GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25

SUSANNAH WATERS

‘Axe Murderer’

BROTHER HAS BAD DREAMS. When he was alive and now they’re worse than ever. A grandfather clock beats time in the shadows of the downstairs room. In the brick-lined fireplace an empty iron grate has been swept clean. Brother lies on his back on the floor with his head near the grate while across the room on a sofa the axe murderer sits with his axe balanced, lightly, across his lap. His hair is the colour of wet straw and falls to his shoulders. When Brother moves from room to room in the bad dream house, upstairs and down, the axe murderer follows. As Brother brushes his teeth at night, he hears the axe murderer’s footsteps pacing the length of the hallway outside. He wishes he could tell his dreaming self not to be afraid but instead he wakes in a sweat, limbs twisted within sheets that are damp and cold in the glare of unforgiving daylight and he cannot tell if this is still a dream.

‘What are you thinking about?’

‘The people I loved.’

‘You don’t love them anymore?’

This is what the axe murderer does. Gets into Brother’s thoughts and meddles or stuns, like a jolt of electricity through murky water and soon all the fish are floating belly-up. Brother tries to ignore his questions, to tell himself this man and his axe are figments of his over-active imagination, the culmination of a lifetime of fears, no longer relevant. And sometimes this works; when he opens his eyes the axe murderer is gone, only the front door still ajar (in the bad dream house), as a reminder.  

*

‘Go away, please!’ Brother calls from the floor in the front room. But the doorbell rings again, insistent, its cheery tune looping on repeat. He turns his head to the door; dark wood, two semi-circular fanlights in coloured glass at the top. Maybe it’s some kind of welcome to the neighbourhood thing. In the early days he was expecting this, someone to confirm his whereabouts and explain how things worked. But as time passed he’d decided this was a fantasy, a leftover in his consciousness from before. Angels amid fluffy clouds, carrying clipboards.

‘Oh my God.’

On the doorstep Sister stands holding an overnight bag. The street behind her is deserted, pale flattened grass on the lawns struggling to recover from a long winter. She’s wearing a raincoat but the sky overhead is clear.

‘Hi, Jay.’

How old she looks, how tired. He hopes her death wasn’t traumatic.

‘You could have rung and told us where you were,’ she says.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Brother replies, gently, as he backs away to allow her entrance. ‘But I’m very glad to see you.’

Inside, she sets down her bag. ‘This looks okay.’

‘I was thinking about you.’

She glances his way, frowns. ‘Don’t you have a phone?’

There’s an awkwardness in their exchange, out of the ordinary – usually he’d have asked about the children but he doesn’t want to trigger her in case these memories are painful. Brother needs to give her time.

‘Are you hungry?’

She shakes her head. ‘I ate on the way.’

Brother’s interested by this – he has no recollection of his own journey to this place. It’s getting dark outside. He tells her she can use the bed upstairs, he’ll sleep on the sofa.

‘I’ll be fine down here,’ she says.

‘Are you sure?’ 

After tea she pulls a laptop from her overnight bag. ‘Want to watch something?’ Brother’s surprised again. All he arrived with were the clothes on his back; everything else in the house, such as it is, was here already: tin opener, bath towels, ironing board. Glassware. He won’t let it bother him. Whatever the explanation, right now this is Heaven to sit beside Sister like in the old days and lose himself in Episode 5, Series 10, of their favourite medical drama. However long this lasts, he tells himself, he is going to treasure each second. Maybe it’s all the thinking about her he’s been doing. Maybe he managed to solder a connection, and as long as they don’t jiggle around too much they’ll be fine.

*

Damp sheets twisted round Brother's limbs. In the hallway outside the axe murderer paces back and forth, mutters indistinct ragged phrases. If I just lie here, Brother thinks, I’ll wake up in the normal way. All I have to do is wait. Until the axe murderer gets bored, or something else happens. Something always does. Things move on whether we want them to or not.

BAM.

BAM.

BAM.

