Sycamore Hill Pt. 01

I found myself in what appeared to be a giant living room that was styled in a sort of rustic opulence that only a man of John Williamson's means could achieve. The floors were burnished red oak partially covered in thick, luxurious rugs and furs, the furniture was all rich, soft leather and the walls were covered with western art, hunting trophies and shelves that contained small, wooden carvings. A huge stone fireplace, unlit, dominated the hall and a pair of stairways ran up either side of the room, giving access to an overlooking, railed walkway off of which projected perhaps a dozen or so doors.

I stood there for a moment unsure what to do or where to go next until I heard something coming from somewhere above me. Holding my breath, I just made out the faint sound of a voice or voices coming from one of the rooms off the upstairs walkway. Moving quietly up the stairs I also began to make out some background music, classical and romantic and could smell incense drifting down the hallway. By the time I was just outside the door, it became clear that I wasn't hearing a conversation, but rather, a loud, frantic, sexually charged exchange dominated by a female voice, Lara's voice. I could now hear every word with a sickening clarity and her pronouncements and the passion with which they were delivered made me grit my teeth until my jaw hurt and I began to see red.

"Fuck me John. Fuck me baby. Use me like your little toy, baby. Push baby, push harder baby. Faster. Oh I love what you do to me. I love what you do to me. I loooove what you do to me..."

Driving to Sycamore Hill, I decided on a plan that involved quietly finding a way to surreptitiously record their tryst and use the video, perhaps by releasing it through the internet, to cause the shit-head Williamson and my bitch of a wife as much public embarrassment as possible. But standing there outside the door, listening to my wife's unmitigated treachery as she begged the asshole to take what was supposed to be mine, I lost any desire to be subtle or quiet or controlled. I pulled my cell phone out of a jacket pocket, set it to video, threw open the door and burst into the room.

What I found was so disorienting that it took more than a few moments to understand what I was seeing.

Lara was standing in front of me, fully dressed in jeans and a pullover sweater, looking mildly surprised. I saw her put a cell phone to her ear and say something like 'he's here now. No, he's in the room right now.' While she was talking, the sounds of passionate lovemaking continued and I was able to discern that they were coming from a pair of speakers sitting on a desk immediately adjacent to a large, 4 poster bed.

The bed was turned down roughly with sheets in disarray and, lying in the middle, half propped up by some pillows jammed against the headboard, was John Williamson. He was on top of the sheets, motionless, wearing only a pair of white boxer shorts, his face a pale gray, and an ugly wound, welling with dark purple blood dominated the center of his chest.

I moved away from the door to get a closer look at John, almost not believing what I was seeing. I could hardly process the surreal combination of my wife talking in a nearly business-like manner on her cell phone with her disembodied sexualized voice percolating through incensed filled air while a dead man dressed only in his underwear reclined in the center of the room on an oversized bed.

I looked closer at the gray face, the lack of chest motion, the ugly, bloody wound looking for any sign of life, any possible way that I was interpreting this wrong, but it was clear that he was unequivocally dead, the very picture of death. I looked back to my wife who continued to talk on the phone. She looked at me without reacting, shaking her head as though she was frustrated with the way things were playing out. I looked back and forth a couple of times, literally unable to move, rubbing my hands through my hair, simultaneously struggling to make sense of what I was seeing and trying to form the will to act.

I was shaken out of my frozen confusion by the sound of approaching footsteps pounding up the stairs and over the walkway. I looked to the door to see a large, pale white man with a shaved head, almost certainly the security guard I'd seen earlier in the evening, plunge into the room. He carried what looked like a 38 revolver in his gloved left hand and some sort of stun gun in his right.

He looked to Lara when he entered the room and didn't seem to see me at first, but she gestured in my direction with a nod of her head and he turned to face me, our eyes locking. He took two rapid steps toward me and then abruptly raised his right hand and fired the stun gun while I instinctively ducked. The probes unspooled with a whirl and embedded into a wood beam beside the bed with a loud crack. I lunged away from the bed and scrambled to the nearest window and shattered it with a small piece of statuary before launching myself through, slicing my jacket and my pants, scraping both arms and lacerating my left leg as I passed through the broken glass to land on the roof of a fortuitously situated garage.

I looked back to the window and saw Shave-head appear. I knew he carried a gun and so, in desperation, I rolled off the garage before he could fire something fatal, falling to the ground with a thud and a grunt. From there I found my bearings and sprinted toward the woods and on to my car, my torn leg aching and my lungs burning as I ran faster and longer than I had in years. By the time I reached the car I was dizzy, exhausted and confused and my shaking hands could barely turn the key into the ignition. I glanced into the rear view mirror and saw lights coming down the drive, so I stomped on the gas and, barely in control of the car, careened through the woods until I made the main highway.