***

Howard came to live with myself and my wife, Kay, about three years ago, not long after his mother, Loretta, passed away. I used to see Howard and his mom around Coldsleet all of the time; it’s not the biggest of towns, so everyone is always bumping into everybody else, it’s inevitable. Howard’s mom, she was a nice woman. A little jumpy and anxious maybe… my mother, who is, or was, Loretta’s sister… well, she told me that Loretta had had a lot of mental problems from when she was very young, and then, on top of all that, something bad had happened to her when she was in her early twenties. I never found out just what that was until recently, when all of the stuff about Howard came out. Loretta was assaulted… sexually assaulted. Or so she told everyone. Not everybody believed that that was what really happened, because Loretta was quite well-known for telling the odd tall tale, here and there. One little rumour that I heard from somewhere or other, when I was younger, and which I didn’t want to ask my mom about at the time, was that they found Loretta up on Wildbridge Hill, which overlooks Coldsleet, half frozen to death, even though it was the middle of summer. When Howard was finally exposed as a killer, what he’d written down in his journals seemed to confirm that rumour. I actually asked one of the investigating officers working on Howard’s case… a nice guy, called Tom Grogan, if he could confirm that rumour. He did a little research, and came back to tell me that it appeared to be true, though he stressed that WHAT, exactly, had happened to Loretta up on Wildbridge Hill was never established. Certainly, no charges were ever brought against anyone in connection to the alleged sexual assault.

When her time came, Loretta didn’t die easily. She was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer; there was nothing anyone could do for her, except try and ease her pain a little. It took Loretta six long months of suffering before she finally passed away and, hopefully, found some peace. My mom cared for her during her final months, and occasionally I’d go with her, over to Loretta’s house, to help out. It was rough watching a pretty, intelligent and sensitive person wither away to nothing more than an incoherent, mumbling skeleton, wracked with pain. I remember well the day that Loretta passed away. It was a Saturday. I was over at her house with my mom. Loretta had been awake all night, screaming out in agony. My mom called the doctor in. He went upstairs and gave Loretta an injection, you know, to ‘ease the pain’, except we all knew that it was a little bit more than that. The doctor came back downstairs and left. Fifteen minutes later, when my mother went up to check on her sister, she was dead. Nobody ever seems to talk about or admit it, but doctors do that sometimes; they help people to pass over to the other side, if there is one, that is.

After his mother died, it was clear that Howard couldn’t continue to live in their house all on his own. I mean, he was only fourteen or fifteen at the time. So, Howard moved into our home, and my mother arranged for Loretta’s house to be put up for sale. It sold pretty quickly. The proceeds from the sale were put into a trust fund for Howard, for when he reached eighteen years of age. Not long before, you know, the bad thing happened with Howard, he took inheritance of all that money, but do you know something? He hardly touched a penny of it. Money didn’t seem to motivate Howard at all, from what I saw, he couldn’t have cared less about it. In fact, thinking back, I’m not sure what, exactly, really motivated Howard. He was like, just there, but not really there, if you know what I mean. Howard always appeared to have a slight disconnect from the rest of the world. Yeah, sure, he had his interests and hobbies, and sometimes Howard would go on and on about them for ages, but… I don’t know, his delivery on such subjects was always… flat, without any real spark, or true passion. He always came across as a bit… dead inside. When you spoke to Howard, for most of the time, it was like conversing with an empty shell, as if his real self, his SOUL, was off somewhere else. Or maybe there was never any soul there in the first place.

So, Howard came to live at our house. At that time, there was me, Kay, and my mother living here. Even before Howard had moved in, my mother was already in the process of gradually moving out. She’d met a man called Phil, who lived in Elman, which is a town not far from here. Phil owned his own home, and my mother was spending more and more time there with him. About a month after Howard came to live with us, my mother finally moved out the last of her stuff and went to live with Phil permanently. He’s a good man, decent, kind, and Phil is my stepfather now too, because him and mom got married just over a year ago. My mother found happiness. That can only be a good thing, right? Of course it is. I don’t think mom’s ever looked back, and from a personal viewpoint, I’m just glad that she wasn’t around when all of the shit hit the fan following the revelations about Howard.

Once mom had moved away, there was just myself, Kay, and Howard living at home. There was never any problem with Howard residing with us. He didn’t cause any sort of trouble at all. He’d spend most of his time up in the bedroom, though he’d occasionally join us downstairs, usually at the weekend, on a Friday or Saturday night, where he’d sit and watch the odd movie with myself and my wife. Very occasionally, Howard would put a bit of his music on; I don’t know who it was that he used to listen to exactly, but it was soft, repetitive, ambient stuff, almost dreamlike. Kay quite liked it, she’s into that sort of hippy, trippy shit, but me, I found it really depressing, not that I ever told Howard that, because he could be quite sensitive about his music. Sometimes, I’d try and get Howard into the sort of stuff that I liked; rock, metal, grunge, punk… he wasn’t interested though, and didn’t enjoy it at all. He used to say that it was ‘a racket’, which was fair enough, I suppose, if you’re not into that style of music. Most of the younger kids around Coldsleet, they like the same sort of music as me. There’s quite a big punk and metal scene going on in this whole neck of the woods. Howard though… nah, not interested in the music, or the fashion style that went with it, at all, he really wasn’t. One thing that you could definitely say about my cousin; he was very much an individual, and never went along with the herd.

In the winter months, Howard would spend a lot of his time outside, in the back-yard, with a telescope trained towards the stars. He was interested in astronomy (though, as was typical with Howard, he would never talk about the subject with any sort of real, fiery passion), and told me that a clear night during December, January or February, was the optimum time for star-gazing. Howard explained that we were quite fortunate, here in Coldsleet, because there wasn't really much in the way of pollution. There was, he said, pretty good atmospheric visibility whenever he viewed the moon, stars, and planets through his telescope. Howard once told me that his favourite planet to look at was Saturn. He said that it was beautiful, like a jewel in the sky. One night, he tracked Saturn through his telescope, and let me have a look at it. Howard was right; it was beautiful. It was made up of different bands of colour, and then, of course, there was those rings around it.

“You’re right, Howard, it is like a jewel.” I said to my cousin. He smiled at me.

“There’s far more beautiful planets than that out there, Lucas… but they’re too far away for us to ever see.” He had replied. I asked him what he meant, because astronomy wasn’t really my sort of thing. “We call them exoplanets, Lucas. Worlds that orbit other stars, far outside of our own solar system. We’re discovering new ones all of the time. They even think that some are a lot like our Earth.”