The Name in the Driveway

“Some names don’t just introduce a person—they split a day wide open, and nothing is ordinary again after they’re spoken.”

"Come on, Gladys. We have to go," Beatrix urged, her voice sharpened by a note of urgency that was more than simple impatience. She tugged at her sister's arm with quick, decisive movements, the kind of gestures that came from someone used to acting first and questioning later. There was a tautness in her body, a coiled readiness that betrayed not just irritation but fear—fear of being caught here, tangled in something far larger than either of them had bargained for.

Gladys resisted, rooted to the ground as though the driveway itself held her captive. Her hesitation wasn't simply drunken sluggishness—it was the pull of guilt, of responsibility she half-recognised but refused to name. Her eyes darted to the truck, to the shadows inside where Joel's body lingered like an accusation written in blood.

"Come on," Beatrix pressed again, exasperation spiking in her tone. She jabbed her sister with her hip in a sharp, impatient nudge, the gesture carrying all the messy shorthand of a lifetime of sibling dynamics. For the briefest second, the scene almost looked ordinary—two sisters squabbling like they might in any kitchen or car park, their rhythms worn smooth by decades of friction and familiarity.

But the normality was grotesque here, against the backdrop of blood, secrecy, and death. We weren't standing outside a supermarket arguing about who would drive. We were standing in my driveway with a murdered boy cooling in the truck behind us and a plan that grew more complicated by the minute.

"I'll hold it," Gladys declared at last, a brittle decision made. Her hand, faintly trembling, darted out to snatch the folded paper from her sister's grip. The manifest fluttered faintly, its thin edges catching the breeze, delicate in her unsteady grasp.

"Wait!" The word burst from me with an urgency I hadn't anticipated. Both sisters froze, their heads snapping toward me, their eyes heavy with twin weights of curiosity and impatience.

"What now?" Gladys's voice cracked with irritation, her hand flapping the manifest as though it were some absurd flag of surrender to the chaos. Her impatience was real, but beneath it, I heard something else: a tremor of fear, a plea to get this over with before it consumed us all.

I hesitated, my throat constricting. The words I needed to speak balanced on a knife's edge. They weren't going to like it—hell, I didn't like it—but the truth pressed on me with undeniable force. I couldn't do it alone. The admission swirled in my chest, sour and humiliating, but real.

"What do you need, Luke?" Beatrix's voice broke the tension, a contradiction to her sister's shrill panic. Calm, measured, and strangely soothing, it slipped into the chaos like balm over raw skin. For all her quirks—the strange detachment, the curiosity that bordered on morbid—she had a way of pulling focus when it mattered.

"We need to move the body," I admitted, the words leaving my mouth like shards of glass. Bitter. Heavy.

"Hell no!" Gladys's voice cracked the silence like a whip. Her shriek wasn't just refusal—it was visceral rejection, animal fear clawing its way out of her throat. She recoiled, her whole frame trembling, as though even the suggestion might infect her with something she could never wash off.

"I can't move it by myself," I said, forcing my voice into steadiness, even as turmoil churned within.

"Gladys," Beatrix cut in before her sister's hysteria could spiral further. "We're already involved now. We may as well keep going."

The words had weight, not of eagerness, but of weary acceptance. It was the logic of someone who knew the threshold had already been crossed—that we'd passed the point of clean hands the moment Beatrix climbed into that truck bed. And though she framed it in pragmatism, I felt something beneath it—an undercurrent of solidarity, unspoken but real.

I met Beatrix's eyes and managed a faint smile. Gratitude, yes—but more than that, an acknowledgment. In this bleak, tightening trap, she had chosen to stand inside it with me rather than claw her way out. For better or worse, the bond was sealed.

"Are you going to take him through the Portal?" Beatrix's question came sudden, pointed, her tone almost gentle but carrying a sharpness beneath the surface. It pulled me back from my whirling thoughts. She studied me closely, as though peeling back layers, seeking the truth beneath the mask I fought to hold in place.

I shook my head. The motion was firm, outwardly decisive, but the heaviness behind it betrayed me. I couldn't voice the reasons yet—the tangled mess of morality, loyalty, and Jamie's trust.

But the refusal was enough to make the air grow colder.

"Why the hell not?" Gladys snapped. Her words lashed through the air with palpable frustration. Her brows knitted, her mouth curled into an expression that was half bafflement, half fury. To her, practicality was obvious—dump the problem into the other world and be done. The fact I resisted only fuelled her suspicion.

