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Yeah, I trust you. Just, I don’t like surprises, is all.’

  It’s me who can’t be trusted, Amy.

  ‘Law, please,’ you beg, and fuck if I can’t obey when you melt that begging voice into my nickname.

  I extend my hand out, palm facing upwards.

  ‘Close your eyes and open them when I tell you to,’ you say, and I can hear the excitement in your voice.

  I shut my eyes and feel something cool and light drop into my hand.

  ‘You can open your eyes, now.’

  I look down at my hand, and at first, I’m not sure what it is.

  It's oval shaped like your emerald eyes. A keyring, I think. It looks like a dreamcatcher, but you’ve replaced feathers for plastic stars.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask you.

  ‘It’s a Monster Catcher.’

  I don’t say anything. I don’t even blink as I just keep staring at it, crushed into silence. I turn my hand over and let it dangle from my fingertips.

  I’m scared I’ll break it, Amylocks. Break you.

  ‘It’s like a dreamcatcher, except the stars capture monsters. It will protect you, Shepherd. It will protect you from all your monsters.’

  You start humming that lullaby. The one you sing whenever you put a plaster on my cuts and scrapes. It echoes off the darkest corners of the tight space we’re crammed inside, like it’s warding off the monsters, already.

  The voice of an angel, your voice could stop wars.

  There are hidden things, things within the chaos. And Amy, I can’t let this go on.

  Us.

  There can never be US.

  It ends now.

  ‘Listen, Amy, meet me in the woods later. In the abandoned church, okay?’

  You twirl the gold seahorse pendant around your neck, the gift I got you for your fourteenth birthday.

  ‘Is it safe?’ you say.

  ‘You can trust me.’

  It’s not my first lie. And it won’t be my last.

  You look so excited, like something nice might happen to you. I hope something nice does happen. But it won’t be because of me.

  I’m a bad person, Amy. Why can’t you ever see that?

  Snakes click in my head. Everything broken.

  Tonight, I’m gonna show you that the monster I’m afraid of the most is . . . me.

  And that you should be afraid, too.

  I don’t want to hurt you. I only want to protect you. But like it or not, there are some things in this world that need killing. And the sooner you understand th
at, Amylocks, the better off you’ll be.

  I’ve got demons, Amy. Bad ones. One sniff of sunshine is all it will take for them to hunt you down. I can’t let them kill you, too.

  I’m gonna drag you to Hell, Amy. I’m going to make you hate my fucking guts.

  It always hurts to look at you.

  1

  YOU

  Six years later . . .

  I’m not afraid of the dark.

  I’m afraid of what’s in it.

  That’s what you are to me,

  the monster in the dark.

  The man I hate the most.

  MY WORLD IS ON FIRE.

  It’s been on fire since I woke up.

  It’s taking me a long, long time to get out of my room this morning. It isn’t the cold of winter. Neither is it the dark.

  Getting up isn’t my problem, getting out is. Once I’m showered and dressed, I start the process of checking my room is secure.

  It’s like a reverse of the process I go through in the evening, but worse somehow, because time is against me. I can spend all night checking if I want to, but I know I have to get to group therapy, so in the mornings I can only do it so many times.

  I live in Swan Lake. A private clinic for addiction and depression in Greystone, a small town of Suffolk, England. The girls who stay here are volunteer patients. Lost, addicted, hurt. And rich. Only the prestige come here. Treatment costs the earth.

  I use the term volunteer loosely on my behalf. I’m only here because of my father’s worries. I didn’t want to come here.

  The other girls are gone now. My friends won’t be back until after New Year. Swan Lake is closed during Christmas time, but I’m allowed to stay and look after myself.

  I can’t go home to my family. I can’t leave. The OCD won’t let me. And other dark things . . .

  I have to leave my curtains open to exactly the right width every day or I can’t come back in the room again. There are sixteen panes in each of the patio doors. The curtains have to be open so I can see just eight panes of each door if I look up to my room from the stone path at the back of the old Victorian estate. If I can see a sliver of the room through the other panes, then I’ll have to go back up to start again.

  My door is bad. I have to check and re-check it six or twelve times, and then the communal front door. Sometimes I have to go back and check my room door. If a staff member or one of the other girls has left the front door on the latch again, I definitely have to check my room door. Anyone could have been in.

  This morning is the worst. The front door is on the latch and is slightly open. It must’ve been Rebecca, a staff member. She’s the only one who didn’t go home for Christmas. I think she did it because she feels sorry for me.

  Poor Rebecca had the task of telling me the news of my mother’s death, last week. It hurt her to bring the news. She was so very sorry. I’m too exhausted to feel. My emotions have been put on hold since I started to wither away. I couldn’t even think of an appropriate response, of what a normal person would say, so I said nothing.

  As I reach for the front door, a man in a suit pushes it open towards me. I flinch backwards. Behind him is another man.

  Younger. Over six feet tall. Wearing dark jeans and a . . . haunting leather jacket.

  My heart pounds, for all the wrong reasons.

  It can’t be him . . .

  I’ve spent enough time in despair that my face doesn’t give anything away. My pulse quickens some more and my pupils are like an abyss, but there’s no expression as my eyes meet the cold black eyes of my enemy.

  Shepherd Lawson.

  The boy who left me in the woods . . . fed me to the wolves.

  He didn’t just break my heart. He took it. Whatever beats inside me now is broken.

  It’s just my imagination. It’s just my mind playing tricks.

  This is a dream. A nightmare. It has to be.

  Or maybe I’m going mad. This is a hallucination of some kind. I must’ve taken drugs that have messed with the chemical reactions in my brain.

  No, I can’t be asleep, I can’t be drugged. I can feel pain. And the smell of tobacco and worn leather make the nightmare real.

