The Girl and the Pendulum (An Original Story – Part 8)

Part Eight

Cattrell pounded the steering wheel with a fist, and then picked up his pre-paid bitcoin phone and dialed Boone’s number.

It was late, but he didn't care.

“Boone residence.” The reception was shoddy.

Cattrell hung up. The thought of chatting with Boone churned his stomach.

This was a wild goose chase. He smelled that even through the liquor-filled haze of the car’s interior.

Cattrell guzzled the last of the beer and threw a second empty bottle out the open passenger window into a bed of ivy.

His thoughts turned to his first wife. Sybil. Such a sweet name, a sweet girl. Back before the bank holiday, the holiday that lasted forever.

“Will you always love me?” she whispered softly to him, her breath faint against his earlobe.

“Yes, I always will love you,” he reassured her, placing her hand up to his lips.

“Will you always remember me?”

“Of course, how could I ever forget you –“ He remembered how uncomfortable that question felt, how it had squeezed a tear from his eye that traveled the length of her finger and hand before disappearing beneath her medical bracelet.

The next day, she cried, in silence. And then, that following morning, she murmured, so faintly, “You can’t guarantee you’ll always remember.” And then, even fainter still, “So how will you always love me?”

How that haunted him, always those last words before she died, moments later, in his arms, that greedy disease, so black, so awful, like the spreading madness of a mind gone mad, but not the mind, the body, a body that refused to let go, and would never let go, not until it thought that it would surely be forgotten.

Cattrell understood what it felt like to be a ghost alive in this world, walking with no purpose or intention.

His tears slid down the sides of the dirty steering wheel, dripping on blue jeans as he entered sleep. Yes, he eventually found his second wife.

But it was his first wife he lost, that he truly, truly lost.

Read from the beginning:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven

Read the next chapter:
Part Nine

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"The Girl and the Pendulum" is an 18-part future-noir science fiction story about a a private investigator's search for a missing android. How can a man who searches for missing women find lost artificial intelligence? I welcome feedback on this story about a man and his difficult case in a post-war, post collapse world. Stay tuned, as I also will begin publishing my 300,000 word epic novel "The Messiah" on Steemit in 2017.

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