Nothing to worry about, Brother tells himself, when the doorknob rattles loosely on its screws. Yet since Sister’s arrival things have felt more uncertain, a little blurred, and so he isn’t ninety-nine percent as sure as he was, say even a day ago, when it comes to the mode of his consciousness. In the dark he gnaws on the skin round his thumbnail until it tears and bleeds onto the sheet. Everything is mixed-up in his head; in a dream within this one he was a patient on a television ward in the final stages of terminal cancer, family gathered close round the ICU bed to say farewell. Everyone had been there, sister, brother, mother father… friends from boyhood. Good friends, bad friends. A favourite teacher. A women he’d loved. A large cast of guest stars. Hope.

Eventually he hears the axe murderer stomp downstairs. He’d grow calmer now, that’s the pattern. He’d mope around for a bit, fetch himself a glass of water from the kitchen and slip out. Or he’d sit down and wait, in his usual place on the sofa…

Sister!

*

At the kitchen table she’s eating a soft-boiled egg. Beyond her the window on the upper half of the door to the back garden is shaded by a white lace curtain fixed to two horizontal rods. And over in the corner, leaning against the side of the refrigerator, stands the axe murderer. They’re chatting. Brother can see their mouths moving but no sound. For a moment he has the feeling he isn’t there, that it’s he who is a dream.

‘Susie?’

Her head turns but not fully round to meet Brother’s eyes. ‘Couldn’t sleep?’ she asks.

‘What time is it?’ 

‘It must be nearly day. It’s getting light outside.’

Brother’s gaze shifts to the axe murderer. In one hand he’s holding a glass of water and in the other—

‘Neil was telling me you two have been hanging out,’ Sister says.

‘Neil?’

The axe murderer laughs – a husky, phlegmy, metal scraping metal sound.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Sister. ‘He’s not usually this rude.’

‘I’m not being rude! He’s never told me his name. I have no idea who he is or where he comes from.’

‘Jay.’ Sister lowers her egg spoon, turns properly to face Brother. ‘Everything’s fine. He locked himself out of his house, that’s all, next door. He’s your neighbour.’

‘Why is he carrying an axe?’

Sister turns to the axe murderer who explains, ‘I was chopping wood, out on the front porch when the wind slammed the door shut behind me. I should have put a brick in place, or something, to stop it from closing.’

‘You were chopping wood in the middle of the night?’

The axe murderer smiles at Brother, shakes his head. ‘This was yesterday evening, before sunset. I tried some other things to get in first. I didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘You haven’t,’ Sister replies. ‘Neil thinks maybe he can get in through the back door,’ she explains to Brother.

‘Well I’ll have a go, anyway.’ Straightening up from his lean on the refrigerator, the axe murderer drinks his water and gently sets the glass down on the counter by the sink. ‘Thanks for that.’ After the back door has shut behind him Sister puts down her egg spoon and goes over, pulls aside the stretched taut curtain. ‘He’s over the fence,’ she reports while Brother sits down at the table and takes a bite out of one of the toast fingers.

‘You always did that,’ he says.

‘Climbed over fences?’

‘Took other people’s word for things.’ A toast crumb catches in his throat and he coughs. ‘Over mine.’

Sister tuns and stares at him a moment, before asking if they should go for a walk.

‘Now?’

‘Why not? It will be quiet. How far is the sea?’

‘The sea?’

She nods. ‘I saw it from the train. It can’t be far. 

Brother is about to say he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but then he thinks of the time when they were young and her kitten got run over by a car and for weeks she pretended it hadn’t happened even though she was right there when it did. And she kept talking about how the kitten was going to turn up any day and she put signs up all over the neighbourhood with her drawing of the kitten on them and a reward offered for the kitten’s return: £10. ‘Ten pounds?’ their parents exclaimed. ‘That must be all your birthday and Christmas money combined!’ They let it go, though, because they knew she’d never have to pay it.

*

Every house along the street is pretty much the same as Brother’s. Clapboard facing, grey-pink in the muted light of dawn. They’d look prettier in snow, he thinks, or strong sunshine, but this in-between state, this tired, brown-grass time of year, is doing no favours. 

