The Lear Library

This piece jumped into my head rather fully-formed, and unfortunately presumes a little knowledge on the reader’s behalf. The main character, Charlotte, is a potent telepath and telekine, fled from home to avoid discovery… and the neglect and persecution of her father. In this piece, she returns to her home when she finds that her mother has been dead for several months, only just informed by her father.

This was an attempt to deconstruct the superhero genre from a character-driven viewpoint, to show how even larger-than-life characters with incredible powers could be influenced by more mundane sources.

_______________

This man is drunk, and it’s fairly obvious. He sits in his large, leather chair and stares at nothing. The lights aren’t on in the room, steeping him in darkness. The only illumination is a shaft of moonlight that streams through a three-quarters-empty bottle of whiskey. The glass next to the bottle is also empty, with half-melted ice resting at the thick bottom.

An unsteady hand reaches out to the bottle, then another follows for the glass. After a short pause, the bottle is returned, significantly lessened in its remaining contents.

The man sits in silence, drinking. Roughly half an hour passes.

Eventually, the man rises and walks a little waveringly to a telephone where he places an international call. As he speaks to the person on the other end of the line, his hand itches for the glass to still be in it. Listening to the voice on the other end of the line, he sneers slightly and slurs a reproach. Then he puts the telephone down and returns to his seat.

The glass and the bottle. Both are empty.
The man sits in silence, and stares at the wall. He watches the past in Technicolor, all played out in front of him in perfect clarity.

Over in America, that one telephone call has already affected one life forever. Shortly, it will affect a second.

***

Clothes landed in the open suitcase, folded haphazardly. Charlotte stormed across the bedroom again, pulling out clothes and discarding them, seemingly at random.
Two days, that was all. She was going to take two days to sort all this out, and then back into the city.

“I can’t believe the nerve of that bastard!”

She’d spent the evening comforting Stewart, holding him close and quietening him as he bravely held back tears. She hadn’t cried. She was burning with anger.

The suitcase slammed shut and clicked locked. She took a long breath and let it out slowly, her heart winding down from its frantic hammering. She looked a little guiltily at the leather jumpsuit she’d left on the bed, then picked it up and reverently placed it in her wardrobe.

“I’ll be back shortly…” she mumbled, almost as if reassuring a child. “Just two days…”

Then she walked to the door and left her apartment, uniform and her suitcase. For the moment, at least. She had to get her affairs in order before she left.

And then she and her father would talk.

***

May 17th, 2003. England. 6.35 pm.

The smile she bore was beginning to fray around the edges. Yes, today had been wonderful so far… Stewart and her mother had given her a perfect eighteenth birthday up until now. Cards, presents… plenty of jokes about legally being able to buy alcohol… and her close-knit group of friends would be appearing shortly to whisk her off to Liverpool to do just that.

The chair at the head of the table, however, was empty.

She’d booked into a small bed-and-breakfasty place for the couple of nights she’d be staying here… didn’t bother to unpack, she could pick things out of her suitcase as and when she needed them. Now, she avoided being overwhelmed in nostalgia as she walked the streets by the overriding sensation of her smouldering anger.

It was past midnight by now, but the fact that her old home’s doors were locked didn’t really mean much to her. A small “pop” and a flash of grey light and she was in the kitchen. She padded softly across the hallway and towards the living room, where a diffuse light that slipped from under the doorway announced her father’s presence.

When she opened the door, he was sitting in a chair with an empty bottle next to him. He looked as if he was about to rise from his chair in surprise when he saw her, but he only managed to sort of slump sideways.

“Daniel.” She said coolly, and all he could do was stare. Seeing as he seemed unwilling to welcome his prodigal daughter, she took another step into the room. “Where is my mother buried?” She didn’t have the patience for preamble.

After a pause, Daniel Kennedy replied “Landican cemetery.” She nodded shortly, and took another step forward. This time, Daniel did rise from the chair and raised a finger to point at her, but with a telekinetic shove he was sent sprawling back into the sofa. He fumbled for the neck of the bottle, grasping it like a club and tried to rise again, but with an impatient noise from his daughter the bottle slipped from his grasp and flew up against the ceiling. He cried out and covered his head as whiskey-stained shards of glass rained down on him.

When the quiet tinkle subsided, Daniel tried to move again, only to find he was stuck rigid where he was to the chair. Charlotte was much closer now and using her leggy height to full intimidation advantage, looming over him with her hands crossed crossly. It passed his mind that she looked very much like her mother in some respects… Her tone, too, could be similar.

At this point, it was not. Right now, it was withering in its scornfulness. “Why did you wait two months to tell us?”

***

July 5th, 1998.

The closest girl was a good two meters behind, frantically pushing herself to her limits to close the gap. She didn’t know this, of course, because it was easy to trip when you looked behind. Her eyes were on the finish, only five footfalls away. Her long legs ate up the distance quickly and in less than a second of sprinting, she had won.

She looked around, and when she spotted Stewart and Annette waving ecstatically at her she allowed herself a twinge of pride and waved back, ignoring for now the jibes some girls would make about her being “fast.”

When she talked to her father about it later on, he didn’t even look up from the newspaper.

Daniel glared balefully at his daughter, who seemed completely unfazed. Indeed, she gave as good as she was given… more so, truth be told. Her green eyes, usually sea-soft and cast downward, were directed straight at him and… this was possibly his imagination and inebriation but… hard points of light seemed to shine at her pupils.