"Then what?" Beatrix asked, quieter, sharper. Her gaze locked on mine, unyielding. Unlike her sister's blunt hostility, her question dug deeper, as though she could sense the war raging in me—the tightrope between what was right, what was necessary, and what was survivable.

A lump formed in my throat, thick and immovable, a physical manifestation of the dread seeping through me like ink through water. Swallowing felt like dragging glass down my windpipe, each gulp a battle against my own body.

"Jamie isn't ready for the news yet. We can keep the body in the shed at the back of the yard for now."

The words came out heavy, clattering like stones dropped onto frozen earth. Even as I said them, I felt their weight pressing on me, anchoring me to a reality I wanted to deny. It wasn't just a suggestion—it was a sentence, binding us all tighter to this dark conspiracy.

"And the truck?" Beatrix's voice cut clean through my fog of dread. Always practical, always one step ahead—her tone was sharper now, as though she'd already begun mapping the next moves in this grotesque game of chess we'd stumbled into. Her question wasn't idle; it was survival, plain and simple.

"I'll clean it out and bleach it while you are gone. Then I'll drive it through the Portal."

The plan sounded disturbingly ordinary, like I was outlining weekend chores rather than covering up a murder. I hated how natural the sequence felt on my tongue, as though efficiency could erase the moral rot underneath.

"But, if you are taking it through the Portal, why bother cleaning it first?" she countered. A fair point. Her logic, as ever, was unassailable. Her eyes were on me, steady, almost too steady, daring me to admit the real reason.

"I'd rather not raise any suspicions with Paul and Jamie," I answered, my voice low, steady but stripped of pretence. It wasn't about sanitation; it was about deception. About shielding them from the truth until I decided they could handle it—or until I could craft a version of the truth that wouldn't destroy everything.

The idea of Paul or Jamie stumbling across even a hint of bloodstain or the metallic tang of death was intolerable. It would shatter the fragile scaffolding of trust I was barely managing to hold together. And I needed that scaffolding, more than oxygen, if I was to keep this whole thing from collapsing.

"Fair call," Beatrix conceded at last, a subtle nod of agreement sealing our unspoken pact. For a moment, her words felt less like support and more like a binding contract—three conspirators tethered to the same dark fate.

Once again, Beatrix and I climbed into the back of the truck, the metal cool and unyielding beneath my palms. Every vibration beneath me seemed to hum with accusation.

"We need a blanket," I announced, the realisation striking with the blunt force of necessity. Without one, every step we took risked painting a grotesque trail across the driveway, a breadcrumb path of horror leading straight back to us.

"Gladys," the deep male voice resonated through the air, sudden and dissonant, tearing through the brittle silence like a blade. My heart lurched in my chest, slamming against my ribs as though it wanted out.

"Shit!" Beatrix spat, her curse sharp, venomous, her body snapping taut like a wire under sudden strain. Her eyes flew toward the source, wide, alert, all casual bravado gone. The sound of his voice had transformed her from reluctant accomplice to a predator caught mid-act.

I froze, my gaze drilling into Gladys. My mind sprinted ahead, questions and alarms colliding in a frenzy. Who the hell is this? What did she drag into this? The intrusion of another variable at this razor-thin moment was intolerable, dangerous. Every nerve in my body sang with adrenaline, a primitive readiness to fight or bolt, though neither option would save us now if we slipped.

"Gladys, everything okay here?" The man's tone carried an easy familiarity, casual concern threaded with a kind of probing curiosity that only tightened the knot in my stomach. It wasn't a question—it was a feeler, the verbal equivalent of shining a torch into a darkened room, seeing what moved.

Gladys peeked her head around the corner of the truck, her voice instantly transformed, brighter, falsely cheerful, sugar poured hastily over rot. "Cody!" she exclaimed, pitching it like a reunion, her tone an unnatural blend of delight and distraction.

"Who the fuck is Cody?" The words tore out of me before I could temper them, raw and instinctive. A demand, not a question.

"Gladys," I whispered sharply, my voice a knife-edge of warning and urgency, urging her with every syllable to recognise the razor-thin line we were walking. One slip, one misplaced word, and the whole fragile façade we were constructing could collapse.