‘Which way?’ Sister asks when they reach a T-junction.

Brother doesn’t know. He keeps expecting to reach a limit, to see the world at the edge of their vision melt away as they draw near, a mirage beyond which there is no passage.

‘Can you smell it?’ Sister says, nose to the air.

‘What?’

‘The sea.’

Why does she keep talking about the sea? Was this the place of her death? There was a beach they’d visited once, when her children were small. A rocky cove, pebbled sand. Warm water thick with salt. Brother flew out to join them and felt alone despite all Sister’s best efforts. To be with her now feels unchanged, familiar, Sister a few paces ahead, bounce in her step, Brother wondering, if this world is more expansive than he first thought, where he might buy an espresso. It wasn’t always this way, he thinks. There was a time when he led, when it was he who’d forged ahead.

At the next corner she stops. ‘Oh,’ she says, face in profile. ‘Jay.’

‘What?’

‘Look.’

He doesn’t want to. This was what she always did: Look, Jay, look, showing him good things, beautiful places, pointing out love. He never blamed her, but it had only made things worse. The beauty was beyond him, behind him, no longer accessible. And she failed to understand that even though she’d tried her best.

This time, though – is different. The beach runs flat and empty to the sea, a long way out. Sand a dun, dappled winter colour. In the clouds, a loose seam spilling sunlight. The water looks calm, curling ribbons of white that quickly smooth into shallows.

‘What are you doing?’ Sister asks when Brother starts to undress.

‘Going in.’

‘Won’t it be freezing? You didn’t bring a change of clothes.’

‘I don’t mind.’

In the swell, dark patches glimmer where sunlight scopes the water. He closes his eyes, body rising into buoyancy, curled open fingers sifting sediment, trails of seaweed. He remembers this: sunrises, sunsets. Campfires on the beach. Starlight. Friends. Weightlessness. Hope.

‘Jay?’ Sister calls. Her voice is anxious, from the distant shore.

‘Please don’t swim out too far!’ 

*

At the house he’s waiting for them. ‘What happened?’ Sister calls as she and Brother approach and he chuckles, smiling, shaking his head.

‘There was a chain across the back door. I don’t use it ordinarily.’ He laughs again. ‘I must have been extra vigilant yesterday for some reason.’ 

The cold of the seawater has settled in Brother’s bones. It feels as though his skeleton is shrinking within the muscles that surround it, the muscles that knit it together and hold it upright within the skin that contains this whole arrangement.

‘Did you go for a swim?’ Axe Murderer asks.

‘Jay did,’ says Sister.

‘You’ve got wood chips on your coat,’ Brother says.

‘Oops,’ says the axe murderer and he brushes clean the front of his coat with the hand that isn’t gripping the axe. ‘Thanks.’

In the kitchen he leans the axe, blade-down, against the side of the fridge. Sister makes tea and they sit together at the table; Brother and the axe murderer facing each other, Sister on the side between. Which part of this is his nightmare, Brother wonders. When did he fall asleep? Before or after he came out of the sea?

‘I have to confess something,’ says Axe murderer, eventually. ‘I don’t really live next door. I just needed a place to stay.’

‘I knew it!’

‘Jay,’ says Sister, hand pressing the side of his leg under the table, but the axe murderer is nodding.

‘I know, I should have told you before. But I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of weirdo, or criminal. And it’s been such a long time since I’ve talked to anyone friendly… like you two. I just wanted some company.’ 

Brother is watching Sister as Axe murderer speaks, gauging her reaction. He estimates the speed at which he could leap from his chair and take hold of the axe that is leaning against the fridge, before the murderer got to it.

‘So you’re on your own,’ Sister says.

‘That’s about it,’ Axe murderer replies. 

*

Brother’s on his back in the downstairs room, head against a leg of the grate. It’s dark. The chime of the grandfather clock begins to toll... one two three, a few hours before dawn. From the sofa he hears low voices, Sister’s, and another, gruffer.