He dismissed it as a trick of the light.

“Do you really need to ask?” he slurred angrily. “My daughter tells me never to come near her again and then walks home all righteous…” He flinched as Charlotte cut in, her voice harder than he’d heard before.

“She was my mother.” His daughter let that hang in the air.

After a long, awkward silence, Daniel shrugged and averted his eyes.
“And I’m your dad. We don’t get to choose that kind of thing… wish that we did…”

Charlotte’s stance was different from how he’d always seen her before. In the past she’d been drawn into herself, shoulders hunched and head down. When she stood at her full height… well, she seemed a lot taller than he remembered.

“Is this the part where you wish I wasn’t your daughter? That I was never born?” Those words sparked something in Daniel, a sense of injustice so profound he’d harboured it for just over twenty years.

“You should never have been born in the first place!” he yelled drunkenly and surged to his feet. At least, he tried, but the psychic force of her daughter pushed him deeper still into the leather armchair.

“Meaning?” Charlotte asked shortly. Daniel locked eyes with her and gave her a cruel smile as he imparted what he’d never told even her mother.

“You were a mistake.”

***

December 25th, 1993

Christmas. Christmas as a child, where you were filled with a sense of wonder and joy. Where you belted out the carols at the top of your tiny little lungs and laughed easily. Where eight-year-old Charlotte Kennedy played with her younger brother, covering him with torn wrapping paper.

A Christmas like any other, where Annette sighed and smiled and laughed, and wondered why Daniel was taking so long delivering their presents to their relatives.

Charlotte blinked, surprised. She only half-heard her father’s voice as memories slowly ordered themselves for inspection in the new light of informed study.

“Your mother insisted on keeping you, of course… being a Catholic.” He sighed expressively and brushed some glass off his lap. Now She looked like the daughter he remembered. Quiet, dull, introspective and cowed.

“I tell you, on the day you were born I almost cried. The day I found out she was pregnant I actually did, though not for the reasons your mother thought. I knew that my life as it was… was over.”

Charlotte flinched, and Daniel felt the unseen forces pressing him down relent, becoming unfocussed. The floor beneath Charlotte’s feet creaked.

“Nothing would ever be the same, much as I wish it could be. As soon as you came along I couldn’t do what I wanted anymore. I had to tend to the new addition to our happy little family.”

Charlotte drew into herself, and again the wall creaked. With little popping sounds, the tacks holding down the carpet under her feet slowly edged upwards, pulling out of the floorboards. The picture-frames on the walls rattled and jerked.

“I remember wishing… wishing you’d died in childbirth. Then at least the whole thing would be over and no-one worse off… except your mother. For a while, anyway.”

Daniel rose from the chair, almost involuntarily, as the suction in the room increased again. The windowpanes groaned, the glass thrumming in vibration. Daniel didn’t care. Daniel wanted to hurt her.

“And I suppose I could have taken some consolation if you’d been a boy… the worst moment in my entire life was when the doctor disabused me of that notion… or maybe when I heard you’d been whoring yourself aro-”

He never finished that sentence… because in one simultaneous moment, and with the sound of a massive thunderclap, all the windows on the ground floor of their house imploded inwards.

***

She was three, and her dad played golf while she stumbled over her attempts to read with her mother.

She was seventeen, and her dad almost threw her friends out of the house for no reason other than she laughed too loud.

She was twelve, and her father didn’t come to the opening night of the play

She was… nine, six, fifteen, eighteen, not even twenty, leaving, gone, dead, forgotten.

Shards of lethal-sharp glass spun and whirled in the air, converging on a single fatal point. Charlotte stood in the centre, watching with blind eyes as fractured windowpane lanced towards her and her father.

The sound of glass breaking faded.

The feel of carpet bucking underfoot subsided.

The whizz-whizz of glass halted.

All this was replaced. By laughter. Charlotte laughed. She laughed right in his face. As glass hung around them, suspended in mid-air. As carpet tacks rotated in space, sharp as vicious needles. She laughed, laughed, laughed. Laughed at him.

“Do you mean to say…” she composed herself, “d’you mean to say I’ve been wasting my time bowing and scraping… to a man who lacks the cranial capacity to operate a condom?”

Her laughter bit, scorched, burned and scoured in its scorn. Daniel turned red with anger and began to protest his mortally wounded young-manhood but Charlotte waved a hand and his jaw clicked shut. Another flick of her fingers and he was back in his chair. She smiled, sweet as decay.

“I think that’s possibly the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.”

Her face hardened.

“I think I got what I came for. I’ll be leaving the country tomorrow. If you contact either me or my brother again, I will make you… sorry.” A worming, insidious part of her mind crept into his and tweaked, making him flinch. “Don’t think I lack the capacity.”

She didn’t even turn to leave. She just disappeared.

In the pre-dawn glow of the rising sun, Charlotte walked down the road towards her bed-and breakfast. It was a long time after she had gone that the crystal spider-web of broken glass fell to the floor and Daniel dared to move again.

The next day, she wore black and bought flowers.

A friend had said before she left that it is always regrettable to not have a chance to say goodbye to those you love. This, of course, is true. But to a person who pierces human minds the spirit world daily, to a medium… death is not so much of a barrier.

It will not be divulged what was said between Charlotte and her mother. Suffice to say they talked, and cried a little, and parted ways as they must.

That evening, she thought of souvenirs, and hunted down her old school friends.