Stepping fully into view, Gladys squared her shoulders and faced the man. "Yeah, everything is great here," she declared, her lie drifting into the air like smoke—insubstantial, fragile, easily scattered by the slightest breeze of suspicion. I clenched my jaw, every muscle in my body taut, listening for the crack in her voice that might betray us.

"Get rid of him. Now!" I hissed, my whisper venomous, laced with desperation. The need to contain the situation, to stop this Cody before he became a problem, pressed against my chest like a weight, crushing and unrelenting. Every second he lingered was a risk multiplied.

"Why don't we…?" Gladys's voice faltered, the words trailing off into nothing, as though her courage had evaporated mid-sentence. Her indecision hung in the air like bait, dangerous and unfinished.

"Wait," Beatrix cut in suddenly.

I whipped my head towards her, glare sharpened into a silent reprimand. My face said what my lips didn't: don't test me. "What?" I mouthed, the word soundless but heavy, weighted with impatience and the unspoken demand for clarity.

Beatrix's brow furrowed, her lips pursed as her eyes darted, calculating. I could almost see the gears grinding behind her expression, her mind reaching beyond fear, past disgust, into possibility.

"I think he may be able to help us," she ventured at last, her voice low, tentative, but with an edge of conviction.

"Help us? How?" The words slipped out before I could restrain them, a reflexive echo that betrayed both disbelief and curiosity. My eyes widened, just slightly, my breath catching. The idea that this man—this stranger intruding at the worst possible moment—could somehow shift from threat to ally was dizzying. Disorienting.

And yet, within the flicker of shock, I felt the faintest spark of dangerous intrigue.

"I think he is like you."

Her words were quiet, almost too quiet to trust as real, yet they struck me harder than any scream. The suggestion lingered in the air like smoke—slippery, insidious—implying kinship, alignment, some hidden likeness between me and this man I'd never met before.

The thought jolted through my chest, cold and electric, leaving me momentarily hollow of breath. Like me. What did that mean? Another person with a Portal Key? Another Guardian? Someone else who could cross between worlds, who understood the weight of secrets that couldn't be spoken, who knew what it felt like to stand with one foot in each reality whilst belonging fully to neither?

If Beatrix was right, then Cody wasn't just another bystander. He was something else. Someone else. And in that possibility, both danger and opportunity coiled, indistinguishable.

"But shh," Beatrix added quickly, her finger pressed against her lips. The sharpness of the gesture cut through the space between us, silencing the questions gathering like stormclouds behind my teeth. Her eyes locked on mine—steady, deliberate—communicating a seriousness that demanded obedience. "I don't think Gladys knows yet."

My whisper came out tight, urgent: "But how does Gladys know him?" The words scraped from my throat, half question, half accusation, as my mind wrestled with the tightening snare of connections. The simplicity of my world, already fragile, cracked further under the weight of hidden truths.

"They're dating," Beatrix disclosed, her voice maddeningly calm.

"Dating?" The word fell from my mouth, heavy with disbelief. It echoed inside my skull, absurd and alien, rattling against the horrors of the past hours. Dating. It was so ordinary, so disarmingly human, and yet here it was, dropped into the middle of blood, panic, and impossible portals.

The surrealism of it churned in me like nausea. Since when did Gladys date... anybody? In all the time I'd known her through Jamie, she'd always seemed solitary, consumed by her work at Aurora Energy until they'd dismissed her, then consumed by wine and whatever quiet desperation filled the hours that unemployment created. She had never struck me as the type to entangle herself romantically.

And yet here was Cody, standing in my driveway with easy familiarity, calling her name like he belonged in her life. A man who might, if Beatrix was right, belong to the same impossible fraternity as me.

Before I could push further, before I could dissect this bizarre new layer, Gladys's voice cracked across the air, sharp with urgency, threaded with something that felt like desperation.

"Cody, wait!"

Her call yanked me out of my spiralling thoughts, dragging me back into the precarious present. The man had started to turn away—perhaps sensing that whatever was happening here was none of his business, or perhaps simply responding to the falseness in Gladys's cheer with the instinct of someone who'd learned to recognise performance.

But now she was calling him back. Pulling him deeper into our mess. And I had to decide, in the space of heartbeats, whether to fight that pull or surrender to it.

Another Guardian. Another person who understood Portals, who might understand the stakes, who might be able to help in ways the sisters couldn't.

Or another witness. Another complication. Another thread in a web that was already strangling me.