‘We should light a fire,’ Sister says.

‘That’s a good idea,’ the axe murderer replies, cheerful. ‘I can fetch some of the wood I was chopping.’

Brother turns his head, cheekbone to the floorboards. ‘There aren’t any matches.’

‘I’ve got a lighter,’ says Sister, ‘in my bag somewhere.’

‘I thought you stopped smoking.’

She smiles, as though he’s a child she needs to placate. ‘I keep it for emergencies.’

When the axe murderer rises from the sofa, Brother gets up too. He’ll lock the door as soon as the murderer has stepped outside, and explain to Sister, as best as he can, the truth of what is going on. He will talk and talk until she understands. ‘I’ll just close these curtains,’ he says, ‘to keep the warmth in,’ but as he draws the curtains across another sound – swish of air being displaced – accompanies the wooden ring’s dusty clatter along the pole and he hears Sister exclaim –‘oh’ – in a small dark voice like spilled liquid. When he turns she’s on the floor, legs askew, dark blood rising to fill a deep notch in the muscle at the join of her shoulder and neck, and above her the axe murderer is circling his axe for a second strike.

Brother roars, vaulting the sofa to tackle the murderer who crashes into the stair banisters, axe dropping from his hands to the floor with a heavy clunk. ‘Are you all right?’ Brother asks, twisting, wheeling his arms to avoid falling on top of Sister which allows the murderer the chance he requires to retrieve the axe and swing it one last time before he flees into the night, only the front door left ajar, as a reminder.

‘Jay.’

Brother is on his back, head against a leg of the empty grate.

‘It’s my fault,’ Sister says. ‘I shouldn’t have asked him in. You were right. I shouldn’t have trusted him.’

‘Nothing’s your fault.’ His hands are sticky from the blood rapidly pooling beneath him, the blood that is willingly leaving his body. ‘He’s been here the whole time.’

‘We need to call an ambulance.’

‘Don’t worry. This is just a dream.’

‘It’s not a dream, Jay! This is real. Why don’t you have a phone?’

She sounds so desperate but he can’t supply an answer. ‘I thought of you,’ he says. How pathetic it sounds – how feeble an excuse for all his wrongs, for all the ways he failed the people he loved.

‘I know you did,’ she says, taking hold of his hand that is coated with blood. ‘I know, Jay.’

She is squeezing his fingers, hard, and Brother’s heart begins to loosen its seams, a kind of relief, because he understands that she is right, that this time it is true, this time he is really dying.

*

When he turns over in bed daylight is leaking round the window blind and he can hear the chatter of birds in the trees that edge the street outside. He’s been woken by a knock; the door opens and Sister’s head appears.

‘Morning,’ she says, gentle. ‘How did you sleep?’

Brother rolls onto his back. He feels the basic togetherness of his body, glances down at the clean, unbloodied sheets. ‘Well,’ he says.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Is Neil still here?’

‘Who?’

‘The neighbour. The one who lost his key.’

Sister shakes her head. ‘He must have found it.’ She comes over and sits on the side of the bed, at Brother’s feet. ‘Shall we go to the sea again today?’

‘Okay.’

Sister takes hold of his ankle, through the bedcovers. ‘I’ll have to go home soon, Jay,’ she says.

‘Home?’

She nods. ‘Yes.’

‘I thought you were dead.’

Sister frowns, withdrawing her hand from his ankle. ‘What?’ She stands. ‘No.’ She sounds upset. ‘I’m not dead, Jay. I’m here. With you. Why would you say that?’ After a while she goes over to the window and raises the blind. The sunlight makes Brother squint and he lifts one elbow to cover his eyes.

‘It’s a beautiful day,’ Sister says. ‘We should go to the beach. Only please don’t swim out as far as you did yesterday. I was frightened, when I couldn’t see you.’

Brother turns over in the bed so that he is facing the open door; his legs curl to his chest, his head tucks. ‘Jay?’ he hears Sister say, voice distant as though she has left the room already, flown out the window of his head.

‘I won’t.’