  They walk up the grand dark-wood staircase, and I try not to freak out. I try not to look at him at all, but I hear the man in the suit say, ‘ . . . there’s a lot of interest in this building, you’ll have to move fast if you want it.’

  I shut the front door firmly and unclip the latch. I rattle the door a few times, checking it’s shot home. With my fingertips I trace around the edge of the doorframe, feeling the door is flush with the frame. I turn the doorknob six times.

  One, two, three, four, five, six. Then the doorframe again. Then the doorknob, six times. One, two, three, four, five, six. Then the latch. Once, and again. Then the doorframe. Lastly the knob, six times.

  When I manage to do it properly, it feels as if the fire I was burning in suddenly turned into a tranquil waterfall.

  It doesn’t last. The fire returns like a blaze.

  Shepherd is turned halfway up the first flight of stairs. He’s looking at me. It’s been a long time since I made eye contact with those dark eyes. I’m a small bug trapped in the spider’s web. His crow eyes scorch my body, turn it to ashes.

  I want to die. He’s caught me in the madness of my checks.

  I’m the mad girl living in Magpie Ward, Room 4.

  I cannot hide in this place.

  His smile reminds me of those vintage vampires you see in old movies. Crooked, ugly . . . beautiful. I can feel my face getting hot. I hope the tinted moisturiser on my cheeks hide it.

  He turns, and I listen to the footsteps heading up to the top floor. They’ve gone past my room. I check my watch. A quarter past eight. I need to take a walk around the lake. I need to do it twice before nine o’clock. But I can’t leave now. Not with Dracula’s return. I go back up to my room.

  That crooked smile threw more wood to the fire burning inside me, and I feel like Hera, the angry goddess who wants to kill Hercules.

  Shepherd thinks he can rise from the dead after five years and pretend we’re two perfect strangers meeting in a foyer of a private retreat. There was no repentance in those dead eyes.

  When I was nearly fifteen, he played a cruel joke on me. I was a toy in his hands. Then he humiliated me in front of the whole school and made my life hell.

  We met when we were nine. It’s so rare to know somebody from that age. Years later, I fell in love with him. Young love, a princess and her prince. A genie lamp full of hope and wishes. I thought he loved me too, and so I trusted him.

  I twirl the gold seahorse pendant circling my neck, a secret crucifix against evil. The sweet-boy Shepherd who gave me this, is dead to me.

  I swallow my glass tears and look up at the ceiling. The thud of his boots remind me of the thud of thunder from that night, six years ago.

  The night he destroyed me.

  The pain in my head makes it hard to think. My memories are hazy, fuzzy round the edges, like an out of focus photograph.

  I waited in the woods by Angel Stone. I waited four hours in the snow storm. I checked my watch for every minute ticking by, wishing this would be the minute he would appear. I wished that no matter what, he would never leave me out in the cold.

  But he did.

  I was tired, hurt, and my fingertips had icicles biting my skin. When I turned to leave, Shepherd’s friends jumped out from the looming trees a few yards away, with their mobile phones pointed at me. They were recording me and laughing, I was a clown to be taunted. It was snowing as big and solid as cats’ paws, so I didn’t realise those were teardrops falling on my face until my cheeks went raw. I tried to search for Shepherd’s face amongst the hyenas, but he was Gone Boy. Missing.

  Carrie, they called me, over and over. They called me Carrie because of the accident I had at school. I was thirteen, just started my period. The blood leaked through my skirt. The nickname stuck for years. It was Shepherd who
rescued me that day . . .

  I didn’t know I was the star in the latest Greystone movie until Shepherd’s gang posted the video to the whole school the next day. The film about the desperate girl who wanted to be alone in the woods with Shepherd, when all along it was a prank. Angel’s stone was where the teenagers went for drinking and sex.

  The worst of it all, worse than the video of me sobbing my heart out in the snow like Princess Elsa, was the graffiti on the school wall the following day.

  ‘Carrie shags all the boys in the woods.’

  I never found out who did it, but I always suspected it was Shepherd. The finale to his cruel games.

  Afterwards, he never came near me. He wouldn’t look me in the eye at school — if he ever turned up. He bowed out of my life and closed the curtains. I stopped visiting the children’s home, it hurt too much. Then, a year later, just like that, when we were fifteen, he vanished from Greystone town like a ghost. Without a word. Without an apology. Without a reason why.

  It’s like all the screws fell out of us the night the snow fell, and we lost any chance to stay together.

  Now, he’s back to make my life hell. I know it like I know rain is wet. Why else would he be in Swan Lake?

  Ghosts, restless and sad, stir inside me like a night circus. It takes all my effort to tamp them down with a hard mental shoe.

  I rest my hands lightly on the back of the door. I try to breathe, try to forget. My heart is beating so fast, it feels like somebody is shooting it with a railgun and won’t ever stop.

  I sit on the edge of my bed for a while with my eyes lifted to the ceiling, as if I can see him through the plaster and the rafters. All the time, I’m fighting the urge to start checking the windows again.

  I concentrate on my breathing, shut my eyes tight. I need to dampen down the thump thump in my heart.

  They won’t be long, I tell myself. Everything is fine. The room is safe. I’m safe. I did it properly before. The front door is shut. Everything is fine. Everything warped will snap back to normal.

  Why is he here? Does he have an addiction that he wants help with? Is he depressed?

  Every so often, a small sound makes me jump, even though it seems to come from a long way away. A cupboard door banging? Maybe. I can hear a vague murmur, too far away to make out words. I strain to listen, but all I hear is the pulse roaring in my ears, my heartbeat banging against my ribs, air whistling through my nostrils.